Azalea straightened sharply. “Give it back!” she said.
Keeper, only a few inches from her, his dark form taking up her entire vision, rubbed his thumb over the smooth, curved surface of the brooch, and he lazily regarded Azalea, making no other movement.
“Keeper!”
He inhaled slowly, took Azalea’s outstretched hand—shudders went through her throat, he felt so solid—and pressed the brooch into her marked palm.
“I was only picking it up,” he said, quietly. His thumb rubbed a red nail mark on her hand. A smile crossed his lips. “Temper, temper.”
Azalea pulled her hand away, her ears hot, and gave the brooch back to Hollyhock. All the way through the silver forest and back up the passage, she wiped her hand on her skirts, trying to get rid of the silky feeling of Keeper’s thumb stroking her palm.
The next morning, Azalea awoke to a commotion. A quiet one, with whispering, the rustling of bedsheets and blankets. Hollyhock, Ivy, and the twins mussed their beds, lifting pillows with the blushing look of someone trying very hard not to look like they were blushing. Azalea groaned.
“Oh, Hollyhock,” she said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve lost what I think you’ve lost.”
Hollyhock burst into bawls.
“I—I—I didn’t mean to!” she cried. “I just lost it!”
All the girls, now awake from the ruckus, set to looking for the brooch. They shook out dresses, rummaged, folded, unfolded, smoothed, searched. Azalea took Hollyhock by the shoulders.
“You brought it back, didn’t you?” said Azalea. “After Keeper picked it up, you pinned it to your blouse?”
Hollyhock gulped and hiccupped.
“I don’t remember!” she said. “I put it in my pocket, I think!”
“Keeper!”
Azalea spat the word, the loudness deadened by the curtains and bedsheets. Everyone stopped rifling through the linens. Bramble gave a last shake to Hollyhock’s boots, and a spoon clattered onto the wood floor.
“We…don’t know it was him, not for certain,” said Clover, wrapping ribbons around the worn slippers.
“Oh, it was him all right!” The familiar boiling-blood sensation began to heat her fingers. She recalled the cold deadness of his eyes when he pressed the brooch into her hand. Azalea snatched the silver handkerchief from her apron pocket.
“Tell Tutor I won’t be to lessons,” she said. “Invent some sort of disease. I’m going to get it back.”
Azalea hardly paid attention to the glimmering silver-white forest as she hurried through, hot temper speeding her steps. The stale, stagnant smell of the pavilion suffocated her, so different from the gardens. It felt dead. She shoved the silver willow leaves aside, click click clicked over the bridge to the pavilion.
Keeper lay balanced across the railing, between the arched sides of the lattice. His cloak dripped to the floor, a strand of midnight hair over his eyes. He looked like a black, serpentine cobweb clinging to the lattice. Only his long, gloved fingers moved.
They crawled and wound about a scarlet-colored web with uncanny dexterity, a needle dangling as he did so. He was playing spider’s crib with Flora’s embroidery thread. And while he played, he murmured a nursery rhyme:
“How daintily the butterfly
Flits to the spider’s lace
Entranced by glimm’ring silver strings
Entwined with glist’ning grace.
“How craftily the spider speaks
And whispers, ‘All is well,’
Caresses it with poison’d feet
And sucks it to a shell.”
“Where is it?” Azalea stood in the middle of the dance floor, arms crossed, so tense she could hear the blood rushing in her ears.
Keeper twisted his hands, the string wrapping even more weblike about his fingers.
“Ah, my lady,” he said.
“Where is it?”
Keeper gracefully leaped from the railing to the floor.
“Do you know why I am called Keeper?” he said. “Because I keep. You have known me thus long.”
“Give it back.”
“No. It is the first thing I have that is your mother’s. I will keep it.”
The tight parts of Azalea’s dress—her corset, the cuffs of her sleeves, her collar—pulsed.
“Oh, no hard feelings, my lady,” said Keeper. “I simply think you are not trying hard enough. Your mother’s brooch should give you all…encouragement.”
The hard, burning heat inside Azalea went snap.
“It won’t,” she spat. “Keep the stupid brooch. Keep the stupid pocket watch. Keep the gloves and sampler and whatever else you’ve stolen. You can enjoy them on your own. We’re not coming down here again. We never should have trusted you in the first place.”
She swept around, skirts twisting hard against her, eyes searing, and strode to the entrance. Keeper laughed.
“One last dance, my lady, before I am never to see you again?”
Azalea turned at the entrance, eyes narrowed at Keeper. They burned his image into her mind, his hard, black form cutting against the soft silver, his sleek, rakish ponytail pulled back from his pale face. His dead eyes.
“I hate dancing with you,” she said.
She stepped on the threshold.
A grating, cracking-ice explosion seized the air. The silver rose bushes that flanked the sides of the pavilion shot up, black-thorned monstrosities, curling themselves around the lattice. They twisted over the entrance, and Azalea stumbled back before the thorns snagged at her skirts.