Old pride rose in me, inevitable and a little embarrassing.
I wasn’t her anymore. This wasn’t my home. I didn’t even belong in that castle, or anywhere around it. I never had.
“Where now?” I asked.
He nodded down the street running at a right angle to the one leading toward the castle. “Not far.”
This district was even quieter than the southern district. I felt freer and more out of place. Beside me, the stink still rose from the grate. “What was that place we came from?”
“The sewer.” He lowered his hood, black hair shining white and blue under moonlight. “Acid rain runs along the streets, through the grates?—”
“A sewer? Here?” Highmark had one, but that was Feyreign.
Faint amusement gleamed in his eyes. “You didn’t fantasize as a girl about how the inner district got rid of their shit?”
Now that I was paying attention, the smell up here was distinctly better than my district’s. Not half as fresh as Sylvanwild, but this was no treeless expanse. The buildings were taller, the window boxes planted, and the lanterns along the street were actually lit—all of them, not one in three.
Fresh envy spiked through me. Would I ever stop being poor and desperate, in sad and unexpected and fearful moments like this one? I was a queen, and I was Eurydice Waters.
Maybe childhood never felt far away for any of us. Maybe I would always feel unwelcome beyond the portcullis.
Dorian’s fingers touched my shoulder, and he urged me down a narrower street. “Over here.” His breath gusted out as we came to the stoop of a two-story row house. “Boarded. Of course.”
The windows to the home had at some point been nailed over with imprecisely laid boards. Whatever lay beyond was maybe visible during daytime between the cracks. If I set my face to the window now, only darkness would push back.
Dorian opened the front door with his shoulder; it gave withoutreal resistance, like any handle or knob had long ago been broken or just given up. The floorboards groaned under his boots.
I stepped into the doorway and paused. Dorian stood in a small sitting room filled with the dust and spiderwebs of disuse. Chairs stood at odd angles, like everyone had just gotten up. One had been knocked over.
He knelt and righted it. “Close the door.”
I did so, pressing my back to it. The moonlight through the window boards patterned the chairs, the walls. Bookshelves were inset along the far wall, next to something strange I didn’t recognize—a black box with a fat tube running into the ceiling.
I crossed to it, set my fingers on it. Metal, cold; my fingertips came away black.
“It’s a stove.” His voice had gone thick. “It burns coal.”
“Coal?”
“For heat, in winter.” He stepped through a doorway into another room. His words echoed around the frame. “The winters can be brutal here.”
I stiffened. The doorway was still, empty, yet I had a sudden understanding that the person who had passed through it was not the person he’d been five minutes ago, or days ago, or weeks ago. Not the historian, not the killer, not myveyre.
Notjustthose things, at least.
The uneasy feeling kept me in place. It made my heart a rabbit. It turned my stomach over.
“Your name,” I said. “It’s a common one in the Kingdom of Storms.”
No answer from the other room.
I took a step forward. The floorboards announced my approach. “A highborn name.”
A scoff from around the corner. “Can you be highborn if you live daily under acid?”
That took my breath and yanked it from my lungs. My hand wentout to the dusty bookcase, still filled with books. The room felt small and too large and strangely uneven.
It didn’t make sense. He had already taken me to his mother’s house in Sylvanwild.