Page 14 of First Light

“So he’s not here?”

“No, he’s not here.” Duncan sat back and his shoulders dropped. “You’re going to hate me,” he said softly. “You don’t think that now, but you will.”

She raised her chin. “What do you care if I hate you or not?”

“Just remember that I tried to talk you out of this” —he kept his voice low and steady— “when you start to hate me.”

“Enough. Fine, I’ll remember.” She gripped her hands together. “Where is Lachlan?”

He looked into her eyes. “Do you believe in fairy tales?”

Carys lookedup from the book she’d been reading into the eyes of a man she’d never seen before. “Excuse me?”

“Do you believe in fairy tales?” He had an accent. Scottish? The man nodded at the book in Carys’s hand. “You’re looking at George MacDonald’s work. Fairy tales, yes or no?”

“Do you believe in the sun?” It was the strangest encounter she’d ever had at Redwood Pages, the outdoor bookshop where she usually shopped. Most book browsers kept to themselves.

Probably too many years in the library.

“Do I believe in the sun?” The man’s brow furrowed. “What kind of question is that in this place?”

Carys cocked her head. The man had an odd way of phrasing things. “Fairy tales are as real as the sun. They exist. Folk stories and myths and legends are told all over the world.” She put the used volume of MacDonald in her basket. She liked the marbled endpapers and the faint scent of cherry tobacco in the pages. “Asking if I believe in fairy tales is like asking if I believe math is real or if trees grow.” She motioned to the towering redwoods that soared overhead. “Fairy tales just… are.”

The man said nothing for a moment, then smiled.

And Carys realized if she hadn’t believed in the sun before—a fair doubt when endless winter fog had set in on the Northern California coast—then she’d believe in it after seeing this man’s smile.

“Your brother askedme the same thing the first time we met,” Carys said softly. “I was shopping for books and found an old copy of George MacDonald. He saw it and asked me….”

Duncan kept his eyes on her. “What did you tell him?”

“I asked him if he believed in the sun.”

Duncan snorted out a laugh. “And what did he say to that? I’m actually dying to know.”

“Nothing, he just smiled.”

Duncan looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read. Itwas… intent. Then he stood and walked to the fire, bending down to add wood to the flames.

“I’m a mythology professor,” Carys explained. “My father told me stories from the Mabinogion before I could speak. I learned to read fromThe Hobbit, and I was obsessed with Greek myths when other kids were playing soccer.”

“So that’s a yes,” Duncan muttered.

“I’m saying I study myth the way that other people study history. So yes, of course I believe in them.” She looked out the window at the forests surrounding the house, thick with pine trees and dense shrubs. “Fairy tales tell us about ourselves in ways that might make us uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean they’re not their own version of truth.”

Duncan stared at the fire, and the silence seemed to stretch across an ocean. “Maybe this will be easier than I thought.”

“Tell me.”

He turned and leaned his back against the mantel, crossing his arms over his chest. “I was seven years old when a boy with my own face walked out of the forest.”

Carys felt her heart skip a beat, but she remained silent.

Duncan’s voice stayed low and steady, his gaze fixed on the ground near his feet. “My nanny was the superstitious kind. I didn’t follow the lights into the woods. I didn’t speak to strangers in the wild. And I never gave my name to anyone I didn’t know.”

Carys frowned. “Do you mean?—”

“I need you to let me finish.” He looked up and met her eyes. “And if you want to leave after it and write me off as cracked, that’s good. That would be better.”

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