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“Miss Luthien, you shouldn’t be here.”
“I know, Isabella, but I feel also that I must.” Luthien smiles. It melts Papa, even, and it certainly melts Isabella. “And as you know, you need not call me miss. I am only sixteen!”
“Full a woman,” mutters Isabella, but she takes herself away with a fond shake of her head and leaves Luthien alone with the boy on the bed.
The little line of pain between his straight dark brows hasn’t gone away, but his skin is a better color—warm beneath its dark tint. Luthien touches his lips lightly with a finger, as her mother does, and finds them no longer cold.
“I hope you are sleeping well, dear Beren,” she says softly, in Spanish. When he was lucid, before Mama gave him a soother to let him rest, he spoke a few words in Spanish as well as his native dialect. He also told them his name.
Luthien steps to the window. Like all windows, it faces the world. She offers a prayer into the breeze, and when she turns back again, Beren has opened his eyes.
“A proper game requires a much larger table, but Mama and I used to play with the tea-tray when I was sick.” Luthien tucks her hair behind her ears, and then adds, quite unaffected, “I shall keep one hand behind my back to make things even.”
Beren blinks. His lashes are as long as hers, but curled where hers are straight as fan-pleats. “I…”
“I know that card-games are more popular than tiles, here.” Perhaps his people played neither, but she cannot ask that question without hurting him. “I will explain as I go along, and I will not cheat. I promise.”
“Promise?” Beren doesn’t smile, but he must know the word. Luthien has been prattling, yet he has not complained. She nods swiftly, and reaching out, she takes his good hand in hers.
He does not let go for a long moment.
They do not even—
His mouth brushes hers, or maybe she is the one who moves first, but whatever it is, the press of lips is like starlight shivering all through Luthien’s body, streaming in silver over her hair.
Her first thought, like this, is: she wants to keep him safe.
Her hands are on his shoulders and his arms come around her. They had been sitting side-by-side on his bed, studying Papa’s volume of Cervantes, but now they turn to face each other. Beren cries out; he must have hurt his injured hand. It is pinned between her and the headboard.
“Oh, no,” Luthien breathes, and reaches for it instinctively, failed in her mission of protection already. She kisses his palm, lightly and gently, and that seems to affect him more than kissing his mouth did.
How can that be?
“I love you,” Beren tells her.
Luthien knew that already, just as she knew that she felt the same. It had been natural.
She says, “Then keep my heart.”