Marta grinned and shook her head. “He passed out. I’m not sure he ever remembered our conversation. Or me.” Her face grew serious, and she rested a hand on Anouk’s arm. “Do yourself a favor and stop torturing yourself with these texts. Try prayer, maybe?”
Anouk wrinkled her nose.
The antler clock in the great hall chimed three o’clock in the morning, the sound echoing through the entire abbey and reaching them in the library.
“Chores.” Marta sighed.
Anouk perked up. “Could we swap?”
“Me make breakfast? I can’t even boil water.”
“Just for today.”
Anouk didn’t say anything about Little Beau, but she didn’t have to. Marta seemed to understand. She reached into her pocket and set a piece of biscuit on the desk. “Just for today. Here. Give your dog this. I saved it from yesterday’s breakfast. We all like him, you know.”
Anouk briefly debated telling Marta that Little Beau was actually a boy with shaggy hair and a love of fast cars, but then she took the biscuit and closed her books. It wasn’t until she was halfway down the cellar stairs that it hit her: as soon as winter fell, just a few short weeks away, she or Marta or, most likely, both of them would be dead, as would Esme and Petra and all the other girls.
Her thoughts were dark as she descended the stairs.
“Sang vivik.”
Anouk shrieked and pressed a hand to her chest. She wasn’t alone. Frederika was lurking on the landing. Her hair was its usual wild black storm cloud. Her eyebrows shadowed her eyes into dark pools.
“Frederika!” Anouk swallowed. “What did you say?”
In the two weeks Anouk had been at the Cottage, Frederika hadn’t spoken a single word to her. She rarely spoke to anyone except Sam, who did the laundry, and then only to tell her that she’d torn another one of her dresses while exercising in the courtyard. Still, Anouk had felt Frederika’s glistening eyes fixed on her at every meal.
“Sang vivik,” Frederika repeated.
Anouk’s eyebrows rose. She glanced toward the top of the stairs, wondering if anyone else was within earshot. “Is that in the Selentium Vox? Something about blood? I don’t know that usage of vivik.”
“A witch took two of your toes. Esme says.”
Anouk glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. It was after three o’clock in the morning. Karla and Lise should be there, up early to start making the daily bread, but they were both notoriously deep sleepers, and they knew that Anouk, the head chef, wouldn’t scold them too severely. No sounds came from the kitchen.
“That’s right.” Anouk’s toes curled in her shoes.
Frederika lifted two fingers to her mouth and started gently gnawing on them, all the while staring at Anouk.
“Are you all right?” Anouk took a step down the stairs, away from her. Maybe Frederika was nervous about the delivery the previous day—just after breakfast, two enchanted Pretties had shown up leading a string of mules loaded down with firewood, having just barely survived the precarious mountain path. They carried in load after load until half the courtyard was filled with stacks of wood. It had shaken Anouk when she realized that preparations were already beginning for the Coal Baths. Tomorrow, Duke Karolinge would begin the grueling, four-week-long process of whispering the wood into coals that would form the basis of the trials. Then, the Coals would need the magic of the Royal Courts to convert them into blue flame. Rennar would be there. She’d confront him about why he hadn’t turned Luc back yet. She’d force a promise out of him—one sealed in magic this time.
Suddenly, Frederika pulled her fingers out of her mouth and dropped to the floor. She started doing pushups on the landing, counting out the numbers in German.
Anouk took another step away from her, then made her way down to the cellar as quickly as she could. When she got there, she closed herself up in the stall with Little Beau and swept him into a hug.
“Beau,” she breathed into his fur. “This place is getting to me. What’s my crux? I haven’t had any insight. Nothing’s called to me. If I learned anything from the Goblins, it’s that I’m not drawn to rats or cockroaches. I know it isn’t roses, like Mada Vittora’s crux. I like thyme, but that’s only because it reminds me of Luc.” She groaned. “This would be easy if I had my magic.”
Little Beau went to the stall corner, took her Faustine jacket in his mouth, and dragged it over to her. He nudged it into her lap and ran his bandaged paw over the winged creature on the back. He whined softly.
Anouk reached out and scratched his head. She pulled the jacket up over the both of them, and they lay in the straw and slept a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 12
Late November bled into December, and every morning when Anouk passed through the glass-enclosed hallway outside of the courtyard on her way to prepare breakfast, she saw Duke Karolinge whispering to the coals. At the break of dawn, he would swallow a powder of rosemary and pine bark that he ground himself and then whisper into the piles of firewood. They sparked and smoked. Day after day Anouk watched the wood transform from fresh-cut logs into chunks of blackened charcoal, reducing more and more until they were each the size of her fist. More mules arrived, carrying supplies for the coming Royals and the Eve Feast: Crates of fine wine. Silk linens for the guest rooms on the upper floors. Truffles and lavender soap and argan oil, until the Cottage’s normally sparse pantry was bursting with exotic treats.
She did her best to find time to visit Little Beau. She kept her distance from Frederika, who’d taken to stalking behind her around the abbey like a shadow. She checked Rennar’s mirror obsessively, growing more worried as each day passed and Luc remained a mouse. It occurred to her that maybe the plagues in London were part of the reason why Rennar hadn’t held up his side of their bargain. What if he’d managed to get into the city on his own? What if he’d already faced the Coven of Oxford without her? She found herself worried for his safety, and that made her worry for her own sanity.
She spent long hours trying to discover her crux. Each morning she rose before dawn and ran laps around the courtyard until her muscles ached. She forced herself to stand barefoot in the snow, then hold her hands an inch from the scalding stove. She memorized and practiced ritual patterns of movement that spell-casters used. She locked herself in the Duke’s storerooms, even though Esme told her it was folly, and examined every herb she could find, from dried rosemary to Spanish thyme, sniffing each one, tasting them all, studying the effects they had on her to see if any one of them gave her some special spark. Then she tried the dried flowers that he stored in glass jars, laceleaf and gardenia, lotus and calla lilies. By the third week, she was desperate enough to move on to poisons. She read about each one in the stained old guidebook before carefully placing a drop of it on her tongue, but this only sent her to the infirmary with stomach cramps, where Esme made her a soothing drink of warm goat milk and honey and gave her two contraband pills (smuggled from a Pretty pharmacy in Berlin) for the pain.
“You’re going to kill yourself, going on like this,” Esme said, handing her the warm milk. “If you have a death wish, the Baths will take care of that for you.”