“Feeling better?” she asked.
“Yes, much.”
She paused, biting her lip. “Well enough to summon Mickelwaithe?”
Thornwood stirred. “Why?”
Mouse clutched the box to her chest like a shield. “I would like to bury this box. It is not much, but they could not bring Bertie’s body back from the Front. I thought, perhaps, Mickelwaithe could pick it up for me, so I do not misplace it on our way back to Thistlemarsh.”
Thornwood did not speak, but he pulled the acorn from his pocket and rubbed the cap. She sat up. Mouse was expecting Mickelwaithe to appear out of midair, but instead he sauntered off the path toward them, materializing out of a crowd of pedestrians.
He was still dressed all in black. His movements were otherworldly, as though choreographed by some unseen hand.
“You called?” he asked.
“Everything went surprisingly well,” Thornwood said, not rising from his sprawl on the grass. “No disasters or butterflies transformed into angry unicorns. Mouse has something to ask you.”
Mickelwaithe turned to her.
“I am sorry to trouble you,” she said, suddenly aware that he must have used an enormous amount of magic to get to London in the span of a second. How did Mickelwaithe’s magic work, anyway? It seemed he was more powerful than Thornwood, but here he was, bound.
“It is no trouble.”
Mouse hesitated. Thornwood shifted beside her, his leg pressing into her thigh. Mickelwaithe’s eyes landed on the line where their legs met, and his eyebrow twitched. The touch paired with the look jolted her into action. “Please take this back to Thistlemarsh and put it in the Matchbox. It is delicate.”
Mickelwaithe took it, nodded, then was gone. For a moment, Mouse thought she caught sight of him in the crowd before someone moved and he vanished again.
Thornwood cracked open an eye. His pupil contracted in the sunlight, and his iris colored his entire eye gold.
“We’d better go. It’ll take a while for us to get back to the station.” The grass clung to him as he rose, and he pulled up the stray stalks woven between the threads of his jacket. He winced, plucking them out one by one. “It seems I will still need your help to walk.”
Instead of speaking, Mouse offered her arm.
He took it gratefully.
They paused at a slanted tree a few streets away. Mouse helped Thornwood disentangle his arms from around her. As soon as he touched the tree, a layer of tension fizzled out of him. He draped against it, smiling at the passersby as they went about their business on the street. Despite it being London, a city inhabited by stony faces and brusque businessmen, everyone who passed by had a smile for them. A woman even offered Thornwood a peppermint from her purse as she held back a boisterous grandchild.
“Do people always react to you like that?” Mouse asked when the woman and child were gone.
“Yes,” he said, without a trace of his usual pride. “When I take the trouble to put up a proper glamour.”
“Is that why you put it up before we came here?”
He flushed. “Ah, you noticed, did you?”
“How could I miss it?”
“Well, honestly, I did not think you noticed much about my appearance. You’ve been immune to my charms since we met.” He shrugged. “I assumed that you would prefer me with it up anyway.”
“No!” Mouse said, too loudly. “No, quite the opposite. I’ve grown accustomed to your look without the glamour.”
Thornwood smiled, and a touch of the gray tint to his skin lifted.
A man stopped in front of them, mustache and sideburns bathed in plumes of smoke from a cigarette.
“You are kind to stop and offer, but I do not smoke,” Thornwood said to the man before he had a chance to speak.
“Of course you don’t. I’ve never met a High Fae who smoked before, but you all drink like fish,” the man said, a laugh burbling around his words.