A Harvest of Hearts

12

I woke with a crick in my neck and a sour taste in my mouth. As soon as I remembered where I was, I snapped my eyes open.

The events of the previous night crowded my mind: my walk to Oyster Lane, the Snagged, the sorcerer’s nightmare. I felt like I had lived a thousand years in the space of sundown to sunup. And now I was in the sorcerer’s bedchamber, of all places. His bedchamber . And to make it even worse, Sylvester was still in the bed.

As I watched, he stirred, and the dark blankets fell away a little, exposing part of his chest. I sat frozen, barely daring to breathe. The bespelled part of me wanted to climb into bed beside him, but the rest of me wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible before either he woke up, or I spontaneously combusted.

I got to my feet, letting the blanket slither to the floor, and tried to creep away quietly, but I knocked into the portrait, and of course it fell over as spectacularly as possible, clattering on the black floor. I swore and grabbed at my shin where I had bruised it, and only then did I turn around and see Sylvester sitting up in bed.

His unbuttoned nightshirt had fallen open, and his chest was now fully exposed in all its pale, chiseled glory. The blood rushed to my head. And elsewhere.

“Sorry,” I said weakly, then rallied. Grouchiness was an excellent cover for the confusing feelings a half-naked Sylvester awoke in me. “Well, it was a stupid place to put it. Right in the way.”

He blinked. “Noted,” he said.

“Why did you bring it in here, anyway?” I grumbled, massaging the sore spot on my leg.

“It should be on the wall.”

He leaned forward, further disarranging the covers and seeming wholly un-self-conscious. “Oh ...” he passed his hand over his mouth. “Sometimes I like to examine it, before I sleep.”

“Why? Who is it?” I asked.

“It could be the right boy,” the sorcerer said softly. “In the portrait. It’s from around the right time, as far as I can tell. And he’s about the right age and has dark hair—although that doesn’t mean much, as my hair could have been changed along with everything else.”

I stared at him. The outlines of something horrifying were starting to form in my mind.

“Changed from what? From whom?”

“Of course, I could only guess at the age. I could be off by as much as ten years, in which case, this has no chance of being the boy.”

“What boy? ” I said, exasperated.

He pressed his lips tether, as if wondering whether to speak. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “The boy from whom I was made.”

I wanted to thump right down onto the floor in shock. “Made? Who made you?”

“My father made all of us,” he said. “He could not birth his own children, I suppose. Or perhaps he could, and the making of magic-workers requires a different way of birthing. I do not know. I have never asked him.”

“So when you said the king was your father...?”

“I meant that he made us, raised us. Trained us to do his bidding.”

All I could think was that Basil would be bursting in his fancy waistcoat with excitement if he could hear all this.

“So, you were a little boy?” I prodded. “A little boy named Sylvester?”

“Years ago, yes. But I doubt I was named Sylvester. I’m not sure who gave me the name. Probably my father. It doesn’t sound like the sort of name given to an urchin, and I was probably an urchin. I almost certainly had no family, no entanglements of any sort. It is simpler that way, you see.”

So the stories of children vanishing in the city were true, it seemed, and even more horrifying than we had imagined when we were sprouts. I blinked. “You were kidnapped and turned into ... this?”

“No.” He sounded impatient with me, as if I was failing to understand something very simple. Perhaps I was. “Not kidnapped. Bought, in all likelihood, as you buy wood to whittle it, or flour to make bread. Shaped for a purpose, by my father, over the course of many years, as I grew to adulthood. I am no more that boy now than a handful of flour is a loaf.”

I wondered what that was like—being a loaf of bread, as he had put it, baked to perfection, rather than the raw dough the rest of us presumably were. Did that sort of thing trouble him at all, or was he so removed from folk like us that such musings were unimaginable to him? But I couldn’t hide my horror. “Who would sell a child?”

He shot me a glance. “You would be surprised,” he said. “Such happenings might not occur in your little hamlet, but things are different in the city.”

“And your father bought them? Bought children to make them into ... you? And your sisters?”

“Yes.”

I sat, taking it in. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

He looked at me. “You told me about your mother,” he said.

“So ... This is a portrait of who you were? ” I said slowly.

“Perhaps,” replied Sylvester. “I found it in a marketplace. The artist had made several such studies of the local street children, years ago, and was selling off some of his old canvases. This one had enough of a resemblance that I thought it might be possible.”

I looked at the portrait again. I could see no likeness, but then, Sylvester’s perfect face barely looked human. It certainly resembled no other face I knew, as the men in our village tended to look more and more like sprouting potatoes as they aged.

Questions bubbled up inside me, but I didn’t want to ask too many of them at once for fear of him clamming up altogether.

“You said your father made you,” I said. “ How? ”

“It is a complicated process,” he said. “He made all of us. Me. Clarissa. My other sisters. Thirteen, in all. The transformation process gave us the magical ability, and then he had years to train us in its use, until we came of age, and he deemed us ready to work on our own.”

Thirteen children, at least, stolen or bought, and transmuted by some magical process— the seemingly innocuous word made my stomach turn — into powerful magic-workers.

“And you were the only boy?”

“Not the only one, but the only one who ... succeeded,” said Sylvester. “My father had tried with male children before, but apparently, I was the only one that ever ‘took,’ as he put it. I don’t think he expected me to come along when I did. Twelve is a nice, even number. Thirteen ... well.”

“‘Took?’”

“Apparently, his other attempts failed rather spectacularly.”

“What happened to the children he used? The ones who failed?”

“I don’t know. He never told me.”

I hated to think what that could mean. I shuddered. Who could look at a child and think of something to be bought and sold—worse, something to be taken apart and reassembled? I doubted he let the “failed” children skip merrily back out onto the street to live lives full of puppies and apple carts.

I stared at the portrait again. I had no idea whether or not this was the boy the sorcerer had once been, but I could see why he had been attracted to it.

There was spirit to the thing. You got the feeling the subject was sitting for the portrait under duress, and wanted to spring up and go chase frogs by the pond, or something similar. He looked like someone who didn’t want to sit about in fussy clothes in musty rooms, tinkering with fancy toys.

It was hard to imagine the sorcerer as a boy, but even harder to imagine his sisters as little girls. Presumably they, too, had been regular children once, before spending unimaginable years being transformed and trained into the beautiful, terrifying things they had become as adults.

“I ... am sorry,” I said. I couldn’t imagine being that boy, taken and twisted into something unrecognizable, with no father but the man who had ruined him. I thought again of Da and how lucky I was. Had been.

Sylvester was still staring at the portrait.

“I had better go,” I said. “Breakfast.”

And with that dazzling piece of repartee, I crept out of there and to my own chamber, as if I really were sneaking back after a night of debauchery.

I wouldn’t have minded a bit of debauchery.

When I got back to my own chamber, I washed my face and changed my clothes to another elaborate black number that the House provided for me. Cornelius had slept on my bed, and when he heard the water splashing, he yawned and stretched.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

He was completely unbothered, but I still felt a flush of shame.

“In the sorcerer’s bedchamber,” I said gruffly. “He was having a nightmare.”

“So that’s what it was! It stopped a lot sooner than it usually does.”

“I woke him up,” I said.

“Well, good,” he said. “I could get some sleep.”

I suppose I could have gone back to sleep. There was really no reason for me to keep so rigidly to my self-appointed duties, except for my slavish devotion to the sorcerer.

But that almost religious routine was the only thing stopping me from going completely mad, and getting dressed and making breakfast was better than lying in bed and feeling my mind melt like butter in a pan.

So, I had learned that the magic-workers had been made rather than born, and weren’t fully human—made from street children, no less, by Sylvester’s “father,” and then trained by him into adulthood. And what kind of power must someone have to take one person and shape them into something else entirely, into a being with the ability to steal hearts and make magics?

Oddly, I felt sorry for Sylvester. I told myself that was the spell talking, the spell that bound and enslaved me, making me feel a connection that simply wasn’t real ... But it had become more real, though, I thought, by sheer virtue of being in his presence day after day, and talking to him.

The love, the dogged devotion, might still have been an ensorcelled illusion, but something else had grown up around it, like a vine curling around a tree. It had to. You could not live with someone, day in and day out, and feel nothing genuine for them at all, good or bad. At least, I didn’t think I could.

I was spellbound to the sorcerer, but I felt a growing sympathy, or even affinity, for the man behind the sorcerer—or the little boy who had been the flour to make his bread, as he had put it.

I made breakfast in thoughtful silence, dropping scraps for Cornelius as I rattled the pans and sipped on my tea. My hands shook a little as I prepared it, and I spilled some hot butter onto the fancy new dress. As always, it left nary a mark.

When I had finished, I piled up the tray as usual with potatoes and bread and eggs and bacon, poured the sorcerer a cup of tea, and poured another one for myself for good measure, and took the breakfast through to the throne room.

My heart thudded with anticipation as I stepped in. Would he be different now? Would he confide in me further?

The answer was, of course, no. He was slumped in the throne, flickering a little fireball between his fingers, and didn’t even look up when I came in, although I lingered and fussed about with the crockery more than usual. I even ostentatiously cleared my throat, but he didn’t budge. When I finally realized he wasn’t going to speak, I left.

I suppose I was relieved. I was still pitifully in love with him, of course, and would have aimed my own meat cleaver into my head if he had asked me, but he seemed reassuringly unaware of that fact. I doubt he had any idea of my feelings at all. I was around, like Cornelius, and I was company, and I was useful, and that was enough.

I hated myself for it, but it was enough for me, too, no matter how often I lay awake in my black bed wishing so hard for his kisses and his hands that my skin stung as badly as if I had fallen into an ants’ nest.

Over the following nights, I listened out for more cries in the dark, signs of his nightmares, but I heard none.

The one change was that he asked me for more tales about the village at the end of each day when I came to collect his dinner plates. I was happy enough to oblige. I had twenty years or so worth of them, after all, and the duller, the better, as far as he was concerned.

I resisted any impulse to embroider the stories, because their ordinariness seemed to be what he enjoyed. There certainly wasn’t much that was ordinary about the House, or him.

He found the story of Goodman Whelk making a fool of himself over the baker’s pretty young daughter, for example, more entertaining than my tale of the birth of a two-headed calf. The deformed calf had entertained the whole village for months, but he barely raised an eyebrow at it before asking me to tell the saga of a pub brawl over again.

He listened like a child being told a bedtime story and, like a child, wanted each story repeated in the same way, with the same details. He even corrected me when I left something out.

I have to admit I enjoyed his attention for the short time he gave it to me. Most of the time, while I talked, he was sprawled across his chair doing something pointless, like throwing and catching a ball, or making a cat’s cradle with a tangle of glowing string, but I could tell he was listening intently.

Maybe there was some eldritch meaning to his little baubles, but I suspected not. He reminded me of an indulged little boy, allowed to sit inside and be idle, rather than being pushed outside to go play with his friends and get out from under his mother’s feet.

I suppose I would be the mother, in that scenario.

I talked and talked about my life until I was fairly sick of it, but he said little more about his. Perhaps he regretted telling me so much when he had woken from his nightmare. I did not press him—although, if I didn’t find my heart soon, I was going to have to. I dreaded the thought.

And I was supposed to find hearts for the Snagged, too; any heart, so that even if I never found mine, I would at least be able to replace what I had lost—or so they believed. I didn’t know if I shared their belief in this mysterious person and process that claimed to hold the key to their cure, but I understood their desperation.

One morning, perhaps four or five days after my visit to the Snagged, there was a crash that sounded at first like the whole place was caving in.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” said Cornelius, appearing seemingly from nowhere.

“Get what?”

“The door.”

“That’s the door ?” Who could hit the door with that amount of force? Another supplicant looking for a hex or a charm? Surely they wouldn’t break the door down before asking for a favor.

I stomped over there and hauled it open, ready to present my most cantankerous self to whoever stood there, but as soon as my eyes focused on the visitor, I was lost.

I had grown used to being almost invisible in the sorcerer’s house. There were no mirrors in my chamber, which suited me just fine, and Cornelius couldn’t give a bald bollock what I looked like as long as bacon kept showing up on his plate every morning. As far as the sorcerer himself went, I might as well have been a piece of his black furniture.

On the doorstep now, however, I felt my plainness again in full force, because I was met with the most beautiful face imaginable, every exquisite line of it a poem. It was the sorceress we had seen at the market, Clarissa.

But seeing her so much closer, breathing her in face-to-face, was dizzying. I must have staggered a little, because I felt myself clutch at the doorframe.

She said nothing to me. She brushed past me with a rustling of silks, and the House opened for her as if it recognized her.

I smelled the scent of her as she passed—strange night-blooming flowers and the drifting mystery of her skin. It smelled familiar, and I remembered the sweet-scented dresses in the mysterious bedchamber.

She walked down the corridor as if she knew where she was going, leaving me gasping in her wake. Her servant followed close behind her, but I could barely take him in, so blinded was I by her presence. He didn’t so much as glance at me, either, but kept his eyes on his sorceress.

“Oh yes, it’s one of them again,” said Cornelius from somewhere around my feet. “Told you.”

I was still breathless from the beauty of her and couldn’t say anything. Of course I remembered her.

“It’ll pass in a second,” said Cornelius, understanding. He dropped to the black floor and started to wash his tail, keeping it carefully in place with one paw. “I’ll wait.”

He was right enough. Whatever influence the sorceress had over me started to fade when I could no longer see or smell her, leaving me with my usual heart-tugging from the sorcerer’s magicks and just the faintest trace of her perfume.

“Don’t you feel it?” I asked when I was able to speak again.

“No. Not even a little,” said Cornelius. “But I can see it on them. Like a cloud. Like pollen. And I can smell it. It works on all the humans.”

Something dreadful occurred to me. “Did she take any more of it?” I clutched at the fabric on my chest, ridiculously, pulling it away from my body as if I had an apronful of blackberries and was afraid to spill them.

“Any more of what?”

“My heart!”

Cornelius gave me a withering stare.

“That’s what they do,” I reminded him.

“You look fine to me,” said Cornelius.

“Well, it doesn’t matter if I look fine.” I patted myself down. “I don’t feel any different, though.”

“Then you’re probably all right.”

“Thanks. Very helpful.”

I started back to the kitchen.

“I’m going to make them tea,” I said.

“No need,” said Cornelius. “They’ll just talk for a while, and then she’ll go.”

“It’s not really about the tea,” I said. “I want to hear what they’re saying, and I can’t get in there unless I have a good reason.”

In the kitchen, the kettle boiled most reluctantly on the stove, huffing out its displeasure. I shook it about a bit, to show it who was boss.

The cups and saucers hid from me in the cupboards, but I hunted them out and forced them onto the tray, and then stood with my hands on my hips and stared down the stove again until it baked me a tray of seedcakes. It singed the edges a bit, just to show its disapproval, but they were good enough.

I had to laugh at myself for a moment, fussing about with tea and cake like some housewife preparing to entertain the preacher back home.

“You’d better not try any tricks,” I said to the House. “All right?”

There was a pause and then a general, bad-tempered sense of agreement. I stamped my way to the throne room. As if in protest, the House made the corridor long again, unspooling the floor out in front of me like a dropped ball of yarn in front of a kitten. I was of two minds as to whether the House would let me into the throne room or not, and it probably was, too, but when I got there, the door opened seemingly as usual.

I could smell the sorceress’s perfume again as soon as I walked in. It made me light-headed, but just for a moment this time. I wondered if it was possible to build up an immunity to them—or if, perhaps, already being bound to one kept me safer from the other.

It gave me a malicious twinge of satisfaction that the sorcerer did not sit up straight for his visitor, either. She had manufactured herself an ornate seat out of something that looked like crystal, sitting regally straight with her hands folded in her lap, and still he lay flopped across his black throne, hair in his eyes, like a puppet with its strings cut.

He was staring at the ceiling, as usual, and she was glaring at him with those gorgeous, unnatural eyes, shaped and colored as smoothly as fresh-grown leaves. Her servant stood behind her, hands clasped in front of him and head lowered, as full of animation and personality as a mushroom.

I hovered with the tray. There was nowhere to put it except on the floor. Seeing my plight, the sorceress flicked her eyes in my direction and created a column of that same crystal, something like a fancy upturned wine goblet, growing like a flower out of the black floor.

I wondered if this was her equivalent of the sorcerer’s black substance—if they all worked with their own particular material. Mayhap she had a castle made of that sparkling stuff somewhere else in the city, like the sorcerer’s House.

I put the tray down with a clatter, deliberately, to make them look around. The sorcerer blinked at me briefly, setting my heart to thudding, and then looked away as if he had always had a personal maid bringing tea and seedcakes to his meetings, and it was nothing worth a second glance. The sorceress glared at me like an owl glares at a weasel.

“What is this?” she asked, gesturing in my direction. “It answered the door.”

“Really? The cat usually does that.”

“Well, this isn’t a cat.”

I bit my tongue to stop myself from retorting. I wanted to see what he would say.

“This is Foss.” He waved a hand at me. “She’s doing the housekeeping.”

“You don’t need a housekeeper.”

“Apparently I do, or the House wouldn’t have provided one.”

“The House didn’t come up with ... this,” she said, taking me in with one sweeping green glance from head to toe.

“It must have brought her here, Clarissa. I didn’t.”

“Sylvester. This is clearly from Outside.”

He looked at me directly then, the beauty of his eyes startling me all over again. I held his gaze for a second, then dropped it, ashamed of what might be showing on my face. I was sure the lady had seen it, however; when I raised my eyes again, she was looking at me with the same sort of amused, pitying knowledge that I had seen on the faces of the girls back in the village, when I was pining after Aron.

The village! That jolted my memory. Clarissa was the one who had taken Dav, I’d swear to it. As I’ve said, the ladies all looked mighty similar in their perfection, but I remembered the tale of the gleaming golden hair like wool all combed out for the spinning, and the yellow green eyes so full of color that the irises almost crowded out the whites. She was the one who had pointed her finger at Dav that day and led him to his doom.

She must have seen something in my stare besides the naked adoration she was used to, because her eyes narrowed.

“What is it looking at?” she said, but she reached for a seedcake as she did so.

“Careful,” I said maliciously. “They’re hot.”

I had half expected the House to be on her side, but it showed gratifying loyalty when it made the seedcake steam, just a little, and burn her hand. She dropped it in her lap and sucked at her fingers. Her servant gave a twitch, as if responding to his mistress’s pain.

“You may go,” she said to me irritably.

I cocked an eyebrow, but the sorcerer waved a hand vaguely in what seemed like agreement, and so I heaved myself back out the door. I let it close behind me, but the House obliged me in its own way by opening an ornate little keyhole in the door that hadn’t been there before. I felt like it was trying to get on my good side again after its sulk earlier.

“I really don’t see why it’s necessary to keep that creature around,” the sorceress was saying when I pressed my ear to the keyhole.

“She just showed up,” said the sorcerer.

“Well, it’s cleaner in here, at least,” she said, brushing some speck of imaginary dust off her perfect skirts. “Careful, though. It’s not a good idea to keep them around for too long. They get ... clingy. Remember what happened with Father? When he tried to keep them? It never worked.”

“You have one,” the sorcerer pointed out.

“Yes, but I replace them regularly, darling,” she said. “I’ve only had him for a month, and he’s already half-used up.”

Used up?

I could almost hear the sorcerer shrug. “I didn’t bring her here. Can we stop talking about it? It’s boring.”

“You must have snagged her without realizing,” said his sister. “I’m just telling you to be careful. She might be a novelty for now, but unless you plan to harvest her, there’s really no point keeping her around.”

He sighed. “Why are you here, anyway?”

“We’re concerned about you.”

“Who’s we ?”

“Your sisters.”

“Any particular ones, or the whole lot of them?”

“All twelve of us, Sylvester.”

“I do have a ridiculous number of sisters,” he said, examining the dirt under his fingernails.

“You’re not producing much,” she said, steepling her fingers and tapping her perfect nails together. He huffed a sigh. “Nothing at all, in fact. We’re all expected to meet a certain quota. You know that. Now more than ever.”

A quota? I thought sharply.

“I’ve only just started,” I heard the sorcerer say sleepily.

“Well, you only came of age a few months ago, of course. But the king has high expectations of you, as the only brother.”

“I don’t like going out to villages. They’re boring. And they smell like manure.”

She huffed an impatient breath. “More boring than sitting in your chair all day?”

“I like my chair,” he said.

“Well, you brought that ugly housekeeper girl back from somewhere, so you must have visited at least one. But one heart isn’t enough. Father has given you a lot of leeway with your training, but he expects you to produce nearly enough as the rest of us by now.”

“I told you, I didn’t bring her here. She just showed up.”

“You mean you haven’t taken anything from her at all ?” The sorceress sat up, and her voice became shrill. “Sylvester, she’s living in your house . You don’t even have to leave your beloved chair . At least have one heart to show Father at the next meeting. It might be enough to keep him happy. For now.”

“ Foss’s heart?” he said, as if startled at the thought. I bit my lip hard as he said my name.

“Well, she’s right here,” said the sorceress. “It would be convenient. And a start.”

He sighed and tapped his fingers on the arm of the throne.

“You don’t have to take it all at once, if you don’t want to,” she said. “Sometimes it’s useful to have one around in case of need. Like Colin, here. But you can’t leave it intact for too long. Just take a little at a time, like sips from a glass. She’ll barely notice.”

I couldn’t see Colin from my angle—just his shadow—but as far as I could tell, he hadn’t moved.

“Of course, it could be shriveled already,” said the sorceress. “It goes one of two ways, with the ugly girls. It’s either ripe and ready, because no one else has picked it, or it’s dried up and bitter. Either way, it’s a lot better than nothing.”

“Look, just leave me alone, all right? I’ll go to one of the villages tomorrow. Or the next day.”

“Not good enough, Sylvester.” She stood with a rustle of skirts. “We’re in a crisis. We need more from everyone, you included. And start with the girl, for goodness’ sake. You need something to show the king.”

As you can imagine, I wasn’t rightly excited to be seen by either the sorceress or the sorcerer after hearing all that, nor would I put it past her to poke her sharp nails through my skin and pull out my heart like the stone of an apricot as soon as she emerged.

I scuttled away as quickly as I could back to the kitchen, where the kettle whistled at me reproachfully, as if to say, “I told you so.”

I stood by the stove and sipped my own tea as I thought about what I had overheard. Well, that had been enlightening. The sorcerer clearly had no idea he had captured me in any way, a thought that was both a relief and a torment. I was just a burr that had caught on his cloak; an accident, like the babes the unmarried women went to the hedge-witch to flush out back home.

One thing had me addled. He had told his sister that he didn’t have my heart, and he had seemed sincere, but I had definitely been hooked, or I wouldn’t have come here at all. So, did that mean that whatever portion of it had clung to him was knocking about here someplace, unbeknownst to him? Or was my heart whole, and I was simply under another spell of some kind? Or was he lying? I had no reason to trust him, after all.

To my surprise, a few minutes after I had closeted myself in the kitchen, the sorceress’s mushroomlike servant wandered in. He looked around the room with a glazed, slack-jawed look, and then his gaze landed on me. He didn’t speak.

“What?” I snapped after a moment.

He moved his tongue in his mouth for a moment before speaking, as if he had to remind himself how it worked.

“My lady requires an herbal tea,” he managed.

The kitchen table gave me a nudge, and I turned to see that a black cabinet had installed itself on one wall. I sighed and tromped over to it, hauling open the door to see rows of herbs neatly bundled with twine and hanging on little hooks inside. Of course.

I gathered them and filled the kettle to boil water, flicking my eyes to the servant now and again. When he wasn’t moving or speaking, he was oddly lifeless, like a toy that needed the key in its back wound up.

“So, you live with the sorceress,” I said, pretending to have trouble with the string binding the herbs in order to delay him. He didn’t answer. “What’s your name?”

“Colin,” he said, after a long pause.

“I’m Foss. Where are you from?”

Another long pause. “I don’t remember.”

I could have made a cup of tea several times over by then, but I was affecting clumsiness. “How did you come to work for the sorceress, then?” I said, putting on the chatty manner of all the twittery housewives I had served in the butcher’s shop.

He blinked. His blink was slow, like a reptile’s. He barely seemed awake. My skin crawled. Is this what would happen to me, if most of my heart was taken away?

I poured the tea into a black china cup as fine as a beetle’s wing case and moved close to him to place it in his hands. As I stood right before him, close enough to see the freckles across his nose, I whispered, “Do you need help?”

His eyes flickered, more rapidly than I had yet seen them move. He mumbled something indistinct and grabbed at the cup with hands as dexterous as if he were wearing oven gloves, almost dropping it.

Before I could say anything else, he turned and fled back to the throne room. I hastened after him, determined to get something out of him, but stopped short when the sorceress emerged.

She clicked her fingers at her servant, and he hurried to her, almost tripping over his own feet. Then she looked past him, to me.

The shock of her green gaze was like a splash of cold water to the face, and I stood numb as she strode to me and lifted my chin with her hand.

I felt a surge of adoration and awe, despite myself, gazing at her, and shame, too—because her relentless, gorgeous eyes magnified every inch of me and shone it back so that I was more aware of myself than ever before, even more so than when Aron had drawn me as a toad on his wine bottles.

“Be careful, girl,” she warned.

She dropped her hand suddenly, leaving me gaping, and turned to leave in a swirl of silks. The manservant followed her out, his eyes fixed on her, still carrying the teacup.

He didn’t even flicker his glance in my direction. He was clearly infatuated with her in the same way I was with the sorcerer—desperately, helplessly. I hoped I didn’t look as much of a fool as he did, though, as he stumbled in her wake like a baby lamb staggering after its mother.

I hid in the kitchen until dinner, chopping vegetables and slicing the gristle off meat as if it were any ordinary day. When I had prepared the meal, I put a plate of meat and gravy down on the floor for Cornelius and took the silver tray through to the throne room, with some trepidation.

If the sorcerer had taken his sister’s words to heart, it might very well be my last march through the dark corridors.

Pushing open the door to the throne room, I could see at once that something was different. For one, the sorcerer was not lounging in his chair, but standing. I was surprised all over again by how tall he was.

The more striking difference, however, was that he was surrounded by a hundred tiny bonfires that lit the room as bright as day and brought sweat pearling on my forehead. He stopped when he saw me, looking like a little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and I almost laughed, I swear it.

“Half the place is on fire,” I pointed out.

“I was bored.”

“I’m not cleaning this up.”

He clicked his fingers, and the fires went out, and the throne room returned to its usual dim self. I plonked the tray down and turned to leave.

“Wait!” he said.

I stopped and turned back.

“Just, wait a minute,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

I waited for a minute.

“Can I go?” I said at last.

“Why did you come here?” he asked.

“To bring you your dinner.”

“No, here . To the House.”

“To be your housekeeper.”

“No. Why did you come?”

I found myself strangely shy. “You came to my village,” I admitted.

He started to massage his temples. “I remember going to a village. I do not remember you.”

I desperately wanted something to do with my hands. I wished I had not put the tray down. I took the fabric of my apron between my fingers instead, and twisted it as if I was wringing the neck of a pullet. “You bought some plants from the herbalist—I don’t know what—and then you stepped back into your carriage. Before you did, you looked out at all of us, at the crowd. And you looked at me.”

“I do not remember,” he said again, looking directly at me this time. How could I possibly have looked at something this hideous and forgotten? I imagined him thinking.

“Well, you ... snagged me,” I said, remembering the sorceress’s words.

“Oh.” He pinked, which surprised me. He looked about as embarrassed as I felt. “I did not mean to.”

So, it had been like walking out of the privy with a rag stuck to your foot, as I had suspected. Flattering.

“Why didn’t you tell me who you were, when you arrived?” he said. “Why did you come here?” There was more agitation in his voice than I had ever heard previously, and I wondered why. After all, he had been made to take hearts, as he said. Why did he seem so horrified?

“I do not want to be here,” I burst out. “I had to come. You did something to me. I was in terrible pain until I got here.”

In the dim light, his cheekbones stood sharp as folded paper, and his eyes were shadowed so that they were black rather than gray blue. I found it difficult not to watch his mouth while he talked and hated myself for it. “You were ... caught?”

“You should know,” I said sharply.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he repeated.

“I needed time ... to figure things out. To try to find my heart.”

“You’ve been looking for it all this time?”

“Yes! What do you think? Of course I have!”

“Even when ...” he caught himself, pinching the bridge of his nose again and breathing deeply. “So since you’ve come here, you have been trying to find your heart. You thought I had it.”

“Yes!”

“So all the times we have talked ... You were trying to find out where it was? That is why you asked me all those questions?”

Did he look hurt? It was so hard to read his face. “You don’t know what it’s like,” I said. “It’s torment. Of course I wanted to be free.”

“To be free,” he repeated. He was silent for a moment, and then, “I did not mean to take you,” he said, more gently. “I promise I did not. It must have happened without my knowing about it. I haven’t been doing this for long.”

As if he were one of Da’s apprentice butchers who had waved his cleaver too wildly and chopped off the tip of a thumb. Just that easy, to accidentally take a piece of a person and barely notice.

“Where is it?” I demanded. “Where is my heart, then, that you took without meaning to? Where are you keeping it?”

“No! I took nothing from you. If you are ... attached to me, then it is a spell that went awry.”

“What spell ?”

“The spell for heart-taking is a strong one,” he explained. “Even though I chose not to cast it in the end, I had been preparing to cast it. Spells don’t like that. It’s like throwing a stick for a dog to chase, and then telling it not to run. I suppose some of that ... preparation caused the spell to reach out and attach to you somehow, without my intending it.”

“Why did you choose not to cast it?” I asked.

He looked uncomfortable. I could tell he was desperate for another magic toy to fidget with. “I just did,” he said.

“So, you don’t have my actual heart? Like, in a box or some such?” All my searching had been worthless. All my time spent here—worthless. I had nothing to take to the Snagged. No way of freeing myself.

“No. You are bonded to me by a powerful spell, that is all. I have no piece of you.”

“But you meant to take a heart. You came to my village to get one.”

He rubbed at his temples violently. “I went to your village to harvest, it’s true,” he said. “But then I got there and ... I didn’t. I left without taking anything. Or so I thought. I would never have chosen you.”

I would never have chosen you. Of course. No one would pick me out of a crowd of Hallies and other lithe, young lovelies—girls who knew how to dress and how to smile, how to look up through their eyelashes and laugh at the right moments. Girls who hadn’t spent their whole lives behind a shop counter trussed in an apron. Girls who hadn’t been cursed from birth.

I looked up sharply, expecting to see disgust or even mockery, but all I could see were his brows drawn together a little in concern. Somehow that made it worse. Thank goodness for that apron to twist. I stared down at my hands as they wrung the fabric: strong and red, the proper hands for a butcher girl to have.

“Can you break the spell?” I wondered, the words coming out more plaintive than I had intended. “Can you let me go? Without using me? Without damaging me?”

There was a pause. He pursed his lips. “I do not think so.”

“Can you try?”

He came toward me. I forced myself not to back away.

“May I?” he asked .

“May you what?” I managed to say through the surge of desire that rose in my throat.

He gestured at my chest. What on earth . . .? But then I chastised myself for being a lovesick fool. He was hardly going to rip my bodice open now if he hadn’t done so previously. He wanted my heart.

“Will it hurt?” I whispered.

“What?” He seemed startled. “No. I want to look at the spell. There are ways to ... Please. Just trust me.”

I shut my eyes. There was a rustle of rich fabric as he raised his arm, and then I felt his palm against my rib cage. I almost groaned but managed to swallow the sound.

“It’s strange,” he said, so close that I could feel his breath touch my cheek. “It’s ... tangled. Many threads all tangled together. I can’t see a way to pull them loose.”

He stepped back, and I opened my eyes.

“So, I am to be your housekeeper forever,” I said. “Or I die. I am doomed, is that it?”

His jaw worked, but he did not reply.

“I will come back to clear your plate,” I said, and I turned with as much dignity as I could muster.

“Wait,” he said, and I paused. “I am not going to harvest you. My sister ...”

“Your sister will know that I still have my heart, when she comes again, and she will harvest me herself,” I said. “I am damned if I stay and damned if I leave.”

“I promise that I will take none of your heart, nor will I let her take it.” He sat again on his dark throne, clenching his fists on its arms. “If I knew how to release you, I would.”

“ Why can’t you?” I asked. “There must be a way.”

“We have never learned it. We have never needed to.” He rose and started toward me again, as if to stop me from going.

“That doesn’t mean it’s impossible!” I insisted. “You could try! If it can be done, it can be undone!” Couldn’t it? I was crazed with fear, with the possibility that I might never be free.

He just stood there.

“In the old stories, a kiss would undo the spell,” I said, unthinking, and then went beet red as I realized what I had said. Now he would think that I wanted him to kiss me, which of course I did, but I didn’t want him knowing that. But it was too late.

He stared at me for a moment, then crossed the distance between us again. I froze.

“You don’t ...” I began, but before I could continue, he leaned toward me with complete seriousness and brushed my burning lips with his cool, dry ones. It was my first kiss, and I had nothing to compare it to, but I imagine that kissing a sorcerer would have trumped all other kisses anyhow.

If I had been red before, now I must have been a rich purple shade. My heart throbbed in my lips, and they felt unnaturally sensitive, as if chapped by a cold wind.

Our lips parted. The sorcerer held my gaze, seemingly completely unembarrassed. “It doesn’t seem to work,” he said.

“Well, I ...” I began, and then realized I had absolutely no idea how to finish that sentence, and that I should just leave before I made an even bigger fool of myself. “Well, I’m going to bed,” I said eventually. “If you feel like setting fire to anything else, feel free to snap your fingers and clean it up before morning.”

He said nothing, and I could not read his expression. I left him there, and I was so angry that I could have spit.