I spent the evening in the caves with Alistair, knees pressed together and fingers slick with ink, going over every test, contract, and history involving the Door. We both knew it was pointless, but he couldn’t give up. He so desperately wanted to be special.
“Every text says the same thing—the only way to entice a Vile into a deal is to offer up lives in some form or fashion.” I tugged the book from his hands and closed it. “It’s one of the Vile, Alistair. You may be the cleverest boy in the world, but you’re still only a mortal playing with immortal things.”
“Drawing lots is the most logical route.” He glanced at me, relaxing at my smile. “Those with skills unnecessary for the survival of Cynlira would submit their names, and the sacrifices would be randomly selected. What would we do if all our healers were part of the sacrificed? No, it would have to be based on skill, and then those within the draw would have an equal chance of survival.”
I sighed. I should have known not to hope by now.
“You’re disappointed,” he said.
I said nothing, and he had his answer.
“I understand how you reached that conclusion,” I said, “but surely you know that those with the money and time to master the skills would be exempt from the lots. It wouldn’t be fair at all.”
“You’ve been disappointed quite a bit lately.” He angled away from me. “Why stay?”
I grabbed his chair and turned him back to me. “For ages, people thought bad smells caused illnesses.”
“Yes?” His brows arched over his glasses. He had removed his coat, but the glasses never came off down here. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Their logic was sound, but they were still wrong.”
“Oh.” He sneered and snapped his tongue against the back of his teeth. “My logic can’t be infallible because I am fallible. That’s an excuse.”
I shrugged. “Whoever defines worth will define who survives, and that definition is not fixed.”
He stared at me, tired eyes hooded and heavy, and held out his hand. “I don’t want to kill that many people anyway. I want to create a better solution.”
He wanted to outsmart the Door, but I laced our fingers.
“I know,” I said. “You created a new way to sacrifice when you were a child. Surely, you have some ideas about this you aren’t sharing?”
Using intangible sacrifices wasn’t his creation, but considering what was coming, it was only fair I treat him nicely.
“They’re untested.” His lips crooked up, and he tugged me closer. “But I have a few.”
He spoke endlessly. It was as if we were back in that carriage weeks ago, our contract unwritten and no words existing between us. Except this time, I understood all of what he said, and he caught himself, backtracking to explain academic references I didn’t know. He never made it my fault for not knowing things. There was a tenderness in trusting another person to understand the threads of your thoughts.
For all of Alistair’s flaws, he did respect me. It was everyone he didn’t I worried for.
“You know,” I said, uncrossing my legs. I had taken a seat on the desk halfway through his latest ramble, and my knees were even with his chest. “Undertakers were all vilewrought back in the old days because deaths were a necessary sacrifice for life. People thought dying meant someone else could live.”
“That never made sense to me.” He stifled a yawn and turned so that my feet were in his lap. His fingers picked at my laces. “We know sacrifices aren’t equivalent. You can’t trade a life for a life.”
“Because we like explaining things,” I said and tapped his nose. “As hard as you pretend otherwise, you are very mortal.”
“I could hardly pretend to be immortal.” He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders back, skin thin as his fancy paper stretching across the blue veins of his throat. How fragile we were. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.” I plucked his glasses from his face and dropped them on mine. “Will you? Will he?”
His vilewright, always so shy, peeked over his shoulder.
“I want to keep reading.” His fingers tightened around my ankle. “If I sleep, I’ll have to prepare for tomorrow. It’s so tedious.”
“What if I help?” Tomorrow, everything would change, especially between us, and it was only fair that I give him what he wanted tonight. Everything would come to fruition or fall to rot. “We can talk. Believe it or not, I like talking to you.”
He didn’t treat me like I was only Lorena Adler, undertaker and outsider. Carlow and Basil were wonderful, but even they talked over me sometimes when discussing magic. It would have been easy to love Alistair. I wanted to love him, but what he had done and what he had allowed to be done tainted all the soft affection between us. So many people were valuing me for my wrights. It was nice to feel like he valued me.
“Considering what my mother did, I have to believe you.” He stood and helped me from the table. “Do you want… Well, we would have to go to my quarters.”
I pulled my legs from his lap and slipped from the desk. “I would like to judge how our Vilewrought Crown lives.”
No one had settled on a moniker for him yet.
He flushed. The halls were dim and empty, a few servants flitting about. Hana, a constant shadow behind us, walked silently, and Alistair carried on our conversation in a whisper as he led me toward the same wing as his study. His quarters were at the end of a high hall hung with portraits, their eyes a weight at the back of my neck. Alistair opened the door and ushered me inside. A painted Sundered Crown glared down at us. Hana stayed in the hall.
Crowns lived like the rest of us, only bigger and gilded. The room had an entry hall like a house would have had, and Alistair left his shoes and coat in a pile by the door. A shelf with telescopes, withies, books, swan-feather quills, statues, and two stuffed rabbits loomed over one wall. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, and everything had its own place. It was more museum than home.
“I can have a chair—”
“Alistair,” I said quickly, staring at him over my shoulder. “Really?”
It was hard to be scared of this barefoot boy wringing his hands at the impropriety of it all.
“You always treat my furniture like chairs, so I’m going to repay the favor,” I said.
Chairs were too confined and rigid. I wanted grounding and sprawling freedom. I wanted to be able to enjoy being understood so well by someone without any of the expectations that went with it. Intimacy without expectations was a luxury. “Unless it bothers you?” I raised one brow like he always did. “Or you had other plans, in which case I’ll be leaving.”
“No, thank you,” he said and wrinkled his nose. “The last time I had other plans was two years ago, and he’s half the country away, thank you very much.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me through a series of rooms, each more ornate than the last, and laughed when my eyes went wide at the walls lined not with tapestries and portraits but hand-scrawled notes and maps.
“You can read them later,” he said.
His bed was the only furniture in the final room. I sat on the edge, pulling a book from beneath a quilt. He stared at me as if he had never seen me before.
“No shoes on the bed,” he muttered and tugged off my boots. “I need to shave, wash my face, and go over my notes for tomorrow.”
“I can help with some of that.” I followed him into a small washroom with an extravagant copper tub, cushioned bench, and wide mirror. “Sit.”
“Really?” he asked but sat.
“Really.” I dampened a cloth and found his shaving tackle. “Do you trust me?”
“Of course,” he said, “but have you done this before?”
I laid my empty hand against his cheek and tilted his head back till his neck was arched and bare. “Only to the dead.”
He laughed.
I pressed both of my hands into his cheeks to warm his skin. He shuddered, pink pooling along his cheekbones and tips of his ears. I tapped his nose and gently ran my fingers in two circles up his nose and along his brows. I pulled away, and his face moved with my hands.
“Still,” I said and moved his head back till his crown was against my stomach. I spread the lather across his cheeks.
He closed his eyes. “What was your first contract?”
“My mother got hurt.” I ran my thumb across his mouth and flicked the soap away. “I wanted to heal her. Only managed to stop the bleeding, but I was thrilled.”
“I did the same thing,” he said. “Different reasons, of course. It was against the rules to use wrights without permission on the grounds then, and my mother seemed so smart. I didn’t want to fail when I showed her.”
“Alistair.” I picked up the blade. “Why were rules so important?”
“My mother made up most of them,” he said softly. “It was like a game when we were children, but after everything, I realized it was to make sure my father didn’t get angry at us.”
“She was protecting you.” I swept the blade down his cheek, and the scrape of metal against skin echoed in the silence. “Alistair, what I did—”
“You were right. She was dangerous in the worst ways.” He opened one eye. “Can we not talk about this?”
“Of course.”
His eyes fluttered shut. I worked in long, steady strokes. Layers of soap peeled away from his cheeks, and softly, I touched his jaw. The skin of his neck pulled taut, and he gripped his thighs. Here, too, I went slow, fingers bracing his chin as the blade slipped down his throat. He never flinched, and I never nicked him. I checked my job with the back of my empty hand.
“Why did you never use your wrights?” he asked, one of his hands reaching back to touch me.
I set aside the blade and cleaned his face. “My mother was afraid the Sundered Crown would find me. I wanted to be invisible. I wanted a life that wasn’t about what I could do for other people.”
“That sounds nice,” he whispered. He grabbed my hand, led me to the bed, and set me on its edge. “We should talk. Not about the Door. Just about us.”
“You have things to do,” I said, one hand still in his. “Doors to investigate and people to sacrifice.”
He folded himself at my feet, his cheek pressed against my knee. “Do you ever think about killing me like we did my mother?”
We—such a simple little word.
“No,” I said and pulled him onto the bed next to me. “It would be a waste.”
He wrapped one arm around me and laid his head on my chest. “Sometimes I think the same thing about you. What else are you thinking, Lorena Adler? Tell me everything.”
“Fine, but I want to hear about you.”
“Hardly an equivalent trade,” he muttered, but he couldn’t hide his shiver. “Do you think I’m a bad person?”
“Yes.” I threaded my fingers through his hair. “I do.”
He sighed. “You’re probably right.”