“How long was he in here?” Dorian asks.
“A couple of hours?” Zachary guesses.
“Well at least he was comfortable,” Dorian says, looking around the room. He turns his attention to the painting over the mantel. It looks like a classic tall-ship seascape, with ominous clouds and choppy waves, completely realistic save for the leporine pirates. “Do you think it’s a coincidence?” he asks. “A girl who pretends to be a rabbit who knows a painter, and then the paintings with the rabbits?”
“You think the painter painted them for Eleanor.”
“I think it’s a possibility,” Dorian says. “I think there is a story here.”
“I think there are a lot of stories here,” Zachary says. He puts his bag down and the bottle of wine clanks against the stone. Zachary takes it out and brushes dust from the lantern and the keys on it, wondering who bottled it and how long it had been in the cellar, waiting for someone to open it. Why not now?
Zachary looks at the corked bottle and frowns.
“Don’t judge me,” he says to Dorian as he picks up a pen from the desk and uses it to push the cork all the way into the bottle, a trick he used many, many times as an undergraduate lacking proper bar tools.
“We could have found a corkscrew somewhere,” Dorian remarks as he observes the inelegant process.
“You used to be mildly impressed by my improvisational skills,” Zachary responds, holding up the successfully opened bottle.
Dorian laughs as Zachary takes a swig of the wine. It probably would benefit from decanting and maybe glasses but it is rich and lush and bright. Luminous, somehow, like the lantern on it. It doesn’t whisper verses or stories around his tongue and into his head, thankfully, but it tastes older than stories. It tastes like myth.
Zachary offers the bottle up to Dorian and he takes it, letting his fingers rest over Zachary’s as he does so.
“You went back for me, didn’t you?” Dorian asks suddenly. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it earlier, everything’s still cloudy.”
“It was mostly Mirabel,” Zachary says. “I sidekicked and then I got tied to a chair and poisoned.” It all feels distant now, even though it was so recent. “I got better,” he adds.
“Thank you,” Dorian says. “You didn’t have to do that. You owed me nothing and I…thank you. I thought I might not wake up at all and instead I woke up here.”
“You’re welcome,” Zachary says, though he feels he should say more.
“How long ago was that?” Dorian asks. “Four days? Five? A week? It feels longer.”
Zachary looks at him wordlessly, without a proper answer. He thinks it might be a week, or a lifetime, or a moment. He thinks I feel like I have known you forever but he doesn’t say it and so they only hold each other’s gaze, not needing to say anything.
“Where did you get this?” Dorian asks after he takes a sip from the bottle.
“In the wine cellar. It’s at the far end of the ballroom, past where the Starless Sea used to be.”
Dorian looks at him with that thousand-questions expression in his eyes but instead of asking any of them he takes another swig of wine and hands the bottle back to Zachary.
“It must have been something extraordinary, back in its time,” he says.
“Why do you think people came here?” Zachary says, taking another myth-tinged sip before handing the bottle to Dorian, unable to tell if the rush in his head and his pulse is from the wine or the way Dorian’s fingers move over his.
“I think people came here for the same reason we came here,” Dorian says. “In search of something. Even if we didn’t know what it was. Something more. Something to wonder at. Someplace to belong. We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own. To Seeking,” Dorian says, tilting the bottle toward Zachary.
“To Finding,” Zachary responds, repeating the gesture once Dorian hands him the bottle.
“I do like that you’ve read my book,” Dorian says. “Thank you again for helping me get it back.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately. Which was your favorite?”
Zachary considers the question while also considering the particular use of the word intimately. He thinks over the stories, snippets of images coming back to him as he lets himself consider them simply as stories instead of trying to break them apart searching for their secrets. He looks at the bottle in his hands, the keys and the lantern, thinking of seers in taverns and shared bottles in snow-covered inns.
“I don’t know. I liked the one with the swords. So many of them were kind of sad. I think the innkeeper and the moon were my favorite, but I wanted…” Zachary stops, not certain what he wanted from it. More, maybe. He hands the bottle back to Dorian.