Chapter 24 #3
He blinked. ‘You don’t laugh much.’
‘I’m bad at it,’ I said tersely, trying to convince my limbs to move and failing miserably.
There was something utterly paralysing about that look on his face.
Something that hooked into my chest and turned even breathing into a laborious effort – something that made me never want to close my eyes again. ‘I … I sound …’
The words drifted off.
I heard the sentence I’d been about to speak. Heard it through his ears again.
‘Oh,’ I said numbly.
His expression revealed none of the triumph I’d expected. ‘Yes. I thought it might be something like that.’
The cage.
The phantom bars.
How long had it been since I’d laughed at anything?
‘Come,’ he said before that thought could spiral any further, holding out his arm. ‘Time to go home. Aunt Gon is probably waiting with tea and thyme cake.’
I took his arm without thinking.
He was so stupidly strong. He sounded so impossibly calm. He smelled so horribly, reassuringly like nightshade and black roses.
Out of nowhere, I wanted nothing more than to bury my face into his slender shoulder and cry my heart out.
My bedroom didn’t have a lock, and I slept deep and dreamless all the same.
Soft pink light woke me, an imitation of a sunrise I’d never seen in my life.
There was just the slightest pinch of a headache when I rolled out of bed, dressed, and tiptoed down the stairs.
In the living room, I found only Errik awake, stitching up a hole in a pair of trousers on the plush cream-coloured couch.
‘Good morning,’ he said in his low, pleasant voice.
‘Good morning,’ I said and took to inspecting the small bookcase in the darkest corner of the room. Neither of us spoke to each other as he continued his sewing work and I settled on the other side of the couch with a volume on deathmade magic – a man after my own heart.
Durlain and Estegonde woke up not long after, and Nanna had apparently appeared somewhere during the morning, because all of a sudden food and tableware floated into the living room.
There was bread and eggs and porridge. There was so much food, really, that I felt like rolling out of the room by the time we finished breakfast; when Durlain suggested I come along with Errik and him to get some exercise, I had to politely decline and blame my head instead.
I took a bath. It was glorious.
Once I was clean and dry and smelled of nothing but violets, I curled up on my bed and read two more chapters on deathmade magic.
According to the book, it was Death’s personal choice to revive the souls entering Niflheim as necromancers.
Garm barked outside, and I wondered if the poor god regretted his decision to bring Durlain back.
When my head started to ache, I put the book away, stared at the bedroom around me, and thought about Mother and Kjell and the secrets they’d kept.
They’d been protecting me, presumably. Why tell a five-year-old you’re preparing to kill a king or three?
And whatever Kjell had been doing after we’d fled the Dusk House, it wasn’t rebelling; he’d never met with anyone but the occasional client buying a knife, and I could count the letters I’d seen him write on a single hand.
So perhaps he’d decided conspiring was too dangerous a job after all.
Perhaps he’d turned his back on the world that had killed my mother and just tried to get me into adulthood alive.
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
If only I could have sent Durlain into hell to have a word with him and Mother … but every bird in Aranc’s service knew that deathmade mages could only interact with the spirits whose bodily remains they held, and I didn’t have so much as a fingernail left from either of them.
I thought about myself, little five-year-old Thraga, secretly practicing her rune signs at the walls of her room when no one was watching.
My room …
I glanced at the door. Could I?
Estegonde and Errik were downstairs, talking. I’d heard Durlain come up the stairs a while ago, presumably on his way to his own bedroom. If I was lucky, it wasn’t the equivalent to the room where I had slept.
If it was …
Well. He’d seen me do odder things.
Decision made, I hopped out of bed and up the stairs, to the second floor I knew and didn’t know at once.
Three doors. The one to the left had its own bathroom, I knew; that had been the guestroom for Mother’s best friends.
The two to the right were connected rooms, sharing a bathroom in between, and that was where we had slept, Mother and me – just a single door between us whenever I had nightmares, or whenever I couldn’t sleep, or whenever my feet were cold and I wanted a hug.
Something prickled in the corner of my eye. I brusquely wiped it away and tiptoed to the second door of the two.
I gave a soft tap. Durlain might be undressing, for all I knew.
No answer came from inside.
In for a spark, in for the fire. I sucked in a breath and cautiously turned the handle, peering into a room that was familiar and yet utterly alien.
Not Durlain’s room, in any case.
The bed stood where my own bed had been, by the window, which was a solid midday gold now.
The walls had the colours mine had shown: pale blue and pink and purple.
But my room hadn’t been crammed full of dresses and shoes and jewellery, and my walls hadn’t been covered in dozens upon dozens of drawings.
Cimmura.
I should so very much turn back.
Instead, I found myself slipping inside and quietly nudging the door shut behind me, drinking in the sight of a life I’d almost forgotten.
There was the corner in which my little desk had stood, home here to a gilt-framed, man-high mirror.
The wall that had held my beloved painting of three wolves having tea, covered here by an oakwood wardrobe.
The wall where my wardrobe had been, holding the dresses I’d refused to wear and the trousers they’d put on me instead; Cimmura’s desk stood against it, and a handful of pencil portraits hung above that workspace.
They watched me while I made my slow circles around a stranger’s room.
Durlain. Estegonde. A woman whose face I didn’t know.
She was a bloody good artist, although her rendition of her brother looked a lot softer than I’d ever seen him in real life.
A sketchbook lay open on the desk – as if she’d never even left, as if she might walk in any moment and sit down to continue the work. One step closer, and I saw the portrait she’d been drawing – in colour, this time, the face on the paper so perfectly lifelike that I almost gasped out loud.
That heart-shaped face. Those quirky horns, just a fraction asymmetrical. That russet, autumn-coloured hair.
Pol.
Pollara Estien, it said beneath the drawing, and in a smaller hand beneath it, We had almost been sisters.
Mists fucking take me.
I shouldn’t touch it. I really, really shouldn’t touch it …
but I was browsing before I knew it, page after page of faces, each of them labelled neatly with name and explanation in that curly, girlish hand.
A book full of memories. Of the people Cimmura hadn’t seen since she’d died and fled her home.
Claudine – Lorn killed her when they came to kill me.
Sicart – probably mad (but I liked him all the same). Hevaine – she told me all the gossip.
I turned the next page.
I froze.
From the paper under my fingers, drawn in shades of gold and tan and blue, a face I knew so very well brazenly grinned back at me.