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Fia had suspected Penbrook had a more complicated story beyond the spare details he’d revealed about himself. That he had a reason for distancing himself from his family in Fantillian and coming to Trivoris. But she would never have guessed this kind of dark trouble was at the root of it.
Though maybe she should have.
Well, you won’t be the thing to kill me anyway, he’d said the very first night he had stayed in the apartment—weary and tumbling toward some beckoning sleep.
“A death curse?” Fia whispered now from behind her hand, hating to speak it aloud—superstitious that the words would edge him closer to his terrible fate. “How… how does it work?”
“Quite like it sounds,” Penbrook said dryly, and Fia pictured an hourglass running slowly out of sand.
He released a jagged sigh, shoulders drooping into their familiar slouch, but there were no sturdy bookshelves or cabinets to slump against. Fia darted forward, grabbing hold of his arm as if he might keel over then and there, expiring at her feet.
Still ably standing, Penbrook glanced down at her hand and then into her eyes. Although his were shadowed with those violet smudges, amusement glinted in their depths. “I’m not going to die right now.”
Fia snatched her hand away from the sleeve of his very soft sleeping shirt, feeling foolish. “Well, how was I supposed to know that? It looked like you were about to topple over.”
“And you were swooping in to catch me?”
Her toes curled on the cold floor. “I don’t know what I was doing.”
“Catching me,” he repeated, as if he might be tempted to fall just so she would.
“How can you make jokes?” Exasperation slipped into her voice, but she wasn’t really sure he was teasing. Or whether he might simply be recognizing something in her he hadn’t expected.
“Trust me.” The muscles in his jaw feathered. “I’m well aware of my serious predicament.”
For a moment there was only the discordant ticking of the clocks and their breaths between them—and she imagined Penbrook counting each one he drew in, let out, noting their dwindling number.
“How much time…?” Fia bit off the rest of the words. It was too intrusive, too horrible to contemplate.
How much time do you have left?
A tingle of nerves rushed through her, and she plucked one of the bronze clocks up from the dresser as if it might hold the answer. He’d relied on the timepiece as a ward against death—likely because no spell could be used to counter, combat, or hold off the curse—but its bell was hardly effective.
“Like all good curses,” Penbrook said, addressing her incomplete question with a dramatic air of inevitability, “it’s fighting to bring me down with haste.”
Fia shivered, but it wasn’t his words that upset her the most. She could see the difference in him now from the first day they’d met, his skin even paler and run through with fine blue veins, his eyes so much darker. Fatigue weighted his bones.
“How did you get tangled up in a curse?” she asked, not to be nosy, but to better understand.
“It doesn’t matter.” Penbrook rubbed his finger, then rather irritably continued, “You’d only think I deserved it anyway.”
Fia’s eyes narrowed. “Do you?”
“No.” A questionably innocent look accompanied his denial, one that told her no other explanation would be forthcoming.
It left her unsettled, and yet she said, “Then… I’ll take you at your word.”
“Most wouldn’t.” He sounded intrigued.
She couldn’t quite meet his eyes, and so she placed the clock on the dresser again, giving herself an excuse to look away. The truth was, she still needed his help, and for that, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt—the same way he’d accepted her incomplete story about that night at Thistledown. They didn’t fully trust each other, but there was some tentative understanding between them that perhaps they had good reasons for their omissions.
“Just don’t go dying on me, please.”
“Not to worry,” he said with a resigned air. “When the time comes, I’ll slink off into the Silten Woods like some poor animal who knows his time is at its end. Gone off alone to die.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that! That’s not what I meant.” Fia wanted to rip the flippant words from his mouth. “There must be some way to break the curse.”
“And you know how?”
