The Heart Forger (The Bone Witch #2)(10)

“If he’d made further headway, he would have contacted us.”

“Well”—I cleared my throat—“I was also thinking about getting Prince Kance something for his birthday, and I have an idea I wanted to run by Khalad.”

For someone who no longer needed breath, my brother’s sigh was loud and exasperated. “Tea.”

“It’s only a gift! I can go without you if you’ve got other things to do.”

“Oh, I’ll come with. But mark my words, little sister. Getting your hopes up will bring you nothing but misery.”

Looking back, I suppose I should have wondered why he seemed so bitter, like personal experiences had inspired the remark more than sound advice.

? ? ?

“It won’t need much,” Khalad said. “A few happy thoughts and nostalgia. This is the easiest glass I’ve been asked to make in years. Did you kill the aeshma?” He paused. “Did you give the bezoar to Fa…the king?”

The Heartforger apprentice’s room at the Kingshead was filled to overflowing with books, papers, strangely shaped glass containers, and bottles upon bottles of flickering lights and hues. I wondered how much the innkeeper had been charging Khalad to keep them all stored here. “I did.”

“Did he say what he planned to do with it?”

“He didn’t say. He asked about you though.”

A frown marred Khalad’s face. “I don’t care. Fox, I’m going to extract a happy memory from Tea, so you might feel some tugging on your end.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Khalad, how long has it been since you’ve talked to your father?” I asked.

“Not long enough.” Khalad slid a finger across my forehead, a gesture he had done many times before. There was a familiar tingling as Khalad turned the pages of my memories, searching.

“Ever thought about visiting?” I ventured.

“Tea.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s a good reason we don’t talk anymore. Let’s leave it at that.” He withdrew his hand, and a few stray wisps of blue and yellow clung to his fingers. In those colored strings, I could see memories of me running across a field with my brothers and sisters and of a younger Fox giving me a piggyback ride through a shallow stream. Asha retain their memories even when a Heartforger takes them, but their removal never stops feeling odd. “How is Lady Mykaela?”

“In bed, resting. Polaire is taking care of her.”

“If ‘taking care of her’ means bullying Mykaela into submitting, then I agree,” Fox said.

“Says the guy who bullies me as frequently.”

“Lady Mykaela is nice enough to listen when she has to. You don’t.”

“Children,” Khalad said mildly, his skilled hands forming a small lump of clay in front of him. Sparks flew from his fingers, and the small mound twisted and turned, trapped by magic not even I could see. He kneaded the strings of memories into the clay until the thick mixture absorbed them and hardened. The mound made a tinkling noise and split open, revealing a spherical glass crystal where blue, red, and yellow lobbied for dominance, shifting from one color to the other.

“I don’t know what to call it,” Khalad admitted, handing it to me. “It’s the first of its kind. It’ll boost his mood, keep him calm whenever he tires. I can only imagine what he has to deal with every day. That’s one thing I don’t miss. As a ruler, you never have time to yourself.”

“Do you miss any of it?” Fox wanted to know.

Khalad gestured at the bottles lining his shelves. “I got a rare memory today. The old man who had it escaped death by hanging in Drycht. In one of these boxes, I have a heartsglass for a woman who forgets everything she’s done the day before. Ironic that I take a memory from a man who does not wish to remember for a woman who would give her all not to forget. I’ve helped more people in the last two weeks than I ever helped people in the last three years as the crown prince.

“The only thing I regret is turning over those duties to Kance with little warning. I used to blame my father—and Dark asha, if I must be honest—for killing my mother. But now that the anger has gone, my dislike for my father remains. He holds many views I do not agree with, and I have always rebelled against him with my temper. He always saw me as an heir more than a son. He favored Kance long before my heartsglass turned silver.”

He paused and frowned. “Have you been feeling unwell lately, Tea?”

“She’s been having headaches,” Fox reported.

“When I was looking through your memories, I felt something unusual.”

“Unusual?” Khalad was as good at reading heartsglass as I was, so I tried to keep my calm.

“I don’t know how else to define it. It felt like there was something that wasn’t a part of you but somehow still is. Is Aenah still in Kneave?”

“She’s warded as closely as the asha can. She has no control over me, Khalad—quite the opposite actually.”

Khalad didn’t look convinced.

“I just put down an aeshma, Khalad. Controlling daeva, even for a short time, doesn’t leave one feeling clean.”

“Take the rest of the day off.”

“I see you don’t take your own advice.”