It was a hopeless task, but I kept at it, opening door after door to see more and more outlandish spices, herbs, and dried foods, and then finally (when the House had run out of ideas, I suppose), empty shelves. I sighed and straightened, smoothing my skirts.
It was unlikely the sorcerer kept his hearts in the kitchen. Unless he was planning to eat them, which—well, it was something I didn’t like to imagine. I was pretty sure the magic-workers absorbed the hearts’ magic in another way, because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
“What are you doing?” asked Cornelius from somewhere by my ear, making me jump. He had woken from his nap and was perched on top of one of the open doors. I felt like a burglar.
“Nothing,” I said reflexively.
He gave a derisive sniff.
“All right,” I relented. “Look, have you seen any ... hearts about?”
“Hearts?”
“Or pieces of hearts. Or anything that could be such.”
“What?” Cornelius cocked his head to one side.
“The hearts. That he uses, in his magicks. That the magic-workers all use. That’s what they do. They take bits of hearts and use them to make their sorceries. Sometimes they take the whole thing and sometimes just a little; sometimes it’s the real, fleshy thing; and sometimes it’s more the essence of it, I suppose. But he’s a sorcerer, and he took my heart somehow, or part of it, and it has to be somewhere in this House, and I have to find it.”
Cornelius blinked, impassive.
“Don’t know about that,” he said. “Haven’t seen any. Haven’t smelled any.”
“No hearts at all?”
“No. He doesn’t even bother to put them in the mice I eat, far as I can tell.”
“Are you sure?”
“If there was a heart about the place, I would smell it,” he said. “I get so little fresh blood.”
I abandoned my search of the kitchen and started wandering the House, letting a duster dangle from my hand lest the sorcerer question me. (Although, he seemed to care very little what I did.) Those other rooms, then.
They seemed less like rooms and more like the living organs of some strange, incomprehensible giant creature. The hallway gave a shiver under my feet, like a horse whisking a fly off its neck, and I found myself facing in a new direction and looking at a new door. Cornelius appeared at my feet, as he seemed to do whenever anything interesting was going on.
“Was this here before?” I asked.
“I don’t pay much attention,” he said. “I just find a warm spot, if one opens up. But I don’t think so.”
The doorknob had placed itself invitingly below my hand, like a dog looking for a pat. I opened it and stepped into the new room, Cornelius at my heels. He made a pleased chirping noise when he saw a long, low sofa, and jumped up and started kneading at it immediately.
“Not bad,” he commented.
It was a bedchamber. The sorcerer’s bedchamber? I imagined him tangled in black sheets, his skin even whiter against the shining dark, his hair mussed about and slick on a black pillow. I flushed hot and pressed one hand to my ribs to keep the rest of my treacherous heart inside.
But it was not the sorcerer’s bedchamber. It clearly belonged to a woman.Thatkept my heart firmly in my chest—the thought of another woman living here, and a beautiful one, judging by the room. Everything in it, although made of the same magical black stuff as the rest of the House, was delicate and feminine and gorgeous.
I inched my way inside, feeling as if a giant, manicured hand was going to appear and flick me away like a speck of lint from an embroidered sleeve. After a second, when no such giant hand appeared, I made my way about the room.
I fingered the flocked wallpaper, velvety black on black, a pattern like crows on bare branches, and opened the closet door to riffle my hands through the row of fine dresses within.
Well. I had thought myself very fancy in my new garments, but these made me aware all over again of how squat and forgettable I was compared to other women.
The clothes were also black, but they were the black of starlings, or ravens, iridescentlike, with a rainbow of colors peeping out from beneath the black like painted ladies smiling from behind veils. A strange and beguiling perfume hung about them, something like honeysuckle at evening and strong, sweet wine. The waist span of these dresses was barely more than the span of my hand, it seemed, and the shoes I found at the bottom of the closet were just as dainty.
I gave in to an unusual girlish impulse and kicked off one of my shoes in order to try one on, but they might as well have been made for mice. I gave one particularly fussy pair a shove with the toe of my boot, just to show them what was what.
“Who lived here?” I asked Cornelius.
