Chapter 36
The clocks on my nightstands said that it was just a little after five-thirty, s.b. The sunlight that slipped in through the windows was brand new, the sun still rising.
Silas sat in the armchair next to mine with half a smile on his face as he poured tea from the teapot, and offered it to me. He’d brought a tray with him—tea, sugar, milk, and a bowl full of pastry.
“I’m sorry to wake you up so early, Ora,” he said, then took his cup and leaned back on the armchair, crossed one leg over the other. He looked tired, Silas. Like he’d slept less than me. “But I did warn you that I’d be coming to you for tea-talk if I had a dream, and…well, I had a dream.”
“That’s okay,” I said, because there’s something-something-something about Silas.
I cleared my throat, straightened in my seat. Said, “Last night, we were out in the mechanical garden. You weren’t there.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t make it. I had some reading to do,” he said, slowly taking a sip of his tea. “I was in the library until late.”
“Library?” Calren had mentioned a library when we first came here, but I’d never had the chance to visit it.
“Yes. It’s on the second floor, south wing. You should check it out. It’s quite something,” said Silas, and looked down at the cup on the table in front of me. “Won’t you drink that? It’s your favorite, with half a spoon of honey. Just like you like.”
I raised a brow in question. “How do you know how I like my tea?”
“We eat three meals a day together,” he said with a smile, and I would have believe him, even if he hadn’t added, “But I’ll admit it was March who told me about this specific detail. He sees almost as much as you do.”
At the mention of that name, the blood in my veins boiled and all the gears inside me sped up.
The prick. The bastard. The asshole.
Heat on my cheeks. I grabbed the teacup in my hands just to do something.
“Anyhour,” Silas whispered. “Things have changed quite a lot since that second trial.”
“We’ve had to give parts of ourselves away.” Of course that was going to change things.
“This is how they do it, yes,” Silas said, waving his finger around at the ceiling.
“Ordinary magic doesn’t produce as much Sparetime to get the wheels on this monster turning.
One needs raw magic, the kind that is bound to the soul.
Memories, parts of our character, our greatest fears, our deepest emotions. That’s what gets the Labyrinth going.”
“How do you know that, though? Where did you find that information? Because I’ve gone over the archives at home, and they had nothing of the sort written or recorded anywhere.”
“Oh, this stuff isn’t in the archives, Ora. It’s just…what I heard, I guess,” Silas said, his eyes never leaving mine. I had my robe over the nightgown and I was perfectly concealed, but I still felt naked sitting there just now. Like he really could see far beyond my eyes.
“Funny thing—I asked Reggie yesterday about the visit he paid Master Talik that night. You know about it, right? We talked in the kitchen.”
He paused for only a split second. “Yes?”
“He claims he’s never been to Master Talik’s workshop at night.”
Silas took a long sip of his tea. Smiled. “He probably forgot.”
I was tempted to smile, too. He was lying and he knew I knew. “Yes. Probably.”
“It’s easy to forget in these circumstances. I’m sure you can agree,” he said, putting the cup on the table before he grabbed a croissant. “After all, we’re basically in a game against time, and you know what they say about that.”
“Time always wins.” That’s what everyone knew to be true.
“Exactly,” said Silas. “Unless…someone cheats the deck.” And he bit into his croissant.
“Cheat, how?”
“Plenty of ways,” he said, chewing slowly. “We can talk about it another time.”
“There is no other time, remember? The trials will be over soon and then we’ll be going back home, and we won’t be seeing each other again.
” The way my insides broke at my own words, when I didn’t even care.
Just that empty space that rang inside me.
It still had power over me. “Unless you want to travel to my town and see me, that is. To talk about how one cheats time.”
“I do intend to travel to your town to see you regularly, brave Ora,” he said. “Not sure if you remember but you did save my life once.”
“You saved ours, too.” This was the trials. We weren’t keeping score, I didn’t think.
“Regardless. A very dear, very furry friend of mine once told me that a debt like that transcends centuries.”
I raised my brows. “A furry friend?”
“Very furry,” he confirmed with a grin. And I knew he was messing with me, of course. But the tea he’d made me was indeed exactly how I liked it.
Which then made me flush because that bastard of a Heartling had no business knowing how I liked my tea.
“All right, then, Silas. We’ll meet someday in our court, far away from this place, to tea-talk about how one cheats time,” I said with a nod. “What will we talk about today?”
“Dreams,” he said without hesitation. “I wanted to talk to you about a dream I had.”
“Why me?” Not that we were strangers or anything, but he was much closer to Reggie and March.
“I thought you were an expert at tea-talks.” He turned then, threw a look back at the nightstand, at my picture of Jinx with her wide smile and bright eyes.
I expected the question. I expected the is that her? but I shouldn’t have. This was Silas.
“You looked a lot like her when you smiled.”
I wasn’t sure what he did just now, only that there was warmth cocooning me where I sat all of a sudden. I wasn’t able to feel it as deep inside me as I wanted—that empty space absorbed it too quickly, but it was still there.
Tears pricked the back of my eyes for a moment. Nobody had ever told me I looked like Jinx before. I had no way of knowing just how much I’d like it.
“That’s not the only reason why, though,” Silas then said. “The other is because you were in my dream, too, brave Ora.”
“I am not brave.”
“I beg to differ,” he said without hesitation, like he knew it for a fact. “Nevertheless, you’ll come to the conclusion yourself given the right time. I have faith.”
What could I even say to that?
I took another sip of my tea. “The dream,” I said. “What happened in the dream?”
Silas looked at me straight in the eye. “I died.”
It was like the world vanished for a second, and I was falling and falling, all the while sitting down.
“What?”
“In the dream, I died,” said Silas, and I could have sworn he looked sad just now. Sorry. “But before I died, you were there.”
“I…did I…did I kill you?” I choked, shocked still at his easy confession.
“Not at all!” Silas chuckled a little. “No, no, of course not. You only asked questions.”
Questions.
“Oh.” I took another sip of my tea, and I was no longer falling. “What kind of questions did I ask?”
“Not ordinary ones,” said Silas, finishing his croissant, before he took his tea in his hands again.
He looked so at ease sitting there in the armchair, talking to me.
Like we really were friends for a lifetime, not weeks.
“You asked where the numbers came from on the records kept. Not the polished ones, but the true ones. You wanted to know who measures time before it’s made presentable for the world. ”
“Except I already have that answer to that—the Great Clock.” That’s what the Great Clock did, ironed out chaotic time and pressed it into hours for us to use.
“Oh, you didn’t think so in the dream, though. You were annoyed because nobody dared to give you a real answer,” Silas said, and the way he looked at me spoke volumes. “You also asked about who is allowed to see and edit those records. You asked a lot about how distribution is measured.”
Something came in front of my mind’s eye, something we’d seen just yesterday. “Timeometer.” Silas said nothing at that, only took a long sip of his tea. “That actually sounds more like an audit than a dream.” Spades had a knack for audits.
He laughed under his breath. “I thought so, too, and in the dream I told you these questions weren’t necessary, that the Great Clock does all of the work for us.”
My heart beat steadily still. “And what did I say?”
“You asked another question.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “You asked who sees the Great Clock while it works.”
Suddenly the air in my room felt lighter. Colder. Less compressed.
I set my cup down. “That’s… oddly specific.”
Silas nodded. “That’s why I thought you should know. You were very persistent. You kept asking about that device that listens to time, and who could build this thing or that.”
My breath caught, just slightly. “And did you have an answer for me?”
Silas leaned back, expression serious. Almost grave. “In the dream? No,” he said. “But you did learn where to look next.”
Goose bumps over every inch of my skin. “Which was?”
“Records. Numbers,” he said. “Numbers never lie.”
A moment of perfect silence, like we were both suspended, out of Time’s reach. Eyes locked, breathing even, hearts beating as one.
I knew he wasn’t talking about an actual dream. I just didn’t know what exactly he was trying to tell me.
“Why are you telling me this, Silas?” Why not Reggie or March?
Or had he already told them?
He put his cup down with a smile. “Isn’t it amusing how you didn’t once ask what happened to me?”
I frowned. “What?”
“In the dream,” he said gently, “You didn’t ask what happened to me.”
Holy Hour. “You…you died.” In the dream, that is.
“Precisely,” he said with a grin, his voice lighter now.
“So, how did you die?”
“Oh, that part doesn’t really matter,” he said with a wave of his hand. “But it did get me thinking that, if something were to happen to me in real life, hypothetically speaking, you’d handle it best. You’d handle it by doing my favorite thing of all, which is…”
I shook my head, dumbfounded. “Asking questions.”
Silas smiled as brightly as the sun. “Yes.”
“Honestly, that’s a terrible reason to tell me this,” I muttered.
“But it’s an honest one.” And he stood up. “Thank you for the tea-talk, brave Ora. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“What?” Was he serious?
I stood up, too, as he made for the door. “Wait, Silas—wait.” He did. He turned. “I don’t…I don’t understand.” I didn’t understand anything.
He shrugged. “I don’t think dreams are meant to be understood when you just have them. They usually tend to make more sense later.”
“You’re not being honest with me,” I said, and he knew it to be true. He wasn’t telling me something—he wasn’t telling me a lot of things.
He put a hand to his heart. “I’m as honest as I can be, I promise.”
I stopped in front of him—and we were both whispering for some reason.
“This is madness, Silas. This whole thing.” I shook my head.
“If you’re honest with me, then tell me this: last night, Seth took us underneath the mechanical garden.
” A flinch. Silas turned his head away, his hand still on the door’s handle.
“We heard Calren and Master Talik talking about some anchors being loosened, and how someone was able to bypass clearance without any records of them doing it. How they were endangering the trials.”
“Not the trials,” he suddenly said through gritted teeth.
It wasn’t a confession, obviously, but…
I swallowed hard. Raised my chin. “So what exactly are you trying to do by loosening those anchors?”
Because it was him. I’d known it last night, and I knew it now. I saw it all over his face.
And Silas knew it, too.
That’s why he smiled the way he did. “Preventing the harvest, of course.”
A confession if I’d ever heard one.
I took a step closer. “Why?”
A hand on my cheek. “Not yet, Ora.”
“Silas, come on. We’re in this together.” And I needed to know what we were up against here. What to expect.
“Was there something else they said?” Silas asked instead.
“Yes, actually. Calren asked Master Talik if he knew what you were.”
Laughter, short and sharp. “Of course he knows!” said Silas, like it was the most natural thing in the world to say.
“Knows what exactly?” I demanded. “What are you, really?” The last time I’d asked him this question, it had started with who, but so much had changed since then.
“Think of me as…a bit of a glitch,” he whispered, then leaned in and hugged me.
Silas hugged me, put his arms around my shoulders and squeezed me to his chest for just a second while I stood there, frozen in place.
“See you later.”
In a blink, he was out the door while I was still trying to process the hug, my mouth wide open and my mind more chaotic than it had ever been before.