“No. Furniture only moves as directed.”
“So the guest rooms are still your fault, though due to inaction. I guess that is better than learning you purposefully put together the guest suites that way. Though it beggars belief that you haven’t been moved to fix them by now.”
“I don’t remember them being as bad as you claim, but I haven’t been in one for years.”
“And no one has mentioned that it might be wise to redecorate?”
“Apparently, none of my previous guests have felt bold enough to complain.”
“Whispers among the maids? Even if they didn’t tell you, surely word would reach Berklay. He’d have enough spine to tell you.”
It didn’t surprise me that Isa knew my butler. He had grown up in Leort. His entire family still lived in town. I wondered how well she knew him, though, to judge his character so confidently. She was right. Berklay would have told me if he thought the guest rooms needed redecorating. But Berklay had as little reason as I to visit those rooms.
“Even when the castle was fully staffed, we never had maids here,” I told her. My mother had tried employing maids, preferring to rely on mundane means for certain tasks like laying fires. But with the cleaning and tidying spells that were always in place, there was never enough work for the them. It was easier to let node magic take over those few tasks, or ask a footman or kitchen helper to do an additional job once in a while.
Isa sliced the bread, tearing a piece into small bites and adding them to my plate without asking. “If the rooms weren’t overcrowded whenever you last visited one, then what happened?”
“My guess? My mother was probably redecorating the rooms before she died. She liked to see multiple options at once before making a final choice. She would have called in more furniture than needed, then sent what she didn’t want back to the storerooms. But she must not have finished the rooms in your hall.”
Isa’s eyes lowered. “Oh. I’m sorry I keep complaining.”
I blinked. “It’s fine. I know you aren’t insulting my mother.”
“I didn’t mean to bring up hard memories.”
I peered at Isa, trying to determine just what it was I heard in her voice. “Remembering my mother isn’t hard. A little sad, of course, but I’d rather face the sadness so I can remember the years of happiness that preceded it.”
She lowered her fork, though her plate wasn’t empty. “That’s a good attitude to have. I wish I had more happy memories of my mother. Her entire life was filled with disappointments, though. I’m not sure I have a single memory of her being happy.”
I wanted to insist that her mother must have been happy around Isa and her twin often, but I knew nothing of her life. Her father had signed away her freedom in exchange for his own. Saying something like that might just make me look like an insensitive fool.
I decided to keep my response neutral. “How long ago did you lose her?”
My mother had died two years ago, and the pain was still sometimes sharp. There was a dullness in how Isa spoke of her mother that made me suspect it had been much longer for her. Not that the pain would lessen, but it would be different if she had lost her mother as a child.
Twelve
Isabel
???
I picked upmy fork again, but I was no longer hungry. “She died when I was eight. It’s been just me, Sofia, and our father since then.”
Soon it would be just me and Father. If he didn’t get himself thrown in jail before Sofia married, which probably wouldn’t be long now; she spent more time with Leo than us these days. I put up with my father to spare Sofia from dealing with him on her own. Even if I walked away, she would never give up on him. She was too much like our mother.
It was true that I couldn’t remember seeing Mama happy, but I knew she had been at one point. Everyone who had known my mother, Penelope, when she was younger always said Sofia reminded them of her. The Penelope from before her optimism had resulted in constant disappointments. The woman from a time when she still had dreams.
She had loved Sofia and me. I knew that much. Even when she barely had the energy to smile at us, I had known she loved us. But she had also loved Edwin. That love had destroyed her in the end. The worst of it was, if it hadn’t been for Sofia and me, she might not have lost her sunny disposition. Her love for her husband might not have broken her.
But we had come along, two little girls with limited control of our truth-magics, and destroyed Penelope Cardh’s illusions. The lies she had told herself that Edwin would change for her—that he had changed for her—fell apart under the onslaught of our powers. Between Sofia accidentally making him speak the truth and my inability to hide my discomfort when his lies became a clamor, Mama lost the comfort of self-deception.
Despite knowing that his lies were falling apart, Father made no effort to change. He didn’t know how to change. Even a deathbed promise to Penelope hadn’t been enough to make him give up his criminal ways.
Pushing the last few bites of chicken and beans around on my plate, I cleared my throat. “Enough about me.” I didn’t want to answer any more questions. I recognized the hypocrisy, but my mother was the only subject that dried up my words. I needed a change of topic, and I had the perfect one in mind. “Are there other things you can do with node power that your father couldn’t?”
Felix cocked his head to the side, the sudden shift catching him off guard. “I once used the node to truth-tell my father, but he couldn’t use it to force me to speak the truth.”
Unexpected questions always got the best answers. Felix hadn’t wanted to discuss the possibility that he might be a mage before, but here he was, confirming my hunch. “That makes sense if you are a truth-teller yourself. Your father would only have the power of the node to draw on. You have the node plus your innate magic. That would make you more powerful than him and immune to his truth-telling.”
