Two, he’d given the children my cookies and they’d love them.
“It’s lucky I had one before I gave them to Christophe and Élan,” he’d told me, grinning. “For when I went back for more, they were gone.”
This made me happy. Not only that the kids had liked them but also that he’d gone back for more which meant he liked them.
That night, I was to have dinner with them.
Suffice it to say, I was freaking out.
I wanted to ask Apollo for one more day (or seven of them) in which I could make them a variety of things. Snickerdoodles. Chocolate fudge. Lemon meringue pie. And I wanted to do this because I wanted them good and primed to meet me.
But I’d told Apollo I’d have dinner with them that night and I couldn’t go back on that now. He was excited (in his badass other world soldier type of way) for me to do it so I had to do it.
For him.
But in thinking about it (okay, fretting about it), I decided that I couldn’t walk into a room with them and keep my cool.
Unless I saw them again.
Therefore, during dinner one night when Apollo offhandedly told me their schedule—breakfast with him, studies, lunch, outdoor activities then back to studies before he spent time with them in the evenings—I was skulking through the forest with Meeta and Loretta in order to spy on them during their “outdoor activities” (whatever those were).
For moral support, I’d brought Meeta and Loretta along.
For obvious reasons, I had not shared with either woman, or Cristiana, that I was from another world. But knowing I looked so much like the other Ilsa, in other words, their dead mother, Loretta got me and understood my concerns about how the kids would react to me (if not all my concerns about why I was the way I was about them).
Meeta, however, watched me shrewdly in a way that felt weirdly like she’d figured things out, something she couldn’t possibly do as, according to Apollo, only those who needed to know about the two worlds knew (with the warning I was to keep it that way, no matter how close I grew to the women).
That said, Meeta had agreed to go, if reluctantly. Though, mostly this was because, having been born and raised in the sun, heat and sand of the Southlands (this I knew because she’d described it), being out in the cold was not one of her favorite things.
So now we were skulking.
I’d been reduced to skulking.
I felt I should be slightly embarrassed about this but mostly I was anxious about dinner that night and I didn’t have it in me to be both embarrassed and anxious. Therefore anxious won out.
“They can hardly hear us from this distance,” Meeta pointed out to Loretta as I kept moving ever closer, using the horse tracks in the snow as my guide to the house.
“You never know,” Loretta returned.
“Do they have unnatural hearing?” Meeta shot back.
“Not that I know of,” Loretta replied.
“Then they will not hear,” Meeta stated with clearly strained patience.
I was no longer listening to their somewhat ridiculous conversation, a conversation that would usually make me laugh, or at least smile.
In the last few days they’d had these a lot. This was mostly because Meeta was highly intelligent, highly logical and not overly emotional (or, at least, she didn’t show it). She was like a Maroovian Spock. Loretta, on the other hand, was not stupid but she was excitable and emotional so she wasn’t exactly Uhura or even Dr. McCoy. More like an honor roll cheerleader who’d been beamed aboard the Enterprise.
This made me Captain Kirk, for I was leading them on a misguided venture and I hoped, like Kirk seemed able to do, I could get us through it unscathed.
On this thought, I saw it through the trees.
The main house.
Karsvall.
And what a house.
I had taken not one thing in when we’d arrived there days before.
Now, as I cleared the trees but stood behind one, peered around it and stared, I had no choice but to take it in.
This was because it was massive, long and four stories tall.
It was also made of the same lacy-carved, dark woodwork as the dower house but there was a lot more of it. Tons more.
The windows on the bottom floor were all arched and each as tall as a man. Along the front of the house there were decorative iron torches planted every three or four feet at a diagonal pointed away from the house. And on the second floor, every few windows, there were French doors that led to balconies with a carved wood balustrade surrounding them.
I noticed, taking it all in as I moved behind a border of trees, that the whole thing cut stark in the white snow. All around it was cleared so the dark pines and leafless trees framed it from a distance making it look like something from a postcard.
I also noticed, as I got to the back, it was about symmetry.
The front had nothing leading up to it but a lane through a proud stand of pines that had clearly been planted in a way they looked like tall green soldiers at attention.
The back had matching gazebos, one on each side. Beyond the gazebos, there were large matching greenhouses with peaked roofs and ironwork shooting into the sky. And there was a line of short evergreen shrubs trimmed in perfect cones between the gazebos and the greenhouses, the shrubs delineating what my guess was the backyard, which was family-related, from what was probably more servant-related, the greenhouses.
And somehow, I had no idea how (they must have been dug by hand), two twin, rushing streams flowed in straight lines from the forest into a fountain that sat between the gazebos. Its waters brimmed forth from the tip of what looked like a carved marble saber. This water ran over frozen ice, the water and ice setting diamond twinkles into the sun. The streams also flooded out from the base of the fountain, going toward the house and disappearing under it.
I took it all in and found it breathtaking in its frozen serene simplicity.
But what stole my breath completely was seeing Christophe wearing a mini-me Apollo outfit including a long cape. He had a bow and arrow and was aiming at a target some distance away.
Not too far from him, Élan was on her knees in the snow, not building a snowman but building what looked like a snow castle.
I noticed two things immediately.
One, they were even more beautiful out in the sun, doing things they enjoyed, not cowering in a bed, terrified out of their minds.
The other was that they both needed to put on hats.
“They should have hats,” I murmured, staring at them, my heart pounding, my eyes beginning to hurt from just looking at all the beauty that was them.
“Try getting a hat on young master Christophe,” Loretta mumbled. “I’ve heard he’s stubborn, that one. His father doesn’t wear a hat, he won’t either.”