Gallant(55)

The door closes.

And they are alone.

She flexes her fingers. Edgar’s knife is gone, but she studies the broken stone hearth, searching the fragments on the floor. Would any be light and sharp enough to wield?

The voice drags her attention back.

“Quite a talent you have,” he says, studying the wild rose. “And quite a pair we’ll make.” He lifts the flower to his nose, inhales, and as he does, it wilts again. The petals wither, the head droops, the leaves curl like dry paper. As it dies, the faintest color floods back into his cheeks. Brief as a fish darting underwater.

The rose crumbles to ash, but the ash doesn’t fall. Instead it swirls in the air around his hand.

“It is one thing to give death form,” he says, and the ashes coalesce into a chalice. “Another to breathe life back into it.”

A twitch of his fingers, and the chalice dissolves.

He draws something from his pocket. It is curved and white, save for the point, which is black, as if dipped in ink. A sliver of bone. He holds it out to her, and as he does, the ropes crumble from her wrists.

“Show me,” he says, and Olivia stiffens. She should refuse, just to spite him, but an urge takes shape inside her. A longing. Her fingers hum with it. And something else forms there. A question. An idea.

He sets the bone in her hand, and the prickle of life rises through her. It hovers just beneath her skin, waiting to be unleashed.

Live, she thinks, and the feeling rushes forward, out of her hand and into the remains, and as it does, the sliver of bone becomes a beak, becomes a skull, becomes a crow, muscle and skin and feathers. In seconds it is whole again, yawning wide as if to caw, but the only sound she hears is the master’s soft chuckle.

The crow clicks its beak, one black eye finding hers, and for a moment, she marvels at the feat of it, the power in her hands. And then—

Attack, she thinks, and the crow bursts into the air and dives for the creature in the chair, and Olivia is on her feet, racing toward the door, even as she hears him pluck the bird from the air, the brittle snap of its neck, even when he says, “My dearest niece, I confess, I do not know exactly where you are.”

Her steps slow. Her uncle’s letter.

“You were not easy to find. Your mother hid you well.”

Go, she thinks, even as she finds herself turning back to face him.

“We must thank Hannah,” he says, and Olivia flinches at the sound of the woman’s name, wishes she could steal it back. “She made the list of all the places you might be.”

The notebook in the study drawer. But Olivia checked the desk in this study. There was no journal there.

“The two houses are bound. The walls are thin. And I have a way of reaching Prior minds when they are inside Gallant.”

Olivia’s heart sinks. Matthew.

“A body needs sleep. Without it, the heart gets weak. The mind gets tired. And tired minds are pliable things.”

As he speaks, the images float behind her eyes like waking dreams. Matthew, rising from his bed. Moving slowly through the house, his eyes half-open, no longer blue-gray but milky white.

“Speak to the tired and they listen.”

I don’t remember falling asleep, her mother wrote.

“Whisper to them and they move.”

But I woke up and I was standing over Olivia.

“A tired body doesn’t care. It’s like a seed, designed to carry.”

She sees Matthew moving down the darkened hall into the study, sees him draw the little black book from the top drawer, even though he cannot read, those borrowed eyes tracking over the list of homes that were not homes.

“I have sent these letters to every corner of the country,” recites the master of the house. “May this be the one that finds you. You are wanted. You are needed. You belong with us.”

Behind her eyes, Matthew’s face collapses in anger. He casts the letter into the fire. “I don’t know who sent you that letter. But it was not my father.”

The master rises from his chair.

“Come home, dear niece. We cannot wait to welcome you.”

He smiles, that eerie, rictus grin. But Olivia shakes her head. He said that Prior minds were his, so long as they were bound to Gallant. But her mother left. And still he followed her.

“Grace was different,” he says. “It didn’t matter how far she went. So long as she carried a piece of me with her.”

He turns his head, and she sees the rent in his cheek where the skin pulls back, exposing jaw and teeth. And that is when she sees the hole. The dark hollow in the back of his mouth.

When you came apart, I found the cursed bone. It was a molar, of all things, his mouth hiding inside yours.

She sees him standing in the ballroom, his skin, tattered with so many missing bones. The ash-born dancers, how they collapsed to dust, and how he called the slivers back, the borrowed fragments of himself. How the skin only healed when the bones returned home.

I ground the tooth to dust, her mother wrote. And threw the filings on the fire. He will never have the piece that was you. I hope he rots while worrying the hole.

The tooth is gone. The piece of him. Her mother made sure of that. How did he find her then? How—oh. Oh no.

At least I have Olivia.

She is the reason her mother could not escape the dreams. The reason he could get into her head, no matter how far they fled. Because half of her is his.