Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
“This is a room?” Lux spun a slow circle, dropping her pack to the floor—where she immediately snatched it off, remembering how dirty it was from all she’d put it through. “This was my apartment in Ghadra.”
Corvin’s gaze flicked across the expanse, nonplussed. “A travesty.”
She made her way around the draped four-poster bed to push into the washroom, squealing silently over what she found: a tub, copper and overlarge, with ornate, clawed feet.
She’d not used one like it since her childhood, withering away in the late mayor’s mansion. All at once, her skin itched to soak.
“There’s a dressing room attached through that wall,” Corvin said, coming up behind her.
“Which you can also enter from a second door out here. These suites are kept stocked for the sake of rare guests, but if you should need anything in particular, you only have to ask. There’s a bell pull beside the bed. ”
Lux surveyed her soiled sleeves. “A launderer, I think.”
He chuckled at her back. “That can be arranged.”
A gentle knock sounded against the main door, and Lux returned to the bedroom alongside Corvin. “That’ll be Manphry with dinner,” he said.
He strode to the door and opened it, but Lux knew in an instant it wasn’t, because Manphry was shaped like a stalk, and this man was as broad as a wall.
“Lord Corvin.”
“Oh. Lord Kent.”
Corvin stepped aside until Lux could see the full size of the man entering the room. He lumbered forward, a black hood pulled low over his brow, and Lux’s skin grew clammy—though his hands were clean of dirt and empty.
“And this is your guest, I presume?” With hands the size of meat pies, Lord Kent gestured to her person.
“This is Lux Thorn of Ghadra. A necromancer.”
Lux bristled at the slew of details all laid bare in a breath.
But before she could throw Corvin a glare, one of Kent’s large hands reached within his robe and drew forth a measuring roll.
“Ghadra? Well, well. And Ms. Thorn can bring back the dead, can she?” The tool unraveled and tumbled to the floor.
He suspended the opposite end near the top of her head. “Average enough, for a woman.”
“Excuse me?” She stepped back from him, outrage curling her lip.
“Height, Ms. Thorn.” He picked up the opposite end, and with a flourish, roped her inside it. “Average again.” The roll left her waist, and he looped it quickly. “The rest I’ve an eye for. No need to fret. I’ll have you a wardrobe by morning.”
“But I—”
“Thank you for your time, Kent.”
“You’re welcome. It’s not often I’m allowed my brilliance its range. Tell me, Ms. Thorn, are you skilled at reviving the departed?”
“Of course,” said Lux, still reeling with confusion.
“Praise to the Saints. What a find,” he replied, but not to her.
To Corvin.
Her mouth parted over his final words, and when Kent ducked his covered head to pass through the door frame, Corvin rushed to shut him out.
He turned back toward her, twin splotches of color reddening his cheekbones.
“He’s a tailor. Or was. His brilliance is in fabrics, rather. But he’s a collector as well.”
Lux’s lips thinned over Corvin’s rambling thoughts.
She’d not yet heard him unpolished. In fact, she’d begun to think it was impossible.
“So, because he works most often with objects, he treats people like them? I didn’t ask for a wardrobe, let alone to be measured.
‘What a find?’ I told you before and I’ll say it again. I did not come here to be collected.”
His color deepened. “Please accept my apology for his behavior. Remember what I warned you of while outside? His manners aren’t what they should be after having been secluded so long.
He’s only eager and intrigued. We all are, really—it’s our nature as academics.
Of course you’re not something to be collected. ”
He’d said she should be wary of gruffness from old men, not insults from one without so much as an age spot on his hands. But following Corvin’s chagrined apology, Lux gathered her courtesy. She couldn’t entirely abandon the role she had to play if she wished to unearth secrets.
She exhaled a slow breath. “I suppose it was a nice gesture. With the clothes. Only, I would have appreciated your asking. I don’t know if I have the funds to cover it.” In her head, her newly acquired goldquins were already spent on the book in Loxlen.
Corvin cleared his throat. “Consider it a gift.” Lux pressed her fingers to her eyes and groaned, but he remained undeterred. “Please? You might not have sensed it, as you don’t know him, but he is thrilled. You’ll let him create something for you?”
Lux slowly lowered her hands. “Seems I haven’t a choice in the matter, being as he’s already left.” Her finger slipped through the arrow-made hole in her cloak. “Traveling wasn’t so easy as I thought.”
“Did you find what you wanted, at least? In your travels?”
Her parting promise to Shaw and the mayor’s daughter was ushered to her mind’s forefront.
That should she stumble upon any hint of lifeblood, any evidence of its inhumane extraction, she would put an end to its use.
It morphed to conjured images of the child’s portrait on the wall, of the girl touching the things Lux now touched.
Of her short life here in a room just like this one.
You were rich beyond measure, Riselda, and you fled to Ghadra? Why? To live out your madness for decades to come?
But Corvin hadn’t anymore answers, and Riselda was gone and devoured. That should have eased her mind, but instead she felt hovered over and watched. She peeked over her shoulder to be sure but found nothing.
“Nearly,” she said, and that was true enough.
Lux’s dinner did eventually arrive. But as she broke through the crust of the steaming dish, she realized her appetite had vanished. A hollowness gnawed at her breastbone in its place.
Only hours ago, she would have devoured something like this, but in her present state, the pie may as well have been a pile of ash. She forced a bite past her lips anyway; she could use the strength.
Lux swallowed hard.
“What is the matter with you?”
A massive mirror, tall enough to reflect even Lord Kent, showed her expression back to her from across the bedchamber. She’d seen a similarly sized mirror before, in her time in Ghadra’s mansion, but that one had been propped on two feet. This had become part of the wall.
You miss him, replied her head. And it was true. She could see it in her eyes.
All at once, they filled, blurring her reflected image and then the food in front of her face. Stop it, she told herself. You’re only tired. But the tears spilled anyway, dripping down her nose. She pushed the plate away.
Only a month. A single, solitary month, and she was already overwhelmed.
By a chase through the forest. By Riselda’s portrait and uncharted madness.
By a second boy whose eyes seemed to bore straight to her core.
Considering the poisonings, she might have embroiled herself in some murderous mess again, and the thought caused her fear of what transpired over Viktar and Mistress Lefroy’s revivals to spike.
A sob escaped her mouth before she could stifle it.
That was too much, too far. She couldn’t hardly handle it.
Lux staggered to the huge bed. Nevermind her unwashed face and unclean teeth—she needed to sleep away everything she felt.
Perhaps by morning her emotions would be in better control.
She pulled back the thick coverings, climbed into the downy softness, and curled into herself.
The bed was easily three times the size she was used to, and she arranged the excess of pillows around her.
When her eyes fluttered closed, Lux imagined the weight of an arm around her waist, the press of body heat against her back, and she imagined the sweet taste of honey, until she thought of nothing at all.