Once Upon a Forbidden Desire, page 18
“Mel will take care of it.” He glanced around the workshop. “Although, it looks like she may have done so already. Sam is clearly an engineer.”
The gnome’s workshop certainly seemed to have a number of components and tools that would be needed.
Cyd nodded and went back to her drawing, adding bigger sketches for each part. The rest of the world slipped away, and all she could see and hear and feel in her fingers were numbers and lines and measurements.
She didn’t even notice Sam arrive with tea and sandwiches, and she nearly leapt out of her skin when Alfred tapped her on her shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said. “I called your name a few times, but you must have been very deep in thought.” He gestured to their host. “Sam says you can tell him what you want and he’ll get it made. Whatever he can’t do himself, he’ll hand over to a friend. He knows a couple of specialists.”
Cyd felt suddenly shy as Sam smiled at her. She held up her drawings like a shield.
“Well, what a fascinating contraption,” said Sam, squinting at the sketches. “What does that lever do?”
Cyd explained, and soon they were deep in conversation about how the machine would work. Sam had some helpful suggestions for the parts Cyd hadn’t figured out yet.
When they surfaced, the tea had long grown cold. A plate of crumbs and a stained teacup sat next to Alfred. He pointed to the full cup and plate beside Cyd. “I emptied and refilled that a few times when the tea got cold. But you were so engrossed in your discussion.”
Cyd eyed the dry sandwich with suspicion.
“Don’t eat that,” said Alfred, pulling it away. “I’ll make you another, if Sam will direct me to the kitchens.”
“Not at all, dear fellow!” said Sam. “I’ll make fresh supplies myself.” He jogged out of the workshop.
“I’ll interrupt sooner next time,” said Alfred. “It isn’t good to starve yourself like that.”
“I can go a few minutes without food,” said Cyd, blinking.
“Cyd,” said Alfred, eyes wide, “we’ve been here for ten hours.”
“Oh!” Where had the time gone? It felt as though she’d only been talking to Sam for half an hour at most. She unfurled from her hunched position, and her body groaned, stiffer than a dry reed. Her joints creaked as she rose from her chair, and she stretched out her aching muscles.
Alfred watched her, then pulled over a scrap of paper, scribbled something down on it, and shoved it in his pocket.
“What’s that?” asked Cyd.
He smiled. “For later. I’ve got piles and piles of lists, though.” He gathered together the pages littered across the table. “I started arranging them into groups, then I mixed up my nouns and verbs, and around hour eight, I forgot how to count syllables. But I’ll sort that out tomorrow.”
Cyd bit her lip. “We need to leave. I must get back to my pond.”
“It’s after midnight, Cyd,” said Alfred. “We can’t be on the streets now. Sam said we could stay the night here.”
“But my pond …”
“You can’t be away for longer than a day and a night, correct?”
“Yes, but …”
He pulled out his pocket watch. “We have plenty of time. So long as we get you back before noon tomorrow. I’ll set an alarm on this to make sure we leave in time. But we could do some work in the morning first. If we take some supplies, we could even continue working beside your pond.”
Cyd nodded, yawning. “We should probably leave first thing in the morning to be safe.”
“Don’t worry,” said Alfred. “You’ll have time to work a little more with Sam before we go. I’ll make quite certain we leave in time. Mel would have my head if I let anything happen to you.”
Sam returned with fresh tea and sandwiches and madeira cake.
Cyd picked up a cheese sandwich and bit into it. She was ravenous, now that she’d stopped to think about it.
“I’ve a room for the young lady,” said Sam, “but you, my dear fellow, shall have to take the fainting couch in the parlor.”
“I don’t mind sharing the room with him,” said Cyd, mopping up crumbs with a finger.
Both gentlemen froze, eyes wide as a nixie’s.
“Cyd,” Alfred said carefully, “it wouldn’t be proper for us to share a room.”
“Oh,” said Cyd, feeling silly. Even though she’d lived in Wenn for years, she still got confused about etiquette and proper behavior. Naiads didn’t have such rules and limitations in their culture.
She tugged at the collar of her dress, which suddenly felt tight.
“Well, then,” said Sam, loudly clearing his throat. “I’ll show you to your places of rest, shall I?”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Cyd woke with the birds. Though tired from her much later than usual bedtime, she couldn’t help waking at first light. It was the prettiest time of day at the pond, still silent before visitors arrived, aside from the morning chorus of birds, the early light filtering through the trees and illuminating the water like a silver mirror.
She washed and dressed in a hurry and slipped through the silent house to the workshop, where she scribbled down all the ideas that had come to her in the night.
Alfred found her hunched over the desk. She didn’t notice him until he set a cup of tea on top of the page she was writing on. She looked up, both annoyed and pleased to see him, which didn’t make sense to her at all.
He was holding a plate of toast and smiling at her, which knocked the breath out of her lungs as usual. Would she ever get accustomed to the sensation?
No, she chided herself. She would not get accustomed to it because she would not be seeing any more of him after they’d completed the machine and Mel had granted her wish.
“I assumed you hadn’t eaten,” Alfred said, setting the toast beside the tea. He dragged a chair up beside hers and dropped into it, then slid her sketch out from beneath her breakfast and examined it. “This appears to be progressing well.” He frowned. “Though I can’t say I understand much of it.”
Cyd crunched a piece of toast, savoring the bittersweet of the marmalade mixed with soft, salty butter. She pointed to a few levers on the sketch. “I thought of those last night,” she said, licking stickiness from her lips. “Dreamt them, actually.”
Alfred chuckled. “I dream of my poems. It’s not always helpful, but sometimes I have good ideas. At least, I think they’re good.”
She smiled. It was nice to think she wasn’t the only one consumed by her work. Was this how it felt to be part of a family? That warmth flooding your chest when you found something in common?
The floorboards creaked, and Sam shuffled into the room. Cyd had a desperate urge to hide under the table, which was silly because she knew Sam and he was kind and helpful. With a start, she realized she hadn’t had the same urge with Alfred. She was getting too comfortable with him.
While Cyd showed Sam her additions, Alfred worked quietly in the chair beside hers, occasionally brushing her arm with his, which made her breath hitch each time.
Alfred’s pocket watch chimed, and he patted Cyd’s hand. “Time to leave. We must get you back to your pond before you turn into a … well, what would you turn into?”
“Mist,” she said with a shiver. “I’d fade into water vapor and dissipate on the breeze.”
The blood fled Alfred’s face, and he gripped her upper arm, firmly pulling her up from her chair. “Let’s not waste any time, then.” He bowed his head to Sam. “Thank you for your hospitality. We can return tomorrow early, if that’s convenient?”
“You’re most welcome,” said Sam. He winked at Cyd. “I’ll have some prototypes ready for you by then.”
Alfred towed Cyd out of the house and into the carriage, and they rattled over the cobbles towards Prater Park.
“Do you ever tire of being tied to your pond?” Alfred asked. “Do you ever wish you could travel far away from it without consequences?”
Every atom of Cyd’s body repulsed the thought. “Never! I could never leave my water. It called me, and now it’s part of me. Why would I want to be anywhere else?”
He nodded thoughtfully but didn’t respond. His gaze floated up to the corner of the carriage ceiling, if that was indeed what he was seeing. She doubted it. His lips moved silently, as though he was having a conversation with himself.
When his mouth stopped moving, Cyd asked, “And you? Do you wish to leave Wenn?”
He shrugged. “The idea of foreign lands is intriguing, but I’ve traveled to many through the things I’ve read. In reality, I’ve never had the money to travel. I think I’d be happy staying here and continuing to read. And imagining new places and peoples and things. With books, you can go anywhere.”
Cyd pondered this. She hadn’t spent much time imagining things that didn’t exist. No, that wasn’t true. She spent all her time imagining things that didn’t exist: analytical machines and equations that had yet to be solved and mathematical theories. Perhaps poetry and mathematics weren’t so different from each other after all.
Alfred left her at her pond with promises to collect her bright and early the following day. She felt a sense of loss as she watched him walk away, but shook it off. She must not get attached. Poets were flighty, their minds always somewhere else. Alfred had admitted it. And why would someone like that ever stay in one place?
They continued like that for two weeks: Alfred collecting Cyd at her pond and walking her to the carriage, peacefully working together in Sam’s workshop, with Alfred insisting Cyd stop to eat and drink at regular intervals. She came to look forward to his interruptions, even if she felt a momentary annoyance at having her train of thought derailed. But then he’d smile at her and she’d feel that breathlessness and a flood of happiness and she wouldn’t care at all that she’d had to stop her work for it.
He told her about his father and older brother, how he’d lost his mother at a young age. She told him about losing her mother at a young age too, although, after hearing Alfred’s affectionate memories of time spent reading together or walking in the park or catching frogs, Cyd wondered if she’d ever had her mother to begin with.
Sam produced some prototypes and introduced Cyd to a few of his fellow engineers and inventors. She and Alfred slept over a night or two at the hospitable gnome’s home so they could spend the evening talking with these men, elves, and other species—and even one woman—of such fascinating knowledge and experience. Cyd felt the time with them was never enough, that they could go on talking forever. Even Alfred joined the conversation, determined to understand as much as he could. Sometimes she felt him watching her, and out of the corner of her eye, she’d see him scrabbling for his pocket notebook and jotting something down.
Finally, they had a working prototype to test.
“This is nonsense!” exclaimed Alfred when the first poem was produced. “A garbled mess!”
To Cyd, it didn’t seem much different to the garbled messes she’d had recited to her. “We may have to refine the parameters for each word group,” she said.
Alfred threw the offending page to the table. “It’s as I said: poetry is from the heart. A machine can never be a poet.”
Cyd didn’t want to argue with him. She wanted him to simply understand that he was wrong, that he was conflating emotion with skill, that he was completely underestimating the importance of math.
She leaned over her prototype, jotting down notes as she examined it.
“Cyd?”
She ignored him. She had work to do. The problem seemed to be in the combinations of verbs and prepositions. Perhaps if they grouped those together according to—
“Cyd?” He put a hand on the desk, close enough to hers to make her lungs skip, and leaned over so that she could feel his breath on her ear.
She hunched over farther and scribbled furiously.
“Cyd? I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just frustrated. There’s a lot hanging on this design and—”
“I’m not upset,” she grumbled. “I can fix it if you’ll only leave me alone.”
“You are upset. I can tell from the way you’re folding in on yourself like an envelope.”
Cyd straightened. She did not fold in on herself like an envelope. She was simply focused on her work.
Alfred put his hands over hers and tugged them towards himself. He dropped into the chair next to hers and made her face him. “Please,” he said with puppy dog eyes, “talk to me.”
She stuttered out a breath, trying to release the pressure on her lungs. “There’s nothing to s-say.” His touch was making it hard to get enough air to speak.
“Cyd, aren’t you frustrated the machine doesn’t work?”
“It does work,” she fired back. “It only needs a few adjustments. And if you’d just let me …” She stared longingly at her papers. She wanted him to let go of her hands. She wanted her hands to stay warm in his forever. She wanted him to go away and never ever leave her.
“Cyd … Please don’t be angry with me. I’m sorry I snapped.”
“I’m not angry—” But she was, she realized. She was furious with him for falling into her pond and bringing Mel into her life and disrupting everything and making her horribly aware of how miserable she’d been before he came along. She’d never been so happy as when she was with those inventors and engineers, chatting about some wonderful new idea, and she’d look up and catch Alfred looking at her with that soft smile and gentle eyes, and she’d lose her breath for a moment and then suck it all back in as though she were breathing properly for the first time in her life.
She was horrified to feel moisture in her eyes.
Alfred’s face fell. “Oh Cyd.”
But he didn’t understand why she was sad. Not really. He didn’t understand that he was going to leave her and break her heart because she’d already given it to him.
He pulled her into his lap, then wrapped his arms around her like she was a small child needing comforting. “It’s going to be all right,” he murmured into her hair, pressing a kiss to it. “You’ll make the machine work and Mel will be thrilled and we’ll both get what we want.”
She’d never felt so warm and comfortable and utterly miserable at the same time because none of it was going to last. If only it would. If only she could always nestle in his arms when something didn’t work. If only she could spend every evening with her inventor friends or drinking tea with Alfred as they each worked on their own projects.
She needed to stop imagining things that didn’t—would never—exist.
She pushed out of Alfred’s arms just as his alarm started chiming.
“We have to go,” he said forlornly, but Cyd was already running out the door.
She ran right past the carriage, down the cobbled street. She couldn’t possibly stand to be in that confined space with Alfred all the way back to Prater Park.
She shoved her way past a group of young gentlemen elves with top hats and canes who whistled and shouted after her, past tradesmen on their way to lunch, small human and orc and goblin children playing hopscotch.
She thought she heard the clatter of carriage wheels coming after her, so she ducked down side streets and narrow alleys. She doubled back and twisted and turned until she was sure a carriage would never find her.
And then she realized she was lost.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know where her pond was—the water called to her from the moment she left it. She just couldn’t seem to find her way out of the maze of back alleys and factories. Every turn seemed to bring another dead end.
The hours ticked away, and her skin itched with the need to get back to the water, her water. She had so far to walk still, and she couldn’t even get beyond these blasted buildings. She tried moving away from the direction of the pond to break out of the labyrinth, and her body screamed as if she was being flayed alive.
Desperation made her run, but pain blinded her, the terror of impending death. She’d been a fool to go with Alfred day after day, letting her stupid heart take her away from what was important. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t made the vow of marriage, the vow to leave her pond and stay with him forever and thus lose her immortality. She would die here in the filthy backstreets of Wenn simply for reaching out to the forbidden.
She sat down where she was, behind a factory building that spewed steam from its chimneys, the grinding of machinery not enough to drown out the screaming of her body. Curling into herself, she held her knees tight to her chest and braced against the pain as every molecule inside her strained towards her water source. She should have kept to herself. It was safer alone, where no one could hurt you.
“Well, that is simply the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Mel.
Cyd dragged her head up to see the shimmering goddesse standing before her with her hands on her hips. Glitter flecked the ground around her.
Mel frowned. “You know, usually I taunt people into doing what I want, but you have completely spoiled the game. And you’ve learned the wrong lesson too. No one is safer or happier alone.” Mel tossed her red-gold mane and huffed. “You avoidant types are most vexing.”
Cyd cried out and clutched her stomach, not because of anything Mel had said, but because of her insides’ need to be where they belonged—at her water. And they didn’t seem to care if the rest of her joined them.
Mel’s face fell. “Oh, you poor thing. As aggravating as you are, I can’t bear to see you suffer so. Promise me one thing, and I’ll take you home.”
“W-what?” Cyd panted.
“Promise me that the next time you see Alfred—which, judging by his puppy dog eyes whenever he looks at you, will be shortly—you’ll kiss him.”
“W-what?”
Mel grinned. “You heard me. Kiss him. Kissing makes everything better.”
“I c-can’t,” Cyd wheezed. “It’s wrong. He’ll l-leave …”
Mel huffed. “Not everyone is like your ridiculous father,” she said. “And not all poets are flighty, brainless humperdincks.” She puffed out her rather glorious bosom. “Also, I’m always right, and you should do whatever I tell you. So trust me and kiss that boy the moment you see him.”
