“Doesn’t matter.”
I paused mid-bite. “More secrets?”
“Let me keep a few.” He winked, reverting to his light, flirtatious tone. “It adds to my mystique, doesn’t it?”
Lunaris thumped me again, but I didn’t break eye contact. I needed to be rid of the wraith, and I needed to trust the one helping me do it.
Kessian dropped the mask. “It’s not some big, dark secret. It’s just a memory I’d rather not revisit, all right?”
Oh. I wasn’t rooting out treachery, I was being an asshole. I might associate the strid with every malicious horror that had plagued my life, but it was unfair to lump Kessian in with it just because the wild magic had given him a gift.
I uncrossed my arms. “That’s fair. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. I get that it seems strange. We hook up not knowing anything about each other, and it turns out you’re cursed by the same wild magic that blessed me. But I’m putting it all together same as you.”
“What happened after you heard the voice in the spring?”
His expression turned inward. “I think of it as a quickening. Some part of the strid connected with some part of me. It felt like a chain, with the strid as one link, me as the second, and then a mysterious third. Maybe that’s you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Instinct, I suppose. I felt most certain of it when we were in the spring together, in those visions.” The candle flame danced in the reflections of his eyes as he gazed off into the distance. “Something about it felt … I don’t want to say ‘like fate,’ but almost like we’d done this before.”
It unnerved me to hear it spoken out loud because I agreed. When we’d first met, it felt like I’d known him a long time. After clearing up dinner, I said, “We should get ready for bed. I’ll show you to the guest room.”
“There’s a guest room?”
He sounded disappointed. I rapped my knuckles on the bathroom door. A clock on the wall next to it had no numbers around its face. Instead, icons of the different places it led to were painted around the circumference. The hour hand always hung around the twelve, which showed a sun, but could be spun to the other hours for different times of day or weather. Each also had a smaller icon for different sorts of rooms. At present, it was switched to the lavatory.
“What does it do?” Kessian asked.
“I’ll show you.”
I opened the door to show him the bog.
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s the guest bedroom?”
“No.” I shut the door and opened the clock face’s glass panel, turning the minute hand to the third hour, which had a picture of a bed next to it. This time when I opened the door, the room had changed, a four-poster bed sat in the center, looking out a big window to a sunset vista.
Kessian’s jaw dropped. He pointed to the different pictures on the clock. “These all lead to different rooms?”
“Yes.”
“What’s this one?” He pointed to a painting of a book.
“Reading room.”
“And this one?” Kessian’s voice took on a tone of awe as he pointed to a painted clay vase.
“My pottery studio.”
I wasn’t sure if I imagined the brittle look in Kessian’s eyes as he said, “Must be nice.” Whatever he felt, it vanished quickly. “Can I see it?”
“Go ahead.”
He spun the minute hand to the vase and opened the door.
My pottery studio was one of the first rooms Lunaris crafted for me when we went on the road. The skylights in an A-framed roof gave a view of the star-spattered night, and porthos plants hung from ceiling beams. One corner was devoted to my pottery wheel, the other to the kiln, and on the naked brick wall at the back, all of my work was stored in shelving. A long bench with an apothecary cabinet below housed my tithes and magical ingredients for enchantments. One mug lay there, half finished.
