16

Our midnight adventure left me weary. I was nearly swaying as Cobie and I followed the freinnen to their studio the next day, dreading the long, terrible hours of stitching ahead.

Fritz’s mention of the freinnen spending a little time in their sewing room each day had been a massive understatement. Remaking their clothes was all they seemed to do—though, now, I understood why.

As we passed his workshop, the door swung abruptly open.

“Seneschal-elect.” Fritz’s voice was relieved.

I curtsied slightly, avoiding his eyes. “Your Highness.”

I’d probably gotten the honorific wrong; perhaps I should’ve addressed him as Your Grace or Your Majesty or Your Serene Beneficence. Neither Torden nor Bear had made much of titles, we never used them aboard the Beholder, and Perrault wasn’t here to correct me. More important, I wouldn’t be standing in front of Fritz long enough for him to comment. I carried on after the quickly disappearing queue, but the fürst stopped me. “Your Grace—”

I turned. My smile felt tight. “I’m not due to return to irritate you for another two days.”

“Selah, please come in,” Fritz said, and the apology in his tone took me aback.

I paused. “Cobie,” I called after her retreating form. She turned, and I pointed to Fritz’s open workshop door.

Cobie looked surprised, but nodded significantly. “I’ll let the others know.”

They wouldn’t notice my absence, and Cobie wouldn’t say a word to them. But she would be watching and listening.

Fritz ushered me inside and closed the door behind us.

The workshop looked a bit tidier than it had the previous day. I wove through the maze of tables and sheets before turning to face him.

“Why did you invite me back?” I asked. “You don’t want me here. You said so.”

Fritz put his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. “I felt bad.”

My face burned. “Flattering.” I started toward the door. “I’ll go join your sisters.”

“No—stay. Please,” Fritz managed. “Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured to a single chair along the wall, sitting by itself. Despite myself, I laughed.

“What?” Fritz sounded affronted.

He had made an effort in the awkwardest manner possible.

“Now I really feel like a child,” I said, thinking of our last conversation and beginning to laugh in earnest. “You might as well have me stand in the corner.”

“That wasn’t my intention.” His brow furrowed. “What would make it a more inviting space?”

Books. Fire. Rain. A kiss.

The thought of an attic study above a library suddenly sprang, unbidden, into my mind, followed immediately by a fjord at sunrise.

I swallowed and pushed the memories from my mind. Fritz wasn’t trying to romance me, and I didn’t want him to. Both realizations eased me a bit.

“A table?” I twisted Torden’s ring on my index finger. “Something to eat or drink?”

I regretted my last suggestion as soon as I’d made it, in light of the fare I’d been served at meals, but Fritz immediately straightened. “Yes! Of course.” He bustled over to a copper contraption in the corner and poured coffee into a mug, pausing first to set what looked like a piece of paper over its mouth.

He passed me the cup. I peered inside, curious. “What was the paper for?”

Fritz’s face brightened. “It’s a filter. A woman named Melitta Bentz developed them, to keep the grounds out of the coffee.”

“Any sugar?” I asked hopefully.

Fritz repaired to the coffee maker and returned with a small bowl. “Don’t ask where I got it.” He smiled slightly.

I took the sugar bowl with shaking fingers.

It was nothing. A throwaway comment. A joke.

But it meant Fritz had secrets. Sources. Ways of getting things from beyond the court. And that was a start.

I would have bet it was a bigger lead than Lang had; reticent though he’d been, I doubted he could have resisted boasting about it.

I sat in my lone chair and sipped my coffee, reveling in the sweetness and my own little victory. Fritz settled down next to one of his machines, slid on a pair of spectacles, and began to tinker with a fitting at the end of a hose.

“So what are you doing in here?” I asked, curious. “Building the perfect woman?”

“I told you, I don’t have time for romance.”

“So what, then?” I pressed.

Fritz took off his glasses again and looked at me. “Important things.”

I laughed. “Goodness, Fritz.” Could he really not hear himself?

He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude again. I’m hardly the charming host you expected.”

What would Fritz make of Bear’s initial biting sarcasm and his eventual efforts to win me over? Of Torden, and his brothers ribbing him and upending half his attempts at romance? Fritz was certainly nothing like either of them.

In fact, Fritz reminded me a bit of me.

I tipped my head to one side, startled by a sudden sense of kinship with him. In Fritz’s frustrated expression, I recognized every time Alessandra had interfered with my work, every budget of mine that she’d flouted in her extravagance.

“Back home, I’m responsible for about three thousand acres, not to mention the cattle, the gardens, and other sundries.” I swallowed, missing my father even as I spoke the words. “My stepmother arranged to send me here without consulting me. I understand having your pursuits interrupted by someone with no regard for what they mean to you.”

Fritz blinked at me, stymied. “I don’t know how large an acre is, to be quite honest with you.”

I gave him half a smile. “Use your imagination.”

After a long moment, he spoke. “A stylist in Rouen invented a way to dry women’s hair quickly.” He nodded at the hose before him, then gestured to a row of gas lamps on a table nearby, each smashed, each connected to an identical hose.

I stood and shifted closer. “So you want to . . . dry your hair?”

“No, I want to dry out the castle.” Fritz pinched the bridge of his nose. “The rot and mildew are everywhere. The carpets, the wood, the tapestries and upholstery. And . . .” He gestured at the machine. “I hoped the stylist’s machine might work for my purposes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to repair the roof?” I mused. “Or patch the leaking walls?”

“Only my father can authorize improvements on such a scale.” He sighed, looking dissatisfied. “Only he can stop things from growing worse.”

I thought of my father. Of his body’s slow slide toward ruin, of the sadness that had seemed to weigh on him since my mother had passed, of Alessandra’s relentless emptying of our coffers. Of my own powerlessness to deal with the source of my problems, rather than address their symptoms.

Fritz did not speak of the tsarytsya, of her thoughts on his castle and his court, and I wondered if he believed what I only hoped was true: that, if not beyond her reach, we were beyond Baba Yaga’s notice in a moldering house at the edge of her world.

“You’re just trying to make the best of the situation he created,” I finished for him. Fritz nodded glumly. With a rush of sympathy, I raised my mug in his direction and drained it.

“I should go,” I said after a long moment, heading for the door. “Your sisters will be wondering where I am.”

They would not. But I wanted to leave Fritz thinking fondly of me, and to do that, I needed to actually leave him.

“It was nice talking to you,” Fritz said. He seemed to mean it.

“We’re not so different, you and I.” I gave him a wan smile. “You should let yourself trust, sometimes, that someone might understand.”