I shook my head, almost afraid to ask. “And . . . what did he say?”

“He just said, ‘Yes, I do.’ ”

THIRTY

Zedok

“Did you see what he did?” whispered the first of the two sibilant feminine voices. “What he brought with him from over there?”

A second voice then. “You don’t think he’s seriously considering—”

“Hush. Do not even say it. He knows better. Which is why he never agreed to it.”

Seated at the piano on my side of Moldavia, the lamp I had demolished the prior evening now intact atop its lid, I lifted my right hand.

“What does he think he’s doing?” hissed the first.

“You mean besides imprudently courting disaster?” scoffed the other.

Ignoring the whispers, I laid my gloved fingers onto the keys.

I could not play “Für Elise.” But . . . I could remember the feel of her hand beneath mine. The discordant, corrupted music we had made together in the dream.

And here I was, for the hundredth time in as many minutes, hopelessly lost in the thought of her, left grasping in vain for the ghost of one of our few moments together.

“He won’t do it, if he knows what is good for him,” hissed the lower of the two voices, her words meant more for me than her companion.

“But why else sit down at the piano with it? He means to play. He wishes to escape.”

“It is my conviction that he knows better than to think he can.”

Again, my mind swept through the memory of last night.

She and I. We had been so close. Drunk on her nearness, lured by her words, her beauty—that voice—I had craved more. So much more.

Had I ever longed to touch someone so?

In closing my eyes, I was able to block out the keyboard’s black-and-white lines, but not the whispers or the ticking mantel clock, which, like the other things I had destroyed last night, had repaired and reset itself.

“Well. Are you going to stop him?”

“We are. Of course we are.”

This was why so much of my written music existed on the Armands’ side of the house.

All of my composing transpired there. Where these two particularly obnoxious monstrosities could not follow me.

“Dearest Spite,” hissed the softer of the two voices. “Did you hear what he just called you?”

“Oh, Envy, dear heart,” answered the second voice, hoarser and deeper in register. “We are both well aware that, of the two of us, he only ever thought of you as obnoxious.”

Slowly, I turned my head to glare at them through a single eyehole of Valor’s mask.

Adorned in emerald and burnt coppery orange respectively, the two women occupied the ever-popular chaise by the parlor’s bay window. They watched me from behind fluttering lace fans while, at their backs, the sheets of snow that never ceased to fall in this realm filled the window’s view.