Patrick listened intently, lost as I was, in the strangeness of the night. “Tell me the rest of it,” he said, not a command, but a plea, and I did.
I told him about my time in Trent, bartering art for a train ticket, then the china shop in Hesson, where the foreman had his hired guards search our pockets after every shift. I told him about Dorser, where I’d come the closest I ever had to starving, and was saved by two elderly gentlemen who took me into their kitchen and fed me poached quail.
Then I came to the day in Delfield, where I’d lived above a pub in a waterlogged flat for all of three days before the infantry marched in. I told Patrick of how the landlord’s eyes had always lingered on my face, of how he’d sold the whereabouts of the earth Charmer to save his own family, and how I couldn’t possibly, even now, blame him for it.
I spoke of how I’d woken in the National House, Tanner hovering over me.
“He paraded my mother in,” I said, my voice thinning. “And I didn’t recognize her straightaway. That’s strange, don’t you think? For a daughter not to recognize her own mother.”
Patrick shook his head, entranced it seemed. “You hadn’t known her in many years.”
“It was more than that,” I muttered. “She was… changed. Not herself. She hummed a song she used to sing for me when I couldn’t sleep, or when my dad was shouting and she wanted to hide the noise from me, but she wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t speak. She’d already lost her mind, I think.”
There must have been tears on my face. I could feel them dripping off my jaw. “Tanner told me… he told me that she’d left Scurryfor me. Somehow, she’d learned the secret, and she’d learned that servants of the House were rewarded for keeping it. Their children made Artisans. That’s why she left me. She was trying to barter a better life for me.”
Patrick was sitting at his careful distance, one arm around his knee, the other hand weaving a coin through his fingers. The ropes of his tendons were rigid.
He didn’t move from this position. He only listened, an unnameable expression on his face.
“They told me to go to Kenton and find the Alchemist, and there was no other choice in it. I couldn’t let them kill her.” My voice wavered. I wondered if he could see all the guilt I was made of. “I was weak,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Patrick didn’t nod, or rise, or shout. Didn’t lift his eyes from mine. The coin ceased its turning. Several long moments of silence stretched. “You could’ve told me everything,” he said.
I sniffed and nodded.
“But you didn’t.”
To that, I said nothing.
“And I can only presume it was because of your friends, Theo and Polly, and what might happen to them, should they be implicated.”
I nodded once.
“Or perhaps you were worried for yourself,” Patrick said. It felt like an accusation. “Perhaps you thought I’d throw you into a canal if I knew the truth.”
I bit my tongue. I could still see the barrel of his gun pointed at me.
“Ah,” he said, reading my expression. “So it was fear, then. You were scared of me.”
I stiffened. “I was scared to lose you.”
“Yet I was devoted to keepin’ you,” he said now. “I vowed it, told you I was in love. You didn’t believe me.”
No, perhaps I hadn’t. “Some loves die when tested,” I said, voice fading.
He nodded. “That they do.”
We sat in silence for a while, the night passing by, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave the room, couldn’t bear to stay.
“Did you give ’em my name, Nina?” he asked. “You can tell me the truth now. Reckon I’ve earned it.”
I was mere whisps of myself. I felt he could pass right through me. “Of course not,” I said. “I’d changed sides. I’d told you that I loved you.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “Not really.”
“I toldno oneabout you,” I said, more forcefully now. “Not even Polly.”
He ran the tip of his finger over his lips, then nodded, as though to himself.
