Skate smiled through the wince as she dropped her hand to her side. “I think I landed on it wrong,” she said, mimicking a trip to get her point across. “You don’t look a hundred and seven.”
“Clean living,” he said offhandedly as he moved to one of the bookshelves. He pulled one of the decanters being used to help the books stay upright off the shelf, and the end book fell over. He paid it no mind as he uncorked the delicate-looking glass. It held a dark blue liquid. “Hold out your arm.”
“Why?” Skate said, reflexively bringing the injured arm up to be held by the other arm, wincing again as another wave of pain shot through her.
“I want to help.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “How do I know it won’t hurt me?” she asked, shooting a swift glance at the bottle. “How do I know it’s not a trick?”
Belamy’s lined face fell slack for a moment; his expression might have been one of surprise. Then he restored himself to a look of irritation. “Young lady,” he began, using that term that Skate was sure was being meant to belittle and mock her, “if I wanted to hurt you, I would be using a far less expensive method to do it. I don’t invite people into my home only to injure them for a lark.”
“You invite them over to steal from them.”
“Borrow!” he insisted, “to borrow from them. And I invited them over weeks ago, before I’d ever met you. It was just a happy coincidence that they were—never mind!” he said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to hurt you. I promise.”
He held the dark blue liquid out, offering its contents again. Gingerly, she put her arm forward, careful to hold it limp to avoid more pain. Belamy tipped the decanter, being very careful to control the amount that left the bottle. As the dark blue stuff poured out, Skate had time to notice that it flowed much like water before a trickle landed on her sprained wrist. She yelped as it landed, feeling more pain. She cut the yelp short, though, because she realized she was only feeling the coldness of the liquid rather than the burning she had first thought. The dark blue disappeared into her skin as soon as it landed. Belamy lifted the decorative glass bottle back up after the brief contact the liquid made with her skin. He had been careful not to spill a drop on the floor or himself. “Better?”
Skate looked at her arm. It didn’t feel any different, but she had been holding it in that position on purpose. She risked a contraction of the muscle and brought her hand up a fraction of an inch. It responded without sending any warnings to her. She clenched her hand into a fist. No pain there, either. “Wow!” she said, forgetting her mistrust of the old man. “It’s perfect.” She bent her arm and threw it in a wide circle with abandon. “It’s like I never hurt it at all!” She had never encountered such an immediate relief from pain before. “What’s in that stuff?” she asked, casting an eye on the bottle.
“Magic,” Belamy responded with a satisfied smile as he replaced the bottle on the shelf. “A gift from a priest, a healer, years ago. For minor injuries—cuts, bruises, sprains, that sort of thing—it does the trick. As long as I don’t use it all at one go, it always refills itself. It’s been enormously useful over the years, though recently—well, I’m glad it helped.”
“Is that how you got to be a hundred and seven? Using that stuff?”
Belamy locked his expression into that satisfied smile. “No. The potion does nothing to help fight aging. Clean living,” he repeated with a wave of his hand, dismissing further inquiries into his longevity. He walked back to his desk. “Now, if you’re ready, you know where your room is. I had Rattle clean it when you left this morning, so it should be ready for you. There may be some dust that evaded cleaning, but it will certainly be better than sleeping on the street.” He returned his attention back to his book and said no more to her.
Knowing a dismissal when she heard one, she turned toward the stairs, then stopped. “And Rattle really cooks?”
“Rattle really cooks.”
Skate tried to gauge the old man’s reaction to her question. As far as she could tell, there was none. He was utterly engrossed in his reading. She felt a question forming in her mind, and she was divided about it. As she looked at the book and saw the joy and concentration on the old man’s face, the question glowed hotter in the back of her brain. She pushed it down, away, where it would not come out into the world unbidden:
How do I read?
Skate turned away and made her way upstairs, leaving behind the old man brooding over his new book. The air got noticeably colder as she ascended, but not nearly to the point of freezing that it was outside.
The stairs led directly into an upstairs hallway with three doors. The one on the left went to Belamy’s room, and the first on the right led to the other study. She could hear the soft flapping and clicking of Rattle moving about the latter, presumably either replacing books on the shelf or else taking one down for itself. The remaining room was to be her own.
When she’d been here that morning, Belamy had opened a creaky door into a room that looked untouched for decades. Everything in the room had been caked in a considerable layer of dust. There were some unidentifiable pieces of furniture that had long ago either been broken into kindling or else rotted away into useless debris. The room had been suffused with a smell like moldy clothing, and Skate had been glad that there had not been warmth to make the odor overwhelming. “Don’t worry,” Belamy had said, “Rattle will clean this up before you get back. I’ll have him take care of it immediately, in fact.” He had closed the door on a room that Skate did not look forward to inhabiting.
The room as she now saw it was unrecognizable. The floors had been swept, and nothing was broken. The room held an empty desk with a chair, a bed with an end table with a white-lit lantern on it, and a dresser. It was this last piece of furniture that she gravitated toward first. She had never stayed in a room that held such a thing. She had nothing to place inside it, but thinking of the tall, heavy wooden set of drawers as being in some way her own felt exhilarating. It’s not mine, she reminded herself, not really. But it was hers to use while she stayed here.
It did not look particularly old. She opened the empty drawers, relishing the feel of the grating wood as she slid them open and shut with successive light bangs.
Skate moved to the bed next. It was set on sturdy legs, the mattress soft but having some resistance to it. Further investigation revealed a wicker latticework to support the soft pallet on top. The bed was not fabulously decorated, nor particularly expensive-looking—if she had been burgling and came upon a room with this type of bed, she’d likely move on to bigger and better marks—but getting to sleep in such a bed was an enormous extravagance. In the safe houses, she slept on mats on the floor or in dingy hammocks strung up between beams. She had only slept on a proper mattress before the fire of her earliest years.
Skate pushed away the unexpected and painful memories, and went to examine the desk. It was a simple affair, with a drawer in the front and nothing on its surface. She knew immediately that it was a thing of age, unlike the other two pieces of furniture in the room. The top was mostly smooth, with a few small pits scarring it where an overzealous writer had pressed through the page with their quill—or else someone had used it as a convenient surface to cut something. Skate could feel each divot as she ran her hand across the top, each scar like a message from the past. There are memories here; there is history here.