Zachary expects it to be the Keeper but there’s a young woman at the threshold looking concerned. This girl is about his age, bright-eyed and short with dark hair tamed into braids that frame her face but left wild in the back. She wears an ivory-colored version of the Keeper’s robe but simpler, except for the intricate white-on-white embroidery around the cuffs and hem and collar. She looks questioningly at Zachary and then turns to Mirabel and raises her left hand, holding her palm sideways and then turning it flat, palm up. Zachary knows without asking for a translation that she’s inquiring as to what is going on.
“We’ve been having adventures, Rhyme,” Mirabel says and the girl frowns. “There was a daring rescue and bondage and tea and a fire and two-thirds of us got poisoned. Also this is Zachary, Zachary this is Rhyme.”
Zachary puts two fingers to his lips and inclines his head in greeting automatically, knowing this girl must be an acolyte and remembering the gesture from Sweet Sorrows. As soon as he does it he feels stupid for assuming but Rhyme’s eyes light up and the frown vanishes. She places a hand over her breastbone and inclines her head in return.
“Well you two are going to get along just fine,” Mirabel observes, shooting a curious glance at Zachary before returning her attention to Dorian. She raises a hand to coerce the smoke from the incense closer, curls of it following the motions of her fingers and drifting along her arm. “You and Rhyme have something in common,” Mirabel says to Zachary. “Rhyme found a painted door when she was a youngster, only she opened hers. That was what, eight years ago?”
Rhyme shakes her head and holds up all of her fingers.
“You’re making me feel old,” Mirabel says.
“You didn?
??t go home?” Zachary asks and immediately regrets the question as the light fades from Rhyme’s face. Mirabel interrupts before he can apologize.
“Is everything all right, Rhyme?” she asks.
Rhyme gestures again and this one Zachary can’t interpret. A fluttering of fingers that moves from one hand to the other. Whatever it means, Mirabel seems to understand.
“Yes, I have it,” she says. She turns to Zachary. “Please excuse us for a moment, Ezra,” she says. “If he’s not awake by the time the incense goes out light another one, would you? I’ll be back.”
“Sure,” he says. Mirabel follows Rhyme out of the room, retrieving her bag from a chair as she goes. Zachary tries to remember if the bag looked like it had something large and heavy in it earlier, because it certainly does now. Mirabel and the bag are gone before he can get a better look at it.
Alone with Dorian, Zachary occupies himself with watching the curling smoke float around the room. It swirls over the pillows and drifts up to the ceiling. He tries to perform the same elegant conjuring gesture that Mirabel used to urge the smoke in the right direction but it curls up his arm instead, wrapping around his head and his shoulder. His shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore but he can’t remember when it stopped.
He leans over Dorian to adjust the cloth on his forehead. The top two buttons on Dorian’s shirt are undone, Mirabel must have done that, maybe to make it easier for him to breathe. Zachary’s gaze moves back and forth from the curling smoke to Dorian’s open collar and then his curiosity gets the better of him.
It feels like an intrusion, though it is a single button’s worth of trespassing. Still, Zachary hesitates as he undoes the button, wondering what Dorian might make of “I was looking for your sword” as an excuse.
The lack of a sword emblazoned on Dorian’s chest comes as both a surprise and a disappointment. Zachary had been wondering what it looked like more than whether or not it was there at all. The extra button’s worth of revelation has exposed a few more inches of well-muscled chest covered in a fair amount of hair and several bruises but no ink, nothing marking him as a guardian. Maybe that tradition is no longer upheld, replaced by silver swords like the one beneath his sweater. How much of Sweet Sorrows is fact and how much is fiction and how much has simply changed with time?
Zachary re-buttons the extra button, noticing as he does that while there is no sword there is a hint of ink higher, around Dorian’s shoulders. The edge of a tattoo covering his back and neck, but he can only make out branch-like shapes in the light.
He wonders about the line between keeping an eye on someone who is unconscious and watching someone sleep and decides maybe he should read. The Kitchen would probably make him a drink, but he’s not thirsty, or hungry, though he thinks he should be.
Zachary gets up from his chair, relieved that the action doesn’t revive the blurry underwater feeling, and finds his bags where Mirabel left them near the door and realizes that he’s finally been reunited with his duffel. He takes out his phone, its battery unsurprisingly dead, though he doubts it would have a signal down here anyway. He puts it away and retrieves the brown leather book of fairy tales from the satchel.
Zachary returns to the chair by the bed and reads. He is partway through a story about an innkeeper in a snow-covered inn that is so absorbing he can almost hear the wind when he notices the incense has burned out.
He puts the book down on the nightstand and lights another cone of incense. The smoke wafts over the book as it catches.
“At least you have your book back even though I don’t have mine,” Zachary remarks aloud. He thinks perhaps he will have a drink, maybe a glass of water to get the honey taste out of his mouth, and goes to inscribe a request for the Kitchen. His hand is on the pen when he hears Dorian’s voice behind him, sleepy but clear.
“I put your book in your coat.”
Simon is an only child, his name inherited from an older brother who died at birth. He is a replacement. He sometimes wonders if he is living someone else’s life, wearing someone else’s shoes and someone else’s name.
Simon lives with his uncle (his dead mother’s brother) and his aunt, constantly reminded that he is not their son. The specter of his mother hangs over him. His uncle only mentions her when drinking (also the only time he will call Simon a bastard) but he drinks often. Jocelyn Keating is invoked as everything from a trollop to a witch. Simon doesn’t remember enough of his mother to know if she was a witch or not. He once dared to suggest he might not be a bastard, as no one is certain of his parentage and his mother was with whatever man might be his father long enough for there to be two Simons so they might have secretly been married but that got a wineglass thrown at his head (badly aimed). His uncle did not recall the exchange afterward. A maid cleared away the broken glass.
On Simon’s eighteenth birthday he is presented with an envelope. Its wax seal has an impression of an owl and the paper is yellowed with age. The front reads:
For Simon Jonathan Keating on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of his birth
It had been kept in some bank box somewhere, his uncle explains. Delivered that morning.
“It’s not my birthday,” Simon observes.
“We were never certain of your birth date,” his uncle states with a matter-of-fact dullness. “Apparently it is today. Many happy returns.”