Chapter 97

The door opened before my hand had come down from the second knock. He had been standing just behind it the whole time I climbed, listening to a step he didn’t know.

“If you’re from the shop,” said Lucien, “I paid on Friday. If you’re from my mother, I’ve died. If you’re from the gods, you’re three hundred years late and you can—”

He stopped.

He had a glass in one hand and the edge of the door in the other, and he looked at me the way Quill used to look at a page with a word gone wrong in it. His hair had grown past his collar. There were four or five days of pale stubble on his jaw, and a wine stain on his cuff the shape of a country, and under his mother’s grey eyes the skin had gone thin and bruised.

He was looking at my hair, which still lay close to my head, black with the blue in it. Then at my coat, plain and elven and not mine. Then at my face.

The glass tipped in his fingers. Wine went over the rim, onto the boards, and he didn’t notice.