The House also continued fiddling with my clothing, which grew richer and more intricately detailed by the day; although when the bodice started dipping lower again, I had a few choice words to say. We compromised on a little more skin than I was used to showing, but not enough to make me feel self-conscious.
Those first days took on ... I wouldn’t quite say they took on a shape, exactly, because time seemed to operate differently in that dim place, stretching out like rubber, then snapping back and coiling in on itself, dizzying and disorienting—but a routine emerged.
I couldn’t tell you for certain how many days passed, as I never saw real daylight, only the odd, off-color stuff manufactured by the House, and I only knew which way was up by the clockwork regularity of the meals: breakfast, lunch, supper, breakfast, lunch, supper, and cups of tea or coffee in between.
Back at home with Da, there had never been a moment when we weren’t either boiling water for a hot drink, drinking one, or rinsing out our mugs ready for the next one, and I saw no reason to alter this pattern just because I was in a fancier house with fancier teacups.
The sorcerer raised his eyebrows when I first brought in his tea, but when I would come back in a couple of hours with the next cup, the previous one was always empty, so he wasn’t complaining.
He also wasn’t complaining about the tea cakes and sweet breads I made to go with the tea, because those disappeared right quick as well.
He liked the sugary things best, I found, and when I brought him the sugar bowl to go along with his tea or coffee, it was always half-empty when I came to retrieve it. It replenished itself each time, of course.
We talked a little, now and then. He commented on the food, mostly, and I managed to reply without falling to the floor or professing my undying love, so I thought I was doing rather well when it came to keeping myself together in the face of the spell.
I was handling it all magnificently, really, if you didn’t count sobbing into my pillow at night when I longed for the sorcerer or remembered Da. At least I wasn’t sighing about the place like some wilting flower.
I was impressed with myself, to be quite honest, that I wasn’t just mooning after him pathetically and was instead able to make myself useful as best I could—even if all I could do was cook meals and make sure the sorcerer didn’t bury himself in a charnel house made of crusted plates.
I did not know where he spent his nights. Not with me, that was for certain. I must admit, I had expected (or feared, or hoped for) something a little more salacious than cooking and cleaning when I turned up on the sorcerer’s doorstep, but my bedchamber remained silent and still each night, save for Cornelius’s snores.
Even so, I tucked myself in with a mixture of fear and anticipation at the end of each day, half hoping and half dreading that he would come.
I was a little surprised. When the magic-workers took someone, it appeared that they owned them, body and soul, for as long as they wanted to. Surely even a magic-worker had ... urges? I obviously hadn’t expected the sorcerer to throw me on a bed of silk sheets and ravish me as soon as I showed up—although if I had looked different, perhaps I would have expected different. But I was a woman, after all, and I was completely devoted to him because of the enchantment.
Of course, I would have let him have his way. Iwantedhim to have his way. That was the horror of the spell. But he hadn’t done anything of the sort, and disappointment was stirred in with my relief.
Maybe he had lovers whom he snuck in, or maybe he had magical ways of sating himself that were more elaborate and satisfying than our sweaty, commonplace human ones.
Of course, I still had myown urges, which I took care of by myself under that thick black coverlet. And if I pictured the sorcerer’s face while doing so, well, it was his fault for ensnaring me the way he had, and so I didn’t feel too peculiar about it.
I didn’t come across anything resembling the sorcerer’s bedchamber, and because the House had not provided it to me, I assumed I did not need to know its whereabouts.
If I’d had to change his sheets, for instance, the House would have practically shoved me through the door. As it was, however, the only sheets I needed to worry about were mine, and I washed them in the big tub before the kitchen fire whenever I needed to.
It was an odd sort of life, and odd how quickly I got used to it, ferrying plates back and forth between the kitchen and the throne room, sudsing them up, putting them back in those blank, black cupboards.
I continued looking for my heart, of course. More rooms appeared to me as I looked, gradually, as if the House was flexing its muscles after a long sleep. I ransacked them, but most were empty, and the rest were filled with black furniture covered with swathes of black cloth.
I could only see the rooms the House chose to show me, and I suspected it was giving me just enough new rooms that I felt the illusion of progress, as you might occupy a small child with a pencil and paper to distract it.
Every so often, I stood with my hands on my hips and confronted the House.
“Go on, then. Where is it? Where is he keeping it?”
The House fanned the flames of the fire a little higher, or produced a whistling kettle for me, trying to ingratiate itself. Or distract me.
“You know where it is. You know where everything is here.”
It shouldn’t have been possible for a House to look sheepish without a face or a body to look sheepish with, but it did.
I made the sorcerer Da’s famous meatloaf one night. I put all my missing of Da into the meal as I worked in the ridiculously well-stocked kitchen, every ingredient I thought of at my fingertips.
Da would make it with all the cuts of meat that were left over, put them through the mincer, and mix that with flour and water and chopped vegetables to make something like a cake that you could slice, crusted with herbs all the way round. He served it with mashed potatoes, and so I did, too.
When I took the dinner to the throne room, I was rumpled and cross from frustration. The fine velvet dress was immaculate, though, not even a speck of dust or a spot of sauce on it from all my day’s labors, and somehow that irritated me further.
I entered the room balancing plates of fine meat and roasted vegetables, snappish and ready for an argument, but at the sight of the sorcerer, I melted again into mawkish worship. It was ridiculous.
