Kirion snorted, a puff of smoke shaping itself into a question mark before dissipating. He looked at the shattered window, then back at me, unimpressed.
“She did it,” I told him. “She didn’t just take advantage of the tragedy; she orchestrated the whole bloody thing.”
Kirion hissed, stamping a clawed foot.
“Exactly. My thoughts entirely.”
I turned from the window. The House wanted more than to give me another history lesson; it wanted me to find something. And considering the manor was currently operating on the architectural equivalent of a panic attack, I decided not to keep it waiting.
The room was a disaster of molten stone and fused books, but in a corner, a small side table had survived the apocalypse. It sat there, coated in dust holding a leather-bound sketchbook.
“Subtle,” I murmured to the ceiling.
I blew the dust off the cover and cracked it open. Fenrik’s artistic talent, it turned out, was frantic. The first page was a charcoal smear that looked like a storm cloud having a breakdown. The second was better, a profile of a woman. It was rough, unfinished. A generic assemblage of features: nose, chin, sweep of hair.
“Who is this?” I asked. “Hismother? A lover?”
As if hearing the question, the charcoal lines began to writhe.
I dropped the book on the table. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
Kirion hopped up on his hind legs to peer at the page, trilling curiously.
“Don’t look,” I warned him. “It’s cursed.”
But I looked, since I couldn’t help it. The graphite crawled across the paper sharpening the angles, refining the shading. The generic chin grew pointed. The soft eyes narrowed into almonds. The hair smoothed itself into an intricate braided updo. Within seconds, Kelda Morvain was staring up at me from the page. Even in charcoal, she managed to look condescending.
“She haunts his sketchbook,” I said, a shudder rattling my spine. “That takes a special level of narcissism. Or perhaps it’s his mind trying to draw the monster.” I flipped back through the earlier pages, searching for dates or annotations. Several had been scratched out and rewritten in the same hand, recent ink overlaying older impressions. I couldn’t tell which was the original anymore.
Kirion growled and tried to set the page on fire with a sneeze. I caught his snout just in time.
“No arson. Not yet.” I flipped the page with the tip of my finger, wanting to get away from that face.
The last page didn’t move and didn’t crawl, it broke my heart though.
Taped to the center of the paper was a dried, flattened moonflower. Beneath it, the handwriting was jagged and hurried, thedesperate scrawl of a man writing in the dark before his mind wiped the slate clean.
“For when I forget. The smell of Lilies. The green dress. She was there.”
The writing trailed off into a heavy blot of ink, as if the pen had been pinned there. I stared at the date scrawled in the corner. Two weeks ago.
“He knows,” I said, tapping the paper. “He knows, Kirion. He’s been fighting her inside his own head.”
Two weeks ago was right before he sent for me. He hadn’t just gotten desperate; he’d gotten suspicious. He was leaving breadcrumbs for himself in the one place she couldn’t reach, the memories of his hands, his art, the physical evidence of his own sanity.
“The green dress,” I repeated, looking at the dragon. “Our villain has a consistent wardrobe. And your master isn’t the madman everyone thinks he is.”
I grinned. “He’s a terrible archivist.”
Kirion head-butted my hip, nearly knocking me into the molten floor. I tucked the sketchbook under my arm. Where the sketchbook had been, a lone paper had remained. It was folded once, anchored by a small chunk of unpolished amethyst. The adrenaline from the ley-window vision was still thrumming through my veins, making my heart kick against my ribs. I knew what I’d seen. I knew Kelda was a monster. And that paper had to be more proof that Fenrik was fighting her. Another desperate note to himself. Another crumb of sanity in the dark.
The handwritingwas his. There was no mistaking that elegant, spidery scrawl, the same hand that had written the invitation that brought me here, the same hand that had labeled the moonflower sketch. But this wasn’t a note to himself.
K,it began.
You were right. I cannot do this alone. The creature—the dragon—is better, but the cost is higher than we anticipated. But I cannot let her know the truth. She would leave.
The floor seemed to tilt. My stomach dropped, leaving me weightless.
