Chapter 5
The door creaked. Nic froze, holding it half-open as he breathed the dusty scent of long-forgotten rooms.
“What is it?” Leaf whispered.
“Someone might hear us.”
She looked around, all too pointedly, from the empty passage to the empty gallery to the equally empty garden beyond the window.
“Who? It’s the first negotiation day, Millie and Lizzy will keep Aunt Theresa away, your father has an audit to prepare for, and mine brought almost his entire collection of ancient Greek texts. Everyone else is quite busy.”
Taking her point, he pushed the door the rest of the way.
The room that emerged into the light of Nic’s lantern was a small antechamber of sorts.
It owned dusty chairs and peeling wallpaper, while the paintings had long since been moved elsewhere, leaving squares of less-discoloured wall.
In one corner, mould climbed the rotten wainscotting in a delicate pattern like it had been painted on.
Nic closed the door behind them, leaving his lantern all that cut the velvet darkness. “Well. This place hasn’t gotten less spooky.”
“You don’t come here often?” Leaf ran a finger across the fragile old silk on a fraying chair. “If this was my house, I would be in here every day.”
All his life the decay of Monterris Court had been a shame his father was desperate to hide. Nic found he preferred the idea that it had value, even just as something to stare at.
“I go down to the grotto often,” he said, deciding it was worth confiding in her. “But I haven’t been up here since Dashiell and I went on an adventure to an Egyptian tomb.”
Leaf looked up from her examination of a broken table. “You mean Master sa Vare? You know each other?”
“You didn’t read that in those preliminary papers you snuck a look at?
” When she didn’t answer, Nic shrugged and added, “It’s no secret that he was my father’s apprentice for years.
We used to sneak away when we could and go on boyish adventures.
This room was the cabin of our ship on the Nile, I believe. ”
They’d even tried sleeping in there once, dragging bedding and cushions from all over the house. With a pair of lanterns on the floor, they’d snuggled into the heavy blankets, only to lie awake listening to every tiny sound before giving up in the early hours and trundling back to their own beds.
And then one day he’d left without even saying goodbye.
“That’s cute,” Leaf said. “Though it doesn’t look much like a cabin.”
“And the rest of the wing doesn’t look much like an Egyptian tomb. It’s called having an imagination.”
He strode to the next door—which had once led down a gangplank and onto the banks of the Nile—and leaned against the frame while she finished her survey of the room, ghostly in her pale dress.
As he watched her, a prickling crept across his scalp and crawled down his spine, like a whisper made visceral, and he glared at the door. “Someone has smithed here recently.”
Leaf glanced over. “How do you know?”
“I can feel the sigils, like… a whisper scratching at the back of my mind.”
“You can feel magic?”
Nic realised she was staring at him and stopped his search along the doorframe. “Is that strange?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps not for people as high on the Brilliance Register as you. I’ve never heard of it, although my magical education has been limited to charmspinning, conjuring flippancies, and poetry. Enough to prove capacity for breeding purposes rather than to make use of said capacity.”
Catching the bitter note, Nic tilted his head. “If you could do anything with it, what would you do?”
Her brows rose into surprised arches. “Personally? Nothing. I find everything about the Brilliance boring. But I hate that women aren’t able to do whatever they like with it, so my greatest wish is to open a school for Brilliant young ladies.
I’ve been trying to convince Papa to fund it, so far to no avail. He says people would laugh.”
“I don’t think people would laugh, but that’s what my father would say too.”
“Something we have in common. What about you? If you were free to do anything at all, what would you do?”
“Conjure. Sing. I also like making little automata.” Despite how easy he found confiding in her, the admission felt shameful, spoken over the ever-present echo of his father’s disdain.
“And I would love to travel,” he added, hoping this might raise him in her estimation.
“I’m slowly collecting travelogues when I can affo—when I can. ”
“None of that was in the notes either.”
Nic snorted a humourless laugh. “Well, no, it wouldn’t be. My father deems none of my pursuits worthy of my name.”
“Oh, but these were the notes Gillingham rummaged up. He’s one of Uncle Ricard’s men, you know, and he’s frighteningly good at finding out things no one else knows. Aunt Theresa hates him. Papa too. Thinks he’s bad for our reputation, having gotten so many warnings from the guild.”
“I guess it’s hard to find out anything about the invisible heir.”
Leaf shot him a theatrical grimace. “I think I ought to apologise for that; you were very unhappy with me last night.”
“Not with you, just… with the idea of being scrutinised, of being a novelty. I assure you I am disappointingly dull. I don’t even have an interesting name like Leaf.”
“For which you ought to be thankful! My mother’s whim, you know, and an eternal burden to me.”
She headed for the door as she spoke, but Nic held out his hand. “Wait, let me find this smithing first.”
With a mock little curtsy, she waited while he examined the doorframe, his fingers eventually finding what his eyes had not—tiny sigils inscribed into the wood.
“Someone has smithed into the frame.”
“What does it say?”
Nic drew the lantern up. “It’s too small to read, but it doesn’t feel nice. Rather like my skin is trying to peel itself off so it doesn’t have to walk through with me.”
Lady Leaf shuddered. “What a delightfully macabre image. Is someone trying to keep people out?”
“Most likely my father. He was well known for his tiny sigilwork as a vowsmith—before he inherited and had to stop working. And his magic always feels faint like this, because it’s so like mine, I think.
Master Everel’s too, as though the family resemblance makes it harder to sense. Still, best to be safe.”
Nic pulled the pin from his neckcloth as he spoke and set its tip to the tiny sigils. Dragging it along, he scratched a line through them all, disrupting their shapes and the feeling of fresh magic.
“Isn’t hidden smithing illegal?” Leaf asked when he stepped back.
“In general,” Nic said, replacing the pin. “Although on a duke’s private property, I think anything goes.” He pushed the door and it swung silently open—a yawning invitation.
Leaf strode through, eyes darting to see the next room all at once, just as though it was a marvel.
It might have been in its day, back when the long mirrors weren’t cracked and tarnished, when the wooden floor had shone and the chandeliers hadn’t been pulling away from the plasterwork.
Now it looked as though the long gallery had crashed into something, leaving even the wainscotting dropping to a seasick angle.
“It’s beautiful,” Leaf breathed, turning slowly.
“I think you mean it was beautiful.”
“No, it still is. Perhaps even more than when it was first made. Look at the way the cracks run up the glass like silk webs. In the plaster too. The bits that have fallen away make a pattern of decay that speaks of… of life. Rich, true life, like damp earth.”
“And people think I’m weird,” Nic muttered, following her through the long room, lantern aloft. “Is there anything in particular you’re actually hoping to find?”
Leaf slowed as she ambled into the next room—a small dining hall where broken windows let in not only the weather but vines that curled around an old charmspun aviary.
“I don’t know,” she said, moving to admire a patch of moss spreading from the damp, split wood beneath the window.
“You said those stairs don’t get used because no one comes here, so it makes sense to see if there’s any reason—” She stopped abruptly.
“Wait, why were you on those stairs last night?”
“Oh.” He ran a mental catalogue over the evening’s events and decided honesty was best. “Because I took a walk out into the walled garden to escape the party and fell into the pond. And since that garden is at this end of the house, it was the quickest route back to my rooms.”
All right, partial honesty.
“That explains why you were dripping wet. You shouldn’t have drunk so much, I imagine.”
“So I have been informed.”
She moved on to admire a large table that had been left to rot, the legs at one end having sunk through the floor, leaving it sloping.
“Oh, I didn’t think about the possibility the floor was dangerous,” she said, the first inklings of doubt creeping into her words.
“Hopefully it’s just because the windows are open here. ”
She walked on, and with the lantern held high Nic followed, amused by her fascination.
Each room begat another, all full of cracking paint and faded furnishings.
With every step, the floor creaked and groaned, while damp crawled up walls in patterns of lichen and moss.
As they went, Leaf grilled him about Rowerre’s usual habits, and where else he might have been going.
“Perhaps your father ordered him to check these doors were locked,” Leaf suggested, stepping into a gallery with more broken windows open to the weather. Here, too, moss grew across the floor and mildew graced the walls like finely patterned paper.
“Master Everel does jobs like that for him.”
“But he’s your head negotiator. Surely he’s too important for such menial tasks.”
“Oh no, he’s a very good vowsmith, but my father owns him like he owns me, so he’s stuck here being my father’s secretary rather than working for the guild.”
Leaf’s brows rose. “He’s a Monterris?”