The Storm Crow (The Storm Crow, #1)(52)

At the top of the stairs, I waited for the locks to be undone. The door opened slowly, revealing one green eye and a band of tan skin, before Caylus opened the door entirely. He moved aside to let me in, then closed the door and redid the locks.

Caylus retreated toward the center island. He wore an apron over his tunic and pants, a strange lump in one of the pockets centered over his stomach. No one else was here.

“I made tea if you want some while we wait,” Caylus said quietly. Always quietly. Like he hoped no one would notice. Yet somehow, his voice still seemed strong, like the quiet rush of a stream that could easily become a river.

“Sure.” I slid onto one of the stools alongside the island. Caylus poured me a cup with unsteady hands, then set it on a saucer alongside a blueberry muffin, still warm from the oven. The lump over his stomach wriggled as he moved.

The tea had an earthy scent tinged with orange, and I breathed it in deep. “So what kinds of things are you expecting me to do as your assistant?” I asked.

Caylus leaned on the island but didn’t meet my gaze. His eyes kept flickering to my face, then away, and once again, I saw something achingly familiar in their green depths. “Cook, clean, kill spiders,” he said.

I stared at him.

“Joking,” he said. A smile split across my lips, and he added, “Small stuff. Measuring, writing, things you need…well, steady hands for.” His fingers curled around his cup of tea.

I thought of the scars along his fingers but didn’t ask. He hadn’t so much as looked at mine.

The lump over his stomach squirmed again, and a tiny white head poked out. The little kitten I’d seen downstairs crawled from the pocket and scaled Caylus’s chest to perch on his shoulder. He didn’t even seem to notice as he pushed away from the island, tea in hand. “I can show you the workshop?”

“What about the meeting?” I asked.

“She’ll be here soon.”

I followed him upstairs, the kitten balancing on his broad shoulders with ease. The stairs emptied onto a small landing with a door to the only room upstairs. Caylus pushed it open, and we stepped in.

Every wall had a long wooden workbench pushed against it, strewn with sheets of metal and rows of glass vials, bottles, and jars. Half-dismantled pieces of machinery sat beside stacks of paper, all organized around books propped open to marked pages and annotated diagrams. The room had a strange haphazard continuity to it, as if each scattered item had grown organically from the one beside it.

My gaze caught on a sketchbook in the center of a cleared space, the bottom corner and spine worn as if frequently opened. I lifted the cover, but the page underneath was blank, and none of the pages looked to have been torn out. Beside it sat several glass vials of what looked like bird poop and a book pinned open to a page with colorful drawings. One vial was labeled Magpie and lay beside another vial titled Raven.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

Caylus looked up from readjusting his perpetually askew shirt. He’d removed his apron and even ran his scarred hands through his hair in an attempt to fix it, but it didn’t help. He gave up, looking as defeated as a puppy thwarted by a door handle. The kitten batted at a stray curl, and I resisted the urge to pat the lock into place.

“I’m looking at the properties of bird feces from species that look related to the crows.” He approached the desk with the vials.

I went rigid. “Why are you doing that?”

“I’m looking for signs of magic.” Caylus tapped the open book. “The crows weren’t the only source, with the Sellas and all. I want to find another. There are a number of ways I think it could work with technology.”

The way he spoke about the crows threw me off, so casual and normal. Like he didn’t fully recognize who he was talking to. Though I was starting to realize that Caylus wasn’t very good at noticing things. He was also talking about the Sellas as if they hadn’t been gone for hundreds of years.

I, on the other hand, was having a hard time not noticing the hard lines of his body beneath the tunic or the specks of white scarring along the golden skin of his arms. Or the way his size made me feel small in a strange, safe sort of way, like the crows always had.

“…considering the crows showed a lot of elemental applications of magic, you know?” Caylus finished.

I blinked. Saints. He’d been talking that whole time. He didn’t miss my bewildered look, a blush rising in his cheeks. “I was rambling, wasn’t I?”

“Not really,” I lied. I peered at the title of the book. “Saints and Sellas? You’re reading a book of myths for information? You must be desperate.”

I hadn’t read the stories in years, but I’d heard them all. Some of the best memories I had of my mother came from when she’d tell me stories about the Saints and the ancient Sellas whose magic gave birth to the crows, according to legend.

“Myths are rooted in history and culture,” Caylus said. “They may be distorted retellings of fact.”

“Or entirely made up,” I said.

“Or entirely made up,” he agreed, dropping into his desk chair and pulling the kitten from his shoulder. He set it in his lap, where it curled up. “I’m desperate. People here don’t have much on record about crows or the Sellas.”

The stories said Sella magic had once blanketed the land, but humans did something to anger the Sellas. So they left, taking their magic with them. The religion around them was nearly extinct now, to the point that most people thought they’d never existed, that the stories were just that. Hardly anyone spoke the old language anymore, and there weren’t many copies of the book left.