Chapter 16
As Magdala watched Asherton sitting at the table, one leg crooked over the arm of his chair, his lean body in a careless slump, she recalled how her father had made them dress for dinner and sit in this very dining room, in appointed chairs. No slouching, no sighing, no slurping.
She reminded herself that those were better days, that her father ran the house the way a house like this was supposed to be run, but she had to admit that wearing her ordinary day clothes and hunching over her plate was more pleasant than sitting board-straight with a starched collar chafing her neck.
Magdala looked up from her food and caught the prince studying her. She smiled at him, partly enjoying and partly annoyed by his paranoia.
All day, she’d searched for an opportunity to slip the amenite into his drink, or dust it over his food, but Zephyr was watching her with hawk-like attention, and since she had to taste everything the prince ate, she couldn’t give him the amenite without also taking it herself.
She considered trying this, but decided against it.
She feared what she might say when forced to tell the unvarnished truth.
Zephyr glanced over his glasses at Asherton, and the prince pulled his sleeve down, concealing his freshly bandaged hand.
“So, eggs again,” Magdala said, breaking the silence. Both men looked up at her warily. “I saw the garden is overgrown. How do you get food here?”
“What garden?” Asherton asked.
“The vegetable garden,” Magdala said with a laugh, assuming he was joking.
“We have a vegetable garden?”
“Surely you eat vegetables,” she said, aghast. “How else do you keep your teeth from falling out?” She wanted to ask how they maintained their physiques without better nutrition, but couldn’t think of a modest way to phrase the question.
With an air of injured dignity, Zephyr wiped his mouth with his napkin. “We manage.”
“Wild berries, apples,” Asherton said. “Whatever we can forage. Lots of mushrooms.”
“Some of them poisonous,” Zephyr murmured.
“That was only the one time and we both survived.”
Magdala glanced at her tin plate. “Isn’t there a china set?”
“Well, yes,” Zephyr blustered. “But Asherton …”
The prince held his hands up defensively. “They make excellent drip pans in the greenhouse.”
Magdala slammed her fork on the table. Drip pans? Her father’s ancestral china, used for the filthy plants? Her lips curling in, Magdala tamped down the outburst by promising herself that soon her father would be home.
Rain drummed against the windows. Zephyr pushed his chair back and took a basket from the floor, then pulled out a tangle of green yarn and commenced knitting a sweater with a fat frog on the front. “You should not have bound your hand again, Ash. You’ll make it bleed. Why did you?” he asked.
Asherton’s fork clattered onto his plate. “It came undone. Miss Devney tied it off incorrectly.”
Magdala looked daggers at him.
Zephyr sniffed and watched the rain outside the window. “This will be good for the frogs.”
Asherton pushed his chair back, stood, and walked out of the room.
“Go on,” Zephyr said without looking up from his knitting. “Go with him before a second assassin tries to get him today.”
So much for hiding the truth from Zephyr.
“I haven’t finished eating,” Magdala said.
Zephyr’s knitting needles stilled. “Miss Devney, does the queen pay you to eat my chicken’s eggs?”
“She does not,” Magdala said with forced placidity. She dropped her cutlery and followed Asherton.
She found him in the sunroom—a domed glass addition to the back of the house. Asherton knelt on the copper-tiled floor, rolling a walnut to Anton. The plant nudged it back to him and Asherton smiled. His smile faded when Magdala entered.
“The beast is growing,” she said, nodding at Anton.
“In a month, he’ll be the size of a tree and capable of eating an entire cow.”
“Capable of eating me?”
Anton rubbed his jaw on Asherton’s knee, purring like a cat. “As you are smaller than a cow, yes, capable of eating you,” Asherton replied.
Curse Huxley. He had painted this as a simple job, in and out in a day. A day and a night had passed, and Magdala was beginning to fear she would be stuck here forever.
A little dragon whizzed into the room, wearing a leather pack on his back. It was no larger than a hummingbird. Magdala stared at it, puzzled. “What is he doing?” she asked.
“Sprites won’t come all the way out here,” Asherton said. “So dragons bring the mail. Check it. It’s probably for you.”
Reaching into the dragon’s pack, she slipped a tightly folded letter out.
She recognized her father’s handwriting addressed to “Magdala Slorus; ℅ Huxley Davenport”.
Her father’s use of his surname instead of her mother’s nettled her, but she overlooked it.
Below the address, in Huxley’s neat cursive, “Elegy Island, Manor House.”
Magdala dropped a kib into the dragon’s pack and it flew off. Turning away from the prince, she unfolded the paper.
Faithful daughter,
I miss you so. My meals are tasteless, as I cannot cook (Magdala hated it when men said they couldn’t cook. She wasn’t born with some innate culinary knowledge. It was a skill, learned like any other skill which, in the absence of a convenient woman, men often miraculously mastered).
Huxley will not tell me where you are, but he says you’re serving your country, so I hope you’ve got a knife in the gullet of the bastard prince at this moment.
Magdala cast a guilty look at Asherton.
I’ve written to tell you I’ve had a bad turn of luck, and l fear I’ve lost the cottage. I did save the furniture, though. I am living at the tavern for now, until my luck changes.
A moan escaped Magdala.
“What?” Asherton asked.
“Nothing,” Magdala replied.
Why wouldn’t he sell the furniture to save the cottage? And where was it now? She imagined her father sitting atop a mountain of stacked tables and sofas and chairs in his tiny tavern room, drinking tea with his pinky raised.
How lucky am I to have a devoted, generous daughter so willing to help me? You are my pride and joy, my meadow hen, and I love you with my whole soul.
Your father,
Seamus
She crumpled the letter in her fist and tossed it on the floor, where Anton snatched it in his jaws and swallowed it. Frowning, she watched the lump slide down his stalk.
“Bad news?” Asherton asked with polite interest.
“Not news, but bad,” she said. She knew her father. He hadn’t had bad luck; he had refused to work and couldn’t pay the rent. “You don’t suppose I could get an advance on my salary, do you?”
Asherton raised an eyebrow. “I thought you had an alternate income stream.”
She rolled her eyes. “If I did, which I don’t, I clearly haven’t collected on it yet.”
“I’ll try to accommodate you and choke on a chicken bone at supper.”
Magdala sighed. “What chicken? You only eat eggs.”
“Huxley sent an advance on your salary,” Asherton admitted. “Zephyr has it in trust. If you want to get paid early, Zephyr might be able to accommodate you.”
Magdala sprang to her feet. “Don’t get murdered until I get back,” she ordered.
“I’ll do my utmost,” Asherton replied.
Zephyr was still in the dining room, peering through a set of binoculars at a blue heron wading in the pond outside. “What are you doing here?” he asked without turning.
“I need a favor. Could I have an advance on my salary? I know it's alot to ask …”
Zephyr huffed. “An advance on your salary? So far, you’ve proven a negligible bodyguard. Why should I do you any favors?”
Magdala balked at this. “The prince is alive.”
“Alive, but there was another attempt on his life,” he said.
“Which you both chose to keep from me. You expect to keep secrets about the health and safety of my son …” He bit down on the word and lowered his binoculars.
“Ward,” he corrected, raising them again.
“And then ask me for your salary after less than two days?”
“I find myself in an unusual situation … I have a family member in need …”
“Prove to me that you can do your job, and I will consider paying you early.”
Magdala chewed her lip. Even if she did give Asherton the amenite tonight, it would be weeks of trial, then probate, then moving.
There wasn’t any money attached to the Elegy estate, so her father would have somewhere to sleep and put his furnishings, but nothing to buy flour or hire servants.
And he would insist on renovations that he couldn’t afford.
Where would the silk jackets come from? The leather shoes?
How would he pay to replace the gnawed curtains or shine the scuffed floors?
If she wanted to keep her father off the streets, Magdala needed to earn an honest living before she could throw Asherton out of the house. Which meant she had to stay at least a week, and she had to prove to Zephyr that she could protect the prince.
“If, one week from now, the prince is happy and whole, will you pay me early?”
“Of course, Miss Devney,” Zephyr replied. “I would be more than happy to.”
Predictably, Asherton had not remained in the sunroom.
Assuming he’d gone to his bedroom, Magdala headed toward the stairs, but she took a detour through the cavernous ballroom.
Ornate murals decorated the far wall, a floor-to-ceiling mirror the other.
The floor was a mosaic of green-and-blue tile spiraling to a round piece in the center, painted with two orange fish circling one another.
When Magdala was little, her father would not allow her to dance on the burnished tiles unless she wore her best shoes.
In a fit of inexplicable defiance, Magdala slipped off her boots.
The cold floor chilled her bare feet as she raised her arms above her head and turned in a slow pirouette.
Her dance teacher had said she was awkward and graceless, but when she was on the Wildlands with her mother, her body knew how to move, guided by the wind and the rain, the fiddles and pipes of her mother’s people.
Smiling, her eyes closed, she spun in a reckless whirl, her hair flying, her feet squeaking on the tarnished grandeur of her father’s tile.
The world blurred, and she imagined music guiding her.
Her hair came loose and flew around her in a joyful tangle.
She bumped into the mirror and turned to laugh at herself, but when she gazed into the glass, her reflection stared back with blue eyes.
Magdala started away from the glass with a gasp. She blinked and her eyes were hazel again. Goosebumps spread down her arms.
The ghost. Surely, it was the ghost. There was no other explanation.
“And you said you couldn’t dance.”
Asherton’s voice sent her heart into her throat.
“Why are you creeping about?” she snapped, her hand on her chest. “I told you to wait for me!”
He was leaning against the wall, grinning at her. “If you’d agreed to dance with me upon our first meeting instead of putting a knife to my throat, we could have had a lot more fun. Picture us, the bastard prince and the Russuli expatriate, scandalizing the whole court.”
Magdala’s cheeks burned so hot she feared her sweat would simmer. Because that did sound fun. In a horrible, devil-may-care way.
Asherton pushed off the wall. “Let’s say I’ve read you wrong and you’re not trying to kill me. What happens to you if I die, Devney? Do you lose your position? Will you ever get a posting again? Or tell me truthfully, would you get a medal?”
He moved closer, a reckless gleam in his eyes. She backed into the mirror, and he braced his arm against the glass above her head, leaning in.
“The heroic bodyguard,” he continued, “who rid us of that troublesome bastard destined to curse us all.”
“Maybe they would,” she said. “Maybe I should let the assassin shoot you here.” She meant to shove him, but she cowered at the last second, lost momentum, and found herself with her hand flat on his chest, over his heart.
“Or do it yourself,” he said softly. “I sleep a stride away every night. What’s stopping you?”
Magdala wondered why he was goading her again. Perhaps some dark part of him wanted her to try.
Magdala smiled coquettishly. She’d never donned a coquettish smile in her life, but Asherton made her act strange. Stars above, she needed to get off this island before it ruined her. “Kill a man while he sleeps in his bed? What would be the fun in that?” she said.
Asherton let out a burst of laughter as she ducked under his arm and passed him into the hall.