t had taken him the better part of a month to draw it up.
It’d been the seventeenth, rain-slick and with a paper bag of smoked fish still tucked into his coat. He’d come for the linings of suits, for the lovely black and white silk of Diana’s Clock’s Eve dress. Off and on he’d seen Grace Carre, manning the desk or bustling about the shop; off and on he’d bowed to the last straggling evening patrons, if they were galdori, or given them cursory sneering glances if not. Often enough he had snuck in the back.
The last time he’d seen her had been the seventeenth, and the shop had sung with black and white and frosty winter colors, rolls of lace patterned like snowflakes, hanging lights. Cotton with printed motifs of clock-hands.
Their pens had traced it out in glossy ink, one after another; he had not spoken it, for fear of what a wandering tongue and errant ley lines could do, but he had listened as she found her way through the sounds.
It was the only way he could think to learn an alphabet, and fast. It was how he’d done it, in his head if not with his mouth.
He’d been too terrified, back then, to say the words out loud – he still wasn’t sure he’d the knack of it, speaking them without casting – but he’d sat for long hours, sounding them out in his head. He’d sat at the back of courses at Brunnhold, whenever he could, his notebook spread out in his lap. He’d listened to professors recite the words; he hadn’t known their meaning then, but he’d copied out the letters as well as he could, then compared them to what was in the text-books. Corrected himself, started over.
It was funny how the letters started to sound themselves out in your head, after not too long at all. You got used to seeing them and hearing them at once, and they got tangled up, just like Estuan; eventually, you’d look at a page and just read it. Funny enough, he remembered struggling with Estuan, too.
Funny enough.
It was one of Anatole’s old perceptive books they were using, at the start. He suspected it wouldn’t hurt if she knew to recognize a spell here, a spell there, even if she didn’t know the grammar. He knew she knew the worth of things that paid off slow, bit by bit; he also knew the world they lived in. A little of both never hurt.
That had been the last time they’d seen each other.
It’d been a quiet week at Stainthorpe; he’d had more time to think. He’d been back in Vienda for a couple of weeks, now. Before that, there’d been no time – his journals had been full of sketches, errant papers folded up in the pages of his warding grim, but he had only just started work on the stencil after Clock’s Eve.
It had been, before that, like two separate worlds; he hadn’t yet begun to stitch them together. There had been the ward on one hand, and Ava on the other.
As he folded up the great piece of drafting paper, careful not to tear at the pattern he’d cut into it, he forced himself not to think. There was no thinking; there had been no thinking since Clock’s Eve. There had been no thinking since he’d asked, that night of the seventeenth, between the closing of the books and the cold crisp night air.
It had surprised him that she’d been thinking about it – hard enough to have already had something in mind, and he thought he might’ve known what – though perhaps it shouldn’t’ve. Maybe it was that there hadn’t been much talk about any of it, at all, since they’d started.
Maybe it was the bold line that always got drawn – somewhere between the moments, smelling of bohea and lavender, when they would talk of other things, no less precious or deep; and the drawing and the speaking of the monite. He’d found himself wondering about her, even as he’d made up the stencil and researched the ward. He’d wondered, in moments when he was tired enough for the line to blur, simply what she was doing.
The sky was already dark. Snow whirled down madly through the streetlamps; it was settling on him like lint, for all the folder with the stencil was tucked carefully inside his coat. It was a thick blanket over the streets by the time he got out of the carriage at the Painted Ladies and walked the rest of the way to the shop.
The bell jangled as he stepped inside, kicking the snow off his shoes.
“Good evening,” he said, easily enough; he unwound his scarf from his neck, folded it over his arm.
He stood straight-backed and high-chinned as he took a few more steps in, a neutral, faintly sneering expression on his face. He was here, after all, for the order of that maroon silk Diana liked so much. He knew better than to break character before the curtain was drawn.