“Do sit down. You are trembling. It is my fault; I know it. That story last night. I hope you can forgive me for it.”
He produced a cup of streaming tea from nowhere, it seemed, and offered it to her, but Azalea waved it away.
“Where is the watch?’ she said.
“Ah, so quickly to the point. That is bad manners, you know.”
He set the teacup on the table, and next to it, lifted the lid from a small platter. Instead of housing a tiny cake, the plate held the pocket watch. Azalea reached for it.
Keeper closed the lid with a clink.
“Mr. Keeper,” said Azalea.
Keeper had no hint of a smile as he set the covered plate aside and lifted the lid off a larger tureen.
Azalea gasped. On the platter lay an assortment of odds and ends. A pair of lace gloves, a needle with a scarlet thread, one of Jessamine’s stockings, Ivy’s spoon, Eve’s pen, all among other things of the girls’. Azalea was aghast.
“Those are ours!” she said.
“I know,” said Keeper. “I like to keep things.”
“That’s stealing!” said Azalea.
“You must forgive me,” he said. “But I am desperate. I need a favor from you, and your sisters. A great favor indeed, and I don’t believe any of you would help me unless I did something, ah, unconventional. I want to be freed, Miss Azalea.”
Azalea frowned. Keeper was—well, Keeper. Magical and beautiful and part of the ethereal pavilion. She shifted on the velvet sofa, feeling both consternation and guilt.
“I…hadn’t thought of it,” said Azalea.
“I know,” said Keeper. He smiled, but not bitterly. “Perhaps you will now?”
“Oh, honestly,” said Azalea. She stood up and strode to the entrance with a click click click. The familiar hotness had begun to run through her, and she felt she needed a breath of real air. “I can’t believe you would just—just steal!”
“Step out of that entrance,” Keeper called, “and you and your sisters will never be welcome here again.”
Azalea stopped so abruptly her skirts swished the threshold. She glanced back at Keeper to see if he was in earnest. A touch of a smile graced his lips, but his face was deadly serious.
Azalea’s toes curled in her boots. She suddenly hated Keeper.
“Don’t—” she stammered. She couldn’t manage to meet his eyes. “It’s…just…We’ve got to keep dancing here, Keeper. It’s all we have. Don’t take it away. Please.”
“Then you will help free me?”
Azalea gripped the side of the arched entrance, wishing to feel some sort of silvery texture beneath her palms. Instead she felt a strange glassy smoothness, and it frustrated her.
“Fine,” she said, her nails clicking against the post. “For the dancing. And the watch. What do we have to do?”
Though she couldn’t hear Keeper’s footfalls behind her, she felt his presence draw near to her, until she could almost sense his sleekness, and his eyes on her back.
“The High King magicked many things,” he said, in his smooth voice. “Your palace. This pavilion. And I. He was fascinated with magic. It was, to him, a science, dealing with force and matter and auras. There are different sorts of magic, too. Some are much stronger than others.
“Miss Azalea, there is an object in your palace that has been magicked so strongly, it keeps me weak. Confined.”
Azalea recalled Keeper raising the gushing, foaming water to the top of the bridge. He had been panting when he stood. Breathless and drawn, taxed almost to illness. Azalea scuffed her boot on the marble.
“A magic object?” she said. “Here, in our palace?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I do not know. But here is a thought: Until earlier this year, I was hardly more than brick and mortar. Something happened to the magic object—it was partially broken. Broken enough that I have my magic back, at least in part.”
Azalea’s eyebrows knit. They hadn’t anything magic, unless it was the tower, and that wasn’t broken, only stopped. They had the old, dented magic tea set, one of the few remnants of the High King. Although—Azalea’s brows knit further—she hadn’t seen that tea set for quite some time.
“I need you to find the magic object, and destroy it,” said Keeper. “Your period of mourning ends in but three months. Surely that is enough time?”
Azalea tapped her toe against the ground, the misty air stifling her.
“We…don’t have much magic left in the palace,” she managed to say. “We could probably find it, if I had all the girls search—”
Keeper took Azalea’s hand from the silver doorframe into both of his, and pressed his lips against it.
“He did what?” Bramble cried.
“I know, I know,” said Azalea. She sliced bread with a vengeance.
It was afternoon, and Azalea had just finished telling them the entire story at tea in the kitchen. The girls’ eyebrows had risen and furrowed with each part of the telling, and at the end, their eyes were circles. Their muffins and tea had been forgotten as they stared at Azalea across the scrubbed servants’ table.
“What a rotten shilling punter!” said Bramble, tearing her bread to bits. “I can’t believe he stole our things! Especially the watch! We stole that watch first, fair and square!”
“Something magic?” said Eve, passing out the sliced cheese. “But what’s left? I suppose there was the harpsichord—although that broke before the King was even born.”