Page 62 of Charmless

He leaned back in his chair at last, steepling his hands in front of him. His voice was soft, but it was the softness of steel sheathed in velvet.

“Your reaction to being arrested surprises me, Ella. Most people either loudly declare their innocence or at least demand to know what the charges are.”

He was still calling me Ella and not Miss Upton? I tried to draw some comfort from that.

“I assumed you would get around to telling me.”

“Can you not guess?”

The orb.

I squirmed. The parchment secreted in my bodice seemed to crackle loudly enough for Horatio to hear. More likely it was my own guilty conscience.

I moistened my lips and said, “I don’t know. Perhaps my neighbor filed a complaint accusing me of practicing witchcraft without a license. She has long threatened to do so.”

“Mrs. Biddlesworth? As a matter of fact, she did, not long after I took up my post here in Midtown. She has tried to file several complaints. I finally told her to stop wasting my time with such nonsense.”

I regarded him with wonder. “You have been protecting me all this time?”

“A rather thankless task. I should have listened to Mrs. Biddlesworth’s accusations. You certainly managed to bewitch me.”

For the first time, I glimpsed a crack in his rigid armor, the hurt and turmoil roiling beneath. I leaned forward in my chair.

“Horatio, you can’t really believe I cast some sort of love spell on you. I am not a witch.”

“No, but it seems you are a thief.”

I flinched. So, thiswasabout the orb.

Horatio recovered his rigid commander’s façade as he continued, “You have been accused of breaking into the king’s treasury room on the night of the ball. You stole a valuable artifact, a glass orb that you replaced with a fake. Do you deny doing this?”

Mal’s voice shouted inside my head.Admit nothing. Obfuscate.

But as I looked deep into Horatio’s eyes, I could not keep lying to him.

“No,” I whispered.

Horatio pressed his hand to his eyes as though he had taken a blow. I realized how badly he had wanted me to deny it, convince him it was not true.

“How did you find out?” I asked. I expected him to tell me that it was because of Withypole Fugitate, that the fairy had managed to recover my memories from the shard of my aura he had pocketed.

“You were seen, Ella! Sidney Greenleaf fashioned some sort of magical device that guards the king’s treasures and captures images of any intruder invading the chamber.”

A magical device? My thoughts flew immediately to the massive carved dragon head mounted on the treasure chamber’s walls. I remembered the eerie sensation I had had, that the dragon’s glassy eyes were watching me. I had dismissed the notion at the time, as a mere product of my nerves, but it seems I had been right.

Who would have believed such a thing possible? Except this was the king’s wizard we were talking about, the magician who had designed the Aura Chamber with its diabolical mirror. The elderly wizard often seemed ridiculous, with his arrogant posturing and flamboyant robes, trying to hide the fact that his true name was something as mundane as Sidney. His magical powers, however, were terrifying. But part of Horatio’s explanation did not make sense to me.

“It has been over a week since the ball. If Mercato realized that I had taken something from the treasury room, why did he not have me arrested at once?”

“Because he has been much preoccupied with the king’s illness and when Greenleaf did have a chance to visit the treasury room, he could not discover anything was missing, so he was reluctant to take any action against you.”

“Why?” I demanded again.

“He told me it was partly because of Prince Florian’s desire to marry you and partly because of the wizard’s friendship and regard for your late father.”

“His what!”I nearly came up out of my chair.

Horatio’s brows lifted in surprise at my reaction. “You did not know that Sidney Greenleaf and your father once were friends?”