“There’s got to be at least some chance that answer actuallyisKirkpatrick.”
“He had every chance to murder me at the sky door. That seems unlikely.”
He touched his finger to his lip. “All right. Yates was around.”
“Somehow, I don’t think a professor of magical medicine is the culprit.”
“Probably not. And Gibbons is out, too. He couldn’t organize a fen ring if he was made of mushrooms. I once saw him fall asleep in his soup. Same with Cottingly-Smythe, just old even then. Old and useless. Not to mention completely motiveless. None of them hated you.”
“So maybe we should think about that more. Who did?”
“I’ve been trying to think, but I’m coming up blank. You were a good student; you didn’t do anything wrong. Or even anything they might just see as wrong. I mean, you were different, like you are now, and you were a little outspoken sometimes about how unfair things—”
He stopped dead there. Like he’d finished the thought he’d had a moment ago, after she’d said something about the food. And it made him go very still. Very unsettled looking. It even seemed like he was holding his breath for a second, gaze far away and focused on the disturbing idea.
She had to prompt him, in the end. “You just thought of something.”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Well, just tell me. It could be I will.”
He hesitated. This time, however, she didn’t need to give him a push. “But it’s not anything. I just had this feeling. I had this feeling every time you started talking about reading books people disapprove of and not liking how this system works and things. It would make me panic, somehow. And I didn’t know why; it made no sense. It still doesn’t, because I had no idea anyone but me hurt you. Yet somehow... somehow, I think...” he said, his words trailing into nothing when he got to the disturbing part. The one that made him reflexively put a hand next to hers, and then when he seemed to register that he could, he touched it. He put his own over it.
Held it gently at first, then tighter.
As if to reassure himself that she was still here.
That she wouldn’t just suddenly disappear.
While she finished his sentence. “You think I said something that unsettled someone,” she said and could see him trying to resist, even as something he himself had known and raised.
“You never did, though. You only ever told me that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing? What specifically did I say, even if it was just to you?”
“Nothing much. You mostly just wanted to find a way that I could go back to Calabaraia—I think because you felt responsible for me getting stuck. Even though you weren’t at all. I just couldn’t stay away from you. I didn’t want to leave your side. Itwas never there that I missed, it was you; god, I missed you even when you were alive, all the time.”
He shook his head at himself, half amused.
While her heart rose and sank, in the same instance.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, now I’m remembering that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Lil. You just felt like it was. Plus, you know, you always wanted to do whatever you could to make things better. It’s one of the reasons I fell so hard for you. I was different and clumsier at hiding it, and you were so kind. You were so welcoming, even when you realized what I was.”
“It must have made it heartbreaking when I wasn’t this time.”
“It was heartbreaking to make that happen. And then again, when I knew that somehow you still cared. When you tried to stop me falling into the long sleep, I almost broke and told you everything, there and then.”
She tried not to cry, at the end of that. But blinking tears back and holding her breath and looking at the ceiling did nothing. They spilled down her cheeks anyway, so freely he noticed right away. He put his hand on her face and swiped one with his thumb. Then when that just made it worse, he pulled her to him.
She wound up curled in his arms, cheek against his chest.
Soothed by the slow sound of his strange heart.
“It’s all right,” he said, as he stroked her hair. “Everything’s all right now.”
“But it’s not, though. We’re still in danger. We’re no closer to the truth than we were a day ago. And for all we know, the clock is ticking. Whoever it was could have twigged and started plotting our demise as we speak.”
