“I—”
“I’m afraid that’s a no. My schedule’s full.” He stepped into his room and grinned bitterly. “Have the night you deserve, Spade.” And he closed the door in my face.
I was left standing there like an idiot staring at the wood, wondering if I should set his room on fire, or maybe the entire Ever; if I should scream and cuss and kick the stupid door down, or if I should just go back to my room and never-ever-reven speak to him again.
Since the other options weren’t worth the effort, I decided on the last.
I knew March hadn’t taken it lightly that I’d left his room at dawn, had peeled his arms off me, had snuck out without telling him. I knew he was pissed about it.Hurt.I didn’t really care about that, if we were completely honest here, but I genuinely didn’t expect to be humiliated like that. To belookedat with such mockery—not byhim.
Either way, I cried when I went back to my room. I cried because Ididn’t carebut it somehow still hurt. It somehow still cut me wide open, and my ego was a bruised mess on the floor, and my pride was piles of ashes near it, too.
Just before I finally fell asleep sometime after two o’clock, I promised myself that I was never going to put myself in that position again, to the Everstill with how he felt and how he looked and how he tasted.
Minutes—that’swhat it felt like. I slept for minutes, and then warm sunlight was on my face and there was a knock on my door, and I was sure it was Lida. She’d come to get me for breakfast, but I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want todo anything,and I’d be damned if anybody could make me. Not today.
So I took in a deep breath and prepared to tell her to go away, to shout it at the top of my lungs if I had to, when…
“Tick-tock-tea-talk.You up yet?”
It wasn’t Lida at all, and I didn’t even need to jump out of bed and run to the door to convince myself that I hadn’t heard wrong—I hadn’t.
It was Silas.
36
The clocks on my nightstands said that it was just a little after five-thirty, s.b. The sunlight that slipped in through the windows was brand new, the sun still rising.
Silas sat in the armchair next to mine with half a smile on his face as he poured tea from the teapot, and offered it to me. He’d brought a tray with him—tea, sugar, milk, and a bowl full of pastry.
“I’m sorry to wake you up so early, Ora,” he said, then took his cup and leaned back on the armchair, crossed one leg over the other. He looked tired, Silas. Like he’d slept less than me. “But I did warn you that I’d be coming to you for tea-talk if I had a dream, and…well, I had a dream.”
“That’s okay,” I said, becausethere’s something-something-something about Silas.
I cleared my throat, straightened in my seat.Said,“Last night, we were out in the mechanical garden. You weren’t there.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t make it. I had some reading to do,” he said, slowly taking a sip of his tea. “I was in the library until late.”
“Library?” Calrenhadmentioned a library when we first came here, but I’d never had the chance to visit it.
“Yes. It’s on the second floor, south wing. You should check it out. It’s quite something,” said Silas, and looked down at the cup on the table in front of me. “Won’t you drink that? It’s your favorite, with half a spoon of honey. Just like you like.”
I raised a brow in question. “How do you know how I like my tea?”
“We eat three meals a day together,” he said with a smile, and I would have believe him, even if he hadn’t added, “But I’ll admit it was March who told me about this specific detail. He sees almost as much asyoudo.”
At the mention of that name, the blood in my veins boiled and all the gears inside me sped up.
The prick. The bastard. The asshole.
Heat on my cheeks. I grabbed the teacup in my hands just to do something.
“Anyhour,” Silas whispered. “Things have changed quite a lot since that second trial.”
“We’ve had to give parts of ourselves away.” Of course that was going to change things.
“This is how they do it, yes,” Silas said, waving his finger around at the ceiling. “Ordinary magic doesn’t produce as much Sparetime to get the wheels on this monster turning. One needsrawmagic, the kind that is bound to the soul. Memories, parts of our character, our greatest fears, our deepest emotions.That’swhat gets the Labyrinth going.”
“How do you know that, though? Where did you find that information? Because I’ve gone over the archives at home, and they had nothing of the sort written or recorded anywhere.”
