Moodily she glanced over the chair’s arm to figure out why he kept moving his hand like that. “What in sin are you doing?”
Except that no sooner was the question out than she realized exactly
what he was doing. This sort of incredulous groping the ground would have made her laugh herself sick with anyone else, except that with Glenn she always suspected it wasn’t incredulity but a genuine effort to beat the glam by solving the trick, the same spirit in which he claimed to have thrown the book at her—trying to hit the bit of her he couldn’t see. By rights that should have made the effort all the more hilarious, except that this time there wasn’t any trick.
Everything was going to be something to be solved with him, always. He would always look for the trick.
She flopped back again, exasperated, her head tipped so far backwards that her long queue of hair dangled over the opposite arm, nearly to the floor. “
Paugh. You are most unreasonably stubborn betimes.”
With a quick flutter of movement, she was up and out of the chair as soon as he stood, planting herself before him with arms laced across her chest and with chin raised just enough that she could still look down the length of her nose at him. Somewhere in the interim she had become just a fraction shorter than he.
“Oh, aye, and it took you no time at all to work yourself through the last set of things. I’ll just slip back and put the kettle on while we wait, shall I?” She made no effort to move out of his path. “I don’t
want be clever enough. I shouldn’t have to be.” Her dark eyes grew stony once more. “If I want something badly enough, I’ll take it. You know that now. But if you set compassion as some sort of reward for being clever enough, you may keep it.”
In the face of his laughter and his avaricious leering, so much like her own, she delicately turned her back to him and glided away, simply because she knew the sharp stab of annoyance from having that look ignored and wanted to punish him for it. Now she wished she had not mentioned it at all. But now she felt bound. This was more important that her petty petulance. She had promised. It was his people. He would want to know, as much as she would want to know were it her own folk. Some things superseded others.
Perfectly silent, she took care to keep herself on the rugs, following them around the room like a little maze. Her fingers trailed over the hubbed spin of a book on a table, over a brass candlestick with a nearly new, unlit candle set in it, over the table’s beveled corner as she passed by. When she turned back toward him, she gripped the candlestick in both hands. With a sudden vicious twist, she jerked the candle free. The heavy holder thumped to the floor.
Between her hands, the taper darkened from wax-white to weathered ivory burnished to pearlescent luster by the oils of many hands. Her hands pulled apart as if drawing out a skein of smoke, and the candle’s skin hardened into bony striation, a spiral knotted with carvings that over the course of numberless years had worn to flat, featureless echoes: the arch of a horse’s neck. A round eye. The outline of a fanged mouth. Once it had been embossed along its length with a parade of these stiff figures. Once, too, the spiral had ended in a sharp tip, now nipped to a flat disc bored with a hole. The wall of the open bell was as thin and delicate as a seashell, a pale gold morning-glory, something less inclined to chip or crack than to simply melt.
There was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. No one who looked on it would ever consider it to be a seabeast’s tooth or an artifact of carved, bleached bone. One knew because
it knew what it was, what it had once been. Its voice, should it be sounded, would be an ancient, mournful cry of rage.
She had meant to hand it to him, but now that the thing was in hand, she could not bring herself to uncoil her fingers from it. It was nearly as long as her arm shoulder to fingertip. Once she had had a dream—was it a dream—where she had gone looking for it and it was gone. Now it was here, the first time she had laid eyes on it in nearly six years, and though it was impossible, even fatal, for her to believe her own glams, she could not shake the feeling that it was real.
“In the First Days,” she began, and then there was no need to speak further. The story awoke from whatever deepest whorl of her brain it resides and began to uncoil itself, stretching to fill the room between them, until the air was hot and moist as a kiss and the cracks in the plaster turned to green veins pumping sap. The floor groaned softly as it bulged, boards bent like taffy and then snapped as vast silver ferns unfurled. The room held its shape, barely. It managed to retain corners and a ceiling. An incongruous chair stood like a relic from a shipwreck tangled in vines, its original purpose no longer recognizable. Outside the window, the city street basked in the lazy afternoon light…but the window went dark, blotted out by the body of a sway, lumbering beast as tall as a haystack, longer than last-night’s carriage. Its red-brown fur hung in matted locks. The glass creaked dangerously as the beast's bulk brushed against it; one pane gave way with a snap and a brittle tinkle.
The glam held but a brief breath after the story ended, then silently fell apart. The room stepped out of the shadows of what had once been, and the sun shone indifferent through the unblemished window.
“And before you ask, He already knows all this,” she added quietly.