Chapter 2 #2
I stared at it with a mixture of annoyance and despair—how many times had I told élise I didn’t need her to mother me?
It wasn’t as if she and her husband could support a third person on his meagre city councillor’s salary.
élise and I had only what little remained of our parents’ inheritance to our names, and I wanted her to keep every penny of her half, not feel the need to support her widowed sister.
My annoyance lasted no more than a moment, though; my stomach was rumbling too insistently. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and devoured the entire pie standing up. It was buttery and filled with porcini in a warm, spiced cream sauce. Heaven, in other words.
Somewhat rejuvenated, I finished up the evening chores, consulting the clipboard to see what élise had already taken care of—she made fun of my checklists at every opportunity, but didn’t go so far as ignoring them.
I freshened the blankets and litter boxes, then added wood to the stove, trying to be as sparing as I could.
Mme. Richard had told me I could take as long as I liked to move out, but we’d both known this to be a hollow kindness with winter on the horizon.
Not only was the shelter essentially open to the elements, but our oil heater had been damaged beyond repair, and wood was expensive.
My landlady had said she could not afford the substantial—and necessary—repairs any more than Hamad could.
So this would become another silent space within the noise and movement of the city, an architectural ellipsis.
I drew a slow breath, trying to push against another wave of anger.
Naturally, the police hadn’t caught the magicians who’d thought it reasonable to duel in the middle of a city street.
Magicians rarely were caught when they broke the law, which was not an infrequent occurrence.
My impression was that the only thing preventing them from tearing the world apart by the seams was their rarity.
Scholars of magic estimated that fewer than one in a million were born with any degree of magical gift, and within this was a great deal of variation.
Most could manage only the simplest of charms.
And thank God for that.
“Come, Banshee,” I said once the shelter cats were all attended to and shut away again. The tabby, who had been staring at an empty bit of wall in consternation, gave one of her silent yowls and followed me upstairs.
Here there was only one small room below the sloped roof; it had been used as storage before Robin and I moved in five years ago.
We’d scavenged two narrow beds from a thrift store, hauling them awkwardly up the old stairs and then pushing them together, giggling all the while.
We’d not been married long in those days—not newlyweds anymore, yet often it felt that way.
I’d considered removing the second bed after Robin died, but in the end could not bring myself to part with it. Now the bed was, essentially, the property of His Majesty.
Perhaps I should not have implied that His Majesty disliked all human company. For in truth, he had made an exception for one person in his life, and that was Robin.
I’d never been able to work out what it was about Robin.
He loved the cats, but so did I, and he was a noisier person than me, for Robin liked to talk, turning almost every anecdote into a story, and often growing so animated he waved his hands about.
Maybe it was his unfailing politeness and good humour, which he extended to the cats, asking Banshee if he could please trim her claws and excusing himself whenever he had to step over someone.
The night after Robin died, His Majesty had refused to sleep, wandering about the shelter and frequently parking himself by the front door, scratching obsessively at it and yowling at me, as if he thought Robin were on the other side, waiting to be let in.
Towards dawn, he’d finally curled up on Robin’s pillow.
The cat glanced up at me when I entered the bedroom, and I wondered, as I often did, if he had been hoping to see Robin. I sensed a disappointment in his inscrutable feline gaze as he put his head back down, but I may have been imagining it. Perhaps I simply wanted company of sorts.
Now Robin had been gone two years, and even with my penchant for tears I no longer wept over him every night.
But it had been a long and lonesome day, and so I allowed myself a bit of a cry.
His Majesty stayed curled up on the pillow, by all appearances ignoring me—nevertheless, he was there.
Banshee was sympathetic, though this was more distracting than anything else.
She kept trying to bat the tears from my face no matter how often I pushed her away, seeming to assume, as she generally did, that the tears were the cause of my distress rather than a product of it, and thus an enemy to be vanquished.
Eventually, I dried my face, wound the alarm on the little brass clock by my bed, and turned out the light. Banshee settled herself between me and His Majesty, and together we slept.