He moved as slowly as he could, untangling her with soft and precise gentleness. He did not wish to wake her, and yet still, he watched her face with a kind of reserved hope that her eyes might slide open and her mouth might bend into a smile to find him trying to escape their tangle, here in the dead of the dark.
Instead, she made a little smacking sound and rolled to the side, pulling her knees up to her chest as the long, belled sleeves of the red dressing gown pooled out around her like a blanket.
He smiled, stifling the urge to chuckle, and slid from the mattress. He took up the letter, which had been discarded in a spray of sheets at the foot of the bed, and then flipped the coverlet up to encase her, tiny as she’d become, balled up like that on the far side of their new room.
She’d had the bed moved. She’d had everything moved, actually.
The room was still outfitted with most of the same furniture it had had on the day they’d exorcised the bats, but with the bed against a different wall and a new wardrobe opposite it, it seemed to Elias a new space entirely.
That was probably wise, he thought, taking up the sputtering lantern and moving it over to the table next to the tub and the fireplace, where a pair of armchairs had been situated.
It was their room now, after all.
Not Willa’s.
Not anymore.
He settled into the cushions and carefully set aside the sheets that Hattie had already read aloud. The two at the top.
There were two more underneath.
The first continued Willa’s story, explaining how her parents and her uncle and aunt had started a small trade network that had slowly grown into an empire.
“‘By the time I met your uncle, my mother had long been gone,’” she had written, “‘and my father was ailing. I was angry and contrary and likely impossible, and he still seemed enchanted with me, anyhow. I will always wonder at that. At the time, I told myself it was because he was a destitute noble, a beggar prince in need of an heiress to restore him to his former glory. But I know now that this was not true. He was more than that, just like you are.’”
Elias frowned, closing his eyes and trying to recall his uncle. He could remember slivers of things, brief impressions. A booming laugh. Twinkling, blue eyes. The way he would always sneak a coin into Elias’s pocket and hold his finger over his lips with a meaningful glance toward the other adults.
He had died of a weak heart, something Willa had explained that he had contended with since he had been a boy.
“He knew he was a temporary husband,” she said. “But he was determined to be an eternal partner. And he cared for you very much, my boy. Very, very much.”
He could hear her voice as he read, suddenly. He could hear her as clearly as though she were standing next to him, hand to his shoulder, reading aloud in the quiet night air. “‘Hattie is my heir, but you were always his. And that is how I knew that the two of you must be together, for you are all of me and my father, and Hattie, bless her, has always reminded me of my late husband. Do you see it too?’”
He released a little breath, glancing up at the bed, at the coils of copper and bronze on his pillows.
He imagined Hattie sneaking a coin into a little boy’s pocket, and his ribs quaked.
It was easy to see. Easy to conjure.
She had remembered the color of the late baron’s ring, he realized. Perhaps she had seen his uncle in detail because they had been kindred, even back then. Even when she had been nothing but an orphan girl scrubbing dishes in the kitchens as he’d lived the final days of his life.
“Are you distressed, Elias?” Willa had asked him, the day of the funeral, when he had been staring down at Hattie for the first time.
And he had shaken his head.
Had it been a lie? Had he been lying back then?
He smiled to himself, shaking his head. Maybe ‘distress’ was the wrong word for everything he had felt the first time he’d seen her, defiant and gravy spattered, and cursing in terms half the world could understand.
He drew in a deep breath, turning to the last page.
He had avoided this for such a long time. It was funny, wasn’t it? That now he was sad to see the end of it.
“‘I suppose by now, you’ve been told about the poem and your new role at the showcase. I imagine you did not enjoy that revelation very much, but you did always wish to participate, did you not? And now is your chance,’” her voice said in his head as his eyes moved over the words, his lips twisting in amusement. “‘Do not let Libba choose something horribly maudlin, please. She will, if you do not stop her.’”
He paused, pressing his lips together.
The poem they had chosen for tomorrowwasrather sad. And he had memorized the damned thing, too.
