Rev slid off the counter and went to the bread bin. When she came back, she had a piece of bread wrapped in cloth and a small pat of butter folded into waxed paper.
“For the road,” she said.
“What road?”
“The one back to your room.” He set his apple down and pushed off the counter. “Curfew,” Kieran said.
Rev looked at the clock above the stove and nodded.
“He’s right.”
“Tragic for everyone,” Kieran said. “I was just becoming interesting.”
I rolled my eyes. “I doubt that.”
His eyes met mine, and the taste of apples came back so sharply I nearly dropped the bread in my hand.
“Oh, I wouldn’t doubt me just yet,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
His smile tilted.
“I’m even better with second impressions.”
Rev groaned. “Like I said, ignore him.” She took Kieran bythe arm. “Come on, let’s go before you make an even bigger ass of yourself than you already have.”
Rev took the narrow pantry door, and Kieran followed her with one last look over his shoulder.
When they’d disappeared, I went the other way, back under the garlic and into the hall, with warm bread in one hand and butter in the other..
The corridor was even colder on the way back than it had been on the way in. But apples stayed in my mouth long after Kieran was gone.
When I reached my room, I went in and sat on the bed with my coat still on. I held the bread Rev had given me in one hand. My wrist had not stopped doing whatever it had been doing since the basin.
I hadn’t looked at it since, but I looked at it now.
The lines on my Mark had moved again. The pattern was nothing I could read, but it was a pattern, and it was responding to something.
Or someone.
Green eyes. Apples.
I pressed my thumb over the Mark.
The lines held their new shape.
I just didn’t know what it meant.
4
The first time my father read my Mark, I was nine.
The reading room at Ashford was on the second floor, north-facing, kept at the temperature my grandfather had decided was correct. The water in the black marble basin did not move like the water in any other vessel of the house. It had been drawn the night before by a steward whose only task was to draw it, then left to settle for fourteen hours. By the morning of a reading it held the consistency my grandfather had taught my father to expect: still, dense, dark at the floor of the basin, lit at the rim where the marble took the north light through the window.
My father’s hands were cold that day. They were always cold.
He set me at the rim of the basin and placed my right palm on the marble. Then he stood opposite me with his palm on the rim.The marble was even colder than his hand. My father had told me when I was eight that I should never flinch before a basin. So I didn’t.
