Page 24

“Wasn’t being nice,” he said. “Bag was heavy.”

I laughed.

The sound came out before I expected it to, startled and completely genuine. It was the first real laugh I had managed since getting off the ferry.

Something changed in his expression when he heard it. He didn’t quite smile, but some of the severity around his eyes eased for a moment before disappearing again.

Then he really looked at me.

It was different from the way everyone in the gallery had looked at me. There was no curiosity in his expression, no fascination with whatever spectacle I had apparently become. He simply watched me for a few quiet seconds, as if he were checking to see whether I was all right.

His gaze dropped to my hands. They were still trembling from what had happened in the courtyard, a faint, persistent shaking I had not been able to stop.

I shoved them into the pockets of my cardigan.

"I'm Wren," I said.

"I know." He waited a moment before adding, "Silas."

He reached past me into the room, moving slowly enough that I could see exactly what he was doing. On the inside of the door was an old iron bolt, brown with rust. He pressed at it with his thumb, but it caught halfway. Without any sign of impatience, he worked it back and forth until the rust loosened and the bolt began to slide properly. His hands were enormous, the knuckles crossed with old scars, but everything he did with them was careful.

"There's only one way up here," he said. "Nobody gets up those stairs without you hearing them."

He straightened and ducked beneath the low lintel.

"Lock the door."

"Is there something I should be afraid of?"

He went still.

For a moment, I thought he had decided not to answer. There was something tired in his face, something so deeply worn that I had the unsettling sense that the answer he was avoiding had something to do with him.

"Lock it anyway," he said.

Then he turned and started back down the two hundred and twelve stairs. I stood in the doorway listening as his footsteps faded one level at a time, until eventually I could no longer hear them at all.

I locked the door.

The room followed the curve of the tower, with bare, wide floorboards and whitewashed stone walls that had gone gray in places where damp had worked its way through. Against one wall stood an iron bedstead with a thin mattress and a neatly folded stack of gray blankets. Beside it was a washstand with a chipped ceramic jug. A glass-fronted cabinet hung nearby, filled with empty brown bottles whose labels had faded with age: Tincture of Arnica. Willow Bark. Salts.

Above the door, someone had painted a sentence in curling letters so faded that I almost missed it.

Rest here, and be mended.

There was only one window, tall and narrow, facing north. Beyond it, the cliff dropped sharply to the sea, which stretched away in a gray expanse broken by white water. Past the fortress wall, the land rose toward the dark shape of the Hollow Wood, where fog lay low between the trees.

The room was cold and isolated, farther from the rest of the fortress than anywhere else I had seen. It did not feel like a place meant for guests. It felt like somewhere people were sent when no one quite knew what else to do with them.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and started to cry.

There was nothing graceful about it. My nose ran, my breathing turned ragged, and my shoulders shook hard enough to hurt. It reminded me of the week after Daniel left, when I had locked myself in the bathroom of our apartment and cried until my face ached.

This time, I cried for the laughter in the gallery and for the bark. I cried for Father: unknown, and for Kaelen Vance saying reject in that cold voice in front of everyone. I cried because the ache beneath my breastbone was still there, deep and stubborn, and because I could not stop thinking about my mother laughing on a beach with the same white streak in her hair as mine. I had inherited that from her, along with who knew what else, but all I had left of her were scraps of memory and more blank spaces than answers.

Of course I'm empty, I thought. I could have told them that for free. I could have saved them the trouble.

What hurt most was how familiar the humiliation felt. The laughter had followed me into a different world, but somehow it still knew exactly where to find me.