Page 28 of Ravished By the Revenant

“The fish.”

In the kitchen, I lay a fat trout on the cutting board, set the filleting knife beside it with its handle turned toward her, and step back with my arms crossed. The fire crackles. Schmetterling takes up his post on the flour barrel, an audience of one, tail ticking like a clock.

“Whenever you are ready, Fräulein,” I say in a placid voice. “You claimed knowledge. Demonstrate it.”

Clara picks up the knife. She holds it the way a courtier holds a dead mouse. She looks at the trout. The trout, glassy-eyed, looks at nothing.

“So first,” she announces with tremendous authority, “you, um. You establish dominance over the fish.”

“Establish dominance,” I repeat dryly.

“It’s a mental game, Aldric.” She pokes the trout with the tip of the knife, near the tail, achieving nothing. Pokes it again, closer to the middle. The trout slides an inch across the board, escaping in death as it never could in life. “Okay, it’s slippery, nobody mentions how slippery—stay still⁠—”

I raise an eyebrow. “It is dead. It is the stillest it will ever be.”

“Then it should be easier!” She pins the trout with her palm, wrinkles her whole face, and saws vaguely at its spine as though attempting to open a letter with a spoon. Scales spray. One lands on her cheek and glitters there like a sequin. “This is fine. This is exactly how it goes.”

“You are attacking it perpendicular to the backbone.”

“That’s what she said,” Clara mutters, which means nothing to me and clearly means something to her, because she snorts at her own words.

I watch for one more minute. It is like watching a kitten fight a boot. The trout is now less filleted than mauled, its side bearing three hesitant gashes, and Clara is glaring at it with the personal animosity of a woman betrayed.

“Clara.”

“I’ve almost got it.”

“You have almost committed a desecration.” I round the table and stand behind her—close, but not touching, honoring her terms with the discipline of a martyr. “Give me your hand.”

She goes very still. “That sounds like the beginning of something.”

“It is the beginning of a fillet. Your hand.”

She surrenders the knife instead, stepping aside, cheeks pink, the scale still glittering on one of them. “Fine. Show me, then, since you’re so medieval about it.”

I flip the ruined trout, take a fresh one from the basin, and set the blade behind its gills. “Watch. The knife enters here, angled toward the head. Then you turn it flat and let the spine guide you. You do not force it, you follow it.” One long, smooth draw, tail to gill, and the fillet lifts free, clean and whole. “The fish tells you where to cut. You were arguing with it.”

“I argue with everything, it’s my love language,” she says, and then hears herself, and pretends fierce interest in the fillet. “That was… annoyingly graceful. Do the other side.”

I do the other side. She leans in to watch, close enough that her braid brushes my sleeve, and I keep my hands steady through pure force of will.

“So you lied to me,” I say, laying the fillets side by side. “You cannot fillet a fish.”

Clara lifts her chin, plucks the scale off her cheek, and flicks it at my waistcoat.

“I supervise the filleting of fish. It’s a management position.”

Scoffing, I carry on preparing dinner under her skilled supervision. For whatever reason, it’s the best meal I have ever made.

18

CLARA

The books have won.

I close the last of the blue Latin ones around noon and just sit there, staring at the desk like it owes me money. Three days of research. Three days of squinting at sketches of corpses crawling out of graves, of translating half-sentences with a Latin dictionary older than Switzerland, of writing notes that all boil down to revenants exist, water is wet, souldust???

Aldric was right. There’s nothing here.