There was an expression on Nick’s face now. He went still, his fingers white around the edge of the door.
He didn’t look at Alan, who was leaning back in his chair, watching him. He held the door, as if he would bolt if he wasn’t hanging on to something, and stared at the floor.
Gerald’s voice echoed in Mae’s ears as if he was still there.
Every line of Nick’s body was tense with the desire to leave, and for a moment Mae was sure he would, that he’d just turn without a word and go.
“Sometimes,” Nick said, still looking at the floor, his voice rough and shocking in the silence. “Sometimes I want to be human for you.”
“But usually not,” said Alan. It wasn’t even a question.
“No,” Nick said. “Usually not.”
He turned away, closing the door behind him.
9
Come Buy
Mae hadn’t really thought about the fact that the Goblin Market was held in a different place every month. It made sense to her that a secret gathering would be held in a different place every month, but still the image of people dancing in a wood filled with fairy lights had stayed with her. She’d thought it would be more or less the same.
On the hour-long drive to Cornwall, Alan explained that they were holding this Goblin Market on the sea-bound cliffs of Tintagel Castle.
“Is this a castle like Cranmore Castle was a castle?” Mae asked, referring to the green hill, once a fort and nothing like a castle, that had been near the woods of the last Market.
“No—it’s a castle like a proper castle,” Alan said. “Mostly.”
“Oh, mostly?”
“Well, a lot of the castle has fallen into the sea,” said Alan. “But it’s very impressive apart from that.”
Mae laughed, and Alan laughed with her, teeth flashing white in the dark. He looked happy, recovered from the emotion that had made his face drawn and desperate in the shadowed kitchen. It didn’t take much to make Alan happy; he was used to living on crumbs.
It made her feel terribly sorry for him, but she couldn’t really understand it. She was pretty comfortable with wanting a lot from life.
“So if a storm comes, we could all be blown out to sea with what’s left of the castle,” she said lightly, and then stopped and cursed her own stupidity as they both thought of storms.
“It’s the first weekend in June,” Alan said after a moment, his smile dimmed but his voice still trying to be light. “I don’t expect storms.”
Mae looked away from the loss of Alan’s smile to the open night road, the tarmac briefly white in the car’s headlights and then fading to black in the side mirrors.
“Gerald said there was a storm in Durham,” she said. “Wasn’t that where—where your family lived?”
Alan’s family: his aunt—the sister of Alan’s long-dead mother—and her children. The aunt Alan had written to in secret. The family Nick had not known existed, because he’d thought Olivia was Alan’s mother, because he’d thought that he and Alan were really brothers.
He had taken the revelation that they were not actually related extremely badly.
“Yeah,” Alan said, rough and short as his brother for once.
“And the storm that was going on in the background when I called you,” said Mae carefully. “That was due to —”
“It was my fault.”
When she glanced at Alan, she saw his jaw was tight.
“I shouldn’t have gone there.”
He looked over at Mae suddenly, just a glance, soft and gentle as if he’d reached out and touched her, or as if he wanted to.
“We should have come back to Exeter with you guys.”
“I’m glad you’re here now,” said Mae, which was true. “So this place is meant to be where King Arthur was conceived,” she said to change the subject, since if she knew anything about Alan, she knew it would make him happy to go on about history and legends. “That’s really nobody’s business but the queen’s.”
“Think the king might’ve been slightly interested as well,” said Alan. Mae made a dismissive gesture, and Alan laughed.
“Also, there’s the problem that probably none of it happened. At least, not here.”
“Well, maybe and maybe not,” said Alan, and looked immediately enthusiastic. “During excavations in 1998 a stone was discovered onsite with the word ‘Artognou’ on it, which could mean ‘descendant of Arthur.’ It’s interesting how people want to believe; words have so many different meanings.”
“It’d be more interesting if it was one of the druidesses,” Mae said.
Alan had read Malory, and Mae had read Marion Zimmer Bradley. They were able to talk about King Arthur until they turned right for Boscastle and Alan paused in his mini-lecture on seventh-century Britain to check the signpost. When he chose what Mae hoped was the right narrow country road lost in pitch blackness, she clenched her fists and tried to be patient as Alan parked his car somewhere high up in the hills that definitely wasn’t a car park. She
