I stand on the terrace and look down at the stretch of gravel where he parked when we arrived. I can see the tire tracks. I woke to a house that was too quiet, got up to check, and here I am, staring at the place where his car should be.
“He left?” Darina steps out beside me, working her hair into its usual braid.
“It looks that way.”
“Did he say anything to you? About where he was going?”
“No. Why would he? He doesn’t answer to me.” I turn my back on the empty gravel. “And I don’t care where he goes.”
Darina ties off her braid and says nothing, which is her way of calling me a liar.
Fine, I noticed that he’s gone, and I keep noticing it, and that annoys me. It isn’t about him. It’s the strangeness of waking up in a house at the edge of a desert, owned by a monster, and finding him vanished without a word.
And there’s the other thing too, the thing I’ve been trying not to think about since I opened my eyes. Yesterday, he offered me his hand to help me into the car, and I snapped at him.“Don’t touch me,”I said, with panic in my voice. Andheapologized tome. Gave us rooms, cooked for us, refused my money, and told me I could leave whenever I wanted. I never thanked him for any of it.
I was distressed. I’d been auctioned off, marched through a portal, and dropped into a new life among a species the people of Concord tell horror stories about. I had my reasons. But reasons aren’t the same as being right, and I know the difference. I should try to be decent to him. Decent costs me nothing.
“Well,” Darina says, “if the master of the house is out, we should explore.”
We start at our end of the hall and work outward. The house turns out to be far larger than I realized. Rooms are carved straight back into the cliff, with high ceilings and heavy doors, and they keep going, one behind another. Some have been restored, with swept floors, mended shutters, and clean, empty shelves. Others are sealed and dusty, with sand gathered in the corners and crates stacked under cloth. We find empty chambers whose purpose I can’t guess, a storage room full of tools, and narrow terraces cut into the rock face, each with its own square of shade.
“How many people lived here?” Darina asks, turning in the middle of an empty room.
“I don’t know. It was abandoned, I’d say. You can see where he’s repaired things and where he hasn’t managed yet.”
“He did all of this by himself?”
“Who else? Have you seen any servants?”
At the far end of the hall, we come to his door. It’s closed. We both stop in front of it, because it’s the last room on this side of the house.
“I’m sure he won’t mind, if you’re curious…” Darina starts.
“No. I would never.” I turn and head toward the stairs. “I’m not interested in him, so I’m not interested in where he sleeps.”
“Of course,” she says after me, in the voice she uses when she’s trying not to laugh.
At the bottom of the stairs, she pushes open a door and calls my name. I forget to be annoyed with her. It’s a library. Shelves are carved into the stone from floor to ceiling, and they’re filled with books. A tall window looks out over the open desert, all red and black cliffs, thornbrush and light. It’s the prettiest room in the house.
Darina pulls a book down and frowns at it.
“Can you read this?”
I take it from her. The script runs in sharp, angled marks, row after row. I pull down a second book, then a third.
“It’s their language. They’re all the same, probably.”
“The one beautiful room in this house,” she says, “and we can’t use it.”
We put the books back and leave. I’m more disappointed than I want to admit. I stop at the window on the way out. From up here, the desert doesn’t look dead, only endless.
The lowest terrace opens onto the garden, if I can call it that. Stone beds line the walls, some cleared, some half-choked with thorny desert plants that catch on my skirt when I pass. A dry fountain stands in the middle, and cut brush is stacked against the far wall where Osric must have piled it.
It isn’t beautiful. In Concord, gardens are trimmed, watered, and never left to their own devices. This garden is bare, dusty, and severe. But it isn’t dead, either. It’s abandoned, and an abandoned thing can be brought back.
Darina toes the stacked brush.
“He seems like a good man. Osric.”
