Cruel Beauty

He leaned his forehead against mine.

“Trust me,” he said.

And I did.

The next day, I heard the bell again.

I stopped in the hallway, fists clenched, and counted off the peals. One, two, three. I hate my husband. Four, five, six. I’m going to stop him. Seven, eight. I’m going to stop him. Nine, ten. No matter what it costs, I will break his power.

The bell stopped. I waited, taut, a moment longer; then I went on with my exploration.

Shade was right. The way to survive was to realize I couldn’t stop him.

This day.

9

Only a fool would feel safe in the house of the Gentle Lord.

But as the days fell into a simple pattern, I started to lose my fear. Every evening I dined with Ignifex. No matter what I said, he laughed and mocked me in return . . . but no matter what, he was never angry. At the end of each dinner, he asked me if I wanted to guess his name, and I said no. Then sometimes he kissed my hand or cheek—but he never again kissed my neck and he never followed me to my room. And though sometimes I was uncomfortably aware of the exact space between us, or his touch lingered on my skin after he had gone, I never felt the strange current of desire again.

Maybe I had wanted him only because he looked so much like Shade. I told myself that, and after a while I started to believe it.

Day and night, I was free to explore the house—and I went everywhere that I could, for my key opened almost half the doors. I found a rose garden under a glass dome; the roses formed a labyrinth in which I always got lost, and yet—according to the cuckoo clock at the door—I would always stumble out again in exactly twenty-three minutes. I found a greenhouse full of potted ferns and orange trees. The air was thick with the warm, wet smell of earth. Bees hummed through the air; the glass walls were frosted with condensation. I found a round room whose walls were covered in mosaics of naiads and tossing waves, and the air always smelled of salt, and no matter which way I turned, the door was always directly behind me.

Every day I went to look in the mirror and see Astraia, and most nights I visited the Heart of Water at least briefly, to walk on the water and watch the lights. Usually Shade was there too; there were not many things he was permitted to say, but we would sit in companionable silence. He often drew the lights down; sometimes he gave them to me, sometimes wove them into lacy patterns around us, in the air or trembling on the surface of the water. I watched and said very little. At those times, I could almost forget my mission, and I felt no hatred festering in my heart. It was the only peace I’d ever known, and I didn’t want to lose it.

I desperately wanted not to lose it. So I never kissed him again. Occasionally he touched my wrist or cheek, and then I wanted to twine and lock our fingers, to kiss him and sink down into the water and be lost in perfect azure peace. But I didn’t know that he would want it. And every other time I’d loved somebody, it had twisted in my heart. I couldn’t risk it with him.

Instead I sat still beside him, my heart beating fast but my face as calm as his, and only darted him sideways glances. A hundred times I wished I could ask him, Why did you kiss my lips? Why don’t you kiss me again? But the words always stuck in my throat: they were too needy, too selfish, too foolish—and how could I ask for more, when he had already given me so much?

I still wasn’t sure that I loved him. Love—the kind that was holy to Aphrodite—was not something I had ever allowed myself to think about much. If you desired someone, if he comforted you, if you thought he might leech the poison out of your heart, was that love? Or only desperation?

Whenever the knot of emotions in my chest grew too tight, I jumped up and practiced racing from the Heart of Water to my bedroom at a dead run. When the time came, I would have to write all the sigils quickly; as soon as one heart failed, Ignifex would surely notice and try to stop me.

I got faster. I learnt to race through the hallways and pick all the right doors back to my bedroom while barely even looking, and I arrived still breathing easily. And once I was in my bedroom—far enough from any of the hearts that I didn’t have to worry about an accidental reaction—I practiced the sigils, training myself to draw them not just accurately but swiftly, until the motions became like a dance.

But no matter how I searched, I never found a trace of the other hearts.

Until one morning, five weeks after I arrived, I tried a new door and walked into the vestibule where I had first met Ignifex. And it occurred to me that I was still a virgin, and my virgin knife—still never used to cut a living thing—was right here, albeit embedded twelve feet up in the wall.

I had never believed in the Rhyme before. And when Ignifex had taken the knife away from me, he had treated it like a joke, not the only weapon that could destroy him.

But I suspected my husband would treat being cast into the abyss of Tartarus as a joke. And while he was happy to let me attack him with all the cutlery at the dinner table, he had gotten my knife away from me at once. That didn’t prove that the Rhyme was true . . . but he hadn’t punished or imprisoned me for my previous attempt at stabbing him, which meant it wouldn’t hurt to try.

It took me the whole morning to get to the knife. The house did not seem to contain any kind of ladder, so I had to find furniture suitable for stacking, and that day I couldn’t find a single room with tables, only chairs and stools. It was a rather precarious-looking pyramid that I built, but it held when I climbed it, and finally I was able to grip the hilt of my knife again.

I grinned. Whether Ignifex lived or died tonight, at least he would receive a nasty surprise.

I tugged at the knife. It didn’t move. I tugged again, harder, and then there was the tiniest bit of give. With a grunt, I gave the knife a sudden jerk—and it came out as if it had never been stuck. I wobbled a moment, then fell over backward—

Into a pair of arms. The shock was enough to daze me for a moment, and in that moment Ignifex set me on my feet, plucked the knife from my hands, hid it somewhere on his person, and raised an eyebrow at me.

“I’m starting to wonder if I should ever leave you alone,” he said mildly, dropping a hand to my shoulder.

I stiffened.

“Then don’t,” I said. “Stay right here and never strike another bargain.”

“Oh, you’re that desperate to be with me?” He leaned forward, his hand still on my shoulder. “If you wanted a kiss, you only needed to ask.”

His touch was light, but I felt it as precisely as the lines of a lithograph, with my body for the paper.