If the heartsickness returned in full when he left, there was no way I would be able to take the heart to the Snagged. If it was anything like when I was in the village, I would be barely able to walk.
Then my love-clouded brain cleared a little, and the anxiety was replaced by sudden knowledge, and my anger rose up like bile in my throat. I dropped the plates, and they smashed at my feet. The sorcerer whirled around, startled.
“What did you do that for?” he asked, staring at the shattered pieces.
“Are you going to one of the villages?” I demanded, hardly recognizing my own voice. “Is that where you’re going? Are you going toharvest?”
For a second, his beautiful face was unguarded, and he looked like a little boy who had broken a window with his ball. Then it was inscrutable and eerily perfect once again.
“You can’t!” I cried. I imagined what had happened to me happening to someone else, but worse, because it wouldn’t be just anothersnag. He would take the whole of them, their whole heart.
I also had to fight down an irrational stab of jealousy. Whosever heart he took, it would be the heart of someone he chose. Not an embarrassing accident, like me.
“You can’t,” I said again. “It’s not right.”
He said nothing.
“Why did you not tell me yesterday you were planning this?” I asked, realizing how ridiculous I sounded. As if he had to keep me informed of his plans. Still, I felt a sense of betrayal.
He sighed. “That’s not all I’ve been doing. I spent the night examining the spell that binds us and trying everything I could to break it, but there is nothing. It is so tangled up in what I am, and what you are.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said, in what for him was an oddly gentle tone. “All I can do is alleviate the pain a little, or so I hope.”
If he wanted me to saythank you, he was going to have to resign himself to disappointment.
“So, you’re going out to the villages now?” I asked.
“What do you suggest I do? Are you offering yourself to be harvested, then, in their stead? My sister will return, and she will expect me to produce a heart. If I do not, she will take yours. Are you sacrificing yourself, then?”
I stood, glaring at him, unable to think of something to say in response. I wished I could have shouted, “Yes!” and meant it, but, shamefully, I was still concerned with preserving my own hide. He was right. I was not about to offer myself up to save someone else, although perhaps I should have. He saw my answer in my face and gave a small, bitter smile.
“You could stand up to her!” I said, knowing I was being ridiculous. Why on earth would he defend his housekeeper against his sister? “I don’t care howkindyour sister was to you,” I continued. “Or howhelpful. She’s a horrendous, evil harpy, and you’re about to be just as bad.”
We stared at each other over the little heap of shattered plates that I had dropped.
“Don’t worry about clearing those up,” said Sylvester, an edge to his voice, and the chips of china rose buzzing into the air like a swarm of bees, reassembling themselves with sinister neatness and efficiency.
I shrank back, as if they were going to aim themselves at me and pierce my body with their thousand broken points. I felt sick. It was the first time I had perceived the sorcerer’s magic for the unnatural, world-bending thing that it was.
The House’s antics happened just out of sight, as things sidled into place at the edge of my vision, and it seemed less like true magic than a sort of sleight of hand. The toys the sorcerer played with every day were just toys, even if he tossed a ball of fire from palm to palm. I hadn’t seenmagicmagic, not like this, so blatant, impossible, and inexplicable.
Seeing these inanimate things rise up, as if suddenly come to life, felt wrong in a sick, visceral way; warped and off-kilter, like a dream where everyone you know looks just a little unfamiliar.
I knew all at once, with a great and strange certainty, that the sorcerer’s kind of magic was something wrong and damaging that should not be here in the world, and might even be doing harm by being here.
I watched the plates, now good as new, stack themselves neatly, obediently, ready for my shaking hands to carry them back to the kitchen.
He was making a point, I knew. The House would have provided more, but no, he had to show me what he could do. To scare me with his power? To show me how insignificant I was by comparison?
“You will wait here until I return,” said the sorcerer in what was probably meant to be a lordly tone but came off as sulky instead.
We glared at each other. I found it was possible to be helplessly in love and completely disgusted with someone at the same time. I picked up the now-mended plates, holding his gaze.
“I’d smash them a second time,” I said, “if I didn’t think you would use heart magic to repair them all over again. And it’s not worth that. Nothing is.”
He fastened the buttons of his coat, all the way up to his chin. “You may go,” he said grandly. I rolled my eyes and stomped off, hoping he’d choke on his own high collar.
