17. Aldric
ALDRIC
The garden is gold with late-afternoon sun when Clara emerges, boots laced, hair braided over one shoulder like a rope of spun silver. Schmetterling stations himself between us at once, tail high, the self-appointed chaperone of Blackthorn Keep.
“Ten minutes, you said.” She squints against the light and wrinkles her nose. “That was a lie. This is a whole itinerary, isn’t it? You have a route.”
“I have a route.” I set off down the gravel path between the cabbages. “The grounds require inspection. The fence by the orchard, the beehives, the barn. You’ll accompany me because the alternative is you returning to the library and going blind before supper.”
“So thoughtful. So bossy.” But she falls into step beside me, and the evening breeze carries her scent to me, driving me insane with more success than all these years of loneliness had.
We walk in silence past the potato field, and the urge to hear her speak becomes too strong to fight.
“Tell me about your life.”
She trips over nothing. “Wow. Straight in. No warm-up. What happened to talking about the weather?”
“The weather has been identical for seven hundred years. Tell me about your life, Clara. Before the forest. Before this Marco you keep mentioning.”
She plucks a bean pod off the trellis as we pass, cracks it open, eats the beans one at a time. Buying herself time. I let her have it. Sieges have taught me the value of patience, and she is a walled city if ever I saw one.
“There’s not much to tell,” she says at last. “I never knew my parents. I grew up in foster care. That’s, um…
That’s when a child is placed with strangers who get paid to house them.
Some of them are wonderful. Some of them treat you like furniture that eats.
” She shrugs, but the gesture isn’t smooth, her usual grace missing.
“I moved around a lot. Eleven homes by the time I aged out. You learn to pack fast and not get attached to anything you can’t carry. ”
My chest tightens around the beating blue shard housed there. I know what it is to watch every attachment leave. I didn’t know a living woman of twenty-some years could already carry the same knowledge.
“And then?” I prompt, hungry for more.
“Then I waited tables in Bern. It’s honest work, decent tips if you can smile at people who don’t deserve it, and I’m an excellent liar with my face.
” She flicks the empty bean pod into the compost heap without breaking stride.
“Marco came into the restaurant one night. Big party, back room, some ‘business meeting.’” She hooks her fingers into the air around the words, making invisible quotes.
“He tipped like a lunatic and looked at me like I was the only thing on the menu, and I know how that sounds, but when nobody’s ever—” She stops and takes a deep breath.
“It was flattering. Flowers at my apartment. A car. Trips. I got swept up in it. It felt like being chosen, and I’d never been chosen for anything. ”
Schmetterling weaves between her ankles, and she nearly falls into the rosemary. I catch her elbow but release it the moment she’s steady. Her terms. My hand aches with the memory of her anyway.
“Did you love him?” I make myself ask.
“No.” No hesitation. “I never loved him. I told myself I would, eventually, like love was a package that got delayed in shipping. And by the time he proposed, there were people around us, and his mother had already picked the venue, and everyone was clapping, and I realized saying no wasn’t—” She clenches her teeth.
“It wasn’t on the menu. So I said yes and felt sick about it every single day after.
The regret just kept chewing on me. And then he brought me here, to Germany, for another ‘business meeting,’ and I climbed out of a bathroom window.
And then I ran until I found your castle. ”
We have reached the orchard fence. I brace my hand on the top rail and test it, though the rail needs no testing. I simply require something to grip that is not this woman or the throat of a villain I cannot reach.
“He asked you to be his wife with witnesses,” I say slowly. “To ensure your answer.”
She breathes out through her nose. “Yeah.”
“In my day, we called that a hostage negotiation.”
Clara laughs—a short, surprised bark of laughter.
“That’s what I called it too, actually.” Then she looks at me sideways, wary and warm at once.
“You’re not going to say something possessive now, are you?
Something like no man will ever pressure you again, for you are mine?
” She drops her voice an octave for the impression.
It is not flattering. It is not entirely inaccurate.
“I was going to say he is a fool who mistook a wolf for a doll.” I push off the fence and continue toward the hives. “But now I will say nothing, since I am apparently a caricature.”
“You do talk like that, though.”
“I talk like a man educated by monks and murderers. Consider the material I had to work with.”
She laughs again, freer this time, and jogs a step to keep pace with me. Schmetterling trots ahead and leaps onto the low stone wall by the hives, supervising.
“Okay, your turn,” Clara says. “Fair’s fair. Tell me about your childhood. Baby Aldric. Tiny warlord. Did you conquer the nursery?”
I check the nearest hive, listen to the drowsy hum within, and consider the question. It’s like being asked to describe a country I visited once, briefly, in fog.
“It was seven hundred years ago, Clara.”
She blinks. “So? You remember the witch. You remember the start of your curse.”
“I remember it the way you remember a knife going in.” I straighten and look out over the orchard, apples blushing on the boughs I have pruned for centuries.
“My childhood is… a haze. I recall a wet nurse’s song, but not the words.
A gray horse. My father’s hand, though whether it was raised in blessing or blow, I could not tell you.
Likely both, and often. The rest wore away.
” I shrug, and I realize a moment too late that I mimicked her fake casualness.
“It’s not important. The boy died long before the man did. Neither is worth excavating.”
Clara watches me with those violet eyes, and she doesn’t push, which is somehow worse than pushing.
“Fine,” she says after a moment. “Then answer me this one, because it’s been driving me insane.
” She points at the wall. At Schmetterling, who pauses mid-wash, one leg extended above his head like an indecent ballerina.
“Him. He was in a kid’s drawing from—what, a hundred years ago?
You said he started collecting his fish tax from you in 1740.
Cats live, like, fifteen years, Aldric. Twenty if they’re spiteful. How is Shmoo immortal?”
“Ah.” I look at the cat. The cat looks at me with the insolence of a creature who has outlived every last thread of my patience. “The goblet.”
“The goblet,” Clara echoes.
“The one the witch poisoned. Laced with souldust.” I lean against the wall beside the beast, and he deigns to bump his skull against my knuckles, once, before returning to his leg.
“After that night, I could not bear to look at it, but neither could I bring myself to destroy it. Evidence, I suppose, or penance. It has been locked in the cellar stores with the dregs still in it. One day, a kitten appeared in the keep. No one knew whose. He was found in the cellar, in the stores, sitting beside the goblet, cleaning his whiskers and looking profoundly pleased with himself.”
Clara’s mouth falls open. “He licked it?”
“We can only presume. The residue was gone, the kitten was there, and the kitten—” I gesture at him, “—remained. And remained. The servants aged, and he did not. It was the only explanation any of us could conceive. Believe me, we conceived many. Konrad’s grandfather was convinced for a decade that the cat was the witch herself, returned to gloat.
He crossed himself every time Schmetterling entered a room. ”
“Was he? Is he?” Clara peers at Shmoo with sudden suspicion. Shmoo yawns at her, enormous and entirely unbothered.
“If he is, then the witch has spent hundreds of years demanding trout and sleeping on my clean shirts, and I confess the vengeance is effective,” I say dryly.
Clara laughs so hard she has to sit down on the wall, and Schmetterling, offended by the seismic activity, pours himself off it and stalks toward the keep. She wipes her eyes.
“So he’s a revenant cat. He’s your curse-brother. You have a soul-bonded familiar and you named him Butterfly.”
“I did not name him. A servant girl named him, when she was six, because he chased one across the entire garden and fell into the well.” I offer Clara my hand without thinking.
She looks at it, then takes it, and lets me pull her to her feet, and neither of us mentions the terms, and neither of us lets go quickly.
“Come. The light is failing, and you owe me a demonstration.”
Her face scrunches up. “A demon—oh. The fish.”
“The fish.”
In the kitchen, I lay a fat trout on the cutting board, set the filleting knife beside it with its handle turned toward her, and step back with my arms crossed. The fire crackles. Schmetterling takes up his post on the flour barrel, an audience of one, tail ticking like a clock.
“Whenever you are ready, Fr?ulein,” I say in a placid voice. “You claimed knowledge. Demonstrate it.”
Clara picks up the knife. She holds it the way a courtier holds a dead mouse. She looks at the trout. The trout, glassy-eyed, looks at nothing.
“So first,” she announces with tremendous authority, “you, um. You establish dominance over the fish.”
“Establish dominance,” I repeat dryly.
“It’s a mental game, Aldric.” She pokes the trout with the tip of the knife, near the tail, achieving nothing.
Pokes it again, closer to the middle. The trout slides an inch across the board, escaping in death as it never could in life.
“Okay, it’s slippery, nobody mentions how slippery—stay still—”
I raise an eyebrow. “It is dead. It is the stillest it will ever be.”
“Then it should be easier!” She pins the trout with her palm, wrinkles her whole face, and saws vaguely at its spine as though attempting to open a letter with a spoon. Scales spray. One lands on her cheek and glitters there like a sequin. “This is fine. This is exactly how it goes.”
“You are attacking it perpendicular to the backbone.”
“That’s what she said,” Clara mutters, which means nothing to me and clearly means something to her, because she snorts at her own words.
I watch for one more minute. It is like watching a kitten fight a boot. The trout is now less filleted than mauled, its side bearing three hesitant gashes, and Clara is glaring at it with the personal animosity of a woman betrayed.
“Clara.”
“I’ve almost got it.”
“You have almost committed a desecration.” I round the table and stand behind her—close, but not touching, honoring her terms with the discipline of a martyr. “Give me your hand.”
She goes very still. “That sounds like the beginning of something.”
“It is the beginning of a fillet. Your hand.”
She surrenders the knife instead, stepping aside, cheeks pink, the scale still glittering on one of them. “Fine. Show me, then, since you’re so medieval about it.”
I flip the ruined trout, take a fresh one from the basin, and set the blade behind its gills.
“Watch. The knife enters here, angled toward the head. Then you turn it flat and let the spine guide you. You do not force it, you follow it.” One long, smooth draw, tail to gill, and the fillet lifts free, clean and whole.
“The fish tells you where to cut. You were arguing with it.”
“I argue with everything, it’s my love language,” she says, and then hears herself, and pretends fierce interest in the fillet. “That was… annoyingly graceful. Do the other side.”
I do the other side. She leans in to watch, close enough that her braid brushes my sleeve, and I keep my hands steady through pure force of will.
“So you lied to me,” I say, laying the fillets side by side. “You cannot fillet a fish.”
Clara lifts her chin, plucks the scale off her cheek, and flicks it at my waistcoat.
“I supervise the filleting of fish. It’s a management position.”
Scoffing, I carry on preparing dinner under her skilled supervision. For whatever reason, it’s the best meal I have ever made.