He looked at me, confused. “What is it?”
I grimaced. “It just doesn’t feel right, walking in uninvited.”
Theo raised his eyebrows at the open hallway. “Well, we can knock, but I don’t think anyone is coming to let us in.” He stepped over the threshold and looked back to find me hesitating there. He frowned. “Are you coming?”
“Don’t you feel that?” I asked him, and again, the wind swept through, sent gooseflesh up my neck.
“Feel what?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “A bad omen. Like we’re disturbing something.”
“Like a ghost?”
I pressed my lips together. He made it sound preposterous. I thought it seemed all too probable. I would have bet Trent was full of ghosts, overspilling with them. I stepped into the hallway gingerly, my boots crunching against broken glass. “You don’t believe in ghosts?” I went past him and led the way up the staircase and into the first open door. The room was wallpapered deepest green and obviously Artisanal. Who else in the brink could afford a gilded credenza, a harp in the corner, shelves of books? I wondered if this house had belonged to a Scribbler, or perhaps a wood Mason. Plenty of wood to mill in this parish, or at least there had been.
“Ghosts?” Theo said. “No.”
I began opening the wardrobe doors, taking the clothing from within. “Crafters say that when you die young, your ghost lingers a day for each you missed. That’s why we grieve the death of a child so badly. We can feel them nearby.”
Theo gave a sad sort of smile. “Sometimes stories are made where logic fails us.” He was looking over the books on the shelves, his fingers running over the spines.
“AndThe Stewards’ Testament… I take it you think it nothing more than a story?”
He turned to face me. “I think this entire thing is a goose chase,” he said. “With no happy ending.”
“If that’s your belief, then you should go,” I said, half of me wishing he’d disappear that very moment, the other half terrified he might just do it.
“Is that what you want?” It was a real question. Vulnerable.
“No,” I said honestly. “Better the devil I can see than the one I can’t.”
Theo’s frown deepened. “I’m not your enemy, Nina.”
“You’ve acted as my enemy,” I countered, rummaging through blankets, towels, sheets. “Not a week ago, you would have seen me lashed. You’ve lied to me. Manipulated me. My mother is dead because of your father’s scheming, and you didn’t do a thing to stop it.”
“And I’m more sorry for it than you could know,” he said tremulously, biting back some emotion. “But you’re not the only one who’s been used and spat out. You are not the only one who’s lost their mother.”
I turned to look at him, at the fracturing in his eyes. His mother, who had suffered the slow death of influenza without the bluff needed to revive her.
“We are all someone’s enemy,” he said now. “Whether you admit to it or not. I regret what I’ve done every waking minute. But I don’t regret coming back for you in Kenton Hill, even when you didn’t want me. I don’t regret killing all those infantrymen to save a town that never accepted me. And I don’t regret saving you from my father or liberating the man who stole the bluff stores that would have saved my mother’s life.” His chest seemed to buckle. “I can’t bring myself to leave, Nina. I spent seven years wondering where you were. So, even if you love him now, and I have to witness the hate in your eyes when you look at me, I choose to stay. It’s better to be near you and know you are safe than to be without you at all.”
He looked at his feet, frowning, as though he had said too much. He sighed, looking up at me once more, his dark eyes warmer now. “I only want you to consider the danger in this, the improbability of it. And not because Iwant you for myself, but because I need to know you’ll still live and breathe when this plan collapses.”
“I don’t much care for living and breathing while your father sits on his throne,” I said, though I knew it was unfeeling.
He looked saddened. “You deserve more than a life of vendetta.”
“I do.” Hot tears pricked my eyes. I wiped them away angrily. “But wishing for it won’t make it so.”
“And will finding that Seam fix it all?” He stepped closer, eyes beseeching. “Will it bring you peace to see everything the Artisans have built, burned to the ground?”
Pain jolted through me. A reflex.
Theo saw it. “This isn’t you,” he said, softer still, his hand reaching out across the void. “This isn’t your war. You’re not a killer.”
But I was. His father had ensured it, and I’d taken the shape of the animal he’d caged. I straightened my shoulders, felt my eyes dry, my tongue turning to steel. “You think you know me?”
“I do.”
