“It must have brought her here, Clarissa. I didn’t.”
“Sylvester. This is clearly from Outside.”
He looked at me directly then, the beauty of his eyes startling me all over again. I held his gaze for a second, then dropped it, ashamed of what might be showing on my face. I was sure the lady had seen it, however; when I raised my eyes again, she was looking at me with the same sort of amused, pitying knowledge that I had seen on the faces of the girls back in the village, when I was pining after Aron.
The village! That jolted my memory. Clarissa was the one who had taken Dav, I’d swear to it. As I’ve said, the ladies all looked mighty similar in their perfection, but I remembered the tale of the gleaming golden hair like wool all combed out for the spinning, and the yellow green eyes so full of color that the irises almost crowded out the whites. She was the one who had pointed her finger at Dav that day and led him to his doom.
She must have seen something in my stare besides the naked adoration she was used to, because her eyes narrowed.
“What is it looking at?” she said, but she reached for a seedcake as she did so.
“Careful,” I said maliciously. “They’re hot.”
I had half expected the House to be on her side, but it showed gratifying loyalty when it made the seedcake steam, just a little, and burn her hand. She dropped it in her lap and sucked at her fingers. Her servant gave a twitch, as if responding to his mistress’s pain.
“You may go,” she said to me irritably.
I cocked an eyebrow, but the sorcerer waved a hand vaguely in what seemed like agreement, and so I heaved myself back out the door. I let it close behind me, but the House obliged me in its own way by opening an ornate little keyhole in the door that hadn’t been there before. I felt like it was trying to get on my good side again after its sulk earlier.
“I really don’t see why it’s necessary to keep that creature around,” the sorceress was saying when I pressed my ear to the keyhole.
“She just showed up,” said the sorcerer.
“Well, it’s cleaner in here, at least,” she said, brushing some speck of imaginary dust off her perfect skirts. “Careful, though. It’s not a good idea to keepthemaround for too long. They get ... clingy. Remember what happened with Father? When he tried to keep them? It never worked.”
“You have one,” the sorcerer pointed out.
“Yes, but I replace them regularly, darling,” she said. “I’ve only had him for a month, and he’s already half-used up.”
Used up?
I could almost hear the sorcerer shrug. “I didn’t bring her here. Can we stop talking about it? It’s boring.”
“You must have snagged her without realizing,” said his sister. “I’m just telling you to be careful. She might be a novelty for now, but unless you plan to harvest her, there’s really no point keeping her around.”
He sighed. “Why are you here, anyway?”
“We’re concerned about you.”
“Who’swe?”
“Your sisters.”
“Any particular ones, or the whole lot of them?”
“All twelve of us, Sylvester.”
“I do have a ridiculous number of sisters,” he said, examining the dirt under his fingernails.
“You’re not producing much,” she said, steepling her fingers and tapping her perfect nails together. He huffed a sigh. “Nothing at all, in fact. We’re all expected to meet a certain quota. You know that. Now more than ever.”
A quota?I thought sharply.
“I’ve only just started,” I heard the sorcerer say sleepily.
“Well, you only came of age a few months ago, of course. But the king has high expectations of you, as the only brother.”
“I don’tlikegoing out to villages. They’re boring. And they smell like manure.”
