Read Some Kind of Fairy Tale for Free Online Page B

a stick and flung it for the dogs to chase. It went spinning through the air and cracked into a birch tree.
    “Well,” he said, “when you have four kids and a menagerie to think about, it changes things.”
    “Yes.”
    Peter watched her carefully, trying not to make it obvious. He pretended to look away when she glanced at him, noting that she wasn’t making a lot of eye contact from behind her dark glasses. She was carrying some guilty secret, he knew it.
    But the extraordinary thing about Tara was how her looks seemed to change under different light. Genevieve had remarked how young she looked; and it was true. Under soft lights she could almost pass for his daughter’s age, or someone in her late teens. Then again the direct sunlight might reveal care lines about the mouth, laughter lines around the eyes. Her complexion seemed unnaturally young, and her delicate and graceful hands seemed never to have done a day’s work. At least not when compared to the ruined, scarred hands of a working farrier.
    Something in Tara’s frame, something in her delicacy, had always made Peter want to protect her. More than once he’d wondered if they had different fathers. He had a large, lumbering physique, a gentle giant, slow-witted, according to his own assessment; she, by contrast, was mercurial, slender-boned, and sharp-tongued. He was earthly; she was aerial. He was made of clay and iron; she was made of fire and dreaming.
    Richie had fallen for her big-time. Peter saw it happening from far off, the way you might see a weather front moving in: you might not want it, but you couldn’t do anything about it. It was Richie in particular who encouraged her along on their jaunts, when Peter might have felt encumbered by having a sister monitoring his moves. But one day Peter saw Richie and Tara laughing together in a certain way. He should have known then and there that they were destined or doomed to become lovers. Peter had a momentary vision of Richie up there in the clouds with her, and on fire. He was more worried for Richie than he was about his sister.
    “You’re going to have to go and see Richie,” said Peter, “at some point.”
    She said nothing, threw the stick again for the dogs.
    “Tara, I went to his house. Day before yesterday.”
    “Oh, God.”
    “You know we had an argument after you left? I let myself be persuaded that he was somehow behind it. Behind your leaving, I mean.”
    “That was stupid. Richie wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
    “He went odd after you disappeared. It all seemed to add up.”
    “Everything seems to add up until you subtract.”
    “What?”
    “How is he?”
    “Old. Like me.”
    “Old is a state of mind.”
    “That’s nonsense.”
    “You sure about that?”
    “I have a weak back, bad knees, fading eyesight, and there’s a bit of gray in my hair.”
    “Shoeing horses gave you the weak back, not your age. Anyway, I know where there is a fountain of youth. God, do you remember when this wood was full of bluebells?”
    “That year you left us. They were …”
    “They were inspirational. They swamped the entire woods. It was like the woods were underwater.”
    “Tara you never went traveling at all. At least not where you said you’d been. Mytilini isn’t even in Crete, for chrissakes.”
    “I saw you were trying to trap me. I knew it.”
    “So why not just tell the truth. The bloody truth?”
    She turned and grabbed the sleeves of his coat, and almost shouted at him. “Because when I tell you the truth I will have to go away again. Really. I will have to go away. You won’t believe it, not a word of it, and you’ll hate me even more and there will be nothing for me to do but leave. That’s it. Now that I have you back for a short while I don’t want to bring it to an end. I love you, Peter, you’re my brother. I love Mum and Dad. But once I’ve told you the truth it will be all over between us. Is that what you want?”
    “Of course it’s not what I want! What