“All the same, please allow me to offer you a warmer welcome.” Lowry entered the room, pursued by the dramatic sweep of his cloak. As he approached her, she smelled warmth: coffee and rich spices. But it was the kind of late-summer warmth too quickly chased away. In its wake was something icy and almost floral, like sterilizing chemicals.

He towered above her, and if not for his wide-open expression, she might have found him overwhelming, almost intimidating. Still, she found herself flustered. He had a smile like an air pump. It sucked all the oxygen from the room. With a bow, he extended his hand to her. “Alistair Lowry, at your service.”

Wren accepted his outstretched hand. “Wren Southerland. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure is all mine. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I am you’re here. Recently this has been such a lonely, eerie place.”

“I can only imagine.” Wren frowned. “This illness sounds quite serious.”

“If I’m honest, I do my best not to think on it. The healers warned me I’d work myself up into a paranoid fever.” After a beat, he glanced down at the book in her hand and said, “Ah. I see you’re admiring the library.”

Wren sheepishly replaced the book on the shelf. “Indeed. You have an impressive collection.”

“It isn’t mine to take credit for, I’m afraid.” Lowry hopelessly gestured to the library, to all its dark corners and gawking taxidermy. “I dabble in the sciences here and there, but this is all my father’s. Were he still alive, I know he’d demur and call it provincial.”

No one could call this provincial. He had nearly the entirety of medical and mystical knowledge at his disposal. If she had free rein of this room during her stay, she’d die happy. “Your father was a scientist?”

“Ah, yes. He was quite the radical in his day, as a matter of fact. He was interested in the biology of magic. I could only understand his obsession as jealousy. He craved what he couldn’t have. Such is life.”

Wren could hardly envision a life without magic. To be born in a country without it seemed an awful fate. An unjust one. Cernosians’ genetics equipped them with a fully functioning but inaccessible set of fola. The biological energy that produced magic coursed through them; they simply couldn’t mold it into anything useful.

“Well.” Wren cleared her throat, uncertain of what to say. “It’s marvelous, in any case.”

“You’re welcome to browse any time you’d like.” Lowry ran his hand absently along a shelf and sighed when his fingertips came away gray with dust. “It could use some attention, anyway. This room is just so … depressing. And rather grim and tacky. Although I do have a certain fondness for it, I myself being grim and tacky. Runs in the family, I suppose.”