The twitching underfoot increased in urgency. I turned to head back to the kitchen and almost walked into a wall that had suddenly appeared in front of me. I glared at it, and it stared right back. I balled my fists under the tray and turned, determined not to let the House bully me, but found myself confronted with another dead end. I sighed.
“Fine,” I relented. “Show me where you want me to go.”
A corridor unrolled before me, and I followed it. I didn’t see that I had much choice. The House led me around a few winding corners before plonking me down in front of a door. I reached for a doorknob that already seemed to be pressing itself up into my hand. What would I find this time? Another bedchamber?
The door opened cleanly and silently, and I saw the same oddly plain, homely room I had found once before. The cabinets were now open, showing its full shelves, and the rectangular frame was still covered with its piece of black sackcloth. The shelves bowed with the weight of jars and canisters, and rough bundles of herbs. Was this the Room of Hearts that I had been searching for after all? My breath caught in my throat.
Several books lay open and dog-eared on the black floor, as well as crumpled notes scrawled in a dark and untidy hand—lots of question marks and exclamation marks, I noticed, as if the author had grown increasingly more agitated and frustrated. The papers littered the floor like fallen blossoms, and thick dust hovered in the air, making it hazy and golden.
I tore my gaze away from the floor and looked up to find the sorcerer sitting behind a black desk that he must have conjured for the occasion, because it hadn’t been there the last time I had glimpsed the room.
I hadn’t noticed him before because his back was to me, but as I walked around the room towards him I could see the curve of his cheek and the flickering movements of his hands before his face. More papers littered the desk, and pools of black ink shone bright and iridescent on the black surface, turning the scrawled notes to purple mush where the ink had soaked the papers.
He seemed absorbed in an intricate net of sparkling thread strung between his hands, something like the cat’s cradles we made as children back in the village, and hadn’t even looked up at my entry. I set down the lunch tray—on the floor before him, amid the mess, since there was no room on the desk—and it made a soft clinking sound.
The sorcerer spun around, his hair lifting and falling about his face. It was constitutionally impossible for any of these magic-workers to do anything gracelessly, it seemed.
“What are you doing in here?” he demanded. “How did you get here?” A sharp frown line carved its way between his brows. I felt like a child caught with her hand in the jam jar, but I rallied.
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I was just trying to bring you your lunch, and the House brought me here.”
“Oh.” He looked at the plate. “What is it?”
“Pork chops,” I replied.
“Again.” He sighed and made a petulant face. I wanted to turn on my heel right there and march out, but I was too intrigued at the possibility that I had found the Room of Hearts at last.
It certainly felt likesomethingsignificant.The air tasted of metal—it made my tongue feel thick and sluggish in my mouth. My ears buzzed faintly.Magic.
I recognized the flavor of it at once, despite never having felt it this strongly before. Perhaps it was an instinct built into me, to recognize its signature, the way a baby mouse knows from birth to fear the shadow of an owl.
The sorcerer continued to fiddle with the sparkling cat’s cradle between his hands. He seemed to have sprouted several new fingers to manage the threads, manipulating them with manic intensity. Staring at it and trying to determine exactly how it worked made my head hurt.
I discreetly stirred the discarded papers on the floor with my foot, looking about for any sign of a heart. Perhaps it was in one of the jars or bottles on the shelves, ground to a powder or dissolved in liquid. I started making my way slowly toward the cabinets, but he looked up sharply, and I stopped, trying to look like I was just idly wandering.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “What is all this?”
I bent down to unfold one of the hysterically scrawled scraps of paper. The sorcerer immediately threw the cat’s cradle down to the floor.
“Don’t touch anything!” he cried.
The cat’s cradle exploded where he dropped it, making me jump, and turned into a handful of glittering ash that descended onto the pork chops, looking like expensive seasoning.
The explosion sent the papers on the floor swirling like a cloud of moths—and it also blew the sacking cover off the frame on the wall. The sorcerer noticed and grabbed at it as it fell, but he was too late. It escaped his grasp and left its secret uncovered.
It was a painted portrait that hid behind the sacking, and I could see it now in full. I was no expert on paintings and had barely seen any besides the portraits of the king that hung in taverns and public buildings, but it didn’t seem like a very accomplished portrait to me.
Rather, it seemed like the work of an excessively average painter, someone who was still learning, and who had scrubbed out and painted certain patches over and over. There was a laborious, many-layered quality to it, and the colors were muddy.
I would have expected a beautiful woman, if I’d had to guess at the sort of secret portrait a man might keep in a locked room in his house, but despite the painter’s lack of skill, I could tell this was definitely a picture of a boy. A very young boy, no more than five years old, perhaps, although I wasn’t much use at judging the ages of sprouts.
The portraitist clearly had trouble with hands, and had erased and redrawn the eyes a number of times, but there was still something of the spirit of the boy there, despite that.
He had darkish, longish hair, a prominent nose, and an unhandsome face that nevertheless had some character about it. The painter had managed to capture a certain stubborn set to the jaw, even if they hadn’t quite succeeded in shaping the lips and had ended up with a kind of muddled, fleshy blob instead.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“No one.”
