Oh, but the sight of him felt dark and sweet and familiar to Clare, a cup of hot chocolate inside that storm. She thought of the word elflocks. “Ach, you’ve got elflocks,” her mother would say when her hair tangled, when she had to tug the comb through hard. Clare remembered that word as she looked at the dark, silent boy, with his long dark face under long, tangled black hair. Elflocks. Not even tangled, more than tangled, and all different lengths, some twisted into ropy strands that hung lightly around his face. He was about her age. His clothes were dark, old-fashioned, and coarse, like someone in a black-and-white movie, and his eyes were cool blues and grays. “I know you,” said the boy. His accent was not Irish or Scottish but thicker and older than them, like the root of the tree that bore them. Clare recognized that way of talking, but she could not think from where. “I don’t know you,”
