“Don’t be so melodramatic. We are notbutchers.”
“Really? What are we, then?”
“If anything, we are comparable to farmers,” she said. “We nurture, and then we harvest. And the harvest is for all. Without our magic, would our kingdom be as safe or prosperous? As peaceful? It is a small price to pay.”
Only if you’re not the ones paying it, I thought. I watched as Clarissa raised the jar to her face and examined it with the eye of a connoisseur. She shook it up, and swirls of oil and little threads and specks of flesh detached themselves from the heart and circled lazily in the slow liquid, like fish in a warm pond.
“Not bad, really,” she said. “A bit shriveled, but not bad.”
“Now will you leave me alone?” said Sylvester. “I will find you others, if that’s what you want.”
“What I want? Darling, it’s what you’refor,” she said, an echo of her earlier words about the villages. She tapped a long nail against the glass. “It’s enough, for now. For today. I will take it to Father. But you still have that girl ...”
“What about her?” he said, rather sharply. I could see just one of his hands through the keyhole. It had been drumming impatiently on the arm of the throne, but now it stilled.
“She’s still here. Untouched.”
“What of it?”
“You need to getridof her, Sylvester. Harvest her and get rid of her. You know we can’t live withpeople.”
I could almost hear his raised eyebrow. “Are we not people ourselves?”
“You know what I mean,” she said, sounding a little flustered. “Withordinarypeople.”
“You keep servants. You all do.”
“Yes, butemptyones, darling.”
Empty?
“Not whole humans wandering about, getting their sticky fingers into every corner and poking their noses into what doesn’t concern them. You can’t keep an intact human in here.”
Intacthad never sounded like a dirty word to me before, but it did now.
“She doesn’t poke her nose into things,” said Sylvester, which was patently untrue.
“That’s beside the point. You can’t keep her here. You can’t know what she’s doingallthe time. It can’t all be housecleaning and cookery—the place is lousy with magic! You don’t need her.”
“Food made without magic tastes better,” he said. “And we can’t eat magical food all the time and stay in best health. Why not have someone to prepare it?”
“I don’t understand you,” said his sister with a sigh.
“I know.”
“Look,” she said. “I told Father about her.”
“Why?” His voice changed, grew more resonant, as if he had suddenly sat up straighter.
“Because you can’t do this, Sylvester. You’re new. You don’t understand the rules yet.”
“I understand them just fine.” It sounded as if he were standing and moving about. I still could not see him, but I could see the nauseating little jar of drifting flesh in his sister’s hands. The ...thinginside—my mind shied away from it—turned a little, like a babe in a transparent belly. “Why did you have to say anything?”
“It isn’t safe to keep her. You know it isn’t safe.”
“What is he going to do?” There was a thread of panic in his voice, odd to hear.
“I don’t know, but I would advise you to get rid of her, one way or another, before he does anything.” A silence. The jar in her lap tilted a little, and thethingpressed up close and gruesome against the glass.
