A kerosene lamp hung by the door, and she lit it, illuminating the stark space. It was larger than Sylas’s apartment, though not by much, and all her furniture, which had been old as long as she could remember it – except for her bed, which Johanna had built her brand new twenty years ago – now seemed decrepit. Her walls, always bare, now seemed skeletal.
“I must apologize,” she said tightly as he set his things on the dusty floor. She removed her weapons and set them with athumpon the table. “I know this is nothing to the fine manors and hotels of the city.”
“A jar of wildflowers would do wonders,” he said, unphased. He considered her small kitchen. “Some curtains. A painting or two.”
Her eyes swiveled, acerbically, to the metal pot collecting rainwater from the hole over her stove. “Yes, well, not all of us have coin to spend on pretty nonsense.”
“I’d rather spend my coin on nothing else.”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” she muttered.
“Yes,” he replied, not with the carefully managed detachment she’d noted before, but with a simple, raw vehemence. “Money should be spent on beautiful things, and beautiful things alone. Necessities should cost nothing at all but the labor it takes to make them or grow them.”
“Or hunt them.” She went to the trunk at the foot of her bed, pushing a pile of unsold rabbit skins onto the floor. At the sight, he pursed his lips.
Testily, she plunged her hands into the trunk. “Why shouldn’t everything be free, then? Beautiful things most of all?”
“Because beauty, more than anything else in this world, is hoarded like a dragon’s gold.”
She scoffed, pushing aside her spare sleeping shirt. “Gold is hoarded like gold.”
“Because it is the price of beauty. Of softness, pleasure. Delight. Knowledge.”
Her back to him, Anya paused her digging, listening. She had the impression he was voicing something he’d never been able, or allowed, to voice. That he voiced it now because her opinion of it couldn’t matter.
He went on. “The stingiest miser might spare a penny for a beggar on high holidays, or in fear for his own soul. Even the cruelest despot will open a workhouse and feed him watery soup for his labor. But no one would dare say the beggar deserved a soft bed, deserved a nightly feast fit for a king, not for his labor or for his past suffering, but simply because he was born. And the man who believes that is called a fool at best, a danger at worst. Beauty has the steepest price of all.”
She resumed sifting, keeping her eyes in the trunk. “That was a rousing speech. Do you and your friends give such overtures over champagne at the club?”
He folded his arms over his chest. “Not exactly.”
“You’re right. Beauty does have a steep price.” She lifted a mink skull from the trunk. She brandished it at him, clacking its sharp teeth. “This chap was beautiful, once.”
“Charming.” He looked as if he had been insulted. She supposed he had.
Her throat was tight as she turned back to her trunk. “The pelt I skinned from this beast, and a dozen like it, fetched me enough money for a new rooster after ours was torn to shreds by dogs, and made acharmingcoat for somecharmingwoman who pays her servants late and a pittance at that, with beatings and insults to make up the difference. That’s what softness – whatbeauty– is worth.”
Heart thrumming, she put the skull back into the trunk and continued digging. Her fingers drifted over a pile of lilac cloth. A silk dress. The last remnant of her past life; a traveling dress, impractical and ridiculously expensive. The one she’d been wearing on her last ride into the countryside. It was odd; she felt no relation to it any longer. A stranger’s dress. A doll’s dress.
The wizard’s voice broke through her reverie. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“What do you care if I know what you meant?” she snapped.
For several long moments, the only sounds were of the rain pounding on the roof, the clang of drops into the metal pot she’d set under the poorly patched hole. The gentle shifting of the contents of the trunk. She thought the matter settled, and fine that it was.
But then he said, in a softer voice, “There’s more to life than base survival. There must be. I must believe it.”
His profile was to her, his attention fixed on the kitchen window, on the raindrops against the glass. The fine instrument of his expression was out of tune. She felt he had forgotten she was there; felt she was intruding on something private. He was revealing a hidden facet of himself. She did not want to see.
“Maybe for a certain set,” she said coolly.
As he faced her, the strings strummed back into perfect tune. “I’m not sure I catch your meaning.”
“I know I appear a simple country rustic to you, but despite what you may think, I’m not a complete idiot. I know it takes an absurd amount of money for an education like yours. I saw your friends.”
And back out again. “I do not think –honestly.” He threw his hands in the air. “Tell me then, how did a cultured young woman such as yourself come to acquire such acharmingabode?”
“Parents were killed on the road.” She found what she was looking for and slammed the trunk shut. “I was eight. Ran into the forest. A woman found me, a hunter. Took me in as her own. Johanna. She died, too. Three years ago.”
