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God, that must be lonely.
Mara straightened her jacket and marched up the front steps to the door.
"I'mnota chicken," she said, stepping out of her wet boots.
"I know. Got you inside, didn't it?" Large hands came to her shoulders, and Augustus helped her take her overcoat off and hung it up for her. "Come on in."
The first thing Mara noticed was how normal everything looked. The house had honey timber floors, walls painted a muted cerulean blue that contrasted with the dark timber wainscoting, polished door frames, and antique furniture. It was masculine but surprisingly tidy and clean and nothing the way she imagined a sorcerer's house to look.
Mara followed Augustus through a sitting room and made a small sound of excitement when she saw the wall of books. Like a moth to a flame, she zeroed in on the shelves and hurried to study the titles.
"May I?" she asked before reaching for them.
With a faintly amused expression, he nodded. "Of course. These are mostly fiction. The research and non-fiction are upstairs. You like books?"
"They are probably the only thing that's kept me sane," Mara said as she scanned through them, her fingers running along the spines. "When you are forgotten by every person you meet, apart from very nosey relations, you find that fictional lives are the closest thing you get to normality. We constantly traveled, so it was hard to get new books, and often I had to leave them behind. I would've sold at least three of my cousin's souls for such a thing as an e-book reader when I was younger so I could take my books wherever I went."
"Only three? That doesn't sound like very saintly behavior," Augustus mused with a teasing smile. "When you were younger… How old are you?"
"How old do I look?" she raised an eyebrow at him.
"Thirty at most. Why? How old are you?"
Mara bit the inside of her lip. "I don't actually know. My mother didn't think keeping track of things like that was important. She said we lived outside of time and that trying to mark every year wouldn't do me any good."
The Corvo family traveled the length and breadth of the known world (and a few places of the unknown), dispensing miracles as they went. They lived in Europe when the Second World War broke out, and fearing that they would be round up and put into a camp, Sophia had decided that moving from Europe was the only option.
She had packed up Mara in the middle of the night, and they had boarded a ship to Australia, as far away from the war as Sophia could get, and they would wait it out until everything blew over.
The constant travel had caused two things to happen within the Corvo family: a confusion of time on a cellular level meant the ordinary rules of aging didn't apply to them, and that they had so much mixed blood they were destined to be forever without home or country.
Mara, who had been too busy reading book titles, didn't realize she had spoken out loud.
"I've never heard of time being tricked in such a manner. You're full of surprises," Augustus said, looking her over curiously. She hadn't seen him pour two glasses of scotch, but he held one out to her. "Don't worry, it's not poisoned."
"If it is, I'll make you suffer for it," Mara said, liking the way his eyes opened a little wider in surprise. Something in his guarded demeanor shifted, and she decided she liked unnerving him.
"Consider me warned. You didn't come here to look at my books. I'll show you what this is all about."
Mara followed him up a tall flight of stairs, and the sense of magic grew stronger with each step. They passed a closed door with shimmering golden sigils painted on the floor and door frame, and Mara instantly wanted to open it to see what was on the other side. A room full of dead wives, perhaps.
"This is my study. Sorry about the mess," Augustus said, opening a set of double doors.
Thiswas what she had expected to see in a sorcerer's house if a more mundane and less magical version. The room was dominated by a large wooden dining table covered in maps, papers, and books.
One wall had been painted with blackboard paint, and sigils spread along it like math equations, with notes in at least three languages.
Books were stacked neatly in shelves or in piles beside them; a makeshift lab had been constructed at one end, and another large desk stood near a fireplace with a laptop balancing on a stack of battered notebooks.
"What's wrong?" Augustus asked.
"Nothing. It only seems more scholarly than I imagined a sorcerer's workshop. Wasn't your kind meant to have demon slaves trapped in jars or something to serve you and give you their magic?"
"Unfortunately, the only demons I have are on the inside and are all quite useless," Augustus answered, making her laugh.
The only part of the walls that wasn't tacked with notes was a painting of a castle in a misty English forest with a silver stag watching them.
"You have a thing for stags, don't you?" Mara asked as she looked at the painting. It was beautiful if a little melancholy.
