“What have you done with the mirror?” she asked.

“I have placed it in the attic, facing a portrait of Clothilde Thorn. Should the Chancellor happen to look through it, I trust he will receive an unpleasant surprise.” Before Elisabeth could respond, he said, “Would you try that broth and tell me how it tastes?”

She found a ladle and dipped it into the pot. “It’s good,” she reported.

“But not exceptional?”

“I suppose not,” she said, unsure whether there was such a thing as exceptional broth.

“I feared as much,” he sighed. “I shall have to start over from the beginning.”

Elisabeth watched him dice carrots and onions, hypnotized by the rhythmic tapping of the knife against the board. After last night, it seemed impossible that his alabaster hands should look so flawless. His burnt, steaming wounds flashed before her eyes, and she winced. “Silas,” she said tentatively. “How did Ashcroft catch you?”

The knife paused. She couldn’t tell if the hint of tension in his shoulders was real or imagined. “He used a device invented by the Collegium during the Reforms, designed to control rebellious sorcerers by capturing their servants. I did not expect it. I had not seen one since the days that I served Master Thorn’s great-grandfather.”

“I’m sorry.” Guilt twisted her stomach. “If I hadn’t asked you to go—”

“Do not apologize to me, Miss Scrivener.” His voice sounded clipped, as close to anger as she had ever heard him. “It was my own carelessness at fault.”

Elisabeth doubted that. Silas was never anything but meticulous. However, she received the impression that he wouldn’t appreciate her saying so out loud.

Finally, he spoke again. “You came downstairs to ask about the life you bargained to me. You wished to know how it works.”

She sat up in surprise. “Yes.”

“But now you are having second thoughts.”

“I’m wondering if—perhaps it would be better not to know.” She hesitated. “I could still live to be seventy, or I could die tomorrow. If I knew—if you told me—I think that would change the way I lived. I would always be thinking about it, and I don’t want that.”

Silas continued chopping, aware she wasn’t finished.

“But I would like to know . . . how it happens. Do you do it yourself? Or do we just . . . ?”

She imagined herself toppling over dead, her heart stopped in an instant. That wouldn’t be so terrible, at least not for herself. The thought of Nathaniel dying that way—

“No,” said Silas. “It is not like that.” Now it was his turn to hesitate. He went on softly, “It is impossible to know how many years a human will live, or in what manner they will die. Life is like the oil within a lamp. It can be measured, but the pace at which it burns depends upon how the dial is turned day by day, how bright and fierce the flame. And there is no predicting whether the lamp might be knocked to the ground and shatter, when it could have blazed on a great while longer. Such is the unpredictability of life. It is good you do not have many questions; I do not have any answers. A portion of the fuel, the life force that once belonged to you and Master Thorn—I hold it now within myself. That is all I can tell you. The rest remains uncertain.”

Thoughtfully, Elisabeth leaned back against the fireplace’s warm stones. “I see.” She found his explanation strangely comforting—the idea that she had no preordained number of years remaining, that even Silas didn’t know her fate.

The warmth of the stones soothed her bruised and aching muscles. Her eyelids drooped. She felt as though she were half in the kitchen, listening to the quiet rattle of pots and pans, and half back in Summershall, dreaming of the apples in autumn, the market saturated in golden light. Eventually, she was roused by Silas setting the table in front of her. Her stomach growled at the rich aroma of thyme emanating from the pot on the fire. She blinked the rest of the way awake, watching him lift the pot’s lid and glance inside.

She wondered how he could tell whether it was finished, finding the taste and presumably the smell unappetizing. “Did one of the servants teach you how to cook?” she asked drowsily.

“No, miss.” He straightened to fetch a bowl. “The human servants did not speak to me, nor I to them. I learned through practice, as a matter of necessity. The appetite of a human boy of twelve is almost as frightening as that of a demon. And the lack of manners; I shudder to recall it.”

Guiltily, she took the napkin and placed it on her lap, conscious of the look he had just sent her beneath his lashes. “So you didn’t start until after Alistair died.”

He nodded as he ladled soup into the bowl. “Initially, I didn’t have the faintest idea how to care for Master Thorn. He came to me in poor condition; he had badly cut his arm drawing blood for the summoning—that is the scar, which I had not the knowledge to tend properly. . . .”

Silas’s movements slowed, then stilled. His eyes were distant, gazing not at anything in the kitchen, but far into the past. Firelight flickered across his youthful face, lending his alabaster features the illusion of color. Even that wasn’t enough to make him look mortal. She was aware of the vast gulf between them: his unfathomable age, the inscrutable turning of his thoughts, like the cogs within a machine.

“First, I learned how to make tea,” he said finally, speaking more to himself than to her. “When humans wish to help, they are forever offering each other tea.”

Elisabeth’s chest squeezed. She pictured the two different Silases: the one in the pentagram, eyes dark and empty with hunger, and the other in the pavilion’s moonlight, a sword through his chest, his features etched with relief.

She said, “You love him.”

Silas turned away. He set the pot’s lid back in place.

“I didn’t understand before,” she went on quietly. Beneath the table, the napkin twisted in her hands. “Truthfully, I hadn’t thought it possible. It wasn’t until today, when I finally saw why—” Why you had taken twenty years of Nathaniel’s life. She didn’t finish.

Silas rose and set the bowl before her. “Enjoy your supper, Miss Scrivener,” he said. “I will attend to Master Thorn, and see if I can persuade him to take some broth.”

As he turned, his eyes caught on something near her face, and he paused. He reached toward her, his claws very close to her neck, and drew out a lock of her hair. Her heart skipped. Several of the strands shone silver against the chestnut tresses spilling over his hand. Silas’s mark. It wasn’t as noticeable as Nathaniel’s, but she would still have to hide it—perhaps cut it off in order to avoid suspicion.

“I had nearly forgotten,” Silas murmured, gazing at the silver as though mesmerized. “It is an extraordinary sign of trust for my master to have allowed you to hear my true name. You are the first person outside House Thorn to know it in centuries. Now, if you wish, you can summon me. But there is something else you must know. You also have the power to set me free.”

Her mouth had gone dry, despite the soup sending up fragrant tendrils of steam. “What do you mean?”

His eyes shifted to her face. In the firelight they looked more gold than yellow. “Bound in servitude, I exist as a pale imitation of my true self, the greater part of my strength locked away. You saw a glimpse of what I truly am inside the pentagram—only a glimpse. Were you to free me, I would be unleashed upon this realm as a scourge, a cataclysm beyond reckoning.”