Page 17 of Until the End of Ever
My mind remembered just what dress she’d wore the last time she’d gotten ready at Silver’s. Somehow, I managed not to move, or speak, until I’d regained a degree of control.
Get used to this. She’s not yours.
A part of me very much disagreed with that statement.
“All right.” Those two words took a herculean effort, but I managed them. “Tomorrow then? At the manor.”
The beautiful redhead smiled. “Of course.”
I watched her walk away from the shadow of the temple.
Tomorrow wasn’t soon enough.
6
KLEOS
We were all baffled when Silver picked this specific apartment, on the ground floor of a modern building, too far from the town center and the Guard where she knew she’d work, two years ago.
Contrary to what my mother liked to suggest, the neighborhood was perfectly acceptable, but I never saw the appeal in the simple pied-a-terre. There was a park nearby, and a nice view of the mountains where the Grove of Dodona’s saplings had been replanted, but personally, I preferred the canals and its selkies.
Less than six months after she moved in, I understood. It didn’t matter how impersonal or boring the place was to start with: Silver had made it hers.
Everything in the decor had seemed tragically square in the beginning; today there were carved columns supporting every archway and separating the open-plan layout. The minuscule garden at the back of the house became a round atrium surrounded by white walls, with a fountain in the middle.
The light never quite hit the rest of Highvale as brightly as it did in Silver’s hall.
She’d bought a cheap flat in the right place and made it her castle.
“Howthe hell did you build all this?” I’d asked her once.
She shrugged. “One of those days you were in the archives, I wandered and found masonry books. The ancient kind, with stones and mud and sunlight.”
I’d blinked in complete disbelief.
“I mean, no one bothers working that way now—it’s so much easier for people who have tons of money to just hire an architect. But there are plenty of porous stones and limestone in the mountain if you know where to look. It’s not illegal to take some; I checked.”
That made sense solely for her, and no one else in the world. Her physical strength meant that carving and lifting the kind of rock people used to build pyramids on her shoulders was as easy as picking up a pebble.
“It’s been my weekend project.”
Herweekend projectlooked just as luxurious as the Valesco house now. I’d never told my mother, saving it for a day when I really wanted to see her rupture a vein. She only owned the ground floor, but her neighbor, an old priestess of Athena, was more than happy to let Silver play around. I knew she’d renovated her flat, too, though I’d never seen it.
“Morgan would never believe me if I told her who we met today,” Silver mused, glancing up at the stairs leading to the first floor before opening her door.
It was prettiest at sunset, with the warm colors exploding all over her white walls. Silver didn’t have many windows; she couldn’t make those herself. She kept saying she’d hire someone to build some but in truth, with her non-generic circular or large arches, it wasn’t going to be cheap.
It being November, her house was freezing. Still wrapped in my magic shawl, I lifted my hands and focused on buildingshields around the atrium, as she moved to start a fire in her hearth, and one in the fire pit she kept close to her fountain.
“You have got to get some windows. One January, I’ll find you buried under a pile of snow.”
She rolled her eyes. “The rooms have windows, and they share a wall with the hearth. You know, people did survive winters before central heating existed.”
I teased her, but in truth, she rarely complained about the cold, either used to it, or partially immune to it, I couldn’t say. I knew she’d built the atrium on a gentle downward slope which meant that the rain and snow ended up at the fountain in the center, and flowing down to the street; her house was never flooded. Silver might not be as fond of books as I was, but she’d done an exceptional job with this place, so she was clearly capable of studying the ins and outs of subjects that interested her.
“Do you mind if I take a shower?”
“Make yourself at home. I’ll get started on drinks.” She set out to make her legendary hot chocolate, no doubt perfected to combat the arctic temperature her flat could reach—with the house now blocked from the elements, it warmed up in no time.
