Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

Wren, meanwhile, rummaged through his satchel. From its depths he produced a hand-mirror and held it out to Shrike.

Shrike took it. Throughout his centuries he’d heard of mirrors in stories and songs and glimpsed them in the hands of fae and mortal gentry. Then Wren had brought his to Blackthorn—a plain thing, he’d called it when he caught Shrike staring, merely a palm-sized circle of silvered glass set in an oaken frame and handle. Shrike had watched him ply his razor with it many a morn.

But he’d never held it in his own hand until now.

His face looked rather like it had in reflections of still water and in Wren’s sketches. There were but two difference—the bulbous, velvet-covered sprouts of a pair of antlers, one on either side of his brow.

“Ah,” said Shrike.

“You don’t seem terribly surprised,” said Wren.

“It’s a bit early for the first tines to split off,” Shrike admitted. He gingerly touched the tips of the new prongs, then pulled his fingers away with a hiss of pain.

“So,” Wren said, filling Shrike’s mug again—minus the laudanum—and pouring another for himself. “Antlers.”

“Aye,” Shrike replied.

“And this has never happened to you before?”

“Never.”

“So you don’t know how long they’ll take to grow in. Or how broad they’ll be when they do.”

“No,” Shrike admitted. Then, “Do you mind them?”

Wren looked at him as though he’d just asked something absurd. “I mind the pain they’ve caused you.”

Shrike chuckled into his tea.

“But, no,” Wren added with a smile of his own. “I don’t mind them.”

Shrike supposed he ought to have surmised as much, given Wren’s reaction to the Court of Hidden Folk, but it still relieved him to hear the answer.

“Do you?” Wren asked. “Mind them, I mean.”

Shrike shrugged. “They’re coming in whether I mind them or not.”

Wren blinked. “Fair enough.”

~

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Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

The following se’en-night passed much like the first. By the end of it, Shrike’s antlers bore twelve points, and spread far beyond the breadth of his shoulders to span over a yard—very nearly an ell.

This made passing through the cottage doorway rather more difficult than otherwise.

The first time he knocked his antlers against the door-frame it rang through his skull to his very teeth. He staggered back to clutch at the rim of the hollowed stump for support whilst he waited for the pain to recede and his vision to return. He only felt thankful Wren hadn’t witnessed his stupidity. Still, he repeated his error twice over that very morning before he learnt to turn his head aside and duck and so work his way through.

As for the pots, cobwebs, and bundles of dried herbs hanging from the hooks on the rafters—well, he gave thanks again to fortune that Wren didn’t see him tangled up in sprigs of rosemary or knocking a copper cauldron down onto his own head. Shrike spent much of the afternoon taking down the herbs and pots and stowed them elsewhere in the cottage wherever he could fit them.

For some minutes after Wren’s arrival, in the evening, Shrike hoped his idiocy might remain unknown. Until, after Wren had kissed him, he pulled away to gaze in confusion at something over Shrike’s head. Before Shrike could ask after it, Wren reached up gingerly between his antlers and plucked something out of his hair.

“Is this… parsley?” Wren asked, turning the sprig over betwixt forefinger and thumb.

“Aye,” Shrike admitted, and hurried to turn their talk toward supper.

~

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