crowded my head. Anger, harsh words, fear, blood. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. The musty smell of age, damp and disregard filled my nostrils. I opened my eyes again and walked to the counter. I removed my glove and ran my finger through the thick dust. I stood outside the door to the workshop. Composing myself, I twisted the handle and let the door swing open. It creaked loudly before stilling.
I didn’t step inside, I just looked. The vats were cold, the fireplace a dark, barren space. The worktops were scattered with broaches and yards of wick rolled into tight circles. I saw remnants of candles, half-melted stumps, broken votive glasses, pillar moulds, just sitting there, abandoned. While I could recall the lessons, the burns, the triumph of mixing and pouring my early batches, of rolling the wax, straining the impurities, it seemed so pointless now. Even my lessons with Katina, those gentle explorations into the essence of objects, of extracting and distilling, no longer seemed relevant. Not when all I had focused on was kindness and beauty. Oh yes, Katina had warned me that life was not all sweetness and light. Little had I known back then how well I would learn that lesson. I recalled Cane and Dante, crushed beneath a Bond Rider’s horse. Hardly any of what she’d given me, what she’d imparted in our brief time together, apart from the basic skills, was meaningful to me. Not in the life I had now.
Even her order that I must not kill I’d ignored. And why shouldn’t I? Death was not her decision alone nor God’s. Not when I could so easily remove those who didn’t deserve to live. Even while I had these thoughts, others spun in my head: Katina’s warmth, her conversations about her childhood, about Estrattore. She’d always made them sound so good, so noble in their intentions. That was what she wanted from me. I hadn’t listened. I’d done terrible, unforgivable things, felt and responded to extreme emotions, as Baroque had accused. What a disappointment I would be to her.
Standing here, I could recapture those moments with her and Pillar. And yet, as I did, I found I wanted to let them go.
I felt time contract and then expand out into some endless void. How long had I been gone? Was it really more than a year? Looking over the ruins of my former life, it seemed like centuries. I sighed and closed the door.
‘Have you seen enough?’ asked Baroque. He had wiped a space on the counter and was leaning on it. I sensed his agitation, his nervousness. He’d brought me here, manipulated me into coming. He could wait.
‘There is one more place I want to go.’ I pointed upstairs. ‘Wait here, please.’ This was something I needed to do alone.
I slowly ascended, my heels clattering on the stairs. I paused beside the kitchen. It looked so … ordinary. So dirty and poor. And yet I had called this place home for the greater part of my life. Now it felt as remote to me as the distant Dolomites. I took in the blackened grate and pots, the chipped porcelain plates and wooden trenchers that lay on the table. What astonished me was that food had been left upon them and had rotted into hardened green lumps. Not even flies feasted on those remnants. Wherever Pillar had gone, he’d left in a hurry. His coat still hung from the hook. What had made him leave so quickly? I knew from Baroque that the Signori di Notte and the Cardinale had been through this area. God knows, Renzo had paid the price of harbouring me, but Pillar seemed to have escaped. I was relieved. For all that thoughts of him still hurt, I was glad he was safe. I wouldn’t have wanted him to be any other way. I touched the table in the hope of extracting something of his fate. Quinn’s face rose in my mind, and the lacerating power of her words, the agony of her beatings, almost reduced me to tears. I snatched my hand away. Pillar’s fate would remain a mystery.
It was better that way.
I turned aside and climbed the last staircase, to my room. There, I looked upon the tiny space that had been mine. I shook my head. It always seemed so much bigger in my dreams, in my memories. I walked around, trailing my finger along the edge of the two huge vats,