When he woke, the sun beyond the broken window was orange. The shadows in the room had elongated. His father snored obscenely.
Patrick pushed himself upright and stretched out the strain in his neck. He pretended that the lethargy he felt was credited to the lumpy mattress and not to a greater fatigue. For a moment, the room rotated around him like a mirage, and he himself was bodiless. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. He couldn’t stay in this room with its towers of books another moment.
He stood and half dressed himself. The clothes Mrs. Trunk had left smelled like must and time. Socks, no boots, an unbuttoned shirt, no suspenders. He fought the door against the draft in the hallway.
Polly and Nina’s door was cracked open, and inside was Polly sleeping with the Stewards’ book on her stomach, parchment spread around her, those strange symbols bled onto the pages, scratched out, rewritten.
Nina was missing.
She wasn’t with Theo, either, who lay prone on the settee, the bluff making his jaw sag, his eyelids slack in sleep.
A jolt of panic struck Patrick, one that was becoming familiar to him. He went to the stairs and pounded down each one, mumbling beneath his breath about how the woman couldn’t go more than a handful of hours without fraying his nerves.
He found her in the shop, sitting on the piano bench alongside Mrs. Trunk, who spoke to her with music.
Patrick didn’t approach immediately. He simply watched, letting his thundering heart settle.
Nina was smiling softly at the older woman, her hair escaping its clasp and framing her face, dimples appearing in either cheek, lashes fanning tired eyes. He knew their color to be beautiful, though he couldn’t see them. He knew when they caught the light, a spectrum of green swallowed the hazel, the apples of her cheeks glowed pink and the column of her throat, too. It often unsettled him.
It was becoming difficult to remember why he couldn’t love her. Over and over, he replayed the times she’d lied to him. He was trying to convince himself that really, she was a mystery to him, that he’d sprinted ahead to love and ignored everything else. A goner, Tess had called him. He hadn’t had the time to understand the half of her.
But it was so easy to feel like he did.
Mrs. Trunk played stories to Nina, who sat with rapt attention, grinning, answering in kind, throwing her head back and laughing earnestly at whatever the elderly woman told her. She treated people with a blanket fairness Patrick couldn’t allow, gave pieces of herself over freely and closed off other parts in a vault.
He felt that she’d been born in the wrong world. In another life, she was the sort of woman who got all the things a lady deserved. A house and beautiful dresses. A flowery wedding. A bed in which she’d be worshipped. All the children she wanted, or none if she didn’t. Every ounce of bluff or ink she’d ever need so she’d never know a day of pain. Someone who would take on the brunt of the world until it felt soft to her.
He’d imagined himself to be that champion once. It seemed laughable now. Neither of them were meant for that life. Without her, there was no terranium. Without him, there was no alchemy.
And without idium, there was nothing.
Patrick stepped into the shop, and the women looked up, finally noticing him. Patrick tried and failed to grin. “Pardon the interruption.”
Mrs. Trunk nodded when she saw him, then touched Nina’s cheek and rose. As she passed, she stopped to look up shrewdly into Patrick’s face. Whatever she saw there, it saddened her. She crammed into the stairwell, her frame disappearing.
Patrick put his hands in his pockets, stifling the sudden unease he felt. “Do you ever stay where you’re supposed to?”
She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Not recently, no.”
“Anyone could walk in,” he reminded her, nodding toward the door and its open sign. “Recognize you.”
“I’ve been here plenty. Never seen a single customer.”
“Woman, you couldn’t just humor me and stay safe upstairs?”
“If I say no, will you threaten to carry me up there yourself?”
His blood spiked. “It wouldn’t be a threat.”
Nina rolled her eyes at him. Lord, when she did that, he wanted to take her jaw in his hand, tilt her head back until she was looking only at him. “What were you two doin’?”
She glanced her fingers over the piano keys. “Just gossiping.”
“Throughsong?”
Nina’s lip quirked.
“Artisan bullshit,” Patrick muttered beneath his breath. It had the desired effect. There was sustenance for him in her scowls. He thought he could live off them until he was an old man. He smiled to himself as she began to prattle.
