My father had turned the tower into his private retreat, stocking it with supplies, enjoying its isolation and that no one knew of its existence. According to Sivo, he didn’t believe in cursed woods in the same way that he had not believed in the legends of monsters living beneath the ground, waiting for darkness so that they could emerge. Those tales had been part of childhood. Adults knew better than to believe in such fantasies. My father would bring my mother to the tower occasionally to enjoy the solitude and life away from court. It was hard to fathom wanting solitude. I had more of it than I could stand.
I was almost two years old before Sivo and Perla realized my condition. I was already walking, running, and talking. I behaved as a normal toddler in the confines of our tower, if not too active for Perla’s tastes. She would laugh and say that I needed a leash—a fact that almost came to pass when she caught me scaling the wall tapestry in my bedchamber. I was almost to the domed ceiling. She was overwhelmed in those days. With my lack of caution, life was just as dangerous within the tower as it was out of it.
I behaved as though I possessed sight, recklessly barreling full speed ahead. They only discovered the truth because Perla asked me to pick out the blue ribbon for my hair one morning and I handed her the green. I didn’t understand blue. Upon further investigation, she realized I didn’t understand the difference between porridge and stew until I tasted them. I couldn’t understand because I couldn’t see.
And apparently I couldn’t identify when a boy stood before me naked either. Strangely enough, this was both a relief and a disappointment.
I bit my lip, my teeth sinking in and clinging deep to the sensitive flesh until I tasted the copper tang of blood. Fowler was naked in front of me. I released my lip and inhaled a raw breath that expanded my lungs.
I lifted my chin as though I wasn’t completely unnerved. My lack of vision had never felt like a handicap before. Not as it did in this moment.
He was naked.
I inhaled his scent and it was stronger, proof that not a stitch of clothing covered his body. The salt and musk of his skin hit me sharper than before—and something else. Another scent that was indecipherable to me. I felt it as much as I smelled it. It was raw and deep and visceral. My skin almost ached from the presence of it, pulling tight and breaking out into gooseflesh. My stomach knotted like a thousand butterflies were rioting inside me.
“What d-did you say?” I demanded as though I hadn’t heard. As though “you can’t see” wasn’t running over and over in my mind.
“You heard me,” he replied evenly, his voice without inflection.
“Of course I can see.” I channeled all my feelings, outrage, shock, fear—other unidentifiable things—into a reaction that I hoped translated into bemusement. Not panic. “Of course I can see.”
He took his time responding. “You’re lying.”
I shook my head.
He continued, “Your face burns red right now, but not before. Not when you first walked in here.”
“You’re wrong,” I insisted.
“No. Not about this I’m not.”
I turned then, managing a shrug.
“Why don’t you admit it? You think I’ll see it as a weakness? Is that it?”
That was exactly what Perla and Sivo thought, but everything in me rebelled at this.
“I’m not weak.” My voice shook out of me, a tremor on the air that seemed to belie my words.
He stepped closer. The air grew thicker and I felt the subtle ripple in its flow as he shook his head. “I know you’re not weak.”
I inhaled. My chest felt too tight. He was close enough for me to touch and the memory of his skin, smooth and hard under my fingers, roped with sinew like one of the rangy wolves that hunted the woods, plagued me. Touching, feeling another human, someone who wasn’t Sivo and Perla, who wasn’t family, was as strange to me as the idea of sunlight that lasted half the day every day.
His voice hit me like sparks popping and flying from a fire. “I won’t hurt you,” he murmured, like he was coaxing a wild animal closer—in this case, me. He was the stranger here. The interloper. It was he who should tiptoe around me.
“I’ll leave tomorrow, and what you are . . . blind or not.” He uttered “not” with heavy skepticism. “It won’t matter.”
“Then why do you care what I am?” I demanded, trying not to reveal how much he had just shaken me. He was leaving tomorrow.
Leaving us to care for the boy and girl, I presumed. Dusting his hands clean and abandoning them both to us. I wasn’t sure if I was bothered more for Madoc and Dagne or simply because he was removing himself from my sphere. He’d filled what had been empty only to remove his presence just as suddenly.
Except I would remember he had been here. In the tomb of my tower, in dark silence, I would remember his voice, his smell, and the way he handled himself on the Outside. His vital energy. His animal intensity. He was what it meant to be alive.
He made the urge to experience life outside these walls pound deeper inside me—stronger than before. I pressed my fingers to my pulse thrumming wildly at my neck.
“Call it curiosity,” he replied.
“You’ll just leave Madoc and Dagne? Abandon them—”
“They’re not my responsibility.”
“They were with you. You were together. How can you be that . . . selfish?”
The air stretched thin, and I felt his stare on my face, harder than before. “This world demands it. Only the selfish survive.”