My throat closed on the words, but it didn’t matter. None of these people believed I could do what I said, or that I would suffer what I knew I would in consequence.
“And Valentin gives my father what he wants, gets who he wants in return, and Will is free to live out the rest of his days in your arms. A happy ending for everyone. Who am I to stand in the way?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would you want to stand in the way? What do you want?”
Rahel threw her napkin on the table in front of her and pushed back her chair. The men stood as she did, but I kept my seat.
“I wanted to see you, my dear,” she said. “And now that I have, I am quite content.”
She left, and Berit followed. The men retired to the next room for cigars, and Valentin offered to escort me to my room. We climbed the stairs slowly. I was more exhausted than I had expected. My head ached, reminding me how recently it had been pushed into a wall. Valentin kept pace with me silently, patiently. At the top of the stairs, I stopped to catch my breath. I looked up through the domed ceiling far above me, into the gray English sky.
“If I asked you what all that meant, would you tell me?” I asked Valentin without looking at him.
He shook his head slowly. “I cannot.”
“Did Will—” I didn’t want to ask this. I had a cowardly impulse to banish the question, not just from the tip of my tongue but from my mind as well. “Did Will hurt her, somehow?”
Valentin was quiet for a long moment. His teeth worked against each other behind his closed mouth.
“No,” he said. I waited for him to elaborate, but he did not. We continued down the hallway, and I counted the doorways as we passed, wondering who and what was in each. We were on the second floor, below the rooms where Will and Dominic were being kept. Perhaps they felt I was less likely to leap from a window in an attempt to flee. If so, they were right, though it wasn’t my skirts that would prevent me from trying it.
Valentin unlocked a door and held it open for me. Inside was a lovely, high-ceilinged room decorated in soft shades of blue and gold. The bed dominated, a beautiful brocaded affair, with a blue satin canopy draping down from a gold filigreed circle. The paneled walls were papered with blue and green chinoiserie, and a broad window and large gold mirror seemed to expand the room outside itself. I crossed to the vanity, letting my fingers trail over the ribbons and beads from a broken necklace as I passed. I threw open the closet doors, where several delicate gowns reflected the same feminine sensibility as the decor.
“I do not believe those will fit you,” said Valentin from the doorway. He watched me with a guarded, flat expression. His fists were closed tight. “But you are welcome to try them on.”
I touched a petal-pink silk gown, and from the still set of Valentin’s jaw, it was clear that I was not only unwelcome to wear it, he did not even like me to look at it.
“Whose room is this?” I asked.
“For now, it is yours,” he said.
I sat in the chair in front of the vanity and opened a drawer. A letter box lay inside. I touched it. Valentin’s posture tightened. His whole frame was dense with restrained action, but he was in control. He wouldn’t stop me. But I pushed the letter box to the back of the drawer. It was not mine, and I was not the sort of person who read letters meant for others. I pulled out an ivory-handled comb. A long black hair was threaded through it. Deliberately, I took the hair between my thumb and forefinger.
“Not Rahel,” I said. “She is blond. And I rather doubt all of this would be quite to her taste.”
“You asked if Will Percy had hurt Rahel,” said Valentin. He barely opened his clenched jaw to say it. “You thought he might have. And yet you mean to make such a sacrifice for him? To give up your reason, as you believe you will?”
“I asked, and you told me he hasn’t hurt her,” I said. “You declined to say more. Should I turn on my dearest friend because the man who abducted us both seems to hate him for no good reason?”
“Your dearest friend.” His words dripped with contempt. “Is that what he is to you?”
“Not only my dearest friend.” I thought back to the day when he first came to the chateau. He had bowed to my mother but smiled past her, right at me, thinking about how he would like to make me laugh. “My only friend.”
“Your only friend?” repeated Valentin. “What about the other one? Dominic?”
“Dominic is my friend,” I agreed. “But I met him only four days ago. So you might call him the exception that proves the rule.”
I picked up the beads on the vanity and rolled them on my palm. I felt Valentin’s eyes on me and wished he would leave.
“You’ve had a lonely life,” he said.
I looked up at him in surprise. The contempt was gone from his voice. He sounded softer, thoughtful. Like he had actually considered, for a moment, what it might have been like to be me.
I hadn’t meant to invite pity. I never meant to do that.
“I suppose so, before Will came,” I said. “All my friends had been dead hundreds of years.”
Valentin’s expression tilted in confusion.
“My friends,” I explained. “Paracelsus, Ortolanus, Jean de Meung, Jābir ibn Hayyān.”
“Alchemists,” he said, his confusion clearing. “You’re an odd girl, Theosebeia.”
“I should be more like this one, I suppose?” I asked, holding up the dark-haired girl’s beads and gazing around her room. If Burggraf Ludwig kept
