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“I stole the book from my father and learned how he despised me from the notes he’d written in its margins.”
Wait, Jacapo’s scribbles were about Devere?Monster, mistake…His father had written those things about his son? “But he spoke of Adair.”
“No, not Adair. Me. I do not blame him. He was grief-stricken and mad with it when he made me.”
My anger fizzed in the face of Devere’s words. I’d lived with parents who despised me. It was no easy thing to survive.
“I am part fae, Val, but I do not know their ways or them. I only know Adair. And I know his magic is what keeps me alive.”
“He is a dreamweaver?”
“Yes. Most fae cannot do what he does. They spin small illusions, glamour, to briefly change their appearance. Some even change into animals, although I have never seen such a thing. There is talk sometimes in Minerva of an enchanting masquerade where fae and humans mingle. I cannot imagine it ends well for any mortal.”
“They openly cavort with humans?” I asked.
“Sometimes and in certain places. As the days grow dark and winter closes in, they reside between the waking world and dreams. Humans are weaker there…”
Yes, this was good. I needed to know more, to knoweverything. “I read there are courts?”
“I know nothing of those. Just of Adair. If he’s a member of any court, he does not speak of it. And I should think it would be something he’d lord over me. He is alone. I know that much. I suspect he crossed a line, even for the fae. His obsession is a sickness.”
“Is he the only fae in Minerva?”
“No, there are others.” He hesitated, clearly wondering how much to reveal, as though I might buckle under the weight of truth. I’d already buckled long ago. “In the gentlemen’s club, where Jacapo would drown his sorrow. They have their way with the weak-minded, the lost, or the lonely, and then they cast them out with little memory of the encounter. Just dreams.”
The club where Jacapo had encountered Adair and where the toymaker had likely been killed. “We should go back there, to the club.”
“No, it’s too dangerous. You are not part of their world. They will entrap you as Vine and Claude did—”
“You know that pair?”
“I knowofthem and those like them.”
“Are they dead? Did the beetles kill them?” I hoped so.
He shook his head. “My beetles stripped them of power. They prey on the weak. Now that they know you are protected, they’ll not return.”
“Your beetles? They were all your doing? Then Devere, you can spin glamour, like the fae? You have their power too?”
He glanced down at Hush’s separate components. “I have some ability. It is how I can animate Hush, and when you came to me that night after Rochefort assaulted you, you’d have been lost to the cold had I not used magic to warm your heart.”
I touched a hand to my chest. I’d had no idea. “You saved me?”
“Merely out of convenience than emotion. At the time I was the prime suspect in my father’s murder. You dying in my chair would have been inconvenient.”
“Wait, you remember that go-around?” Before, when he’d remembered, it had only been pieces, not all of it.
“I fear I remember all of them.” He swallowed.
I returned to his side at the workbench, and for a few moments, we fell quiet, with just the sound of the logs crackling in the stove and the odd chimes from his clocks. “If you can perform magic, then you are of their world?”
“No.” He shifted in his seat. “I am not fae or human.” His gaze drifted around the room, at the twisted and broken remains of toys he could not fix. “I am a collection of gears and cogs glued together by Adair’s magic. A puppet.”
“You’re not a puppet.” I crouched beside him. “But youaremagic.”
“A magic that does not stretch beyond Minerva.”
A problem I would fix, somehow. Adair could free him. I knew it. “Devere, you must believe you are so much more than those who made you. Jacapo was blind not to see how wonderful you are, and Adair is a vicious prick. They do not define you. Nobody does. You choose to be who you are.”
