CHAPTER 49 #2
Bristol didn’t know of any person in her father’s life named Fritz. If he came with her father to the mortal world, she never saw him. “Who is this Fritz person?” she asked.
“The doorward of Celwyth Hall. But you probably knew him in his other form, as Angus. Not many knew he was a shape-shifter. He preferred it that way.”
Bristol showed no emotion. She didn’t feel like a surprised novice anymore, but a jaded veteran of this world.
Still, anger curdled in her stomach at the lies she never saw.
Angus was a shape-shifter. The family’s long-lived ferret who always managed to disappear at convenient times.
He had been listening to them all those years.
And he didn’t take crumpled letters from the trash to shred the paper. He read them.
“Fritz told me about you,” Reuben said. “May the great gods save me, I never wanted you to come here. Except for a few artists who stick close to the conservatory, things rarely end well for mortals in this world. Even da Vinci suffered a gash that nearly disemboweled him when he ventured too far. Elphame is a dangerous world that’s often difficult to escape once you’re here, especially if you become someone of particular worth.
That’s why I told you to go home, Miss Keats.
Before you or anyone else discovered your value. ”
Value. A chill trickled down her spine. She was the only known bloodmarked in Elphame besides her mother.
The thought had lurked in her mind, cloudy and unformed, but now she saw the danger of it, fully formed in Reuben’s eyes.
There was a threat in being needed by the wrong people.
Her mother was proof of that. But Bristol had the means to leave whenever she wanted to. Her timemark was safely hidden away.
“That’s also why I put your father’s note in your room,” he continued. “I thought if I couldn’t convince you to leave, surely he could. He had the golden tongue that I was not blessed with, but clearly you were immune to his pleadings too.”
“He came to you with the note?”
“No. It was Mae who passed it on to me. She was the go-between for a trow who knew of my involvement with Willow. He requires a favor of me from time to time for his silence, though that time I was happy to oblige.”
Bristol hissed out a breath. “Mae told me she hated trows.”
“She does, but she’ll do anything for a coin.”
Anything? Bristol remembered the cloaked mercenary guide who led her to her father at the barn, always rubbing his fingers together, requiring coin for the smallest bit of information.
His identity was carefully disguised. A glamoured Mae?
Bristol sighed. She had been duped by a master.
Mae would probably be the first to calculate Bristol’s value.
“That’s why you ordered me to leave, to spare me? ”
“Why else? Some mistakes I can never fix. That only leaves me to mitigate the mistakes about to happen. You’re a prize, Miss Keats, and at risk.”
“I can take care of myself, Reuben.”
“No doubt. You are your father’s daughter. But be judicious with your risks. During my early days with Willow, I thought I owned the world. Now I can see I was only hanging on to its edge all along.”
Be judicious now? Bristol could almost laugh. She’d been reckless ever since she decided to stop running from unseen monsters and return to the Willoughby Inn. Now wasn’t the time to put on the brakes. “Willow said my father was nowhere. Does that mean he’s dead?”
Reuben’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t know. It probably means he’s out of her reach, but I don’t know if that is a good or a bad thing.”
“Neither do I,” Bristol said, “but the last thing my father needs right now is an unstable fairy exposing where he’s hiding.”
Reuben tapped his knuckle to his chin, thinking.
“Agreed. I’ll go to her shanty today. I visit there every few years—my own pilgrimage of sorts—even though it’s mostly been reclaimed by the woods now.
Without Willow, its magic is gone.” He sighed wistfully.
“Chances are slim that she’d be there, but I’m due for a visit anyway. ”
“Thank you,” Bristol said quietly, then added, “I’m sorry about burning your robe.”
A pensive smile pulled at his mouth. “It was my least favorite.”
She stood to leave, and Reuben reached out and touched her arm. “He was a good man, at least as good as any man can be.”
Bristol leaned against the cottage door after she closed it behind her, still thinking about Reuben and his long-ago life, one she never would have dreamed existed. A life he still grieved for, like it had all happened yesterday.
Of everyone in court, she had hated Reuben most of all, and with good reason—but she had also understood him the least. He had offered her a stiff, shallow mask, and she had assumed only more of the same lay beneath it.
Was it possible to know anyone at all? Reuben, a broken man?
Impossible. A man trying to redeem himself by making it hard for Bristol to stay in Elphame?
A man who regretted his fateful mincing of words and now spent a lifetime firing them out like bullets instead?
She tried to imagine Reuben and Willow living in a forest shanty, entrenched in a steamy affair. Reuben, a stuffy, ambitious scholar enamored with a quirky free spirit who only lived in the moment, star-crossed lovers who had been perfect for each other—at least in his faded, bejeweled memory.
Maybe that was why he understood her father so well.
He was a good man. A good man forced to become a hated one instead.