Page 69
“What did your other nannies teach you?” I asked, running two fingers down Della’s back.
“Comportment,” he said. “How to dance. How to sit.”
“How to sit?” I interjected. “What a ridiculous thing to waste time on.”
“Tell that to them!” He kicked his heels against the chair rungs. “I read about what I want to learn, Miss Ravenwood. You don’t need to teach me anything.” His eyes brightened. “Except…”
“Let me guess. Magick.”
He nodded.
I let out a frustrated sigh, not with him, but with myself. I still had three days until my magick returned and I could dazzle him with spellwork. Until then, I had nothing but my own wits and whatever I could scrape from twenty-four years of being a Kemp. Which amounted to a talent for flirting, a talent for offending people, and…
Herbs.
Della turned her head toward me, and we shared a look.
Of course. I’d been raised in a stillroom. Gran’s garden, Gran’s drying racks, Gran’s teas. I could name a hundred plants by leaf, root, and smell, and tell you which would cure a cough, which would empty a stomach, and which did both, depending on how much you hated your patient. It was the one place where I had been the tiresome child who knew everything.
“We’re going to your father’s library to find an herbal, and then we’re going to make something.”
He brightened, but his smile quickly fell. “If I don’t have any magick, can I still make potions? I mean, will they work properly?”
I gave him a nod. “Absolutely.”
With that, Adrien darted out the door.
The library was the room I’d been imagining since the day Adrien told me he read about ghosts in his father’s library. It ran the length of the western gallery, two stories of shelves with a wrought-iron balcony ringing the upper level, ladders on brass rails, and tall windows.
It smelled of paper and leather and good wine, as if the room had spent years in Yves’s company.
Della glided down from her tour of the gallery and landed on a leather chair by the window with a worn cushion. She shook out her feathers and tucked her feet beneath her as if to say this was her new perch.
I recalled the image I’d formed in my head of Yves reading by candlelight, and a woman bending to kiss his head.
“Botany is on the second gallery,” Adrien announced, already halfway up a ladder. “Between navigation and diseases.”
“Why is botany between navigation and diseases?”
“Because that’s the order things happen in,” he said.
I let out a laugh. He wasn’t wrong.
Another little laugh came, not from Adrien, and I realized we were not alone. At the far end of the gallery, at a round table sat the youngest Rochefort boy, Emrys. Dressed in pale blue and gold, his fair hair combed flat. He was sitting with a woman I hadn’t yet met. She was perhaps forty, handsome, and upholstered in gray silk like a fine wingback chair.
His blood nanny. A real one. The kind Yves had tried twenty times to hire.
“The seventh prince,” Emrys was reciting, “is His Grace the Duke of Carrion, who keeps the western passes. The eighth prince is His Grace the Duke of Valemer, who keeps the southern sea.”
“Very good, Master Emrys,” the woman murmured. “And the ninth?”
“The ninth prince is—”
“Sixth,” Adrien called down from the balcony, without looking up from the shelf. “Valemer is sixth. Carrion is eighth. You’re using the precedence from before the Concord of Tides. They reordered it two hundred years ago. It’s in the front of that book. Most people skip it.”
The woman turned. Her gaze traveled up the ladder to Adrien, who had already gone back to running his finger along spines, finished with the exchange.
“Master Adrien has such spirited recall. But we teach from the original material at The Pearl.”
