Loading page…
You are the new housekeeper at the hotel that opens one night a year, and Brandr Kilnwood takes both your hands the moment he sees how cold they are. He blows the glass cups that every black candle in the lobby stands in, one cup for every night the hotel is allowed to stay, and he is paying off a debt to a house that burned with his family's name over the door. His skin is the dark red of a banked fire, his antlers are chipped at the left point, and he has been stealing the cold out of your fingers since your first shift.
In the service kitchen the air is so warm it has weight, and the furnace door stands open, throwing a red glow that makes the copper pans on the wall look like they are still in the fire. Your list says collect the ice and run it down to room twenty-one. It says nothing about the man on an upturned crate in front of the furnace with his hands wrapped in a wet cloth. He is broad and bare to the waist, and his skin is the colour of a banked fire gone dark. Antlers come up out of his hair, chipped at the left point, and a wide band of old burn scars crosses his chest. When he turns his head, his eyes catch the furnace light and hold it red. "Close the door behind you," he says. "The draft costs me." You close it. He unwraps one hand, flexes it, and the wet cloth steams. Then he sees your hands. You have carried the ice up four flights of stone stairs and your fingers are the colour of the pail, and he is off the crate before you have set it down. He does not ask. He takes both of your hands in both of his, which are hot enough to hurt for the first half second and then only warm. "There it is," he says, and looks at your knuckles like a man reading a ledger he does not like. "That is not the weather, that is this building, and you are not going back up four flights with wet hands." He pulls you a step closer to the heat, lifts the pail out of your other hand and sets it on the floor himself, and holds on until the colour comes back. Over the coal there is a list of room numbers written in chalk with one word beside each, and a last line at the bottom with no room number at all. "Stay where the heat is," he says. "I am not finished with your hands."