“The house wants us to trust each other.” I straightened, holding the book against my chest. “Maybe you should listen to it.”
“The house,” he said slowly, “has been making increasingly poor decisions lately.” In the wall behind me, a pipe groaned.
The bed swallowed me whole. I lay in the centre of that ridiculous mattress, surrounded by pillows and quilts that smelled of lavender and cedar, and felt like a single grain of rice lost in a banquet bowl. The painted trees swayed in the lamplight, their yellow blossoms seeming to flutter with each gust of wind against the windows. Beautiful. Peaceful. A cage lined with silk and fading murals.
On the bedside table, the marriage contract sat folded beneath a silver inkwell. Lady Lysa Stormgarde. The words had dried the day before, but they still felt wet on my tongue, foreign and ill-fitting. I’d worn Emberlin my whole life, carried it like a second skin through the infirmary’s cramped rooms, through the Academy’s cold corridors, through every whispered warning about my unnatural gift. Now I was meant to shed it for a name that belonged to portraits with disapproving eyes and a manor that breathed beneath my feet.
The wyrmling was curled at the foot of the bed, his midnight scales rising and falling. He’d refused to sleep in the creature sanctuary, had keened so pitifully when Thorven tried to carry him away that I’d relented. Now his warmth seeped through the quilts, a small comfort in this vast, strange room.
I should feel grateful. Debts paid. Family safe. Access to research that might finally help me understand my gift. Instead, I felt observed. The house’s attention pressed against my skin, curious and patient.
Someone was playing a piano, the notes climbing and falling in a melody that made my chest tighten. I sat up slowly, carefulnot to disturb the wyrmling, and pressed my ear against the cold plaster. Was that coming from the music room? The one Fenrik had gestured toward without explanation, the door locked? Around me, the manor’s timbers groaned. It sounded much like a sigh. The house was mourning something. Or someone.Who are you mourning, House?
eight
Fenrik
The study door clicked shut behind me, and I let myself fall apart. My back hit the stone wall. The fire had died hours ago, and I hadn’t called for anyone to relight it.
I yanked the leather gloves off with my teeth, one hand and then the other, and stared at my hands. Shadow-dark tendrils crawled up from my wrists, branching and spreading. They writhed beneath my skin, pulsing in time with that wrong, wrong,wrongsecond heartbeat that had taken up residence in my chest thirteen years ago. The veins had reached my elbows now. Last month, they’d barely passed my wrists.
I pressed my palms flat against the wall, desperate for something solid, something real, something that wasn’t the phantom sensation ofherstill burning through my nerves. Lysa. Her name was a wound I couldn’t stop touching. I could still smell her. Rain and herbs and something warm, like honey left toolong in the sun. The scent clung to the corridors she’d walked, seeped into the very stones of this manor that had chosen her over me within moments of her arrival. When she’d touched the bannister, the wood hadwarmedfor her. When I touched anything in this house, it merely endured me. She had no idea what her presence stirred in me, she carried a discipline obviously learned the hard way.
The thing inside me lurched.Want,it seemed to say.Want her.
I ground my teeth until my jaw ached. The memory of her wrist beneath my fingers played behind my closed eyes, her pulse hammering rabbit-quick against my thumb, her pupils blown wide in the lamplight. She’d been so close. Close enough that I could see the faint smudge of ink on her temple where she’d pushed back her hair, close enough to count the scattered freckles across her nose, close enough that one step forward would have—
Stop.
But my curse didn’t stop. It fed on this, on every forbidden thought I tried to bury. My cock hardened against my thigh, and I hated myself for it, hated the images that flooded unbidden through my mind: Lysa’s head thrown back, her throat bared, those hands fisting in my sheets while I—
The shadow-veinswrithed.Pain. I needed pain, needed something to cut through the wanting before it consumed me. Before the thing used my desire as a doorway and I woke to find I’d done something unforgivable.
Her legs wrapped around my waist. Her voice breaking on my name. The wet heat of her clenching around me while she—
The wrong heartbeat accelerated, pounding against my ribs. The shadows crept higher, past my elbows now, racing toward my shoulders. Silver sparked at the edges of my vision. I slammed my fist against the stone hard enough to split my knuckles.
Blood welled, and the pain was a mercy. The images fractured. My breathing slowed. The shadows retreated, sulking back toward my wrists. Not today. Not tonight. I would not lose myself to this. But Gods help me, I could taste her on the air.
The window glass caught my reflection, and I made myself look. The monster that stared back wore my face, barely. Beneath the skin at my temples, something pressed outward. Raised bumps, hard as bone, that hadn’t been there a month ago. Horns. The thing was growing horns inside me, and soon they would break through. My collar hid the worst of my throat, but I knew what lay beneath the fabric: silver cracks spreading along the column of my neck like fractured porcelain, like something had shattered me from the inside and the pieces no longer fit together.
I shifted my weight, and the reflection shifted with me, but not quite right. Behind my shoulders, translucent shapes flickered into being. Wings. Skeletal and vast, the bones visible through membrane-thin skin that wasn’t skin at all but shadow made solid. They stretched the width of the study, thoseghost-wings, and for one disorienting heartbeat I saw scales instead of skin, saw slitted pupils instead of grey irises, saw the thing I was becoming superimposed over the man I’d been. I wrenched my gaze away. My knuckles throbbed where I’d split them against the wall. Blood dripped onto the floorboards, and somewhere beneath my feet, the ley-line pulsed in response: hungry, always hungry, feeding the curse even as the curse fed on me.
Control. Distance. Suppress.The words came automatically, a litany I’d repeated ten thousand times. I breathed through my nose, slow and measured, forcing my shoulders down from my ears.Control. Distance. Suppress.Kelda had taught me this technique. Kelda had—
Had she? The memory slipped sideways, rearranging itself even as I tried to grasp it. I could picture her voice walking me through the breathing exercises. But the image felt wrong somehow. Overlaid. Like a palimpsest where the original text bled through beneath newer words.
Control. Distance. Suppress.I couldn’t remember if those were Kelda’s words or my own. Couldn’t remember when she’d first started visiting, first started helping. The gaps yawned wide and dark in my mind, swallowing years I should have been able to recall. My fingers twitched toward my desk, toward the notes I’d tried to write earlier. The notes. I had to check the notes.
I pulled open the drawer where I kept my private journal of the curse’s progression. The leather cover was soft with handling, the pages swollen from years of entries. I flipped tothe most recent section and ... the words swam. Blurred and reformed and blurred again, whole paragraphs dissolving into grey smears before my eyes. I blinked hard, pressed my fingertips against my temples, tried again.
...she has been helping me for three months now, her tonics provide some relief...
I turned back a page. The same handwriting—mine, unmistakably mine—declared:
...five years since Lady Kelda first arrived to assist with research. I cannot recall how we met, but her presence has become...
Five years? That couldn’t be right. Kelda hadn’t appeared until... until...
