8
In the morning, I opened my eyes to blackness. I listened for the sound of Da’s bed creaking as he swung his legs over the edge, and his slow footsteps down to the kitchen to light the hob for tea but heard nothing. When I remembered where I was, I felt a shiver of fear, laced with excitement.
There were no windows, but when I stretched and yawned, there was suddenly light, as if the House had been watching and waiting for me to wake, which was an unsettling thought. I couldn’t tell where the light was coming from, exactly; it was diffuse and mild, seemingly coming from everywhere all at once, as if the black stuff had decided to glow. I suppose the House had thought that lighting one of the magical chandeliers for me would be too much of a shock at the start of the day, which I appreciated.
I noticed an extra blanket had appeared across my knees, an enormous, thick, black fur, and my feet were toasty warm.
Cornelius was still asleep, or mostly asleep—little fingernails of light showed beneath his eyelids—and when I stirred, he started a half-hearted purr that clicked in and out, like a fire sputtering in the grate.
I swung my feet onto the floor, which was warm and uncomfortably fleshlike—it would take me a while to get used to that—and washed up in the basin. Cornelius snorted and complained a little at the splashing noise, but then roused himself and stretched, lengthening his tail and legs, and even his ears and whiskers, and then letting himself settle comfortably back into shape.
“What does he do for breakfast?” I asked when I was clean.
“Usually leftovers from the night before,” said Cornelius.
“Off those dirty plates!”
“Yes. He’s not too fussy.”
He lived like a pig, it sounded like.
“And who makes those meals in the first place?”
“The House, I suppose? Probably in the same way it makes my mice. They don’t taste all that good. I don’t even like to lick the plates.”
“The meals looked pretty fancy.”
“Oh, they look fancy, all right,” said Cornelius darkly.
I sighed. “I suppose I’d better make His Nibs some breakfast, then,” I said. “Since I’ve apparently volunteered to be the maid-of-all-work about the place.”
I dressed in my fine, new clothes, marveling again at the intricacy of the stitches and the richness of the cloth.
They seemed to have sprouted new clusters of embroidery overnight. I also spotted that the neckline seemed noticeably lower than it had the day before—still modest, by most standards, but exposing more skin than I was used to in that area. I gave the House a sideways glance for that one. Was it going to tinker with my garments every day?
“Listen,” I said out loud. “These are very nice, thank you, but they’re a bit on the fancy side. I’m a butcher’s daughter. I’m sure I look ridiculous. All I need is something serviceable and an apron to tie over the top, and I’ll be set.”
A small movement at the edge of my vision made me glance sideways to the bedpost, where a black lace apron had apparently hung itself. I couldn’t have imagined a more impractical garment, but I rolled my eyes and put it on.
When I judged myself ready, I opened my chamber door and had the impression that the House had gathered itself together in order to look like a respectable, normal dwelling. There was that sense of movement suddenly stilled.
I stepped out carefully and made my way to where I thought the kitchen probably was, based on my memories from the day before. The House undulated a little underfoot, guiding my feet one way or the other when I lost my way. It was being gentle with me, I thought, trying to help but not startle me.
I did find the kitchen, and I am ashamed to say that, on that first morning, I barely thought about the village and my Da at all, even as I cooked the little cakes that were Da’s favorites and floured the potato wedges for breakfast just as he liked them.
It was just a relief to have the pain dulled at last, and to be near the object of my tortured, involuntary love, and I reveled in it rather than think about it too deeply.
As well as the cakes and potatoes, I made the sorcerer eggs and bacon, fried mushrooms, and tomatoes. Everything appeared at my fingertips when I needed it: butter, milk, anything I might want, and good stuff too, not rubbish. My initial reservations about eating magical food melted away soon enough when I got a whiff of it all, although I wondered what it what it would do to my body if I ate it day in and day out.
The House seemed enthusiastic about breakfast. The fire roared and sputtered, the eggs danced in the pan, and the bacon rashers curled in on themselves like so many bashful girls hiding their faces. There was even coffee, so dark and rich smelling that I felt I could have dyed my hair black with it.
I gave Cornelius a piece or two of bacon, and the way he went at them, you would have sworn they were still alive.
“I’ll give you more in a minute,” I said. “Let me take this tray up first. Will he be in the throne room this morning? Or in his bedchamber?”
I imagined him in bed and felt my whole body flush. The pain and almost irresistible tugging was much better, being this close, but it seemed to flare up when I pictured things like that. I wasn’t proud of it.
“I don’t know if he has one, I told you,” said Cornelius.
“You don’t ever want to sleep on his feet, like you did on mine?”
“No. He’s never wanted me to, I suppose. I’m not sure why he brought me here in the first place. Maybe he thought I would amuse him. I was outside the walls, being a perfectly respectable alley cat, and then I was in here. Haven’t been out since. Haven’t been able to.”
“Have you tried?” Was I trapped here, too?
“Once or twice. But what’s the point, really? It’s warm in here, and dry, and I get regular meals.”
“Does he play with you?”
“He did a little, at first. He made fireballs for me to chase, but they singed my whiskers when I got too close. He never got the hang of it, really. Eventually, he gave up.” Cornelius gave his whiskers a quick wash. “It’s not a bad life.”
“All right.” I piled a tray high with breakfast and silverware. The House produced a bowl of exotic fruit that I did not recognize, as if dropping a hint, and so I popped a couple of pieces on there, along with a paring knife, just in case.
My heart thudded as I walked back down the black corridor. I was on my way to see the sorcerer again, and I could barely stand the anticipation. Again, the House guided my feet, and I found myself at the throne room door within seconds.
As far as I could tell, the sorcerer hadn’t stirred since the day before. He was still slouched across the throne, legs drawn up, staring at the ceiling.
What was left of my heart gave a joyful leap upon seeing him, and I was disgusted with myself. He did at least turn his head when I came in this time, just the slightest bit.
“What?” he said ungraciously.
“Breakfast,” I said.
“Oh.” He heaved himself up on one elbow and looked about, as if it were perfectly normal for him to have a servant bringing him breakfast in the morning. “Put it anywhere.”
As if there was anywhere to put it. The floor was still littered with filthy plates. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind, but instead I picked my way through the mess like a frog jumping lily pad to lily pad, and found a spot of bare, black floor on which to lay the meal, since there was no table.
This was closer than I had been to him yet, and my stupid, cursed heart yearned in my chest. I imagined that I felt his warmth and smelled his scent—a faint spice, unfamiliar and inviting.
Despite myself, I wondered what he thought of the new clothes the House had provided for me and how I looked in them. I hoped desperately that they didn’t look like a fancy cozy on a stout little teakettle.
“You can go,” he said airily, waving his hand.
I supposed he would eat the meal, eventually, although I was sorry to miss the look on his face when he got a taste of Da’s potato wedges.
I reached for one of those dirty plates, then another, and started to stack them on my arm. The sorcerer pinched the skin between his eyebrows, as if the chinking and clinking were giving him a headache, but I didn’t care.
It served him right for living in a pigsty and for dragging me all the way here to clean up after him, even if he didn’t seem to realize he had done it. I thought with a pang of Da, at home, who never drank so much as a cup of tea without rinsing his mug and putting it away. “My Mam brought me up right,” he would always say with a wink.
I half thought the sorcerer was going to say something as I collected the dishes—tell me to be quiet, perhaps—but he must have seen the no-nonsense expression on my face. He watched as I gathered up as many plates as I could carry, which was a decent amount. I had pride in the strength of my arms.
“Have you seen the cat today?” he said at last, startling me so that I nearly dropped everything. I turned to face him.
“He’s in the kitchen.”
“Oh. All right. I hadn’t seen him for a while.”
“He’s there. He showed me around.”
“So, you’re finding everything all right, then.”
Oddly, the sorcerer seemed to be trying to make conversation . It was like hearing an eagle try to cluck. He stared at me, and I stared at him right back, feeling what was left of my heart fluttering in my chest, and wondering if he was beginning to remember who I was.
Somehow, it would be even worse if he had snagged a piece of my heart by accident rather than design, like stepping on a toilet rag and dragging it out of the privy with you, stuck to your boot. I waited, but he showed no signs of recognition, just continued to stare.
What was he thinking? I wanted to flush and turn away, feeling every imperfection of my face writ large upon it, but resentment rose in my gullet. Why should I feel ashamed and look at my feet, when he was the one who had dragged me here? If he wanted to stare and judge, so be it.
“More or less,” I said. “Most things seem to stay where I put them.”
“I built the place when I first came of age,” he told me, “but it has rather taken on a life of its own.”
“Came of age?”
He looked wary, suddenly, as if he had given too much away. “Yes. We are all given a house when we are ready. What we do with it is up to us.”
“You and the sorceresses?” I pressed.
He suddenly became very interesting in cleaning under his thumbnail.
“The cat told me you and the House are one and the same,” I said.
“The cat? ”
I suppose Cornelius’s gift of speech was news to him. “He said this great black House grew up around you, from your magic.”
“Clearly the cat should have remained voiceless,” the sorcerer said, still seeming a little perturbed.
“Is it true?”
“I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” he responded. “It started out as part of me, of my magic, but it has ... taken on a life of its own. I let it do what it likes, now, mostly.”
“But are you aware of everything it does?”.
“Impossible. It has grown so large and sprawling that even I don’t know how many rooms it has. In theory, I suppose, it could be an infinite number by now.”
“But from the outside ...”
“Space and time work differently in here, as you may have noticed,” he said. “The House is much larger on the inside. I tried to map it once, out of curiosity, but it was quite impossible.”
Since he seemed to be in a chatty mood, I ventured another question. “What’s your name?” My heart beat faster at my own audacity.
He wrinkled up his forehead and cast his eyes upward. Was he trying to remember it?
“I rarely use it,” he said. “It begins with an ‘S,’ I think. Yes, I’m almost certain it is an ‘S.’ It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
Another long pause.
“ Sylvester . That’s it.”
What kind of a person forgets his own name? I stared at him. And was he a person at all? That was an uncomfortable thought. We stared at each other for a moment.
“You may go,” said the sorcerer— Sylvester —at last, waving his hand grandly. I fought the urge to roll my eyes and made my way out of the throne room as best I could while balancing the plates. I made it to the kitchen without incident.
Cornelius was waiting for me.
“I didn’t eat your breakfast,” he said. “I wanted to. Shouldn’t have left it out like that.”
I sat and poured myself some of the coffee and started on my eggs. I twitched a couple more rashers of bacon off the plate and onto the floor for Cornelius.
“Ta very much,” he said.
It was an odd first day, but not a bad one, entirely. I was used to work, having spent my whole life in the butcher’s shop—first underfoot, as a sprout, then behind the counter, when I was big enough to see over the top of it—and the work distracted me from the more bizarre parts of my predicament. It wasn’t too different from cleaning a non-magical house, except for the occasional appearance of a new item when I needed it. I did find that one or two of the rooms I had explored had either disappeared or moved to a different part of the House when I tried to return to them, but was relieved to find that the kitchen, my bedchamber, and the commode stayed where I had put them.
I scrubbed the kitchen to within an inch of its life, while Cornelius watched. I heard him start to snore, eventually, a tiny, comforting noise, while I rifled through the cupboards to make a plan for lunch and dinner. It was a luxury, having so many different ingredients all at once, and I intended to make the most of it.
While I cleaned, I thought about my heart and how to retrieve it. If the sorcerer truly didn’t remember me, he wouldn’t expect me to be hunting about for it, and I should be able to explore the House on the pretext of cleaning it.
I was surprised he had so easily allowed a stranger access to his home, however, and that he seemed so uncurious about my origins or motives—but I suppose that, to him, I was no more than another inconsequential stray who had just wandered in, like Cornelius, and the cat and I were diverting enough in his shapeless days that he tolerated our presence.
As soon as I had finished cleaning up after breakfast, I started the search for my heart in the kitchen.
No matter how many drawers or cupboard doors I opened, more appeared, sidling in at the corner of my vision and then solidifying when I turned to look at them.
It was a hopeless task, but I kept at it, opening door after door to see more and more outlandish spices, herbs, and dried foods, and then finally (when the House had run out of ideas, I suppose), empty shelves. I sighed and straightened, smoothing my skirts.
It was unlikely the sorcerer kept his hearts in the kitchen. Unless he was planning to eat them, which—well, it was something I didn’t like to imagine. I was pretty sure the magic-workers absorbed the hearts’ magic in another way, because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
“What are you doing?” asked Cornelius from somewhere by my ear, making me jump. He had woken from his nap and was perched on top of one of the open doors. I felt like a burglar.
“Nothing,” I said reflexively.
He gave a derisive sniff.
“All right,” I relented. “Look, have you seen any ... hearts about?”
“Hearts?”
“Or pieces of hearts. Or anything that could be such.”
“What?” Cornelius cocked his head to one side.
“The hearts. That he uses, in his magicks. That the magic-workers all use. That’s what they do. They take bits of hearts and use them to make their sorceries. Sometimes they take the whole thing and sometimes just a little; sometimes it’s the real, fleshy thing; and sometimes it’s more the essence of it, I suppose. But he’s a sorcerer, and he took my heart somehow, or part of it, and it has to be somewhere in this House, and I have to find it.”
Cornelius blinked, impassive.
“Don’t know about that,” he said. “Haven’t seen any. Haven’t smelled any.”
“No hearts at all?”
“No. He doesn’t even bother to put them in the mice I eat, far as I can tell.”
“Are you sure?”
“If there was a heart about the place, I would smell it,” he said. “I get so little fresh blood.”
I abandoned my search of the kitchen and started wandering the House, letting a duster dangle from my hand lest the sorcerer question me. (Although, he seemed to care very little what I did.) Those other rooms, then.
They seemed less like rooms and more like the living organs of some strange, incomprehensible giant creature. The hallway gave a shiver under my feet, like a horse whisking a fly off its neck, and I found myself facing in a new direction and looking at a new door. Cornelius appeared at my feet, as he seemed to do whenever anything interesting was going on.
“Was this here before?” I asked.
“I don’t pay much attention,” he said. “I just find a warm spot, if one opens up. But I don’t think so.”
The doorknob had placed itself invitingly below my hand, like a dog looking for a pat. I opened it and stepped into the new room, Cornelius at my heels. He made a pleased chirping noise when he saw a long, low sofa, and jumped up and started kneading at it immediately.
“Not bad,” he commented.
It was a bedchamber. The sorcerer’s bedchamber? I imagined him tangled in black sheets, his skin even whiter against the shining dark, his hair mussed about and slick on a black pillow. I flushed hot and pressed one hand to my ribs to keep the rest of my treacherous heart inside.
But it was not the sorcerer’s bedchamber. It clearly belonged to a woman. That kept my heart firmly in my chest—the thought of another woman living here, and a beautiful one, judging by the room. Everything in it, although made of the same magical black stuff as the rest of the House, was delicate and feminine and gorgeous.
I inched my way inside, feeling as if a giant, manicured hand was going to appear and flick me away like a speck of lint from an embroidered sleeve. After a second, when no such giant hand appeared, I made my way about the room.
I fingered the flocked wallpaper, velvety black on black, a pattern like crows on bare branches, and opened the closet door to riffle my hands through the row of fine dresses within.
Well. I had thought myself very fancy in my new garments, but these made me aware all over again of how squat and forgettable I was compared to other women.
The clothes were also black, but they were the black of starlings, or ravens, iridescentlike, with a rainbow of colors peeping out from beneath the black like painted ladies smiling from behind veils. A strange and beguiling perfume hung about them, something like honeysuckle at evening and strong, sweet wine. The waist span of these dresses was barely more than the span of my hand, it seemed, and the shoes I found at the bottom of the closet were just as dainty.
I gave in to an unusual girlish impulse and kicked off one of my shoes in order to try one on, but they might as well have been made for mice. I gave one particularly fussy pair a shove with the toe of my boot, just to show them what was what.
“Who lived here?” I asked Cornelius.
“I don’t know. Must have been before my time,” he said through his purr. The sofa must have been comfortable. “It’s only ever been him here, as far as I know.”
Jealousy roiled in my stomach like a bad stew. I walked to the dressing table, a frivolous thing on spindly legs that looked like they were about to take off running, and stared into the mirror. The thing was surrounded by a frame like that around an oil painting, which looked very odd encircling my face, I can tell you.
The room made me feel all sorts of painful longings that I thought I had long ago suppressed. I felt a pang of anger at my mother, for dying when she did and leaving me without anyone to talk to about such things—how to care for your hair and skin, how to dress, how to talk to someone you found appealing.
And then I felt a great surge of guilt, because whose fault was it that she had died? Perhaps I was better off alone, rather than subjecting someone else to the curse of my bad fortune. I turned my back on the mirror, walked over to the bed, and touched the coverlet. Black lace.
“You said the House would show me things as I needed them,” I said. “Why do you think I need this room?”
“How should I know?” said Cornelius. “I’m just a cat. The House probably has its reasons.”
I opened every drawer and cupboard. Mayhap this was where the sorcerer kept my heart, amid his lover’s frills and furbelows. In an ornate box perhaps, like a piece of jewelry to be presented to a lover; because this was the kind of room a rich man would give his lover. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking he kept it for when his mother visited (if he had one)—there was far too much skimpy lace nonsense in the drawers for that. I rummaged about but didn’t find anything but more clothing.
After a while, I gave up and left the room, closing the door softly behind me as if to avoid disturbing an invisible occupant. There was such a strong sense of presence in there.
“So will this room stay here, like the kitchen?” I asked Cornelius.
“I keep telling you, I don’t know for sure,” said Cornelius.
When I tried the doorknob again, however, giving in to a shameful desire to finger those soft fabrics again and imagine the fine lady inside them, the room was gone.
I had missed my opportunity, whatever it was. I hadn’t seen what the House wanted to show me. Or maybe I was giving it too much credit or imagining it to be too much on my side. Maybe it had just wanted to taunt me with the specter of the kind of woman I would never be.
The next room of any interest that appeared to me was more prosaic than the boudoir. I was on my way to the kitchen, this time, when another door appeared in front of me, and another doorknob insinuated itself under my hand. I rolled my eyes and opened it.
I don’t know what I had expected—another bedchamber? Very little would have surprised me. A room full of nothing but pungent black lilies, for example, or a torture chamber hung with blades and screws, or an enormous corridor lined with oil paintings with eyes that followed you about. Any of those would have seemed quite at home in the sorcerer’s black mansion, and plenty stranger things would have fit right in, too.
What I saw, instead, was a plain room, still black, lined with locked cabinets, with a wide plain table in the center. There was a floor that needed sweeping, some cobwebs, and a painting covered by sackcloth. Or perhaps it was a mirror; I couldn’t tell.
Before I could step in, the door wrenched itself from my hand and slammed shut, as if from a gust of wind, leaving me gaping.
“What are you doing?” said a voice from behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I whirled around. The sorcerer stood just behind me, so close that it set my senses swirling. He was watching me rather as a well-fed cat watches a bird—with speculation rather than predatory intent.
“You’re exploring,” he said.
So he knew about my wanderings through the House. I almost apologized, but I managed to stop myself in time. “It’s my job to clean, isn’t it?” I said. “And I wouldn’t call it exploring. My feet get twitched out from under me, and I find my hand on a new doorknob, that’s all.” As casually as I could, I added, “I found a bedchamber. A woman’s, by the look of it.”
“My sister’s.”
A sorceress? But I was shamefully relieved it hadn’t been the chamber of a lover.
“She lives here?”
“She used to.” Something flickered across his face that I couldn’t identify.
“Oh.”
I waited for him to tell me to stop snooping, but he did not. He stared at me for a moment, then turned on his heel and strode away, his hair lifting and settling about his shoulders.
And so things continued for the next several days. The sorcerer and I barely spoke. I came in at every meal, announced myself, announced what was on the plate, and left. After a day or two, however, he started to request certain dishes, or protest petulantly that he didn’t like cabbage, or clams.
It was no skin off my nose. The House provided everything I needed, however exotic, and it all seemed real enough. I did wonder, though, if the food we ate was like the mice the House created for Cornelius to chase—convincing, but not quite as nutritious as the real thing.
Whether it was real or not, Cornelius had already grown plumper on my cooking, and the sorcerer’s throne room was clean of plates and smelled of soap rather than rotting meat, which could only be an improvement.
It had been a satisfaction to scrub that room properly for the very first time and see the stains disappear. The sorcerer had watched me in silence while I worked, chewing on his nails, and hadn’t offered any charms or cantrips to help speed the process.
I learned my way about, for the most part, if the House behaved and kept things in the same places, and I grew used to sleeping in the huge bed with the enveloping black covers.
The House also continued fiddling with my clothing, which grew richer and more intricately detailed by the day; although when the bodice started dipping lower again, I had a few choice words to say. We compromised on a little more skin than I was used to showing, but not enough to make me feel self-conscious.
Those first days took on ... I wouldn’t quite say they took on a shape, exactly, because time seemed to operate differently in that dim place, stretching out like rubber, then snapping back and coiling in on itself, dizzying and disorienting—but a routine emerged.
I couldn’t tell you for certain how many days passed, as I never saw real daylight, only the odd, off-color stuff manufactured by the House, and I only knew which way was up by the clockwork regularity of the meals: breakfast, lunch, supper, breakfast, lunch, supper, and cups of tea or coffee in between.
Back at home with Da, there had never been a moment when we weren’t either boiling water for a hot drink, drinking one, or rinsing out our mugs ready for the next one, and I saw no reason to alter this pattern just because I was in a fancier house with fancier teacups.
The sorcerer raised his eyebrows when I first brought in his tea, but when I would come back in a couple of hours with the next cup, the previous one was always empty, so he wasn’t complaining.
He also wasn’t complaining about the tea cakes and sweet breads I made to go with the tea, because those disappeared right quick as well.
He liked the sugary things best, I found, and when I brought him the sugar bowl to go along with his tea or coffee, it was always half-empty when I came to retrieve it. It replenished itself each time, of course.
We talked a little, now and then. He commented on the food, mostly, and I managed to reply without falling to the floor or professing my undying love, so I thought I was doing rather well when it came to keeping myself together in the face of the spell.
I was handling it all magnificently, really, if you didn’t count sobbing into my pillow at night when I longed for the sorcerer or remembered Da. At least I wasn’t sighing about the place like some wilting flower.
I was impressed with myself, to be quite honest, that I wasn’t just mooning after him pathetically and was instead able to make myself useful as best I could—even if all I could do was cook meals and make sure the sorcerer didn’t bury himself in a charnel house made of crusted plates.
I did not know where he spent his nights. Not with me, that was for certain. I must admit, I had expected (or feared, or hoped for) something a little more salacious than cooking and cleaning when I turned up on the sorcerer’s doorstep, but my bedchamber remained silent and still each night, save for Cornelius’s snores.
Even so, I tucked myself in with a mixture of fear and anticipation at the end of each day, half hoping and half dreading that he would come.
I was a little surprised. When the magic-workers took someone, it appeared that they owned them, body and soul, for as long as they wanted to. Surely even a magic-worker had ... urges? I obviously hadn’t expected the sorcerer to throw me on a bed of silk sheets and ravish me as soon as I showed up—although if I had looked different, perhaps I would have expected different. But I was a woman, after all, and I was completely devoted to him because of the enchantment.
Of course, I would have let him have his way. I wanted him to have his way. That was the horror of the spell. But he hadn’t done anything of the sort, and disappointment was stirred in with my relief.
Maybe he had lovers whom he snuck in, or maybe he had magical ways of sating himself that were more elaborate and satisfying than our sweaty, commonplace human ones.
Of course, I still had my own urges, which I took care of by myself under that thick black coverlet. And if I pictured the sorcerer’s face while doing so, well, it was his fault for ensnaring me the way he had, and so I didn’t feel too peculiar about it.
I didn’t come across anything resembling the sorcerer’s bedchamber, and because the House had not provided it to me, I assumed I did not need to know its whereabouts.
If I’d had to change his sheets, for instance, the House would have practically shoved me through the door. As it was, however, the only sheets I needed to worry about were mine, and I washed them in the big tub before the kitchen fire whenever I needed to.
It was an odd sort of life, and odd how quickly I got used to it, ferrying plates back and forth between the kitchen and the throne room, sudsing them up, putting them back in those blank, black cupboards.
I continued looking for my heart, of course. More rooms appeared to me as I looked, gradually, as if the House was flexing its muscles after a long sleep. I ransacked them, but most were empty, and the rest were filled with black furniture covered with swathes of black cloth.
I could only see the rooms the House chose to show me, and I suspected it was giving me just enough new rooms that I felt the illusion of progress, as you might occupy a small child with a pencil and paper to distract it.
Every so often, I stood with my hands on my hips and confronted the House.
“Go on, then. Where is it? Where is he keeping it?”
The House fanned the flames of the fire a little higher, or produced a whistling kettle for me, trying to ingratiate itself. Or distract me.
“You know where it is. You know where everything is here.”
It shouldn’t have been possible for a House to look sheepish without a face or a body to look sheepish with, but it did.
I made the sorcerer Da’s famous meatloaf one night. I put all my missing of Da into the meal as I worked in the ridiculously well-stocked kitchen, every ingredient I thought of at my fingertips.
Da would make it with all the cuts of meat that were left over, put them through the mincer, and mix that with flour and water and chopped vegetables to make something like a cake that you could slice, crusted with herbs all the way round. He served it with mashed potatoes, and so I did, too.
When I took the dinner to the throne room, I was rumpled and cross from frustration. The fine velvet dress was immaculate, though, not even a speck of dust or a spot of sauce on it from all my day’s labors, and somehow that irritated me further.
I entered the room balancing plates of fine meat and roasted vegetables, snappish and ready for an argument, but at the sight of the sorcerer, I melted again into mawkish worship. It was ridiculous.
I knew it was the spell and out of my control, but I turned my irritation inward. Why wasn’t I strong enough to resist? Why couldn’t I shake him off and get back to my life, rather than waiting on him hand and foot and dreaming about his pretty eyes?
Those same pretty eyes were half hidden behind a swathe of black hair. As I entered, he puffed out a breath to blow it away and managed to make even that look elegant. He was sprawled across his chair as usual, one hand pillowing his head, while the other bounced something that looked like a yo-yo up and down—although there was no string, and the ball that slid up and down from his finger to the floor looked as though it was made of fire.
Such pretty toys he made, and he seemed to sit there all day playing with them. How many hearts did it take to make them, I wondered? Was mine already all burned up in the makings of some pointless plaything?
He watched me as I set his dinner down on a black table that had politely presented itself to one side, as it always did. He rarely commented favorably on anything I made, and so I was surprised when he tried a forkful and said, “This is good.”
I refrained from saying thanks, because I wasn’t about to thank him for getting me away from Da in the first place. I had been in tears for most of the time I was cooking it, if I was honest.
“It tastes ...” He paused, pressing his lips together, as if to squeeze the flavor from them. “I can taste the heart in it.”
Well. From anyone else that might have been a nice, if rather maudlin, compliment. From him ... I felt the urge to clutch at my chest. What else had I inadvertently given him, feeding him my Da’s recipe?
“You are a good cook,” he said now.
“It’s not hard to be a good cook with a magic kitchen,” I replied. “Anything I ask for is right here, at my hand.”
“But this is no illusion,” he said. “Whether the ingredients are or not.”
I still hadn’t learned to look the sorcerer in the eye without flinching—it was too overwhelming, and I was too ashamed of the upsurge of love, and how ridiculous that love must seem to him—but I lifted my gaze now and stared at him. We looked at each other, and I could not read his expression.
“What do you use the hearts for?” I asked suddenly, surprising myself.
He coughed, as if a piece of meatloaf had gone down the wrong way. Good , I thought maliciously. “What?” he sputtered.
“The hearts. We all know you take them. What are they for?” I teetered on the brink of telling him about my own heart but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.
“We ...” he stopped. Was he really looking uncomfortable? He twiddled his fork between his fingers. It seemed to change shape as he did so, becoming a little silver snake with four darting tongues. Another trick. “We protect the kingdom,” he said at last.
“So I’ve heard. But how?”
“Heart magic is the most powerful magic there is,” he said. “We take only enough from our people to ensure the safety of all.”
It had a rehearsed sound, as if it was something he had been taught by rote.
“The safety of all. Right. Except the people who lose their hearts.”
“Rarely a whole one. They barely notice.”
I managed to stop myself from actually scoffing out loud. He filled his mouth with another bite of meatloaf, scowling as if he regretted saying that much. I waited, but he chewed for an inordinately long time, as if avoiding further speech.
“I knew someone once,” I began carefully, “who had his heart taken.”
He swallowed convulsively and did not meet my eye.
“He certainly noticed ,” I continued. “In fact, he hasn’t been the same since.”
“I suppose it might affect some more than others,” he said vaguely, as though he was talking about nothing more consequential than a bad head cold.
“To the point of looking like the walking dead?” I asked. “Barely able to speak?”
He chewed on another mouthful. I got the feeling he was deliberately keeping his mouth full to avoid speech, because while Da’s meatloaf was good, it wasn’t that good.
“What happens to the ones you take from? Afterward?” I pressed.
His strange eyes flickered a little. “I’m not sure,” he said after a while.
My own heart pounded with my audacity. “Ever go back?” I asked. “Make sure they’re all right? After all, you said you only take what you need, and leave them barely noticing. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I said.”
There was a long pause. Clearly, he wasn’t going to say any more on the subject. Not for now, at least.
“Well,” I said, taking up his empty plate. “Good night, then.”
“Good night,” he echoed.