11
The journey back to the House was excruciating, and I hoped Sylvester hadn’t managed to blow it up in my absence. The nagging ache had worsened as my hours away from the sorcerer wore on.
When I finally reached the door, I was so eager to get inside—and so fearful that I might be shut out—that I tripped and fell. I lay prone on the threshold, knowing that I must have looked like a sack of potatoes but unable to move.
The heartsickness passed from me like a fever, soothed by the sorcerer’s proximity, and left me weak and shaking and empty.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but eventually I gathered enough strength to open the blank, black door and stagger inside. I was surprised, and a little unnerved, by how much it felt like coming home.
In the kitchen, the kettle was already boiling for a cup of tea. The House knew me well.
“Did he notice I was gone?” I asked Cornelius.
“I don’t think so.”
Of course not. I had been there to bring him his dinner, and I would be there to bring him his breakfast, and that was all he cared about. I set about making my tea while Cornelius watched me.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, what?”
“What happened? Outside, I mean.”
“Nothing very helpful.” I didn’t usually take sugar in my tea, but I felt the need for it after my ordeal. I scooped in several spoonfuls, almost as much as Sylvester. “They want me to bring them a heart. More than one, ideally. I can’t even find my own, so I’m not sure where they expect me to find someone else’s.”
“Why?”
“Some harebrained scheme to replace the missing ones. Apparently, they know some other magic-worker who can fix us all up.” I stirred the tea with unnecessary force. “So now I have to find a heart. Either here, or on the black market, I suppose, if they indeed sell some real human hearts and not just the pork bits they fobbed that fellow off with yesterday. If the House lets me leave again, that is.”
That was a thought. Would the House release me again? I had proven that I would come back, hadn’t I? But then, I didn’t know how the mind of a sorcerous building worked, or if it had a mind at all.
Just as I thought this, the floor seemed to turn liquid beneath my feet, sending me lurching and my sugary tea spilling all over. I swore and clutched at the kitchen counter. Was the House punishing me for my midnight excursion?
Cornelius leaped up onto a shelf, his fur bristling and his eyes big as saucers.
“What’s going on?” I cried. “Is this more of what happened earlier?”
“No, no,” said Cornelius. “It’s not that again. I can smell the difference. This happens sometimes.” He shrank back as far as he could into the relative safety of the corner. “It’ll pass. Just hang on to something.”
“It just happens ?” Another queasy lurch almost sent me sprawling. It felt like being on the deck of a ship during a storm. I righted myself and, clinging to a wall, started feeling my way out of the room, thinking to lie on my bed until it passed, but the House gave a shudder that sent me staggering down another path, as it had when it had shown me the way to the sorcerer’s workshop.
There was something it wanted me to see again, clearly, but I didn’t know how it expected me to get there if it was planning to toss me about like a piglet in a sack. I’d had more than enough of that for one day already.
Still, I knew there was no point in resisting it, so I let myself be bullied down a long corridor until I reached another of the seemingly infinite black doors and opened it as soon as the House was calm enough for me to turn the handle.
So, this was the sorcerer’s bedchamber, and apparently, he did sleep—or something like it. Like the throne room, it was near empty and bleak.
The only furniture was a large bed, rather like the one the House had provided for me, with black blankets and furs that had been kicked and tossed into a snarled heap along one side and were trailing onto the shining floor.
There was a haphazard tower of books on the other side of the bed, with a few open volumes scattered around it as if tossed aside in fury or frustration. There was the portrait I had seen hung on the wall of his workshop, leaning against one of the walls, with the sacking that had covered it half torn off.
And there was the sorcerer, naked but for a pair of black drawers with lacings down the sides that were probably supposed to tie at his knees but had been rucked up by his flailing to sit more at mid-thigh, exposing a cool, hard stretch of muscle in each leg. His chest was bare.
As I watched, trying not to blush, he kicked out his legs and sent yet more blanket sprawling onto the floor, and the House heaved again.
His eyes were tightly closed. He was asleep, then, and perhaps having a nightmare? I took a step back, intending to leave him to it rather than risk him waking to find me gawking at him, but then I saw him lash his head back and forth on the pillow, so violently that it looked like he might break his neck.
The House juddered and shuddered as if it were about to break apart, and I was relieved that it wasn’t made of bricks and mortar.
Was he having some sort of fit? I hesitated. If so, I couldn’t just leave him, loath as I was to go any closer and intensify the spell with my nearness to him ... and nearness to his half-naked body, and his bed, and everything that implied.
Was this why the House had practically pushed me through the door? To entangle me with the sorcerer and his spell even further? Or was it concerned for him?
They were connected, after all.
I blew out an exasperated sigh and stamped over to the bed as best I could through the House’s rocking, trying to keep myself feeling as practical and unromantic as possible. The fact that I was tired and grumpy helped, and I focused on that, trying to pretend I felt nothing but irritation, and not a fluttering of excitement and pleasure.
I was fearful that I would lose all control as I approached the bed and throw myself on his flailing body or something equally as mortifying, but the state of him soon shook me sober.
He had thrashed his head with such force that he had bitten clean through his bottom lip, and the blood welled from it in generous red bubbles, mixed with saliva. I could see the white of the fat through all the red, and it made my stomach turn.
He was in a bad way, every muscle of his body rigid and trembling, the cords standing out in his neck. His black hair was drenched with sweat, clinging to his skin in coils thick as rope. He grimaced as I leaned over him, his lips pulling back from his teeth in what seemed like an involuntary snarl. What with the blood from his cut lip, it was a grisly sight.
If I didn’t wake him, he could do more damage to himself. I took him by the shoulder as emotionlessly as I could, trying to ignore the spell, and shook him hard.
His response was immediate. His eyes snapped open, darker than I had ever seen them, with the pupils huge and staring. He flung out an arm at me, and although I was quick to dodge, my foot twisted under me, and I fell, sprawling onto the black tile. He leapt from the bed with animal speed and landed over me on all fours, his hands on either side of my head.
I froze. He stared at me with those great black eyes, panting open-mouthed like a dog, the blood from his almost-severed bottom lip dripping on me, stinging hot. I had forgotten how inhuman they could look, the magic-workers. He looked like something out of a children’s story, a monster made up to terrify the wee ones into good behavior.
He didn’t seem to recognize me. I wondered if he was going to rip out the rest of my heart at last or ravish me. Both options seemed utterly terrifying and, because of the spell, darkly enticing.
“Sylvester?” I said tentatively. It was the first time I had actually spoken his name to him, I realized. It sat oddly in my mouth. He blinked, and his dilated pupils shrank to a normal size. He brushed his hand along his jaw and stared at it when it came away, taking in the blood.
“Foss ...” he said, his voice trailing off. He looked more human now as he stared down at me. I could feel the heat coming off him. He looked about him, at the tangle of bedclothes. “Ah,” he said—an entirely inadequate syllable, in my opinion.
“You were having a nightmare,” I said. I would have been mortified to be discovered in his bedchamber if I weren’t so shaken by the state of him—and annoyed that he had knocked me on my arse, intentionally or no. “The House ...” Sent me? It seemed ridiculous to say.
He seemed to realize that he had me pinned, and he heaved himself off me and stood. I scrabbled on the floor, trying to right myself. There was a swishing sound, and I looked up to see the sorcerer extending a hand—he was clothed now, by magic means, and I suppose the noise I’d heard was the fabric slithering into existence and onto his body.
I gripped his hand and allowed him to lift me, surprised a little at his strength. The spell was still dizzying me, of course, but I fought to keep my face expressionless.
“Thanks,” I said grudgingly, once I was upright. I saw that the bed had tidied itself, too. I reached out to touch the pillow that had been such a bloody mess. It was dry, and the blood was gone, as if it had never existed—either magically evaporated or dissolved into the black fabric, I suppose. When I turned back, the sorcerer was looking at me, his mouth slightly open and his breath still a little ragged.
“Thank you for waking me,” he said after a long moment.
You’re welcome seemed an altogether ridiculous thing to say. “Do you have those often?” I ventured. “The nightmares, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“And is it always ... like that?”
“They are not always as bad,” he said. “I cannot observe myself while I am sleeping, of course, so I don’t know what you saw.”
His lip had knitted itself back together, and there was nary a trace of where his teeth had severed it. I glanced down at myself, and the blood had vanished from my clothes as well.
“And do you remember them?” I pressed. I knew I was being nosy, but who would blame me? After what I had seen, a bit of nosiness was natural, surely.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his temple with a weariness I hadn’t yet seen in him. “I do.”
Even I wasn’t ill-mannered enough to ask any more. I did let the silence stretch out between us for a moment, though, just in case.
“It helps to think of other things, afterward,” he said. “Perhaps you could talk to me.”
“ Talk to you?”
“What is it like, where you come from?” he asked, surprising me again. He seemed to be demanding a bedtime story. He even had his head propped up on one hand, ready to listen.
I sat gingerly on the bed beside him, leaving as much space between us as I could, and smoothed my skirt down before folding my hands in my lap like a well-behaved schoolgirl, lest they reach out to him involuntarily.
What sort of story do you tell the sorcerer who holds your heart in his hand? I decided to keep it as prosaic as possible, for my own sanity. As he lay down again, I told him about the butcher’s shop in the square, about Da with his gentle hand that could yet wield a cleaver like no other, and about the blood and the mess that a butcher’s shop makes.
I told him about plucking chickens and turkeys, and skinning larger game. I told him about the poachers who snuck their prizes in for butchering by the back door, and to whom Da turned a blind eye. It was both a bloody and a rather tedious tale, at least to me, but he seemed fascinated.
It was odd, seeing him fascinated by me, but I knew he was fascinated by my commonness, my ordinariness, and not by me myself. Despite my brain’s good sense, however, my body responded, and sent a flush to my cheeks, a brightness to my eyes, and made me gesture more than I would normally.
He asked to hear more about Da, and I told him. My grandfather had been a butcher, and my great-grandfather, and all before him, as far back as anyone could remember. My Da had been a dreamy boy, from what he told me, prone to making contraptions out of wood and metal, and sometimes even the cleaned-off bones from the butchered carcasses.
When you’re born with a name like Butcher, though, and a shop with its doors open and inviting, and an apron with your name embroidered on the pocket, there’s not much else to do but pick up the cleaver and resign yourself.
“And your mother?” asked the sorcerer.
The word “mother,” so cozy and rounded, sounded odd coming from his perfectly formed mouth. It was too ordinary. Still, it was the same mouth that had been wrapped around my very ordinary meatloaf, so perhaps it was the very ordinariness that fascinated him.
“I didn’t know my mother,” I told him. “Da told me she was very ...” I hesitated. “Beautiful.”
The sorcerer didn’t react.
“Beautiful,” I repeated, the word sitting oddly on my tongue. “All the lads were after her, Da said, but she liked him, because he folded the paper we wrap the meat in into little shapes for her. Animals and such. She liked his blue eyes and his dreaminess.”
“You have blue eyes,” said the sorcerer.
I thought I was getting used to him, living in his house, and used to my ailing heart. I had started to treat it something like a fungus on my toe; it bothered me occasionally but was largely out of my control.
Now, however, I realized that my detached assessment of it was a pile of shite, because I could have died on the spot right then and there when I realized he had noticed the color of my eyes. And then, a split second later, I was furious at my own heart for its gullibility. I sprang to my feet, ready to race out of the room before I did something to embarrass myself.
“You’re probably wondering how I turned out so ugly,” I said, chewing on the word as if it were a bit of gristle. I didn’t wait for his reply, nor look at his face. “I don’t take after Da’s side of the family, and I certainly don’t take after my mother’s.”
I rarely talked like this. Perhaps that was what made me hate the sorcerer most, despite my love—that he had woken in me again the desire to be pretty. To hold hands with a sweetheart. To wear the stupid white dress and carry the fresh ears of corn, as tradition dictated, and marry in front of a holy man. All that rubbish.
The sorcerer stared at me. “Ugly?” he said.
Like he’d never heard the word before. I waited, but he did not look as though he wanted to say more.
“My mother died when I was born,” I said at last.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, but ...” I was doing my best not to look at him. “Part of the sorceresses’ protection—your protection too, I suppose—is that everyone is born healthy. Almost everyone. It’s rare for anyone to lose a pregnancy or have a stillbirth. And it’s rare for a mother to die in childbirth.”
“So I have heard,” he said.
“But my mother died. Having me. So there must have been something very wrong with me, for her to die, something stronger even than your magic could fix. Or she wouldn’t ...” I stopped and cleared my throat. “Anyway.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
“Well ...”
“And your father doesn’t blame you.”
“No.” I felt the prickling of tears. “No, Da loves me.”
“I’m afraid I have been rather a disappointment to my own father.” Sylvester sighed.
“You have a father?” It was hard to imagine.
“Oh yes. You’ve seen him, in fact. Or at least a picture of him.”
I stared blankly.
“The king,” he said, moving his hand in a lazy impression of a royal wave.
“The king? The king is your father?”
“Of a sort. We are all his children, my sisters and I.”
“I ... I didn’t know.”
“It’s not something he advertises.”
The king had fathered all the magic-workers?
“I don’t know what, exactly, is wrong with my magic abilities. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. When they do, they are apparently more powerful than the others’. When they don’t ... Well, the results can be messy, as you saw. He was elated to have succeeded in creating me, at the time, but despite all his best efforts, I haven’t the same control as my sisters, the other magic-workers. Clarissa tried to teach me how to be more like them. She did her best.”
“She was kind to you?”
He thought about this. “It is hard for me to know what is kindness and what is not,” he said. “But I think my father would have discarded me like the other boys if it weren’t for her. I tried to do what she taught me, but my spells either wouldn’t work, or would work far too well.”
“What do you mean, ‘too well?’”
“They were too powerful. Not that that was of any use to me. Flooding a spell with too much magic is almost as useless as giving it too little. It’s like pouring an ocean into a wineskin. It will overflow, go in directions you did not intend. It is a delicate balance, gauging how much power to give to any particular spell, and I don’t seem to have the ...” he waved his hands vaguely. “Finesse.”
“So, she tried to teach you how to control it.”
“At first,” he said. “With little success. And then she came up with a way for me to ... siphon some of that power away, so I could control it better.”
I couldn’t imagine any of Clarissa’s ideas being without their sinister side. “What was it?”
“The House,” he said simply. “The others built their magical houses on top of real structures, as I did, but theirs aren’t so ... chaotic. If I gave too much power to a spell or felt a surge of it coming upon me with no immediate purpose, I could send the excess into the House. Give it more magic. Each time, it expanded to accommodate it. It got a little unmanageable, but it was better than letting the magic run wild.”
“So that’s why the House is ... how it is.”
“Yes.”
He let out his breath in a sigh. His hair fanned out behind him in annoyingly perfect curls.
“I do wonder though,” he said, “what is to become of me if I am unable to fulfill my single purpose.”
“Maybe magic doesn’t have to be your purpose,” I said. “Couldn’t it be something else?”
“No. I was made for one thing and one alone.”
“Well, that’s what your father wanted, but why can’t you do something else?”
“I was not given the skill for anything else.”
“Right,” I continued, exasperated. “But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be this one thing forever. You don’t have to do what the king tells you to do every hour of every blessed day. Fine, you don’t have any other skills. So learn some.”
I had spoken more sharply than I intended. There was another long silence. He rubbed at his eyes.
“Well,” I said. “I suppose I should let you ...”
“Wait.” He reached out to hold me by the wrist. I stopped.
“It is hard for me to sleep again, after,” he said. “We need little sleep, thankfully, but even a magic-worker must rest now and then. Stay.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
“Stay until I am asleep,” he said. “I would not be alone tonight.”
I couldn’t concentrate on his words for the touch of his hand on my wrist, heavy and encircling and precious as a bracelet. He seemed to realize this and withdrew it.
“Where?” I wondered. I looked around at the room. “I mean ...”
An overstuffed black chair sidled in at the edge of my vision. Another one of those large, shaggy black throws lay temptingly over the arm.
“You need not,” he said, and it was the thread of uncertainty in his voice that decided me.
“All right,” I said, and made a show of settling myself in the plush chair and drawing the blanket over my knees, taking time to tuck it in under me and arrange it perfectly so I didn’t have to look directly at him.
I could feel him watching me until I stopped moving, and when I dared to look up, he had settled himself down and turned his head from me.
“Good night,” he said, and the light in the room extinguished as if a giant, black hand had descended to snuff it out.