ME, CINDERELLA?(38)

“I’m sorry,” he said, hefting her shopping bags in one arm and looking at her new outfit. “I’m hosting an ill-dressed American girl here in my home. Do you know where she might have gone?”

“I was not ill-dressed, only ill-dressed for Budapest,” Brynn said, a frown crinkling her nose in mock anger. She strode past him and knelt down to pet the kitten who already seemed to know her step and who had come out of the recesses of the castle’s rooms to greet her.

“So glad to see you’ve adjusted to the climate.”

“It’s adjusting to me…the sun is so nice outside, I’d swear I was in California if there wasn’t so much snow on the ground.”

“You bring the sunshine with you,” Eliot said, the words escaping his lips before he could stop them. He knew he shouldn’t be saying sweet things, shouldn’t be leading her toward anything unprofessional, but he could not help the swelling in his heart when he looked at her bright face.

“Can we go exploring?” Brynn looked up from petting the kitten, and her eyes sparkled.

“Yes, of course,” Eliot said. “Just let me put on some boots. I was working on the projection proof.”

“Oh, well, I don’t want to keep you from your work. I can go by myself.”

“No, let’s go together!” Eliot felt a rise of enthusiasm in him, and he did not know from where it came. “I could use some time to clear my head. And I don’t want you out there alone.”

“Right, right. Can Lucky come?”

Eliot looked at the small kitten and tilted his head in consideration.

“I wouldn’t chance it. There are owls out there.”

“Ah, you wouldn’t like the snow anyway, Lucky.” She placed the small kitten on the couch, but he promptly jumped off and skittered away into the corridor.

“He’s been doing a lot of exploring inside,” Eliot said.

“He hasn’t been bothering you, has he?” Brynn said.

Eliot shook his head, thinking of the kitten clawing his ankles while he tried to work on his math, then meowing for more food as soon as he had finished eating the leftover bits of turkey Eliot had given him.

“Not at all,” he said.

They walked out through the gardens in the back of the estate. Eliot had been through the paths so many times before that he could have walked through them blindly, but Brynn stopped every few feet to examine the different plants that had frosted over in the winter. She found a spider’s web sagging with the weight of frozen dewdrops, the spider nowhere to be found. With every turn of the path came a new treasure for Brynn to muse over, and Eliot soon found himself engrossed in the minutiae of the walk, seeing the trail in a way he hadn’t seen it in a long, long time. With someone else to see Budapest for him, he was beginning again to fall in love with his homeland.

“Come,” he told Brynn, once they reached a fork in the path where the snowdrifts rose before them. “I want to show you something.” He clambered up the side of one snowdrift, feeling utterly awkward and ill-equipped for such exertions. But when he got over the snowbank and squeezed through the rock passage, he found the spot just as he had left it. A bed of rocks overlooked the pool of a small stream, now frozen over. The pine branches overhead drooped with a thousand tiny icicles off of its needles. Moss partially covered the rocks, creeping green and alive even under the frost, and he brushed the snow aside to sit down.

“This is beautiful,” Brynn said. She stood beside him, looking down into the frozen pool. Under the glassy surface, dark waters still roiled, fed by an underground river. Eliot felt his heart swell with the love of a place that can only come about through a long and intimate familiarity. He knew this bank better than he knew his bedroom.

“I used to come here all the time when I was a child.”

“You grew up here? In a castle?”

Eliot paused. He didn’t know how much to tell.

“It’s my family’s.”

“Did you ever have to defend the castle from marauding hordes?” Brynn grinned, and Eliot breathed a sigh of relief that she had not not pushed further back.

“Of course,” he said. “We just poured boiling hot oil on their heads, though.”

“No archers from the roof? Or a moat?”

“This is the only moat on the property,” Eliot said, nodding to the small stream.

“Aw,” Brynn said. “What about a torture chamber in the basement?”

“No torture devices in our basement, at least none that I knew about. We do have the baths, though.”

“Baths?”

Eliot pressed his lips together. He should not have mentioned them.