Chapter Thirty-Eight Patrick
When he woke, the sun beyond the broken window was orange. The shadows in the room had elongated. His father snored obscenely.
Patrick pushed himself upright and stretched out the strain in his neck.
He pretended that the lethargy he felt was credited to the lumpy mattress and not to a greater fatigue.
For a moment, the room rotated around him like a mirage, and he himself was bodiless.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
He couldn’t stay in this room with its towers of books another moment.
He stood and half dressed himself. The clothes Mrs. Trunk had left smelled like must and time. Socks, no boots, an unbuttoned shirt, no suspenders. He fought the door against the draft in the hallway.
Polly and Nina’s door was cracked open, and inside was Polly sleeping with the Stewards’ book on her stomach, parchment spread around her, those strange symbols bled onto the pages, scratched out, rewritten.
Nina was missing.
She wasn’t with Theo, either, who lay prone on the settee, the bluff making his jaw sag, his eyelids slack in sleep.
A jolt of panic struck Patrick, one that was becoming familiar to him. He went to the stairs and pounded down each one, mumbling beneath his breath about how the woman couldn’t go more than a handful of hours without fraying his nerves.
He found her in the shop, sitting on the piano bench alongside Mrs. Trunk, who spoke to her with music.
Patrick didn’t approach immediately. He simply watched, letting his thundering heart settle.
Nina was smiling softly at the older woman, her hair escaping its clasp and framing her face, dimples appearing in either cheek, lashes fanning tired eyes.
He knew their color to be beautiful, though he couldn’t see them.
He knew when they caught the light, a spectrum of green swallowed the hazel, the apples of her cheeks glowed pink and the column of her throat, too. It often unsettled him.
It was becoming difficult to remember why he couldn’t love her.
Over and over, he replayed the times she’d lied to him.
He was trying to convince himself that really, she was a mystery to him, that he’d sprinted ahead to love and ignored everything else.
A goner, Tess had called him. He hadn’t had the time to understand the half of her.
But it was so easy to feel like he did.
Mrs. Trunk played stories to Nina, who sat with rapt attention, grinning, answering in kind, throwing her head back and laughing earnestly at whatever the elderly woman told her.
She treated people with a blanket fairness Patrick couldn’t allow, gave pieces of herself over freely and closed off other parts in a vault.
He felt that she’d been born in the wrong world.
In another life, she was the sort of woman who got all the things a lady deserved.
A house and beautiful dresses. A flowery wedding.
A bed in which she’d be worshipped. All the children she wanted, or none if she didn’t.
Every ounce of bluff or ink she’d ever need so she’d never know a day of pain.
Someone who would take on the brunt of the world until it felt soft to her.
He’d imagined himself to be that champion once. It seemed laughable now. Neither of them were meant for that life. Without her, there was no terranium. Without him, there was no alchemy.
And without idium, there was nothing.
Patrick stepped into the shop, and the women looked up, finally noticing him. Patrick tried and failed to grin. “Pardon the interruption.”
Mrs. Trunk nodded when she saw him, then touched Nina’s cheek and rose. As she passed, she stopped to look up shrewdly into Patrick’s face. Whatever she saw there, it saddened her. She crammed into the stairwell, her frame disappearing.
Patrick put his hands in his pockets, stifling the sudden unease he felt. “Do you ever stay where you’re supposed to?”
She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Not recently, no.”
“Anyone could walk in,” he reminded her, nodding toward the door and its open sign. “Recognize you.”
“I’ve been here plenty. Never seen a single customer.”
“Woman, you couldn’t just humor me and stay safe upstairs?”
“If I say no, will you threaten to carry me up there yourself?”
His blood spiked. “It wouldn’t be a threat.”
Nina rolled her eyes at him. Lord, when she did that, he wanted to take her jaw in his hand, tilt her head back until she was looking only at him. “What were you two doin’?”
She glanced her fingers over the piano keys. “Just gossiping.”
“Through song?”
Nina’s lip quirked.
“Artisan bullshit,” Patrick muttered beneath his breath. It had the desired effect. There was sustenance for him in her scowls. He thought he could live off them until he was an old man. He smiled to himself as she began to prattle.
“You don’t seem to have a problem with ingenuity until you learn it’s an Artisan who’s responsible. And you’re awfully superior for a man who is, by any reasonable measure, an Artisan himself.”
He sighed. “We ought to get you your own piano. I might even enjoy it if you scolded me in song.”
She looked at him with that flat expression of hers, one finger rising to the key entitled bastard. The sullen note rang out. But a grin broke through. A blush crept up her throat from beneath her collar, and he watched it. She looked away.
That was just as well.
“Why aren’t you resting?” he asked. “We’ve had a long journey.”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Polly was scratching away at her translations half the night. Your dad’s snoring was coming through the wall, and I couldn’t be in the living room.”
“Ah,” Patrick said. “Theodore.”
A small hesitation. “Yes.”
“Because you can’t stand him?” Patrick asked. “Or because you can’t stand the thought of him being hurt?”
She bit her lip, looked down into her lap. “Because I can’t stand knowing… that he would have died for me.”
Patrick sat on the bench beside her, his chest heavy. “More agonizin’ company I couldn’t imagine.”
Her eyes were wet with something unspent. “It was easier hating him,” she said. “That, I could reconcile with.”
Patrick nodded. In truth, he felt the same way. It was all made simpler before he was indebted to Theodore. But he’d saved Nina twice now.
“I know we should leave him here,” Nina said tightly. “But I can’t, Patrick. I wish I could.”
It sounded like she was saying something else. That she wished she didn’t care for him.
Patrick tasted metal and blood. He grimaced. “If you could be anywhere else,” he asked, needing desperately to change the subject, “even for just a day, where would you choose?”
Her fingers traced the keys. There was a rigidness to her posture now. “I don’t have an answer for that.”
He wished he could read her thoughts. “Try.”
“Won’t do much good.”
“Why?”
“There’s no place that’ll have me, Patrick,” she said. “Unless you count the House of Lords.”
And for all his troubles, he couldn’t imagine that cruelty. To have no place of retreat. Nowhere that felt like home. But he wouldn’t let his pity show. He knew she would hate it. “What about Kenton Hill?”
She scoffed, the sound unexpectedly sad. “I suspect I outstayed my welcome there.” There was a shake to her hands. Enduring shell shock.
Patrick clasped one large hand over hers to still them. He counted to three and then removed it. “I only meant… did Kenton Hill mean somethin’ to you?”
Nina looked at him and sighed. “I’d rather not say.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’ll believe the answer,” she admitted. “And you have a certain way of looking at me when you don’t trust me.”
He watched gooseflesh rise along her collarbone, saw the way her legs crossed tighter. “How do I look at you?”
“Like we’ve never met,” she said. “Like you’re looking at a stranger.”
He pushed his molars together. “We don’t know each other in the ways that matter.”
“Yes, we do,” she said, looking up at him. The same freckles she’d had as a kid. Same hazel eyes, same clenched fists. “Better than most people would. Because I’ve seen the tarnished side of you, the one that flies into a rage and throws around his muscle. And you’ve seen the ugliest parts of me.”
He knew he should get up and leave this very minute. “It don’t mean we’re good for each other.”
“I’m not saying we are,” she said reluctantly. “I’m just saying we know each other. If it eases you to think of me as a stranger, then so be it. It hardly makes it true.”
She didn’t know the half of his thinking. He shook his head minutely. “In truth, Nina, I’ve been tryin’ to wipe my mind of you altogether.”
She winced. “Any success?”
He paused, thinking that his answer should stay locked away. “None at all.”
She nodded, looking down at the piano keys, fingers playing a phantom of a song from her memory. She swallowed. “That will become easier when we part ways.”
Patrick very much doubted it. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“Kenton Hill,” he said. “Did it mean somethin’ to you?” He’d taken her to the hills and through the village, to the Coal Works and the market beneath the lamps. And he’d thought he’d seen the parish work its magic on her. Had he imagined it?
Nina suddenly filled with something. She expelled it in one heavy breath and said, “I’ve traveled the Trench over, and I’ve never loved a place more.”
A lump rose in his throat. “And when you thought you might still bury it… what did you tell yourself?”
She hesitated before responding, as though knowing the weight of her answer.
“Polly told me something back then,” Nina said.
“She told me that I had to try not to see it—all the good in Kenton. Scottie and Otto and your brothers. The dancing and the music. The community. You.” Nina’s hands pressed to her stomach like something had punched her.
“But I saw it all anyway. In truth, I told myself I had time to find a solution. I made bargains with myself. I was drunk, I think. On the parish. On you.” She looked up, smiled sadly.
He tried not to show his understanding, how conflicted she made him feel. “Then we were both drunken fools.”
She nodded weakly.
Patrick turned back to the piano. “Can you play?”
“A little,” she said. “Though I was my music professor’s least favorite student.”
“He was a fool, too, then.”
Nina smirked. “In my first year, I used to sneak into the conservatory to practice at night. The headmaster caught me once, but he walked right by like he hadn’t seen me.
After that, I was never chastised again in my music lessons.
I think Professor Dumley had something to do with that.
” She frowned at the wall for a moment, lost in thought.
It was odd to imagine her in the Artisan school alongside the other swank kids.
Patrick could only imagine her as she’d been at the siphoning ceremony: lopsided bow, poorly stitched blouse, dirt on her nose, fire in her eyes.
“Was it difficult?” he asked. “To try and fit in where you didn’t belong?
” For it had always been so clear to him where she truly belonged.
“Impossible,” she said. “Polly and I were the only brink children in our year. They called me worm and her squid beneath their breath. I didn’t know how to fight back.
In Scurry, it would’ve been fists and slurs.
In the Artisan school it was gossip, whispers, jokes.
The violence was all silent. I think it turned me into a coward. It didn’t get any better until…”
Here, she came up short, something lodged in her throat.
“Until what?”
She looked away. “Until Theo,” she admitted.
Patrick tensed, the poison rising in him against his will. Like Nina, he was born in the brink, where a person was measured by how well they fought. He wished he could eliminate any other man from her thoughts the only way he knew how.
“Did he defend you?” he asked, trying to hide the flash of jealousy. “Rough up the other boys in front of you and make you swoon?”
Nina scoffed. “Artisan boys don’t rough each other up.”
“Ah, pardon me. Then he picked you flowers and drew you pictures?”
The blood pooling in her cheeks told him he wasn’t far off.
“He was a friend to me,” she said. “For no good reason other than I needed one.”
Patrick clicked his tongue. “Oh, there was a reason, darlin’.”
Nina glared at him. “We were twelve, Patrick. I don’t think romance was a factor.”
“I was twelve when I saw you for the first time,” Patrick mused, “and romance was definitely a factor.”
Nina rolled her eyes again, and this time he did take hold of her jaw, turning her face to his.
His fingers were neither harsh nor gentle.
“Do you want me to tell you what men see when they look at you?” he said, voice deepening.
Here was the madness taking over again, flooding him, muting all sensible thought.
He ran his thumb over her bottom lip, and she released a small gasp for him.
He felt it resonate low in his abdomen, in his groin.
“They see every sinful imaginin’ they’ve ever had, all at once,” he murmured.
“Every beauty that existed before vanishes from memory, until their whole head is crowded with you. You in their hands, their beds, in every improper way that can be imagined. They see a woman they’d commit terrible crimes for.
Just for a chance.” He was close enough now that the words were skating over her mouth, down her throat. “They’d kill for it if they had to.”
She shivered, her hand rising up to flatten against his chest.
“They might pretend to be gentlemanly for you, Nina,” Patrick said, coming close to the edge of his restraint, “but inside every man, Artisan or not, lives a beast. Some only hide it better than others.” Fire erupted in her eyes, on his chest where she touched him.
“Some of us don’t bother to hide it at all. ”
He released her chin and drew away, removed his gaze from her mouth. Tried to redraw the line.
He felt her gaze on him. “Play me a song,” he said.
She sighed and repositioned herself on the seat, shoulders slumping. “What do you want to hear?”
“Only songs I know came from a church or a tunnel,” he said. “Play me somethin’ I don’t know.”
After a moment of hesitation, her fingers hovering over the keys and their carvings, she did.
And Patrick was sure, then, that whoever that Artisan professor was, he had gas in his head.
The song expounded in his chest and his blood like idium, expanding his mind tenfold. Made him forget all the wrong she’d done, all the sin in his head.
How could something so beautiful be so wrong?