Marcel’s conditions for the visit were: forty minutes, no magic, no agenda.
MC had agreed to all three, which had made Marcel briefly look at him like he’d expected to negotiate and found the negotiation pre-empted.
He’d agreed because two of the three were already true and the third was flexible enough in definition that disagreement would only have created suspicion about what kind of agenda he was hiding.
He brought books.
Not magical texts — ordinary ones.
Two novels and a collection of essays on New Orleans architecture from the 1940s, the kind of books you brought to someone who spent their days alone in an attic and was probably very tired of their own thoughts.
He’d thought about this while walking to St.
Anne’s.
Memory had given him a picture of Davina in the attic: the sketchbook, the art covering every surface, the candles, a girl forced to become entirely self-sufficient for entertainment and had done so with the determined competence of someone whose alternative was despair.
He’d thought about what he’d want if he were that person, and the answer was new things to look at.
The attic smelled the same as it had a month ago: old stone, candlewax, something that was incense-adjacent but wasn’t incense.
The drawings had progressed — there were new ones on top of the old ones in the corners that had been fullest before, the layers deepening.
He stood in the doorway and Davina stood six feet from the door with her arms crossed and the flat look she used for people she was deciding whether to be rude to.
“Marcel said you were coming,” she said.
“He mentioned I asked to.”
She looked at what he was carrying.
“Those are books.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Why books.”
He set them on the small table near the window, which was the only horizontal surface in the attic that wasn’t covered in art supplies or candles.
“You’ve been up here for several months.
I assumed you’d exhausted the entertainment options.”
Davina looked at the books.
Then at him.
The look had its specific quality — the flat assessment face, the one that was reading for signs of a strategy.
“What do you want for them,” she said.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Generally, no.” He stayed near the door, which was the right geography — close enough to be present, far enough to give her the room.
“I’m not here to negotiate.
I brought books because you’re here, and being here is difficult, and books are something to do when you’re somewhere difficult.”
Davina’s arms, still crossed, changed slightly.
Not uncrossed.
But the quality of the crossing changed — the defensive lock loosening one degree, the way it did when someone was reclassifying an encounter.
She walked to the table and looked at the books.
She picked up the architecture one and read the title and set it back down.
Then she picked up one of the novels.
“Have you read it?” she asked.
“No.”
“You’re giving away books you haven’t read.”
“I assumed you’d read them more usefully than I would.”
She looked at him again.
The look now had something different in it — not warmth, nothing so generous as warmth.
But the absence of the worst version of the assessment.
A door not quite open, but not bolted.
Around him, the attic’s magical atmosphere was present and familiar — the same pressure it had held the first time — Harvest power held by one person.
He was aware of the fragment she’d contributed to him.
He was aware of it the way you’re aware of a borrowed object in your pocket — present, specific, not yours.
The fragment stirred in his direction and he kept the Gate closed and let it stir.
He’d come here to give something without taking.
The two facts had to coexist.
“You could leave,” Davina said.
She wasn’t looking at him — she was leafing through the first pages of the novel.
“Any time.
You’re not stuck here.”
“No.”
“But you stayed last time.”
“Yes.”
She stopped leafing.
Didn’t look up.
“Why.”
He thought about the truthful answer, which was: because you started to play, and I recognized it as the thing you do when you’re trying to find yourself again in a space that’s been consuming you, and I didn’t want to leave the room before it was done.
He thought about what version of that answer was true and safe to deliver, and landed on:
“It seemed worth staying for.”
Davina looked up.
The flat look, but underneath it something had changed — not doubt exactly, something more specific.
The pull had happened.
Not a new absorption — the fragment simply resonating in his direction, the old piece recognizing its source.
He could feel her registering it; the slight tightening of her grip on the spine of the book, the almost-invisible attention shift.
She filed it.
She filed it.
“I’ll be watching,” she said.
It was a threat.
It was also the most honest thing she’d said to him, because she’d been watching since the first time he was in this room and she was telling him so directly.
“I know,” he said.
She kept the books.
On the stairs down he held the contradiction quietly.
He was protecting her.
He was also carrying a piece of her in him, and intended to carry more, and the two facts refused to resolve into a clean arrangement.
The protection wasn’t performance — it was real, it was necessary, it was the work he’d committed to from the moment he understood what was supposed to happen to her.
And the absorption was also real, also necessary, in the way that things you’ve decided are necessary feel necessary.
He’d never found a version of that sentence that didn’t bother him.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped back into the Quarter’s afternoon and decided the only answer was to make the protection as real as the cost, and let the time between now and the reckoning be the measure of whether that was enough.
Marcel was at the street, waiting.
“Books?” Marcel said.
“She likes to read.”
Marcel looked at him.
The cultivation-moment look — the one that had been happening with increasing frequency over the past several weeks, where Marcel received something and couldn’t file it under the category he’d prepared.
“You know that how?”
“I inferred it,” he said.
“She’s been in that attic for six months.”
Marcel was quiet for a moment.
Then: “She kept them?”
“She kept them.”
Marcel turned back toward the penthouse, doing quiet arithmetic, and MC walked in the other direction, and the afternoon closed around both of them.