The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [65]
I looked like my mother.
Turning from the mirror so quickly I almost fell over my own feet, I ventured into the hallway. Graystone was vast and deserted in the daylight, muted with emptiness. I wandered back along the route I’d taken to the library and the kitchen, though it was devoid of all its menace in the daytime. The sour portraits of Grayson patriarchs still glared at me from under their layer of finely aged dust in the rear parlor. I paused to read their nameplates, stern as their visages. HORNTON. BRUCE. EDMUND.
The newest portrait’s placard read ARCHIBALD GRAYSON. I stopped. I was finally going to get to see what my father looked like. If there was anything of him in me. I stepped close, eager to take in every last brushstroke in the light.
My father was dapper and besuited in the painting, streaks of white in otherwise dark hair at his temples and a piercing set of eyes bookended by lines the only hint he wasn’t still a young man. Spectacles on a chain marred an otherwise pristine green silk cravat and his angular cheekbones gave him a disapproving edge, rather like one of my professors. Though, unlike any of my professors, my father was handsome, albeit in a bookish way. Conrad favored him in feature if not in coloring, and after a bit looking at Archibald became too much like looking at the much older, sterner version of my brother. I moved away, back to Thornton, back down the line into the safety of the past.
I didn’t look anything like Archibald. Our eyes were the same, but there the resemblance ended. It put a weight on me, one that I felt like I couldn’t shake off. I wanted so badly to ask Archibald about Nerissa, and everything that had happened. I wanted him so badly to come back and answer me. But he wouldn’t, because wishes didn’t come true, because fairy godmothers weren’t real.
Hurrying toward the foyer, I nearly smacked into Bethina. She shied, and the tray she held spilled oatmeal and toast onto the worn carpet runner.
“Stone and star. Forgive me, miss.” She knelt and began to scrub up the oats and tea with her apron corner.
“My fault, really,” I said, crouching to pick up the toast. It was all heels and felt rough and stale. “You came out of the kitchen,” I observed.
“Can’t very well leave the young miss of the house without her breakfast, can I?” Bethina sniffed. “There’s still a few things in the icebox and the root cellar. ’Sides, it’s daylight and with you three here, I figger the shadows might not find a way in, to … well, you know what I’m saying, miss.”
She shuddered, and scrubbed harder at the rug.
“That’s very kind of you,” I said, standing and smoothing down my new dress. Silk felt like what I imagined wearing a nightjar’s skin would, slick and cold. “Do you think you could bring my breakfast to the library?”
Bethina wrinkled her nose. “I surely couldn’t, miss. That room gives me the creeping spooks, all up and down my back. I’ll leave it in the warming oven, should you take a notion to eat.” She pinched the back of my knee from her vantage. “And you should eat, miss. You haven’t got anything up top or on the stern for a future husband to admire. Like Mr. Harrison, for instance?”
I sputtered at how matter-of-fact she was about the whole thing, jerking from her reach. “I … my … That’s really none of your business, Bethina.”
“Just so, miss.”
In the entry, I found my schoolbag where Cal had flung it when we made our frantic entry into Graystone. I dug through my possessions—now largely mildewed and mud-spattered—and found my toolkit. Straightening my spine, I went to the library again and, just as before, the double doors slid open at my approach. Ice danced up my skin, into my blood like electricity and aether.
Hearing a curse from the rear parlor, I backed away gratefully and retraced my steps down the portrait hall. I wasn’t ready to brave the library again just yet.
In the parlor, Cal was poking a desultory fire. I watched him for a moment, his long limbs bunched up like a new foal’s, cursing and red-faced