Lucena squirmed happily. There was no better place than here, between the two people who loved her most.
“Hmm,” hummed the man, undeterred. “What do you think, my darling? Your mother would keep your name as is. But I hear her every night. ‘Shine bright’, she says. Well, I’ll call you Lux. That way you will never forget what a light you are.”
Lucena grinned, nodding her agreement.
“She likes it,” her father said.
“She likes everything,” laughed her mother.
“It’s better than Vesperine at any rate,” he said, and her mother’s face twisted and hissed, and Lucena grew frightened, because she didn’t recognize that name as her own, only that it meant “before”.
Before she was theirs.
Lux emerged from it choking. Her hand clutched at her chest as she hacked. Artemis began clinking glasses together while Corvin’s palm met her back in sharp thwacks. She pushed him off.
“I’m fine,” she wheezed. “I only swallowed wrong.”
It wasn’t a lie. The shock of a memory—only ever vague and mostly emotion—now clear as a mountain stream, had knocked the breath right out of her. She’d gasped haphazardly at its end.
The healer stilled in his preparations. “Death to the Devil, girl. What sort of bad luck are you carrying?”
“The eternal kind.” Lux tipped her head back only to startle when the door slammed in.
“Oh! My apologies.” A collector stood bewildered in the doorway. He came to his senses after a moment more. “There’s…an ongoing incident with the staff. Someone’s bleeding badly, and I’m not supposed to—”
“We’ll see to it,” snapped Corvin, which had Lux’s eyes snapping to his in turn.
She’d never heard his tone so cutting. Her gaze raked his expression. He didn’t return it but looked instead at Artemis. Some wordless agreement passed between them, one that had Corvin visibly relaxing.
“Lead the way, Lord Tobias,” the healer said, and together the two men exited the workroom.
“What was that about?” she asked once they’d gone.
“Nothing you need to ever worry over,” Corvin replied. “How are you feeling?”
“Numb.” She stared in a haze at the closed door.
“You’re in shock. Should I call for something other than coffee? I know you don’t prefer it.”
“I need nothing except to be alone.”
Corvin grew quiet awhile. “All right. Let me walk you to your room.”
Lux made her way around the table. Her attention shifted dazedly to the wall by the door, to the statue there. Another saint, intricate and crowned. A bowl of incense smoked at its feet.
Even faceless, she felt as if the saint watched her. That it judged.
She didn’t know if she believed in Saints. But she could be swayed to believe in the Devil. What else would ensure she contracted some rare degeneration right as she planned to begin her life? What else would place these stepping stones directly in her path so she would end up beside the sea as she’d always wished, but also in Riselda’s childhood home? That she would have to discover the woman’s early portrait and be overwhelmed by the idea that maybe the mayor’s daughter had been mistakenin that nameless wood. Maybe Riselda really had borne a child once upon a time and that child had become Lux’s ancestor. That Riselda would then be tied to her too.
Lux did not know her birth parents. Her parents hadn’t ever spoken of them. And aside from a strange feeling of isolation as her earliest memory, she had no further clues.
“She has no family,”Morana had said.
“Wearefamily,”Riselda had said.
Lux climbed the staircases silently beside Corvin, and when she passed the Grimrooks’ portraits, she could only glance and keep moving. Because those were not Riselda’s eyes staring back at her today—but her own.
“Should I send up a meal for you?” he asked outside her door.
