She knocked softly before entering. It was a library, but it had the closed-up, solemn air of a museum. Wall sconces burned with an eerie electrical glow, but the room was still dim, the air thick with dust. The ceiling had been dissected to expose the joists, its wooden beams veined with copper wire and studded with ceramic knobs. Tubes and wires, Basil had told her when she asked about how electricity worked. That must have been what fed the lights their strange power.

Heavy red curtains covered every window, and taxidermied specimens covered the back wall. Between stuffed and mounted rodents and birds were insects pinned by their wings like grim mosaic tiles. At the center, in the place of honor, was a twelve-point stag. It was unfinished; without its glass eyes, it watched her through gaping sockets.

The other two sides of the room were walled in by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, each shelf crammed with books about magic, medical textbooks, secular anthologies of essays, philosophical treatises, histories of ancient Danubian saints. Whatever she expected to find in a Cernosian library, it wasn’t this. She could spend an eternity reading everything here. The abbey never had the funding to purchase expensive volumes like these. Her pleasant surprise, however, melted away to perplexity when she noticed The Science of Magic: A Theory of Surgical Technique, an early medical textbook, among the collection. What use would a socialite from a country with no magic have for something like this? Wren pulled the book out and brushed the dust from its spine.

“Goddess’s tits! I didn’t see you there. You scared me half to death.”

Wren whirled around to find Lord Alistair Lowry leaning in the doorframe, his eyes widened and one hand pressed to his heart. The man was red, red, red from his sanguine cheeks to his garish waistcoat to the ruby-studded rings catching the light on his fingers. At the end of a chain around his neck was a gleaming golden key stamped with the symbol of Cernos: stag horns. No older than his late twenties, he had dark curling hair and a cleft in his square chin.

Wren bowed her head to hide the humiliated blush surely blooming across her nose. Not only had he caught her going through his things, but she was so … bedraggled. While she was still in her traveling clothes, he was fit for a royal audience. She stumbled over a curtsy. “I’m sorry for frightening you, my lord.”

“No, no, don’t apologize! It’s not your fault. With all this sickness nonsense, my nerves are so frayed of late, I…” He cut himself off with a shake of his head. With more cheer, he said, “Enough of that, anyway. I’m not paying you nearly enough to burden you with my anxieties.”

“It’s quite alright. I don’t mind.”