“How did you get a key to the attic room?” asked Benni.
“I’ve had it since I was a child,” Lovisa whispered, making up a likely story. “I stole it from Mother years ago and had a copy made. I was scared she would put me in there and forget about me.”
“So you’ve been lying to us for years,” he said. “And sneaking, and stealing. And now we’re all faced with the consequences. Give me the key.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Your mother told me to come home with that key,” said Benni. “If I don’t, I expect your brothers will be the ones to suffer for it. I also expect she’ll come to you herself, looking for it.”
Lovisa knew this was meant to frighten and shame her into acquiescence. It was also probably true. She reached into her shirt, pulled the string over her head, and held the attic key, its glass gemstone sparkling, out to him. Benni rose, took it from her, and looked down at her for a moment with a grave and mournful expression.
“Your mother and I love you, Lovisa,” he said again.
Then he left the room.
* * *
—
Alone, Lovisa lay on her bed, curled into a ball.
The queen was dead. Pari was dead. Katu was “traveling,” and Lovisa found herself unable to prod that thought any further for the moment. Her father was a stranger. Lovisa’s mind was blank, her body empty of instinct or feeling.
After a while, she got up and lit her stove. A soporific tea would make her sleep.
The tea didn’t help much. For a few hours, she passed back and forth from sleep to waking, but was afraid that drinking more of it would make her sick. It was Sunday. Sunday dinner at home was impossible; she couldn’t go home. She doubted her father would come to collect her. Just in case he did, Lovisa got up and went to knock on Mari’s door.
Mari’s room was full of boys lounging on the floor and bed, all of them reading or writing, all snacking idly on cakes from an expensive Flag Hill bakery.
Lovisa needed something physical, something to tire her out and distract her. “Anyone want to go to the ambles?” she said. “I’m bored.”
“I’ll go, when I finish this page,” said Kep Gravla, probably the last person in the room Lovisa would’ve chosen, because he was self-centered and insecure and never shut up. His family’s house was next door to Lovisa’s in Flag Hill and she’d spent her childhood avoiding him.
“Mari?” she said, because the most annoying people were more tolerable if Mari was there too. “You want to join us?”
“Which amble are you going to?”
“Any. I want some hot salted caramel. And maybe there’s some good music,” she added, knowing that Mari had a weakness for both of those things.
He gave her a look, and a smirk, because Mari knew what Lovisa thought of Kep Gravla. “I guess I could take a little break,” he said.
“Good. Anyone else?” said Lovisa, not really waiting for a reply. “I’ll get my coat.”
* * *
—
It was Lovisa’s second trip to an amble that day, but vastly different from her first. Once Mari agreed to go, most of the others did too, so that an uproar of obnoxious boys descended upon the nearest shopping area. The purveyors of certain shops—sweets, games, books—perked up at the sight of them, while other faces closed. Lovisa saw a man who sold fresh flowers drop a pile of roses with a glare in their direction as a woman who’d been dithering over them left, driven off by the raucous laughter of the boys buying hot drinks at the store next door.
“What’s on your mind, Lovisa?” Mari asked her, peeking over a steaming cup of salted caramel. “You’re standing there with your arms crossed like an angry professor.”
“Does Kep know that his crass mouth drove all the shoppers away from the flower shop?”
“Probably,” said Mari. “He’s probably happy about it.”
“Why are you even his friend, Mari?”
“You’re his friend too.”
“But you actually like him.”
“Doesn’t that make it more excusable that I’m his friend?”
“It makes me question your taste in human beings.”
With a quiet lift of his eyebrows, Mari went to the flower shop, still sipping his caramel. He was there for some time, while the boys continue to shout, then shove one another until one of them inevitably dumped his caramel onto another. Lovisa rubbed her aching head, hating this, but knowing that nothing better awaited her anywhere else. She wondered, briefly, what Nev was doing. Probably rescuing a needy animal from some needy animal fate, and feeling good about herself.
When Mari came back, his arms were full of lilies, pansies, and violets. “He grows them in a glass greenhouse he built himself, on the roof of the shop,” he said. “In winter, he pours water onto hot coals to make steam. Isn’t that interesting?”
He handed a bunch of flowers to Lovisa. Then he moved among his friends, passing a small bouquet to each boy in turn. Of course they found this hilarious, stuck them in their buttonholes and wound them into one another’s hair. One of them tucked a pansy behind Mari’s ear and kissed him. Some of the flowers fell, getting trampled and ground into the dirty snow. Lovisa understood that Mari had bought them as an apology to the flower vendor. She could see the flower vendor’s face, though, carefully blank, and she wondered if Mari understood that he might not enjoy watching a herd of rich boys destroying the flowers he’d grown, by turning winter into summer, with great care, in the glass greenhouse he’d built himself.
Without saying goodbye to the boys, she slipped away and went back to the dorm. She put her own flowers into a vase that she set beside a drawing she kept above her desk, one of Viri’s representations of the Keeper. Reaching into a drawer, she found a somewhat linty piece of samklavi candy someone had pressed on her a few days ago, sniffed it cautiously, then tried to eat it, thinking it might connect her to her uncle or at least shock her into a different state of mind. It was so vile that she spit it out, gagging.
Again, she tried to sleep. Again, it didn’t work. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw her father and that guard carrying Pari’s body in a blanket. She heard her mother saying, “You created this situation, and every nightmare before it.” Every nightmare before it. How many nightmares were there? “We had a plan!” her mother had screamed.
What was their plan?
That night, in her soft pajamas and fur-collared robe, she snuck down the corridor and tapped on Mari Devret’s door.
He opened it immediately, a pen in hand, yawning and bleary-eyed, but awake. “Come in,” he said, returning to his desk and sitting down, not seeming particularly surprised. “You’ve had something on your mind today. Out with it.”