Chapter 10: Beneath Her Pillow

The library was dimmer than she had ever seen it. The afternoon light came through the tall windows at an angle that made the dust visible, actual particles suspended in the air between the shelves. Isolde found him near the far end of the east wing, standing with one hand on a globe that looked old enough to be inaccurate.

He turned at the sound of her footsteps.

"You found it," he said. Not a question.

"I found it." She held the book forward. The leather was warm from her hands. "My handwriting. Edmund. My handwriting, and I did not write this."

He did not move to take it from her. He simply looked at it as though it were something dangerous that might detonate.

"Show me," he said.

She opened to the page she had read three times since discovering it wedged beneath her pillow that morning. The hand—her hand, unmistakably her hand—had written:

You may leave. Moor Estate will release you. Your time here will be erased from your memory—all of it. You will remember only that you spent six weeks cataloguing a private library in Yorkshire. You will not remember the house. You will not remember him. You will not remember the library, or the bargain, or the room that does not exist. You will remember only the work. When you leave, you will be free of all of this. The offer remains open for twenty-four hours from the time you read this. After that, it is withdrawn.

Edmund read the passage standing so still that she could not see him breathe. The color did not leave his face, but something else did—some small permission he had been giving himself.

"Did you know?" she said. "Did you know it could do this?"

"I knew it could alter memory. I did not know it would choose—" He stopped. His hand dropped from the globe. "No. I knew what it could do."

"Then why did you let me come here?"

"You chose to come here, Isolde."

"Because I did not have the full picture." Her voice was steady, which surprised her. She was furious, which should have made it shake. "You knew the terms. You knew what it could offer me. And you said nothing."

"You would have come anyway."

"That is not the point." She stepped closer to him, the book still held between them like evidence. "The point is that I had no information. You made a choice for me by withholding it. You decided what I should or shouldn't know."

"I decided," he said, and now she heard the strain in his voice, the tightness around his eyes, "that you would be reasonable. That if you had understood what this place truly was—if I had told you from the first morning what the entity could do—you would have left. And you would have been right to leave."

"And now?"

He looked at her then, and she saw it—the thing in his face that looked like restraint, like the active effort of not reaching for her.

"Now I don't know what I thought I was protecting," he said quietly. "I didn't warn you because I didn't believe you would stay. If you had known, if I had told you—I thought you would be reasonable. I thought you would leave." He paused. The library was very quiet. "I told myself I was keeping you safe from the knowledge. The truth is I was protecting myself from the possibility that you would go."

The anger did not drain from her. It transformed into something else—a decision, slow and definite.

She set the book on the nearest table.

"Isolde—" he started.

She stepped toward him with the deliberateness of someone who has already calculated the distance, already committed to the crossing. He did not move. When she placed her hand on his chest, she felt the solid mass of him beneath the waistcoat, the precise beat of his heart against her palm, and the catch of his breath.

He went still. But when she closed the distance, when she brought her face close enough to see the exact gray of his eyes, he did not pull back. She moved first, but he answered her. His mouth was warm, and she felt the breath of him, and then the moment he stopped holding still and responded—fully. His hand came up to the back of her jaw, his fingers settling in the place where her skull curved, and she was aware suddenly of the specific weight of him, the pressure of his mouth against hers, the particular intimacy of his hand in her hair.

It went deeper then. She moved closer, and he angled his head, and for a single second she felt the whole world compress into the space between them. She understood in that moment why bargains were possible here. The entity could remake memory because the present was vivid enough to reshape everything else. This was vivid. This was real.

The library convulsed.

A shelf shuddered. Books came down from the upper level—dozens of them, hundreds, a controlled thunder of spines and pages, raining down onto the stone floor all around them. The candles on the tables guttered all at once, the flames bending sideways as though something had passed through the room, and then they steadied again, burning higher than before.

Edmund pulled back. They stood apart, both of them still breathing hard, both of them looking at the candles that had steadied themselves into perfect steadiness.

"It knows," Isolde said.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Twenty-four hours from the time you read the offer. That is how long the entity's offers remain open. After that, it withdraws."

She looked at the floor, where books lay scattered like casualties. The library smelled different now—disturbed air, the smell of all those pages exposed at once.

"Twenty-four hours," she said.

"Yes."

They stood in the wreckage of the books, neither of them moving, both of them still recovering from the kiss and the entity's response to it. The candles burned steadily, but the space around them held itself still, as though the air itself was waiting.

She looked at him. He was watching her with an expression she could not parse—relief, or guilt, or something that contained both. His hand had dropped from her jaw. He was very careful not to touch her now.

The note had been beneath her pillow. Not in the library. Not on his desk. Beneath her pillow, in the room she had locked every night since arriving. She had assumed it was the entity. She had not, until this moment, asked herself whether Edmund had put it there.