CHAPTER 11
Lunaris greeted us with low lights, lit candles, a faux fireplace on the mini television mounted to the wall, and the smell of spaghetti Bolognese simmering on the hob.
Not terribly subtle. If she’d put rose petals in the guest bedroom, I’d have taken my chances and slept in the woods. I did not need her exposing how much I liked Kessian, for three reasons.
The first, it was embarrassing. Kessian made no attempts to disguise his attraction to me, but he’d given me the impression those feelings were solely sexual. No strings attached. And I really couldn’t afford to garrote myself with the strings I’d invariably tie myself up in.
The second reason was, given the wraith, the strid, and the general direction my life always took, I could end up killing him. Not directly, but the visions from the spring weren’t terribly subtle.
And third, based on the fragment of conversation I overheard between him and Briar, Kessian was hiding something.
“Cozy,” Kessian said, turning a circle in the doorway. “Is there a reason for the romantic atmosphere?”
“Lunaris is a meddler,” I said, turning my back to him so I could open the cupboard and make tea. A calming activity that might distract from Lunaris’s intentions.
I jumped as Kessian ran a finger down my spine. “That wasn’t a complaint.”
A big part of me wanted to lean into that touch, but for the aforementioned three reasons, I held back.
Kessian sensed my hesitation and a flicker of rejection crossed his face before he removed his hand. I wanted to catch his wrist, but I was exhausted and overstimulated, oscillating between keeping my distance and getting as close as I dared.
“Sorry,” I murmured. “It can take me five to seven business days to process big things. Today has been a lot of big things.”
Kessian recovered himself, nodding. “It is late. Should we have dinner and call it a night?”
Lunaris had taken care of supper, so all I had to do was boil pasta. She could generally prepare anything provided the raw ingredients were available, and luckily I kept leftover Bolognese in the freezer for such occasions as these when the day got away from me.
We settled into the dining booth and tucked in. I tried to ignore the candle flickering between us, focusing on that fragment of an overheard conversation.
“So how did you get to know Briar and Rowan?”
Kessian shrugged. “Like I said, I came here on a trip a couple years back. We have a lot in common, so we get on like a house on fire.”
That final conversation had sounded terse to me. I decided to quit being tactful and just ask. “I overheard Briar offering to make you something?”
Kessian paused mid-chew, an unreadable expression crossing his face. “Were you eavesdropping?”
“Just coming back from the toilet. Are you hiding something?”
Lunaris thumped my back with the booth cushion, chastising me for being rude.
Kessian’s tone was light. “I was admiring some of the fashion designs he had framed on the wall. Told him it’s hard to find clothes that fit me right or let me express myself, so I wish I had that skill.
He offered to make me something, but I don’t want to fall back on ‘mate’s rates.
’ He should be paid for his talent, so I’ll save up until I can afford it. ”
I thought back to what Briar had said. There’s no shame in it. And the brittle way Kessian had said, No, it’s fine. I’m fine.
A bad habit I’d never quite kicked: I assumed everyone told me the truth. Not only because I was terrible at lying, but because deceiving people seemed like so much effort, and I could never understand the motivation to expend that on a disguise most people would see through.
But I rarely saw through it. I took most things at face value, and then looked the gullible arsehole when the truth came to light.
In spite of all that, I could tell he wasn’t being entirely honest.
What reason did Kessian have to lie to me? The optimistic answer was: none. Realistically, he couldn’t have anything to do with the wraith or the drowning of two dozen villagers in Shearwater. He’d moved there three years later.
But he was connected to the strid’s magic, and he was hiding something.
“All right. You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
Kessian’s shoulders sagged, whether with relief that I didn’t press him or disappointment that I’d seen through the lie, I couldn’t tell. I twirled the spaghetti around my fork and moved on to the other thing I wanted to ask.
“If we’re going to speak with the forest tomorrow, we should lay out everything we already know.”
“Not much,” Kessian said. “But go ahead.”
“Do you know how you got your abilities? Or why?”
“Not the why. As to how, they came to me after my first soak in the spring. I remember floating on my back with the water in my ears, and I heard a voice. It asked …” For a moment, he looked nothing like the coy, playful Kessian I knew.
He looked guarded bordering on prickly. “It asked if I had a home.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. I’d just moved to Shearwater. I didn’t know if I was going to stay.”
“Where did you live before?”
“A place called Bellgrave. Not the sunniest place, but it had its upsides.”
“I visited once. Made a killing selling coffee cups near the university. Why did you leave?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I paused mid-bite. “More secrets?”
“Let me keep a few.” He winked, reverting to his light, flirtatious tone. “It adds to my mystique, doesn’t it?”
Lunaris thumped me again, but I didn’t break eye contact. I needed to be rid of the wraith, and I needed to trust the one helping me do it.
Kessian dropped the mask. “It’s not some big, dark secret. It’s just a memory I’d rather not revisit, all right?”
Oh. I wasn’t rooting out treachery, I was being an asshole. I might associate the strid with every malicious horror that had plagued my life, but it was unfair to lump Kessian in with it just because the wild magic had given him a gift.
I uncrossed my arms. “That’s fair. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. I get that it seems strange. We hook up not knowing anything about each other, and it turns out you’re cursed by the same wild magic that blessed me. But I’m putting it all together same as you.”
“What happened after you heard the voice in the spring?”
His expression turned inward. “I think of it as a quickening. Some part of the strid connected with some part of me. It felt like a chain, with the strid as one link, me as the second, and then a mysterious third. Maybe that’s you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Instinct, I suppose. I felt most certain of it when we were in the spring together, in those visions.” The candle flame danced in the reflections of his eyes as he gazed off into the distance. “Something about it felt … I don’t want to say ‘like fate,’ but almost like we’d done this before.”
It unnerved me to hear it spoken out loud because I agreed. When we’d first met, it felt like I’d known him a long time. After clearing up dinner, I said, “We should get ready for bed. I’ll show you to the guest room.”
“There’s a guest room?”
He sounded disappointed. I rapped my knuckles on the bathroom door.
A clock on the wall next to it had no numbers around its face.
Instead, icons of the different places it led to were painted around the circumference.
The hour hand always hung around the twelve, which showed a sun, but could be spun to the other hours for different times of day or weather.
Each also had a smaller icon for different sorts of rooms. At present, it was switched to the lavatory.
“What does it do?” Kessian asked.
“I’ll show you.”
I opened the door to show him the bog.
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s the guest bedroom?”
“No.” I shut the door and opened the clock face’s glass panel, turning the minute hand to the third hour, which had a picture of a bed next to it. This time when I opened the door, the room had changed, a four-poster bed sat in the center, looking out a big window to a sunset vista.
Kessian’s jaw dropped. He pointed to the different pictures on the clock. “These all lead to different rooms?”
“Yes.”
“What’s this one?” He pointed to a painting of a book.
“Reading room.”
“And this one?” Kessian’s voice took on a tone of awe as he pointed to a painted clay vase.
“My pottery studio.”
I wasn’t sure if I imagined the brittle look in Kessian’s eyes as he said, “Must be nice.” Whatever he felt, it vanished quickly. “Can I see it?”
“Go ahead.”
He spun the minute hand to the vase and opened the door.
My pottery studio was one of the first rooms Lunaris crafted for me when we went on the road.
The skylights in an A-framed roof gave a view of the star-spattered night, and porthos plants hung from ceiling beams. One corner was devoted to my pottery wheel, the other to the kiln, and on the naked brick wall at the back, all of my work was stored in shelving.
A long bench with an apothecary cabinet below housed my tithes and magical ingredients for enchantments. One mug lay there, half finished.
Kessian walked past the shelves with stacks of bowls and mugs in different shapes and sizes. He ran his finger over one with a drip glaze in robin’s-egg blue.
“Are they all enchanted?”
None of the work had labels, but I didn’t need any.
I had a map in my head of all the spells and which shelves they belonged to.
“Not all. That section hasn’t been glazed or fired yet, and this shelf has enchantments I added in the slip, but for these ones, I’m waiting until I fire them to incorporate the spell.
I have some runes I activate in the kiln for specific projects.
Recently—” I picked up the half-finished mug from my workbench, showing Kessian the potion brewing inside.
“I found a way to make a mug that gives the drinker energy to last until bedtime without a caffeine crash. I’d been working on it a while, but the enchantment gave me cold chills, so it needed some perfecting. ”