“What happened to the children he used? The ones who failed?”
“I don’t know. He never told me.”
I hated to think what that could mean. I shuddered. Who could look at a child and think of something to be bought and sold—worse, something to be taken apart and reassembled? I doubted he let the “failed” children skip merrily back out onto the street to live lives full of puppies and apple carts.
I stared at the portrait again. I had no idea whether or not this was the boy the sorcerer had once been, but I could see why he had been attracted to it.
There was spirit to the thing. You got the feeling the subject was sitting for the portrait under duress, and wanted to spring up and go chase frogs by the pond, or something similar. He looked like someone who didn’t want to sit about in fussy clothes in musty rooms, tinkering with fancy toys.
It was hard to imagine the sorcerer as a boy, but even harder to imagine his sisters as little girls. Presumably they, too, had been regular children once, before spending unimaginable years being transformed and trained into the beautiful, terrifyingthingsthey had become as adults.
“I ... am sorry,” I said. I couldn’t imagine being that boy, taken and twisted into something unrecognizable, with no father but the man who had ruined him. I thought again of Da and how lucky I was. Had been.
Sylvester was still staring at the portrait.
“I had better go,” I said. “Breakfast.”
And with that dazzling piece of repartee, I crept out of there and to my own chamber, as if I really were sneaking back after a night of debauchery.
I wouldn’t have minded a bit of debauchery.
When I got back to my own chamber, I washed my face and changed my clothes to another elaborate black number that the House provided for me. Cornelius had slept on my bed, and when he heard the water splashing, he yawned and stretched.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
He was completely unbothered, but I still felt a flush of shame.
“In the sorcerer’s bedchamber,” I said gruffly. “He was having a nightmare.”
“So that’s what it was! It stopped a lot sooner than it usually does.”
“I woke him up,” I said.
“Well, good,” he said. “I could get some sleep.”
I suppose I could have gone back to sleep. There was really no reason for me to keep so rigidly to my self-appointed duties, except for my slavish devotion to the sorcerer.
But that almost religious routine was the only thing stopping me from going completely mad, and getting dressed and making breakfast was better than lying in bed and feeling my mind melt like butter in a pan.
So, I had learned that the magic-workers had been made rather than born, and weren’t fully human—made from street children, no less, by Sylvester’s “father,” and then trained by him into adulthood. And what kind of power must someone have to take one person and shape them into something else entirely, into a being with the ability to steal hearts and make magics?
Oddly, I felt sorry for Sylvester. I told myself that was the spell talking, the spell that bound and enslaved me, making me feel a connection that simply wasn’t real ... But it hadbecomemore real, though, I thought, by sheer virtue of being in his presence day after day, and talking to him.
The love, the dogged devotion, might still have been an ensorcelled illusion, but something else had grown up around it, like a vine curling around a tree. It had to. You could not live with someone, day in and day out, and feel nothing genuine for them at all, good or bad. At least, I didn’t thinkIcould.
I was spellbound to the sorcerer, but I felt a growing sympathy, or even affinity, for the man behind the sorcerer—or the little boy who had been the flour to make his bread, as he had put it.
I made breakfast in thoughtful silence, dropping scraps for Cornelius as I rattled the pans and sipped on my tea. My hands shook a little as I prepared it, and I spilled some hot butter onto the fancy new dress. As always, it left nary a mark.
When I had finished, I piled up the tray as usual with potatoes and bread and eggs and bacon, poured the sorcerer a cup of tea, and poured another one for myself for good measure, and took the breakfast through to the throne room.
My heart thudded with anticipation as I stepped in. Would he be different now? Would he confide in me further?
The answer was, of course, no. He was slumped in the throne, flickering a little fireball between his fingers, and didn’t even look up when I came in, although I lingered and fussed about with the crockery more than usual. I even ostentatiously cleared my throat, but he didn’t budge. When I finally realized he wasn’t going to speak, I left.
I suppose I was relieved. I was still pitifully in love with him, of course, and would have aimed my own meat cleaver into my head if he had asked me, but he seemed reassuringly unaware of that fact. I doubt he had any idea of my feelings at all. I was around, like Cornelius, and I was company, and I was useful, and that was enough.
I hated myself for it, but it was enough for me, too, no matter how often I lay awake in my black bed wishing so hard for his kisses and his hands that my skin stung as badly as if I had fallen into an ants’ nest.
