“Don’t make much sense to drag him along any further,” John interceded.
But Nina paid him no mind. She stepped closer to Patrick, her hands balling the way they did when she was scared. Was she afraid of him?
“He followed your orders with those men. He killed them for us, and he took a bullet to save me,” she said. It was damningly soft. “I—I can’t just abandon him.”
Over Nina’s shoulder, Theo’s eyes became star-bright. His shoulders lifted just a fraction.
Patrick let the air pent up in his tired lungs go and swallowed a stream of vitriol that wasn’t intended for her. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll stay.” Lord, but he was loathe to. Loathe to be sitting still while his broken parish stitched itself back together and the Lords’ Army circled in on them and somewhere in the Trench, miles of terranium sat waiting for the taking.
“Thank you,” Nina said, and back she went. Back to Theo and his shining eyes, his wound—visible proof of his loyalty to her. She watched over Mrs. Trunk, who had returned with a carpet bag clinking with medical supplies and begun to pull out foul-smelling antiseptic and yellowing gauze.
Patrick couldn’t stand here another moment watching. He went to the piano with his jaw sticking. He rounded precariously stacked pots and a chest of men’s boots with his nails digging into his palms.
The standing piano was made of Sitka spruce, he guessed, its keys unsurfaced. Atop each key was a letter, or sometimes a word. Patrick saw aYes, No, and oddly, the wordBastard. Each of these was etched into the wood in neat script, no doubt by Mrs. Trunk herself. Patrick ran his fingers across them. They came away dusty.
The keys compressed discordantly, the words spelled out too quickly. Patrick tried to track the letters as they were belted down but was helpless to follow along. He looked back over his shoulder to Mrs. Trunk, who was half bent over, dabbing at Theo’s side in a practiced way.
“What did she say?” Nina called, watching him.
He shook his head. “Could you, uh… go a little slower?”
Mrs. Trunk’s shoulders rose and fell on a sigh, and then the melody played again, lagging now. Partick couldn’t describe how, but he felt as if the sound mocked him, like speech slowed down for the irreparably stupid.
The notes rang out, and Patrick read them aloud. “Don’t… touch.” He grinned down at the keys, then turned to say. “Pardon me, Miss.”
John came to Patrick’s side, his tongue tucked into his cheek in the way he was prone to when deep in thought. For a moment, Patrick was waylaid by memories of him turning over the working parts of some device, his concentration fixed.
“Clever,” John said, bending to see beneath. “She had her tongue cut out or somethin’?”
Another singular note, this one a dirge. The key with the wordNocompressed, and John huffed a guttural laugh.
“She’s notdeaf, John,” Nina called out.
Another note.Bastard.
Patrick grinned again. John chuckled. “Ain’t half-stupid, neither.”
More notes. This time spelling W-H-O-A-R-E-Y-O-U?
“Mrs. Trunk, my name is Patrick. I apologize for the intrusion.”
Mrs. Trunk simply kept on with her ministrations, hovering over Theo, blotting the antiseptic on his wound.
“Please forgive John here. His manners are trapped somewhere betweenhis arse and his mouth.” It was a risk, Patrick knew, to speak crassly to an Artisan lady before asking her a favor, but Patrick had learned to read people. No regular swank opened an antiques store on a cliff in Lavnonshire and piled it with Crafter treasure.
Mrs. Trunk’s eyes twinkled. Patrick knew caged laughter when he saw it. Nina rolled her eyes at Patrick, and he winked at her.
“We’re in dire need of a place to stay, Mrs. Trunk. Just for a few nights,” Nina said. “We’ll keep out of your hair. And we can pay.”
Mrs. Trunk was already nodding absently and waving off the idea of payment as though it were hardly a favor at all. More notes rang out. T-R-O-U-B-L-E-?
Patrick hid his hands in his pockets. “No trouble,” he said easily.
A run of notes followed, one key after another, so dizzyingly fast that Patrick hardly made heads or tails of it.
Nina grinned. “You’ll have to forgive them, Mrs. Trunk. They’re simple Crafters. They don’t read quickly.”
Patrick smirked.
