“My heart!”
Cornelius gave me a withering stare.
“That’s what they do,” I reminded him.
“You look fine to me,” said Cornelius.
“Well, it doesn’t matter if Ilookfine.” I patted myself down. “I don’t feel any different, though.”
“Then you’re probably all right.”
“Thanks. Very helpful.”
I started back to the kitchen.
“I’m going to make them tea,” I said.
“No need,” said Cornelius. “They’ll just talk for a while, and then she’ll go.”
“It’s not really about the tea,” I said. “I want to hear what they’re saying, and I can’t get in there unless I have a good reason.”
In the kitchen, the kettle boiled most reluctantly on the stove, huffing out its displeasure. I shook it about a bit, to show it who was boss.
The cups and saucers hid from me in the cupboards, but I hunted them out and forced them onto the tray, and then stood with my hands on my hips and stared down the stove again until it baked me a tray of seedcakes. It singed the edges a bit, just to show its disapproval, but they were good enough.
I had to laugh at myself for a moment, fussing about with tea and cake like some housewife preparing to entertain the preacher back home.
“You’d better not try any tricks,” I said to the House. “All right?”
There was a pause and then a general, bad-tempered sense of agreement. I stamped my way to the throne room. As if in protest, the House made the corridor long again, unspooling the floor out in front of me like a dropped ball of yarn in front of a kitten. I was of two minds as to whether the House would let me into the throne room or not, and it probably was, too, but when I got there, the door opened seemingly as usual.
I could smell the sorceress’s perfume again as soon as I walked in. It made me light-headed, but just for a moment this time. I wondered if it was possible to build up an immunity to them—or if, perhaps, already being bound to one kept me safer from the other.
It gave me a malicious twinge of satisfaction that the sorcerer did not sit up straight for his visitor, either. She had manufactured herself an ornate seat out of something that looked like crystal, sitting regally straight with her hands folded in her lap, and still he lay flopped across his black throne, hair in his eyes, like a puppet with its strings cut.
He was staring at the ceiling, as usual, and she was glaring at him with those gorgeous, unnatural eyes, shaped and colored as smoothly as fresh-grown leaves. Her servant stood behind her, hands clasped in front of him and head lowered, as full of animation and personality as a mushroom.
I hovered with the tray. There was nowhere to put it except on the floor. Seeing my plight, the sorceress flicked her eyes in my direction and created a column of that same crystal, something like a fancy upturned wine goblet, growing like a flower out of the black floor.
I wondered if this was her equivalent of the sorcerer’s black substance—if they all worked with their own particular material. Mayhap she had a castle made of that sparkling stuff somewhere else in the city, like the sorcerer’s House.
I put the tray down with a clatter, deliberately, to make them look around. The sorcerer blinked at me briefly, setting my heart to thudding, and then looked away as if he had always had a personal maid bringing tea and seedcakes to his meetings, and it was nothing worth a second glance. The sorceress glared at me like an owl glares at a weasel.
“What is this?” she asked, gesturing in my direction. “It answered the door.”
“Really? The cat usually does that.”
“Well, this isn’t a cat.”
I bit my tongue to stop myself from retorting. I wanted to see what he would say.
“This is Foss.” He waved a hand at me. “She’s doing the housekeeping.”
“You don’t need a housekeeper.”
“Apparently I do, or the House wouldn’t have provided one.”
“The House didn’t come up with ... this,” she said, taking me in with one sweeping green glance from head to toe.
