what came from having very few conversations over the years. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you don’t wanna tell me, so you’re evading the question.”
“I am not evading.”
“Look, I get it. You just don’t wanna talk about it. It’s okay—”
“I do not mind talking.”
Talking was strange after a lifetime filled with silence, but nice. I had discovered that I quite liked talking. It was so much easier to gather information that way, than by merely observing.
And yet it required putting into words concepts that did not always seem to fit.
“Then do it however you like,” Ray said. “We’re pretty simpatico mentally. Just send me the images.”
Yes, but of what? I thought. There was so much . . .
“I got nothing but time,” he pointed out.
I nodded, but then just lay there for a while longer, saying nothing. Pondering how to explain the thoughts and feelings I’d been having over the last few months. It felt odd to have someone ask.
It felt odder to want to answer.
“My life . . . isn’t mine,” I said slowly. “I live in the house of Dory’s friend. I do not have a house; I have never had one. I grew up in my father’s house, and since then, my sister has decided where we live.”
“But I thought you liked—”
“Shhh.”
I put a hand on Ray’s arm and he quieted.
“It is not my house,” I repeated. “And the people who live in it are not my friends. I see the fey sometimes—the honor guard to the princess?”
He nodded. It was a strange fact that my twin’s best friend had married a fey prince, and was thus a princess, but we had both grown used to it. What I had not grown used to was her bodyguards. Her father-in-law, the fey king Caedmon, had supplied them, and they did not like me.
“They like you,” Ray protested.
“They like Dory,” I corrected. “Not at first, but I think they have changed their minds. Yet they watch her, nonetheless, or rather, they watch for me. To see if the monster is going to emerge.”
“You are not a monster.”
“No, but I am an unknown, with power they cannot always counter, and thus a threat. I do not blame them; it is their job. But the fact remains, they are not my friends.”
“I’m your friend.”
I rolled my head over to look at him. “I would like to think so. But if so, you will be the first in a very long time.”
I heard childish laughter, from long ago, and it was so real that I started slightly. I remembered too much, and too well; it was both a blessing and a curse. I wondered which this was, as faces appeared in my mental eye that I had not thought about in years, but who had lived on the same street in Venice with me when I was a girl.
There was pudgy Luysio, who used to distract the candy vendors, so that I could steal a morsel for us both; here was pretty Gerita, with her flashing dark eyes and bouncing curls, who was such a good dancer that people would pay to watch her; over there was Rigi with his wooden sword, who had learned how to fight from a great uncle and then taught the whole street; here was tiny blonde Coletta, who liked to feed the birds . . .
“Woah, who are they?” Ray asked, because he could see them, too. I could have closed my mind to him, but I didn’t. I did the opposite, because I wanted him to understand.
And, suddenly, we were back there, my memory perfectly recreating the scene: red bricks and crumbling stucco buildings bordering dusty streets with narrow walkways, because you had to make room for the canals; pigeons nesting in ancient statue’s crowns, dripping droppings down the proud features of some Very Important Person who nobody remembered the name of anymore; heat shimmering off the marble facades of the wealthy, the shiny black paint on the gondolas, and the awed, sweaty faces of the tourists, and darkening the clothes of the beggars with lame legs who got up and walked home at the end of the day.
“Shit!” Ray said, gazing around.
I supposed this wasn’t what he’d meant by images.
“No, it’s just—I just—wow,” he said, and I smiled.
Venice was indeed overwhelming. There were the scents: spices and dirt, unwashed bodies and exotic perfumes, but most of all the ever-present smell of the sea and the things that came from it, the latter of