14. Clara
CLARA
The universe has a sick sense of humor.
I know this because I just spent forty-five minutes creeping along the lake’s edge, ducking behind reeds like a low-budget spy, following the shoreline in one continuous direction—and I have arrived exactly where I started.
Aldric sits on the same flat rock, line in the water, coat folded beside him.
Shmoo sits on the coat. Neither of them has moved.
Aldric doesn’t turn around. “Welcome back.”
“I wasn’t—” I stop. There’s no version of this sentence that preserves my dignity. “I was admiring the flora.”
“The flora.” The line twitches, and he pulls it in with a lazy flick of his wrist. Nothing on the hook. He recasts. “You admired it in a full circle.”
“It’s very circular flora.”
Shmoo yawns at me. Even the cat knows.
I give up and drop onto the pebbled shore a few feet away.
The lake is gorgeous, glassy and dark, ringed by firs so tall they look like they’re holding up the sky.
Somewhere beyond that treeline is a world with phone chargers and oat milk lattes and people who were born after the invention of the wheel.
And between me and it, an invisible wall built by a woman who died before forks were popular.
I pick up a flat stone, weigh it in my palm, and send it skipping. One, two, three, four hops. Not bad. I find another.
“You are scaring the fish,” Aldric says.
“The fish should toughen up.” Skip. Five hops. “Life is hard.”
“Fortunately for us both, I caught three while you were reconnoitering the flora.” He nods at the creel beside him. “Trout. Fat ones.”
“Reconnoitering. You talk like an audiobook on Napoleon.”
“Again, I do not know what an audiobook is, but as the topic is a conqueror, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I skip another stone. It flops, which feels like a metaphor, so I stop. Shmoo has abandoned the coat and is now parked in front of the creel, staring at it with the intensity of a customer waiting for an Apple store to open on release day.
“He’s staring at your basket.”
“He is collecting his tax.” Aldric sighs the sigh of a man who lost this argument during the reign of Maria Theresa. He flips open the creel, takes the smallest trout, and lays it on a flat stone with a bizarre kind of ceremony. “There. Extortionist.”
Shmoo descends on the fish and starts making sounds. Wet, enthusiastic, nom nom nom sounds, like a toddler with spaghetti.
“Oh my god.” I press a hand to my chest. “He’s a foodie.”
“He is a menace with fur.” But Aldric’s mouth does something.
It’s not a smile, just the ghost of one, like his face is out of practice at making expressions.
He watches the cat eat, and for a second, the blue shard in his eye socket catches the light off the water, and I think of a crayon drawing folded into Tolstoy, and I have to look at the lake before my heart does something stupid like skip a beat.
Not going there. The lake is circular and so are my feelings. Everything comes back to where it started.
Back at the keep, I discover a new problem, and the problem is watching Aldric cook.
He’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and his forearms are a whole situation—corded muscle, dark ink winding around scars, silver rings flashing as he guts and cleans the trout with an efficiency that should be gross and is instead, catastrophically, not.
He built the fire in the kitchen hearth without matches, just flint and a strike so fast I missed it.
Now he’s laying the fish in a pan with butter he probably churned himself, with those hands, and herbs he grew himself, with those hands, and I need to stop thinking about those hands.
He’s a seven-hundred-year-old corpse. He is my jailer. He is not a Food Network fantasy.
The butter sizzles in the hot pan, and the whole kitchen smells like heaven, and he glances over his shoulder at me with that one dark blue eye, sleeves rolled, firelight everywhere, and my ovaries file a formal complaint against my brain.
“You’re staring,” he says.
I cross my arms. “I’m supervising. Food safety is important.”
“I have not poisoned anyone since 1314, and he deserved it.”
“Comforting.” I push off the doorframe before I do something regrettable, like continue existing in his line of sight.
I raid the shelves where I find two hand-painted porcelain plates that are probably worth more than my apartment and carry them to the great hall.
I set them at the head of the table, one at the completely dust-free spot, which I now realize is his, one at the corner beside it.
Then I frown at the arrangement, because it’s cozy, and move mine one seat down.
Then I move it back, because yelling across a table built for forty is worse.
Candles next. I plant a candelabra between the plates and light it, and okay, that was a tactical error, because now it looks like a date. In a gothic castle. With a wolf banner glaring down at us.
“Congratulations, Clara,” I mutter, folding two napkins that are older than the United States. “You’ve recreated the Beast’s dining room. Be our freaking guest. Idiot.”
The wolf on the banner judges me. Everything in this castle judges me.
Aldric brings the food but stops when he sees the table. His gaze moves over the plates, the candles, the napkins, and the expression on his half-ruined, half-stunning face makes him look somehow younger.
“You set the table,” he says.
“Don’t make it weird,” I mutter.
“I’m not making it weird.” He sets the platter down—trout with crispy golden edges, baked potatoes, a salad that looks better than mine did yesterday—and pulls out my chair, then stands there behind it like this is completely normal behavior.
I blink at him before taking my seat and letting him push it forward.
“It’s been… some time. Since the table was set for two,” he adds as he does.
“Well...” I clear my throat. “The candles are for lighting purposes only. Purely functional candles.”
“Naturally.” He sits and unfolds his napkin like a man raised by nannies with switches. “Eat, Clara.”
I eat, and it’s the best fish I’ve ever had. The skin crackles, the flesh is butter-soft and lemony, and I make a sound on the first bite that I would deny in court.
Aldric’s fork pauses halfway to his mouth.
“Don’t,” I warn him around a mouthful.
“I said nothing.”
“I can feel the laser beam from your weird eyeball.”
For once, he doesn’t ask me what the hell I’m talking about.
He eats, watching me eat, which should be creepy but instead makes me feel seen.
When my plate is empty, he disappears and returns with a bowl of strawberries and a small pitcher of cream.
It’s thick and fresh, and for the first time in my life, I know the cow that produced the milk it’s made from.
He pours it over the berries himself and slides the bowl in front of me.
Strawberries. Like the tray beside the bath. Like last night with his fingers, his mouth, the sound he made when—
I shove a strawberry in my mouth. He’s watching my lips.
I’m watching him watch my lips. The candles I lit for purely functional purposes are doing romantic things to his cheekbones, and the room is getting smaller, and if I don’t change the subject right now, I’m going to end up begging exactly the way he predicted, and I will have to walk into the lake.
“So,” I say, too loud. “The curse.”
Aldric leans back. His face goes blank. “What of it?”
“The witch. Walk me through it. What exactly did she say to you?”
“That I would languish unchanged for eternity, confined to this castle while everyone around me dies.” He recites it with a flat voice.
“Okay, but the servants could leave. So the curse has exceptions. Rules. Rules can be exploited…” I tap a finger against my lips.
“Did she say anything about how it ends? In all the stories I’ve read, curses always have an out.
A loophole, a condition, true love’s—” I stop before finishing that sentence. “A condition.”
“She said nothing of an end.” His voice is bitter. “We searched, Clara. I searched. My servants brought scholars’ letters, occultists’ books, spiritualists’ texts. There is no loophole. There is only the boundary, and me inside it.”
“But I got in,” I argue. “That’s new data. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means something is different about you.” His eye lifts to mine, and the shard glows beside it, twin points of blue. “I have not yet determined what.”
“Then let’s determine it! Let’s go back to the library, let’s read the ledger, let’s… I don’t know. Let’s test the gate at different times, retrace exactly how I came in—”
“To what end?” His voice stays level, which is somehow worse than shouting. “So you may find the crack in my prison and slip out of it?”
“So we may find the crack and both get out, you absolute gargoyle.” I drop my spoon into the cream with a clatter. “This is the part where a normal person says ‘great idea, Clara, I too would like to leave my haunted terrarium.’”
“Hope is not a kindness to a man like me,” he says, and each word comes out colder. “I have buried it more times than I have buried servants. Forgive me if I decline to exhume it because a beautiful woman found my gate unlocked.”
“That’s—” Beautiful. He just slid that in there like an athlete slides into a model’s DMs. I refuse to let it sway me. “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, and I once watched the Titanic sink in 3D.”
Aldric growls, the sound pure frustration. “I do not know what any of that means.”
“It means you’d rather keep the one interesting thing that’s happened to you in a century locked in your terrarium than risk finding out the door might open!
” I’m standing now. My chair scrapes back, and my hands are flat on his ancient table.
“You know what? Great dinner. Ten out of ten fish. Terrible everything else.”
I snatch a last strawberry out of the cream—because I’m furious, not stupid—and march for the stairs. Shmoo joins me, materializing at my ankles and escorting me like a tiny bailiff.
“Clara.”
I don’t stop. “Goodnight, Lord Broods-a-lot.”
“Clara.” His voice rolls down the hall after me, all battlefield general. “If you insist on commandeering the master bedroom I have slept in for centuries, you could at least do me the courtesy of sharing my bed with me!”
I stop on the third stair. Turn. He’s standing at the end of the hall, candlelight behind him, all broad shoulders and creepy blue glow and nerve.
“That,” I call back, “is the worst invitation I have ever received, and my last one came with a mafia ring.”
“It was not an invitation. It was a grievance.”
“File it with the cat!”
I stomp the rest of the way up.