dropped spool of thread. She sensed that if she didn’t intervene, she and Nathaniel would become strangers to each other, and she wouldn’t be able to put things back the way they were before. She drew in an unsteady breath.
“I don’t want another place to stay!” she shouted up the stairs.
Nathaniel took one more step and halted, his spine straight. He didn’t turn around, as if he couldn’t bear to face her.
“I like it here,” she said, the truth surprising her as she spoke. “It almost feels like—like a home to me. I feel safe. I’m not afraid of you or your nightmares.”
He laughed once, a bitter, humorless sound. “You barely know me. You haven’t seen what I can do, not truly. When that happens, I expect you’ll change your mind.”
She thought of that night in the Blackwald, when he had sat gazing through the forest at his ancestor’s work, a wound hundreds of years old and still festering. Was that what he feared—that Baltasar’s evil lived on inside himself? Every beat of her heart hurt, like a knife sliding between her ribs.
She lifted a rose from the floor. Its petals were damp, and the thorns pricked her fingers. A symbol of love and life and beauty, so unlikely to see in Nathaniel’s empty, despairing manor, though in truth she hadn’t thought of his house that way in quite some time. Now she understood that the roses had been for her. A sign of hope, struggling up through the ashes.
“Perhaps I haven’t seen what you can do,” she said. “But I’ve seen what you choose to do.” She looked up. “Isn’t that more important?”
The question slipped past Nathaniel’s guard. He gripped the rail, off-balance. “I chose not to help you fight Ashcroft.”
Her heart ached. She gazed at his shoulders, the line of his back, which expressed his unhappiness so plainly. “It isn’t too late to change your mind.”
Nathaniel bent and leaned his forehead on his arm. Silence reigned. The foyer stank of aetherial combustion, but beneath that, there was the faint scent of roses. “Fine,” he said at last.
Joy rushed through Elisabeth like a gulp of champagne, but she didn’t dare ask for too much at once. “I can stay?”
“Of course you can stay, you menace. It isn’t as though I could stop you even if I wanted to.” He paused again. She waited, breathless, for him to force out the rest. “And fine, I’ll help you. Not for any noble reason,” he added quickly, as her spirits soared. “I still think it’s a lost cause. We’re probably going to get ourselves killed.” He resumed walking up the stairs. “But every man has his limits. If there’s one thing I can’t do, it’s stand by and watch you demolish irreplaceable antiques.”
Elisabeth was grinning from ear to ear. “Thank you!” she shouted after him.
Nathaniel waved dismissively from the top of the landing. But before he vanished around the corner, she saw him smiling, too.
TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN ELISABETH BROUGHT the scrying mirror to Nathaniel’s study the next evening, he didn’t seem surprised—even though, according to him, it had been lost for the better part of a century.
“It belonged to my Aunt Clothilde,” he explained. “She died before I was born, but I always heard stories about how she used it to spy on her in-laws.”
Elisabeth hesitated, remembering what Mistress Wick had told her the other day. “Wasn’t that after the Reforms?”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t believe the number of forbidden artifacts squirreled away in old homes like this one.” He closed his eyes and ran his fingers over the mirror’s edges, concentrating. “The Lovelaces found ambulatory torture devices in their cellar, including an iron maiden that chased them back upstairs, snapping open and shut like a mollusk. Personally, I won’t even go into my basement. There are doors down there that haven’t been opened since Baltasar built the place, and Silas tells me he had a bizarre obsession with puppets. . . . Ah.” His eyes snapped open. “There we are.”
She leaned over on the couch for a closer look. The glaze of frost had receded from the mirror’s surface. According to Nathaniel, there was nothing wrong with it; its magic had only needed to be replenished after lying dormant for so many years. Now, she and Katrien should be able to talk for as long as they wanted.
A delighted laugh escaped her. She looked up to find Nathaniel watching her, his eyes intent, as though he had been studying her face like a painting.