Chapter 24
XXIV.
Curiosity Often Costs Many Regrets
The sun rose too hot, too orange, slanted at a fiendish angle. Somewhere far away in the forest, thunder rumbled. My stomach curdled and all I felt was the weight of inexplicable dread.
It was still early when I arrived at his quarters a little breathless and carefully, modestly dressed.
“I am leaving,” he said, without so much as looking at me.
I pulled back as if I’d been slapped. Distorted images of myself from his perspective cascaded through my mind—from my lewdness to the care I’d taken in dressing just moments ago. I could see it all and feel his revulsion. I thought I might die from embarrassment.
“Salomé,” he ordered. “Come here.”
I straightened my spine and emerged from the shadows to face him, despite my mortification. “Yes?”
“Hold out your hands, ma petite chou.”
I lifted my chin and did as he instructed.
From his cloak he pulled something and laid it in my hands.
The keys.
I nearly gasped and clutched the iron ring. A swell of emotion closed off my throat and I couldn’t even speak.
The first time he had given them to me I had known the keys were important.
Of course, I had! A great lord, Death himself, had trusted me with his home.
But I had not understood what they meant, as now I did.
Access to the entire house, with all its secret places.
Access to his quarters. It was not a test this time, but trust. He knew—I knew—what I could do with those keys.
He trusted me not with his home, but with his heart.
His soul. For what was this house and its secrets but a reflection of its owner?
“Thank you, my lord,” I said, tucking the keys into my pocket with all the pride of a great nobleman’s wife. For with those keys, I truly felt as if I were Death’s consort.
“Continue your work while I’m gone. Stay close to the house.” He met my eyes. “The forest is dangerous, and you are on the cusp of all you’ve been working for.” Then he stepped closer to me and pulled my chin to him with his gloved finger.
I blushed, my throat still tight.
“You could destroy me,” he whispered. “You cannot understand how much you hold in your hands.”
My breath caught and his gaze dropped to my mouth, but he did not kiss me, just looked at me, a strange pain in the sheen of his gaze. Then he turned and left, the smell of cold spice lingering even in the heavy summer air.
I went to his window and listened as his stallion’s hoofbeats rang through the courtyard and were swallowed up by the forest.
The chateau was soon silent in his absence. My dream from the night before came back to me, and I shivered. I wandered back to my room, fighting the knot of some disappointment I could not name.
There was no reason to feel like this. He had given me the keys and told me kind things. I had my work. I had so far to go.
Rain began to hit the windows, and I thought to close them, only it was still so hot. Thunder rumbled, close, but I slumped in my chair and picked at the food on my platter, listless and not hungry.
Sitting there with my mind idly wandering, I suddenly remembered a time when Dacia and I had been so hungry, we’d picked maggots out of weeks-old bread.
I looked at the food I’d been poking at, and disgust rose in my throat.
I was forgetting more and more about my life in the village.
I’d forgotten about everything I’d been the day I arrived—starved and cold with grave dirt still under my fingernails.
Feral, he’d said. Frozen, what was I recalled.
That life felt far away, but this morning had reminded me how close it truly was.
Pulling my chair to the table, I picked up a plum with my thumb and forefinger, squeezing the lurid flesh.
I didn’t think—not about how Renaud left me or how I’d left Dacia, only at how disgusting I felt.
I put the plum in my mouth and grimly chewed.
The juice rolled down my chin and I didn’t even bother wiping it away.
Leaning over the tray as if it might disappear by the same unseen hand that laid it there, I stuffed every bit of food into my mouth.
I ate so fast my throat constricted and couldn’t seem to swallow.
Not bothering to chew enough. Not bothering to slow down.
I kept going, ignoring the clench of my body.
Until it just left my throat. I vomited onto the tray and the food and then, I don’t know why, I feel the shame even now to tell you.
I kept eating. The disgust was so strong, so consuming, that I ate as if it were the only thing that could save me.
The clatter of the keys slipping out of my pocket and hitting the floor broke me out of it.
I blinked through the tears and the vomit, staring at them splayed on the floor.
I suddenly remembered that Renaud had trusted me, had believed in me, had stood in this very room and ran his hands through my hair and rinsed me clean and pulled me from the water himself.
If he saw me now, he’d be disappointed, so disappointed, and perhaps disgusted. This was not feral; this was shameful.
The keys, the trust they meant, brought me comfort and brought me back to my senses.
The work. I dropped to the floor and clutched the keys tight, the bite of cold iron pushing into my flesh.
I needed to throw myself into the work Renaud had left for me.
Pushing myself up, I wiped my mouth. Already the tray had disappeared and the mess I’d left vanished.
A new dress and a small washbasin of water lay on the table instead.
I should have been grateful, but I dipped my trembling hands into the water only hoping that Renaud would never be aware of the shame that cloaked me now.
I rinsed the sick off and brushed back my stray, sweating hair.
Shucked and shed my clothes as if there were a way to dispose of myself in the process, then smoothing the clean dress over my body.
Last of all, I carefully put the keys into my pocket.
For several hours I set myself to transcription work.
The rain sluiced against the windows, and the stones seemed to sweat with the damp and the dull heat that gets trapped under heavy gray clouds.
But with each stroke of the quill and the whispered scratch of the tip against the parchment, I forgot some of my shame and found more of my strength.
I came to the end of the section and was nearly out of ink by the time I put down my quill.
As I glanced out the window, I thought about Perchta’s hut, wondered if she waited for me to return. But even if I’d been tempted to ignore my promise to Renaud, the hammering rain deterred me from taking the thought any further. I was confined to the chateau.
My mind was calmer now, at least. Taking the keys, I began roaming about the room, idly pulling out drawers and peering through shelves.
I wanted to find something intimate or even shameful, as if that could relieve me of my own.
But there was nothing. More ink. Quills.
Some correspondence, but when I opened the parchments, I only found tedious documentation of properties or money.
I put them back and slumped in his chair.
It was strange to live with both the seen and unseen. The immortal and the mundane. What manner of man or god was he? The forest called to my mind again, but I turned my back on the window and my thoughts and pushed up out of the chair.
I would explore the chateau instead.
Regret No. 1
By this time, I had figured out a comfortable route through the rambling halls, one the house seemed happy to oblige—my daily path to the gardens, and to and from my quarters to Death’s. But the rest of the corridors and floors remained a mystery.
I tried several rooms at random, opening them hesitantly. But the doors I opened contained only empty bedrooms. They were as empty and desolate as the rest of the chateau, but yet there was no dust, no coverings, as if they were waiting for occupants.
I wandered for a time then, opening nothing, until I passed a beautifully arched set of double doors, set at the end of a long hall. I had to work to get them open, but once I slid inside, my breath left my chest in wonder.
I had assumed all the books in the chateau were in Renaud’s study, with his parchments and inks. That he simply pulled them all from thin air, like the food and clothes. Even at the nunnery, all the books were hoarded carefully in the Mother Superior’s chambers.
I had never seen a room like this, filled floor to ceiling with volumes.
It was like finding a room full of gold.
I couldn’t fathom the time and money that had gone into it.
Hazy filtered light made its way in from the triplicate of arched windows all the way at the end of the long room, but between me and the window, the room sat in a papery, muffled dark.
The library felt filled with spirits, those contained in the shape of paper and ink.
It smelled as damp as everything else, but strangely none of the books I could see from the aisle showed any signs of mildew.
Were they spelled? Then I realized, this must be where the answers to all my questions—particularly the ones Death demurred to answer—lie.
If I could find a true summoning spell among these tomes, I might be able to bring Rochelle through instead of attempting to conjure her again, only to have her remain trapped in the mirror. Heart racing, I stepped forward into the aisle, skimming the first shelf.