Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
Cold pressed against her forehead. Her neck. Lux blinked awake. Her head throbbed, and it took too long to focus. When she finally did, she stared blearily at Corvin, watching as he adjusted his gloves.
“Blessed Saints. You fainted,” he said.
Lux blew out a weak breath in reply.
“Can you stand?”
She nodded from her place on the floor.
Corvin gripped her beneath the arms, and she leveraged herself against him, pulling against his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, as hot now as she was cold before. The flush swept her entire body. She refused to meet his eyes.
A steaming mug was shoved into her hands.
Lux stared down at it. “Drink the coffee, Ms. Thorn,” said Artemis, then he clinked his own cup against hers and sipped.
“My apologies over my abrupt delivery of your diagnosis. I spend so much of my time now experimenting and studying. So many books, you’ll understand; not even with all the time in the world, could I accomplish everything I want.
Still, I should have been more tactful.”
Lux didn’t look at him. Instead, she leaned against the table behind her and stared into the mug of brown liquid. She didn’t mind the smell, but it looked a concerning color. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank.
Her face twisted into a grimace. “Ugh! It’s bitter.”
“It won’t jolt you enough if it’s had any other way.”
Against her better judgement, she braved a second sip. She didn’t grimace this time, and when the bitterness doused her tongue, she embraced it. It matched the bitterness in her heart now. “What can be done?” she said.
Corvin’s glance pricked at her profile, but she didn’t turn toward him. She leveled her hard stare on Artemis.
The healer met it with a shadowed one of his own. “You have two options, and neither one has been practiced with any regularity.”
Lux braced herself with another sip of the bitter drink.
“For the first: You do nothing. You learn to cope with your hallucinations and dysfunction as best you can. Eventually it will lead to your death, but at what age and by what means, it is impossible to tell. Most of the Grimrook family, for example, met their ends rather young and by secondary methods.”
Lux felt as if she would never get the dark taste from her tongue. “Which sorts of methods?”
Artemis crossed his arms, revealing a paunch abdomen beneath the robe. “Accidents. Stabbings, drownings, being run over by a carriage. The mind can only handle so much.”
“And the second option?” A sourness filled her mouth now, her stomach a riot.
“The second option is something I’ve been working on for quite some time. It’s a means of removal. One I’ve had nothing but success with while in the experimental phase.”
Lux straightened. “A removal of the madness?”
“Yes,” said the healer and inclined his head. “Unfortunately, being as it is attached to your brilliance, that would have to come too.”
“Attached to my—” She stared down at her fingers’ grip on the mug. They were beginning to numb again.
“I’ve named it ‘The Stripping’. It’s a simple procedure but must be done with severe accuracy. Once completed, you should be returned to your rightful self. Sans necromancy.”
Lux’s balance shifted. She felt disembodied. “I need to sit down.”
Corvin’s hand was at her elbow, guiding her onto the table. “I’m so sorry, Lux,” he murmured.
“This can’t be all.” Despair bloomed through her. “This can’t be it.”
“I feel I need to ask,” began Artemis. “Considering the rarity of this. Does your family have any ties to this place?”
“No,” Lux said immediately.
“Yet you look just like her. It’s uncanny.”
“I thought the same,” said Corvin.
“Like who?” she asked.
You know who, her gut told her.
“Riselda Grimrook. Did you see her portrait? She was never found, you know. Perhaps you are a relation and were never made aware?”
“That’s impossible.”
“Impossible or undiscovered?”
Impossible or undiscovered…
Lux tumbled into a memory.
“Lucena is such a big name for her, Mads.”
The man sitting beside her on the sofa reached across his thin frame to tweak her nose. Lucena scrunched her face and laughed.
“Only you would think so. No one calls me Mads, but you.” Her mother came to sit at her other side.
Lucena squirmed happily. There was no better place than here, between the two people who loved her most.
“Hmm,” hummed the man, undeterred. “What do you think, my darling? Your mother would keep your name as is. But I hear her every night. ‘Shine bright’, she says. Well, I’ll call you Lux. That way you will never forget what a light you are.”
Lucena grinned, nodding her agreement.
“She likes it,” her father said.
“She likes everything,” laughed her mother.
“It’s better than Vesperine at any rate,” he said, and her mother’s face twisted and hissed, and Lucena grew frightened, because she didn’t recognize that name as her own, only that it meant “before”.
Before she was theirs.
Lux emerged from it choking. Her hand clutched at her chest as she hacked. Artemis began clinking glasses together while Corvin’s palm met her back in sharp thwacks. She pushed him off.
“I’m fine,” she wheezed. “I only swallowed wrong.”
It wasn’t a lie. The shock of a memory—only ever vague and mostly emotion—now clear as a mountain stream, had knocked the breath right out of her. She’d gasped haphazardly at its end.
The healer stilled in his preparations. “Death to the Devil, girl. What sort of bad luck are you carrying?”
“The eternal kind.” Lux tipped her head back only to startle when the door slammed in.
“Oh! My apologies.” A collector stood bewildered in the doorway. He came to his senses after a moment more. “There’s…an ongoing incident with the staff. Someone’s bleeding badly, and I’m not supposed to—”
“We’ll see to it,” snapped Corvin, which had Lux’s eyes snapping to his in turn.
She’d never heard his tone so cutting. Her gaze raked his expression. He didn’t return it but looked instead at Artemis. Some wordless agreement passed between them, one that had Corvin visibly relaxing.
“Lead the way, Lord Tobias,” the healer said, and together the two men exited the workroom.
“What was that about?” she asked once they’d gone.
“Nothing you need to ever worry over,” Corvin replied. “How are you feeling?”
“Numb.” She stared in a haze at the closed door.
“You’re in shock. Should I call for something other than coffee? I know you don’t prefer it.”
“I need nothing except to be alone.”
Corvin grew quiet awhile. “All right. Let me walk you to your room.”
Lux made her way around the table. Her attention shifted dazedly to the wall by the door, to the statue there. Another saint, intricate and crowned. A bowl of incense smoked at its feet.
Even faceless, she felt as if the saint watched her. That it judged.
She didn’t know if she believed in Saints.
But she could be swayed to believe in the Devil.
What else would ensure she contracted some rare degeneration right as she planned to begin her life?
What else would place these stepping stones directly in her path so she would end up beside the sea as she’d always wished, but also in Riselda’s childhood home?
That she would have to discover the woman’s early portrait and be overwhelmed by the idea that maybe the mayor’s daughter had been mistaken in that nameless wood.
Maybe Riselda really had borne a child once upon a time and that child had become Lux’s ancestor.
That Riselda would then be tied to her too.
Lux did not know her birth parents. Her parents hadn’t ever spoken of them. And aside from a strange feeling of isolation as her earliest memory, she had no further clues.
“She has no family,” Morana had said.
“We are family,” Riselda had said.
Lux climbed the staircases silently beside Corvin, and when she passed the Grimrooks’ portraits, she could only glance and keep moving. Because those were not Riselda’s eyes staring back at her today—but her own.
“Should I send up a meal for you?” he asked outside her door.
Lux stared at the engraved 7 until it blurred. “No, thank you.”
“I feel like this is my fault.”
Lux’s vision sharpened as she turned toward him.
“I gave you false hope, speaking of the condition’s rarity and praising Mothlock’s healer. I shouldn’t have. I know how much worse it is to raise your expectations only to have them dashed.”
She absorbed every distraught line of his face. “You didn’t give this to me. Someone else did.” Her fingers closed over the knob. “Thank you for trying.”
His hand settled atop hers before she could turn it. She stared at the contrast of dark leather against her pale skin. She didn’t look at him.
“Will you consider the treatment?”
Lux shook her head. “I feel hollow enough. There’d be nothing of me left if you took my brilliance from me.”
“I don’t believe that. Not even for a moment.”
Lux’s eyes scrunched closed. “If nothing else, I was finally able to meet the sea outside of a daydream. That’s something, at least.”
Then she turned the knob and left Corvin behind.