When we finally sobered, Agnë cleared her throat. “You shouldn’t be upset with Robin Hood over his, um, ears either. He did save me, after all.”
Robin!
Renewed alarm burst inside me as I swept around and floated away.
Meira rushed to intercept me. “Where are you going?”
“I need to see him! His wounds looked terrible!”
Agnë came to flank me from the other side. “The healers will take care of him. And we’ve been assured we’ll see him tomorrow.”
“Leander once told me the Summer Court has the longest days in the realms of Faerie. Tomorrow could be next week for these people, and I can’t wait that long.”
“But they said they allow no one into patients’ rooms,” Agnë protested. “They must have them guarded or warded or both. They’re probably guarding our quarters, too.”
“Good thing I won’t be going through any doors, then.”
“But…”
I didn’t wait to hear more of their misgivings. Gritting my teeth against my aversion to walking through anything, I went through the wall behind one of the beds.
I walked through all the rooms in the hall, managing to avoid most occupants’ notice, but startling a couple. It took some investigation, but I eventually found where they were keeping Robin.
There were guards at the door, and the healers were still with him. I waited, my mind storming with worries and questions. Once they left, I went in through the wall of the adjacent room.
Then I saw him, lying there on the bed unmoving, and shirtless, and forgot everything.
Chapter Sixteen
I tried to remember. What I’d come here for. Where here even was. But it was impossible to think at all.
It was also impossible not to look. I had to keep looking, after all, to be sure that his chest rose and fell. If I happened to notice how wide and defined it was—or how the variety of scars over his muscled shoulders and thick arms and sparse abdomen, told many stories—that was unavoidable.
His head injury seemed to have been sealed, as if the torn flesh and scraped bone had been reformed, leaving a narrow, angry line down his temple and cheek. His other injuries were hidden beneath faintly glowing bandages. His skin had lost its pallor, its tan warm, and uniform, like he had labored under the sun, possibly during the war, digging trenches and setting up tents.
The thought of a man sweaty and dirty from work, with his skin altered by the sun, should have been repulsive to me. But as I approached him with bated breath, the hammering of my heart had nothing to do with aversion. And that was before his face captured my focus to the exclusion of all else.
A face thousands had speculated about over the years, wondering what this infamous man looked like under that hood—if he even existed at all.
Yet here he now was, right before me, asleep, and with a face not even the most gifted of painters could imagine.
His face was a canvas of singular structures, filled with the finest details I’d ever seen in a man. Arched, dense eyebrows gracing a leonine forehead and a ridged brow, and shadowing thick lashes that brushed prominent cheekbones. A slim, proud nose covered in a dusting of freckles residing over sculpted lips split by a thin, healed cut, and a wide, triangular jaw stubbled with gold. All in proportions my drawing tutors would have called a “golden ratio.”
Not even the pointed ears could upset the balance of beauty in this man. In fact, as much as I hated to admit it, they may have accentuated it.
Enraptured, I leaned over to take a closer look, committing his face to memory—and realized something.
I’d already seen enough fairies, including Bonnie, with their perfect faces and forms, but there was a quality to him that neither they nor humans possessed. It was as if the best in each species had gathered in those entrancing features. Also, his skin differed from the fey’s pearlescent sheen…
His eyes flew open, instantly alert and slamming into mine.
The deepest, most vivid forest-green—like his hooded cloak.
My mortified recoil had me floating away, my gaze still captured in his.
He said nothing, until I began to worry he couldn’t speak, that the healers only fixed his flesh, but his brain was damaged…
“Of all the ways to get unmasked, this had to be the least exciting option.”
I gaped at him. He’d spoken. But his voice… It was clearer, more sonorous than it had been with his hood on. Then what he’d