Chapter 708: House Kessarine

The door of her old bedroom still carried her height marks, a ladder of scratches climbing the frame. Somebody cut over every one with a blade since she left, deepening each line far past her memory.

Cessy stood before it with the red wax seal crumbling in her fist.

'Ten years of dust would have been kinder than fresh cuts.'

House Kessarine rose above the Thorn District in black marble, shaped like a throat opened by a knife. Its windows were slits, its gutters ran with red dye, every servant bowing far too low to trust.

"You're doing the thing where you pretend you aren't scared," Hajin said from behind her shoulder.

"I am a Kessarine, I am never scared, I am merely well-informed about what waits inside," she answered, lifting her chin.

He caught her at the guesthouse gate at dawn, then refused to let her walk off alone. Now he stood in the dim corridor, grinning at a hundred portraits of her silent, toothy ancestors.

"Your family has a lot of teeth," he whispered, "I count at least forty in this hallway."

She jabbed him in the ribs, "They are heirlooms, so don't stare."

Every portrait here wore the same smile, painted by someone plainly afraid of the sitter's temper. Their eyes followed Hajin along the corridor, as though pricing him by the pound at market.

"Does your mother like me?"

"She likes nobody, she is merely curious which of us will break first."

A footman in livery the color of old blood took their coats without once lifting his eyes from the floor.

The door at the corridor's end swung open before she touched it, spilling cold roses everywhere. Matron Ysolde Kessarine waited there in wine-colored silk, her thin smile a knife drawn halfway free.

"Cessy, darling, you have grown into that mouth at last, I always feared it would stay too large for your face."

"You look well yourself, Mother, I'm told grief keeps the skin tight," Cessy said, folding her arms over her ribs.

"Such spirit, darling, it is a relief to see something of mine survived the surface."

A tall figure stepped out of the shadows beside the matron, pale as paper in black. Lucan did not smile or wave, only bowed his head politely, exactly the way servants do.

"Mother asked me to be here, so I am here," he said coolly.

Her smirk slid off her face like a mask, too fast for her to catch.

"Lucan, you could have warned me," she said, far too softly.

He brushed a speck from his cuff, "I did try, you were busy being dramatic."

Ysolde's fan snapped open with a flick of silk, her gaze drifting past her daughter's shoulder to Hajin. She studied him the way a butcher regards an unfamiliar cut of meat hanging in a crowded market.

"And this is your stray," she said, stepping close enough to smell the tea on her breath, "how thoughtful of you to bring him home."

Before anyone could stop her, she caught his chin between two lacquered fingers, smiling sweetly like a hostess. She turned his face to the lamp, thumbing his lip back to check his teeth like a horse's.

"Strong jaw, decent molars, one chip, no rot," she murmured, "he'll be cheap to feed."

"Hey, I brush every day," Hajin mumbled around her fingers, looking more amused than offended.

"He's mine," Cessy said.

The corridor went so quiet that she heard the red dye dripping in the gutters outside. Lucan's eyebrow rose a quarter inch while Ysolde's fan froze mid-flutter above her bared, perfect teeth.

Heat flooded Cessy's face, climbing to the tips of her ears until she felt scarlet.

"Mine to... bring home, I mean, he is my guest, I was speaking of hospitality," she added, far too fast.

"Of course you were, darling," Ysolde said, releasing his chin at last, "how very modern of you."

Hajin rubbed his jaw, giving Cessy a sideways look that was entirely too pleased with itself, "That's the nicest thing anybody's said about me all week."

"Say another word, I dare you," she snapped, her tail lashing against the marble.

"Not a one, I'm in the middle of being claimed."

Ysolde laughed once, a brittle sound, then swept into the old bedroom without waiting for anyone. Every dust sheet was gone, the quilt lay freshly pressed, a candle burning on the nightstand.

'She kept it ready for me this whole time, I'll never forgive her for that.'

"Sit down, nobody is going to bite you," Ysolde said, patting the mattress, "I have something to tell you that I should have said eleven years ago."

Cessy sat on the edge of her old bed, the springs creaking exactly as they always did. Hajin leaned against the doorframe with folded arms, while Lucan lingered in the dim hall outside it.

He studied the carpet as though it owed him an apology he could never hope to collect, jaw set tight.

"Eleven years ago a child went missing from Ibaran's own court, the last daughter of the Horned Line," Ysolde said, lowering herself into the chair by the window.

"A hidden child," Hajin repeated, his arms uncrossing slowly.

"His Majesty wanted her hidden by the one house nobody would suspect of kindness, so he asked us to carry her out of the Underworld."

Cessy's hands went cold on the quilt as she searched her mother's face for any sign of lies. She found only the tired weight of a woman rehearsing this speech in a mirror for a decade.

"Carry her where, Mother?" she asked.

"To the First Prince's laboratory in Silverwood, under a false name, with a number already waiting for her arm."

The room tilted a little, as if the whole manor drew one slow breath through its narrow slits. Hajin pushed off the doorframe, his voice dropping low and flat, nothing like the laughter in the corridor.

"You handed Nyra to Ruvan," he said.

"My husband's men carried her, my signature stamped the crate, I never once asked what lived inside it."

"I knew," Lucan said quietly from the hall.

Cessy turned slowly to stare at her brother's profile through the open door of the bedroom. He kept his eyes on the floor, shoulders rigid, a man confessing to a blank wall.

"I was fourteen, I carried the crate to the cart myself, I told myself it held ledgers."

He swallowed, his jaw working, "I should have told you the moment I saw her horns in Silverwood."

"You let me hug her, braid her hair, tuck her in... you watched me do all of it—"

Cessy could not finish, so she pressed both palms flat against her knees and stared at them. Those hands tucked blankets around a sleeping girl while her family's hands delivered that girl to pain.

'The ones who hurt her are sitting in my mother's chair, wearing my face.'

"She's fifteen, Mother, she steals candy and hates being tucked in," Cessy said, her voice cracking.

Her mother's lacquered nails tapped once against the chair arm, "She wears gold on her horns now, darling, they suit her."

"You watched us," she said, staring, "all of it, from some balcony."

"The whole Underworld watched you, dear, I merely had the better seat and a warmer cup."

"Why did you agree to it, Mother?" Cessy demanded.

"The King asked, darling, a request from him is a door you walk through or a coffin you are carried out of."

"You could have said no."

"Nobody has refused Ibaran in three thousand years, I was not going to be the first with two children to feed," Ysolde replied, studying her rings.

Cessy pictured Nyra asleep behind a guesthouse door, one stubborn man on the floor outside it. Nobody in this manor deserved to speak that child's name aloud, Cessy herself least of all.

Lucan stepped into the doorway at last, his hands clasped behind him, "I tried to tell you in the carriage, every word turned to dust before I spoke it."

"Then you should have written it down," she shot back.

"I wrote it eleven times, I burned every letter before the ink dried," he said, looking away.

A maid slipped in with a tray of tea, then backed out without ever raising her eyes. Red dye stained her sleeves to the elbow, the same mark every servant in this house wore.

'Eleven letters, yet he still sat across from me at every breakfast.'

"Why tell us now?" Hajin asked, low and dangerous, a thread of gold flickering along his wrist.

"The King wished me to make you angry before dusk, I find I would rather make you informed."

He frowned, "He wants me angry?"

"An angry guest breaks a rule, a broken rule is a gift to a host, Ibaran adores receiving gifts."

Gold crawled along his wrist, then dimmed as he forced his fist open one finger at a time.

"Not in this house, the walls listen, my mother likes it that way," she murmured, laying her fingers over his knuckles.

Hajin tilted his head, "What does the King's peace do to a man who tries?"

Ysolde smoothed her skirt, "It unbirths whatever offends it, dear, one limb at a time, in the gentlest way possible, you will not even notice the hand is gone until you reach for a cup."

Hajin crossed the room in three strides, then crouched so she had to look at him. He did not take her hands or speak, only waited there, unafraid of her family's teeth.

"If I'd known, I would have carried her out myself... would you believe that?" Cessy whispered, her voice small enough to embarrass her.

He did not hesitate, "Yeah, Cessy, I do."

Something in her chest folded like paper, then her forehead dropped against his sternum without her permission. He smelled of woodsmoke, cheap soap, his heart thudding steady against her aching skull, ridiculous and alive.

She stayed exactly one breath, fingers curling into his shirt, before sitting up.

Her smirk returned, thin and wobbling, but she wore it with her chin high.

"If you tell the others, I will bite you in your sleep," she warned.

He thumbed a tear off her cheek, "Noted, I'll sleep with my eyes open."

"Brave of you to smirk, darling, your face was never built for lying."

Ysolde rose from her chair, smoothing her gown like a hostess finished with the soup course. She stopped at the window, where the distant palace burned pale against the inverted sky above.

"He will want his cousin back, darling, since the Courtesies begin at dusk."