Chapter Fourteen
“Do you ever sleep?” Aidan demanded from the kitchen doorway the next morning.
Sorcha, up to her elbows in flour, her hair in a messy knot at her nape, skewered him with a glance. “I did sleep. As you well know. When I could have been doing something else much more fun,” she added with a mutter.
He looked entirely too well rested. He must have brought his own clothing back in the cart yesterday, but he had left off his frock coat and cravat again.
He wore a lawn shirt and trousers. He looked very much like a curator who dug in the sand for ancient treasures and was sometimes a wolf, and very little like an earl.
“It’s barely past dawn,” he scolded.
Even if he sounded exactly like an earl, all stern and likely entirely too accustomed to getting his own way.
“I had a nap.” Truth be told, she had never slept so well.
She had woken with three pink robins flying down her cold chimney with a song.
And then the kittens had invaded, equally thrilled and incensed at the intruders.
Since there was no going back to sleep after that, she had decided to see to the bread.
There was always dough rising or needing to be punched down.
There were charms to coddle the dough, hexes against temperature fluctuations in the oven, and spells to keep the cold from interfering, but it was best not to leave them unattended too long.
Hecuba had stopped in for queen cake leftovers soaked in rosewater and then made her way to her bed as the sun rose higher.
“There’s tea in the pot,” Sorcha told Aidan, covering the dough with a moist cloth before wiping her hands on her apron. “And blackberry scones. Do wolves eat blackberry scones?”
“Wolves eat everything.”
“That’s promising.”
He lifted his head slowly to look at her, eyes molten.
Had she really said that out loud?
She grinned. He shook his head and poured his tea, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Menace.”
Feeling much more cheerful, she decided to move on to the next of the morning chores.
“Now where are you going?” Aidan asked. “Do you never sit either?”
Sorcha shrugged. “Not when there are beasties to feed. Have you ever seen a hungry unicorn? It’s not pretty.
” She took off her apron and tossed it over the back of a chair.
Aidan wrapped two scones and two pears into a napkin and joined her.
“We can find you something more substantial for breakfast,” she said. “There are eggs and potatoes.”
“These aren’t for me.”
“Well, unicorns don’t eat scones. At least, Nimue doesn’t. Not nearly fancy enough for her refined palate.”
“They’re not for her. They’re for you.”
Sorcha stopped. “For me?”
“Do you think I did not realize almost immediately that you spend all of your time feeding your menagerie of monsters and the demanding, brilliant, and yet still somehow absent-minded professors of Hallow, and never yourself?”
“I eat.” Had she eaten yesterday? He might have a point. To be fair, they had been rather busy. Her eyes stung for no good reason. “Thank you.” She swallowed hard. “But speaking of feeding the monsters…”
He followed her out to the courtyard, where one of the bakery boys was already dragging piles of sticks into the bakehouse. “The fire keeps going out,” he huffed when Sorcha greeted him. “That water spell after the fire worked too well.”
“I’ll ask the phoenix to drop a feather for you.”
“That would be grand, thanks!”
Sorcha brought gold-dusted rose petals and raw meat to Nimue, staying well out of reach of the glittering horn and hooves and teeth. Aidan helped her with the hay and the heavy sack of oats.
That was nice too.
Aesop had already fed the kittens. The hippogriff lay on his side, watching them.
He flicked his tail when one of them climbed up to curl on his spine and fell instantly into a snoring sleep.
Simon and Aesop were in the bakehouse already, Aesop’s horns dusted with flour, red skin redder with the heat from the fires.
A goat wandered past her, bleating.
“Where did you come from?” Sorcha asked the goat.
Another bleat.
“I see.”
“Do you understand goats as well as birds?” Aidan asked.
“No, but I did not wish to be impolite.” She crouched down, and the goat hurried closer.
“Someone tied him to the gatehouse yesterday,” Simon called out.
The goat meandered closer to Sorcha, opened his mouth, and screamed.
Loudly.
Like someone getting stabbed.
Repeatedly.
Startled, Sorcha fell back on her bottom. She huffed a laugh. “I see.”
“I imagine they heard that in London.” Aidan frowned. “Do people often leave you screaming goats?
She smiled when the goat let her scratch his ears. “Goats, donkeys. A chicken someone spelled to sing naughty sea shanties every midnight and could not undo it.”
“Is that what I heard last night?”
“Everyone knows Sorcha will take them in,” one of the boys explained as he passed by, dragging an armful of twigs.
“I imagine you have work to do today?” Sorcha asked Aidan. “Something for the museum? Or the wolves?”
“I am doing what you are doing.”
“You don’t have to protect me,” she said softly.
He grunted. Clearly she brought out the best in him. “I go where you go.”
“In that case, I believe I shall go for a walk.”
“A walk,” he repeated. He looked suspicious. Exceedingly suspicious.
Clever man.
“But first, the feeding of the beasties is not over.”
“Isn’t it? Are there monsters left to feed on the island?”
“Unfortunately, yes. And we’re nearly out of pineapple jelly. It’s the only thing the hippogriff will eat, and it costs a fortune.” There were dukes who could not afford to eat so much pineapple jelly.
Resigned, Sorcha ducked into the drawing room, still hung with the green brocade her grandmother had favored, the ceiling trim ornate and brightly gilded. Snakes carved from jade and marble and crystal lined the mantelpiece. Among them sat a crystal horse.
“Don’t you dare sell that.” Granny appeared with a pop of irritated light. Her snake eyed Sorcha judgmentally. “It belonged to your grandfather’s grandfather.”
“You didn’t like my grandfather,” Sorcha pointed out. “Nor, I expect, did you care for his grandfather.”
“All the same.”
“All the same, I have more mouths to feed. The hippogriff is almost as fussy as the unicorn. Only worse, because he is sad.” A mournful hippogriff was surprisingly difficult to ignore.
“He’s a beast.” Granny sniffed.
“A sad beast.”
“Hmph. Sad beasts are cheaper to feed, I am sure.”
“Granny!”
“Oh, very well. Sell the jade snuffbox there instead. Lady Winthorpe has always coveted it. And if you tell her Lord Gorse wants it, she’ll double the price.”
“Thank you, Granny.”
Granny vanished with a decidedly cantankerous “Hmph.”
“Does that happen a lot?” Aidan asked quietly, taking the jade-inlaid snuffbox from her and adding it to his pack.
“What? Haggling with Granny? Daily.”
“Selling off your family heirlooms to feed your wee beasties.”
“Mostly I sell bread.” He raised an eyebrow. She wrinkled her nose. “Very well, yes, and the occasional heirloom. Of which there are few. Do you know what unicorns eat?”
He grunted. “Anything.”
“That may be true for the other unicorns, but Nimue is very particular.”
“She’s clever, you mean. Wrapping you around her iron hoof.”
“She has nightmares and is afraid of the dark,” Sorcha said softly. “That’s why we keep the oil lamps burning in the courtyard, and the firefly lights. Those cost a fortune too.”
“I see.”
“What do you see?”
He half smiled that serious and faintly amused smile he seemed to reserve for her. “You.”
Aidan wandered toward the window where the view showed the hills, the road down to Hallow, the gray rooftops, and the sea churning beyond.
A glass bottle with cut daisies caught the sunlight.
He let his gaze soften, his senses wake.
The threads of old spells glittered throughout the room: a charm to keep guests from pilfering the silver, a spell to attract a suitor, magic to keep the crack in the upper corner of the window from growing.
A few were over a hundred years old, barely gleaming. One of them smelled like pepper.
He found one that was promising and followed it to a sewing basket by the settee. He plucked a small silver hand mirror decorated with seashells from under packets of sewing thread.
“I’d forgotten that was there,” Sorcha said. “Granny hid it there when my grandfather’s brother insisted on visiting. He snooped through everything.”
It sparkled with threads of magic. “It’s been charmed to let you speak to a mermaid.”
“Yes, my grandfather was obsessed. And he hated that this house came to Granny and he couldn’t touch it. She liked to hide his favorite things, and his brother knew it.”
Aidan made a note to remember that the women of Sorcha’s family believed in their own forms of justice.
He followed another glimmer to a large opal shaped like an egg. “This one is a spell to talk to the pigeons.”
Sorcha smiled. “Granny did not like being left out of conversations.”
“The spell might fetch something, but the opal itself would feed a family for several months.”
She brightened. “Will it, really?”
“Not a Lycan family, mind,” he added. Something else glimmered, calling him from upstairs. The thread was green as ivy leaves. It smelled like spring, like new leaves and lilac petals and wild strawberries. With a hint of wolfsbane and holly berry. Curious.
He stalked after the thread, past a tapestry from the time of Queen Elizabeth and edged with bewitched silver beads, past a marble-topped table with lion’s feet, past silk brocade wallpaper frayed by kitten claws. He turned left and pushed open a heavy oak door.
“That’s my bedroom,” Sorcha pointed out. “Granny would not approve.”
Granny, as if summoned, appeared in a draft of frigid air. Her diamonds were enough to make the eyes water. They could have fed a hundred unicorns. “You make me sound positively fussy, gel.”
“You’re not fussy, you’re tyrannical, old woman.”
“Bah.”
“Ouch!” Sorcha exclaimed with a laugh when a pellet of ice smacked her on the nose.
“Serves you right.”
He’d never known a family who were so easy with each other, so loving even through sharp words and teasing. His own family… Well. He’d never known this kind of acceptance. Trust.
“Did you make your bed?” Lady Gloucester demanded.
“That’s what you’re worried about? Not my shiningly pure reputation?”
“Well, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t,” Sorcha muttered. She slipped ahead of Aidan and frowned at him as her grandmother vanished in a waft of rose perfume. “You don’t get to lecture me about my unmade bed.”
“Of course not.” If she only knew how desperately he wanted to unmake her bed every day and night. He did not even glance at it. It may as well have been the bloody sun, waiting to blind him.
Instead, he returned to the green thread, leading him to a chipped stone mask of a man with leaves surrounding his face and bursting from his mouth. It sat on the mantelpiece, scratching at him, pulling him closer.
“Granny bought that a few years before she died,” Sorcha said when he picked it up to inspect it further.
The Green Man was a common motif in some medieval churches, full of oak leaves and acorns.
“She was told it was once used to spell the poison gardens behind the Hallow Library. She’ll be very put out if she was lied to. ”
“She wasn’t. It’s authentic. I can see the green threads where the spell was cast.” And taste the wolfsbane. He set it down hastily as his wolf snarled.
“You can tell just like that?” Sorcha asked.
“Aye. It’s my job to know,” he replied.
“Right,” she murmured. “Lord Most Exalted Curator of the Fancy London Museum of Old Magical Things.”
“I generally go by Most Exalted,” he replied drily. “It saves time. But I can see the magic of it. This Green Man is easily five hundred years old. The museum would buy this from you.”
She placed her hands on her hips. “I see what you are doing, Aidan Carnahan.”
“Finding artifacts? It’s my job, remember?”
“Hmph. That’s not it, and you know it. But as Nimue will eat my arm if I don’t find the funds to feed her, I shall allow it.”
“Very magnanimous of you.”
“Isn’t it?”
“In that case, you also have a horde of Saxon coins buried under the left-back corner of the Pegasus stall,” he said. He was itching to dig them up. “They belong in a museum. Donated.”
“You would say that. And ha. You can buy them if you want them so badly.”
The museum curator in him wanted to lecture her about the necessity for donated relics, that legally all found gold belonged to the Crown, but the rest of him just wanted to tell her she was adorable.
He wanted to drink in every detail of her chambers, tuck it away inside himself.
The soft pillows, the chair by the hearth, the baskets scattered around for various animals to sleep in.
The birdseed on the windowsill outside for the birds that followed her everywhere.
The bed, which he, once again, was not looking at. His eyes flared, the wolf stirring.
“Are you about to wear the wolf?” Sorcha asked, sounding curious and not at all frightened. She truly was a wonder.
“No.”
“I don’t mind, but try not to shed on the furniture. We can’t keep housemaids for very long, and I do not care for dusting.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
He wanted to kiss her again, to taste every inch of her so badly that he was afraid he might start sweating. Or growling.
He could not read her expression, which was disconcerting. Sorcha’s every emotion flitted across her face. “Shall we go for that walk?” she asked.
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a long moment. “Where to, Lady Sorcha?” He used her title mostly to remind himself that she was not Lady Coventry. That he had to act accordingly. With restraint.
Something he was very accustomed to.
“Why, to the Cauldron, Lord Coventry.”
The way she mocked him only made her more endearing. Very few people mocked an earl. Or an Alpha, whatever he might think of the designation.
And then her words registered. The air around him stilled, chilled. “Pardon me?”
“Freya said you could not find it because it has cloaking spells.” She grinned smugly. “But I can.” She added over her shoulder, “Are you coming?”