CHAPTER FOUR #2
Bad luck, he thought, to keep the reminders of a life not lived on his walls.
But he found bare, white walls intolerably depressing, and he couldn’t afford anything else to decorate with.
He’d sold all his best work long ago; all he had left were practice attempts and a few charcoals he’d done in recent years, unable to quit entirely but unable to muster the courage to attempt putting paint to canvas.
They glowered at him. A still life of a table laid with fruits, cheese, and a limp, jewel-colored pheasant, its claws gnarled and wrinkled.
A charcoal sketch, never finished, of David.
His more polished, colorful attempts: vases of flowers or of shop windows he admired in Upper Bunting, finished before he’d finally given up on selling a thing and applied for the Sangfeder Academy of Inscription Arts.
A chance to earn a living, to make a name for himself. To win a future. And he’d won it, clawed ahead of dozens of other applicants, some of whom had paid for tutors their entire lives, with the steadiness of his hand, the adroitness of his memory, and the precision of his strokes.
And what luck, he thought, studying the image of the dead pheasant, was that?
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key sliding into his lock.
David burst in, trailed by the sound of the building super’s enormous key ring jangling as she disappeared down the hallway. Sy was sure David had been forced to bribe her – not because she held any loyalty to Sy, but because she did nothing for free.
“Traitor,” Sy called after her, doing his best to ignore David’s cool stare.
But David had not bargained his way into Sy’s room to be ignored. “You missed dinner last week.”
“Edgard called,” Sy supplied, with an air of finality.
“I haven’t seen or heard from you in a week because Edgard called.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Pondering.”
David released an exasperated sigh, and crossed the two steps to the window, pushing aside the curtains – curtains Sy had not parted in a week, he now realized.
Seeing him, David’s expression immediately softened, and Sy groaned. “Don’t. Stop it.”
“Abigail Skeylor,” David spat.
“To be fair, Edgard was quite demanding as well.”
This knowledge stood between them, heavy and awkward. To divulge royal secrets would land both of them a tongue-tying, or worse. David knew better than to ask Sy what Edgard had made him do.
Sy found himself wishing, just once, he would ask anyway.
“Give me a cigarette,” he said, lamely reaching out a hand.
David indulged him, then sat in the armchair and lit one of his own, never taking his eyes off Sy.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his back aching as he eased into a sitting position for the first time all day.
“The meeting’s tonight,” he said, to break the heavy silence. “I suppose Claude and Sabina will be there?” He paused. Where had David been in the past week? “Terrence, I suppose, as well,” he finished.
“Everyone will be. I suppose you’ll have finished your pondering by then.
” He exhaled forcefully. “Pondering. You’re the one who put that ad in the paper.
Of course you are. What, you’re going to find a phoenix?
Are you going to catch a pixie by its wings and bottle an earthquake while you’re at it? ”
Sy bristled. “I know you think it’s a waste of time, but–”
“It’s worse than a waste of time. It’s dangerous. You’ll get yourself killed. And for what?”
“For what?” Sy laughed around the smoke rolling on his tongue. “David, you’re not a stupid as you pretend for your friends.”
David sighed, not rising to the bait. “Do you need anything? Water, something iron-rich to eat? You look terrible.”
“No thanks to Countess Herceg’s sky blue eyes.”
Ah, this, he could not resist. His forehead wrinkled. “What?”
“Dear Abigail was quite in her fits over having the most unnatural eye color at the Midsummer Gala.”
“Am I supposed to turn down a good reference because your favorite client is insecure and overly demanding?”
At favorite, Sy flicked ash on the floor. “It isn’t as if you need the money.”
David shook his head. “I warned you about her, from the first moment she commissioned you. Vain and a hypochondriac. I told you, I can help pay for whatever you need. You let her gorge on you because you go weeks at a time taking on charity–”
“Will you stop calling it that?”
“–over some false nobility, or false modesty, I haven’t determined which, that makes you insist upon debasing yourself–”
“Debasing myself?”
“I didn’t – that isn’t what I meant.”
The apartment suddenly felt small as a closet, the air close as a crypt. Close as the knowledge, the certainty, that he would die here, scraping together pennies, surrounded by mementos of a life unlived, by concern that could do nothing but suffocate, by care that could do nothing but confine.
His cigarette, forgotten, was dead, half ash. “As you can see, I’m quite spent. I think its best you leave.”
David pressed his lips together, wetted them, as if considering his next words, then nodded. “Yes, I think it is.”
As he left, Sy felt the impulse to call after him, but stamped it out. There was nothing more to say. The door clicked shut.
But if David had asked, just once, he would have told him. Told him what it was like, being owned. And David would tell him he wasn’t owned; only his debt. And Sy would tell him he was right; there was a difference. And then he would describe exactly what that difference was.
He would tell him how he knew, as soon as he was directed, discreetly, to the antechamber of Edgard’s bedroom, why he had been summoned that evening.
How the sight of the girl sitting shadowed and silent on a settee had hit him like a blow.
How Edgard had commanded Sy, as impassively as if he was remarking upon the upholstery, to be quick, as his heart was bothering him again.
How he said nothing more, only motioning toward the settee before disappearing back into his bedroom.
How three of the girl’s fingers jutted at alarming angles.
How her calm and stoic face was bruised and blooded, though her lip trembled when she thought Sy wasn’t looking.
Fair haired with a round face and wide eyes, like all the other girls.
Edgard’s tastes were very particular, and with the right glyphs, any part of the body could be rearranged.
He wondered how much of her looks, of her body, was her own.
If any of it was her own desire. Another possibility for her stoicism: she may have had her tears taken away. She wouldn’t be the first.
She was the first he had seen with broken bones.