“But that’s what Brandyn came to do? Isn’t it?” Gabi challenged. Her cheeks were flushed with nervous excitement.
Godfrey exhaled.
“Something’s wrong,” Lisbet said. “I can see it.”
“Only a sense,” he said. “I wandered out here to catch a final moment with my thoughts, but I’ve been gone long enough, and I should return.”
“Great, we’re coming with you.”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing for you at Arboriana. Nothing but death.”
Another man appeared in full armor. “Godfrey. Who are speaking with?”
Godfrey waved him forward. “Steward Law. You would not believe me if I told you who has joined us.”
Steward Law removed his helmet. “Children. What are you doing out here? Alone?”
“We’re heading for the same place you are,” Lisbet said, and this time she did touch her bow. Not in threat, but to show she was not afraid. “We represent the houses Dereham, Blackwood, Warwick, and those Quinlandens who would see greatness restored to their Reach once more.”
“No. Absolutely not.” He looked at Godfrey. “Who are these bairns? Where are their parents? Are these... tell me these are not the children who ran from their duty and started this war?”
“Two of us are,” Eavan answered, holding her head high. “We refused to marry a pretender, and we’ll die before it ever comes to pass. Two did die to avoid this fate. We’ll avenge them both one day.”
“The whole kingdom is looking for you. You are not safe here.”
“We’re not safe anywhere, as long as the king lives,” Lisbet spat.
“I’d say there’s Warwick blood in that one, if I didn’t know better,” Law muttered. “Foolish girls. You’ve walked straight into the wulf’s lair, and you don’t even know it.”
“Godfrey told us what we will find at Arboriana. We are not afraid.”
“Has he told you there are only a handful going up against a whole town?”
Lisbet’s blood chilled, but she didn’t drop her eyes, or show her fear. “You have three more now than you had before.”
Law choked a laugh. He ran an armored hand over his mouth. “They are not joining us, Godfrey. I will not have their blood on my conscience.”
“We have nowhere else to go!” Gabi said. “My home is not safe! The Southerlands is full of the king’s men. We cannot go back through the Hinterlands, and if what you say is true, then we will fall into the hands of the Quinlanden Guard if we try to go north. I know we are only girls in your eyes, but you do not know what we have been through!”
Law gaped at her, unsure what to do with the small girl speaking so boldly.
“Law, they are no more safe here than at Arboriana,” Godfrey interjected. “We do not have the means or the time to secure their safety elsewhere.”
“I have never, in all my years...” Law said, scoffing as he looked at each girl. “Children. And not just any children. The future of our realm.”
“If we are the future, then why should we not get a chance to help write it?” Lisbet asked.
“I said no, girl. Those are all the words I intend to waste on it.” He replaced his helmet. “Godfrey, we must speak. The Magi has come with...” He glanced briefly at the girls. “Important news.”
Godfrey nodded. “I’m coming.”
When Law had left, Godfrey knelt before them. “He’s right. You’d be walking into almost certain death if you come to Arboriana.”
Lisbet set her jaw tight.
Godfrey rested a hand upon her shoulder. “Guardians be with you, whatever you do next.”
* * *
“He’s stopped screaming.”
Corin watched his wife. She stood at the bars of the cell, listening to the torture of their nephew. She hadn’t moved for hours. When he urged her to sit, she twitched at his touch and said she wouldn’t dare seek out her own comfort as long as Brandyn was suffering. He tried to offer his own helpless gestures to ease her, running his hands over her aching back. She refused this, too.
“You don’t think...”
Yesenia shook her head. “No, I don’t think he’s dead. Mortain wants something from him, Corin. He won’t be satisfied until he gets it.”
“What was Khallum thinking? Bringing him here, without aid, without reinforcement?”
Yesenia turned toward him. Beads of sweat cut through the grime crusted on her face. She seemed oblivious to that, or her torn dress. He had never seen such anger radiating from her, but it was a vulnerable kind, and for that, Corin himself had never felt so neutered.
“Is that what he wants?” she answered, voicing her thoughts aloud. She looked at the crumbling ceiling and paced before the bars. “Has Mortain asked himself this very question?”
“He doesn’t need a boy to give him the answer.”
“He does if his visions have failed him.”
“But why...” Corin’s eyes widened. “No.”
She nodded. Almost smiled. “Yes. Perhaps.”
Corin stood and joined her. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “If this is true, then we must simply wait for help to come. It is only a matter of time.”
Yesenia turned away. “Time is the one thing Brandyn does not have.”
* * *
They passed the first couple of hours in the stables, waiting for morning light. Drystan’s eagerness took some effort to temper. He insisted on going the moment they slipped through the crumbling gates of the old close. But the bustle of morning would provide better cover than the meager workers still moving around in the dead of night, and Ash managed to convince him that his plan would work better if he was not captured and questioned.
They entered through the kitchens. The broad stone buildings hummed with life, full to the brim with workers, and it was nothing to join them, to disappear into plain sight. Ash felt his son’s energy turn into something new here. Until this point, he’d held to the thin hope he might instill a sense of reality into Drystan’s idealistic vision. But as he witnessed a subtle but powerful change come over Drystan, his belated fear turned to animalistic intensity, he understood that Drystan had become the vision he’d created for himself. Only death could sunder this prophetic unfolding.
Ash had sworn to himself he’d return to Gretchen with their son, but the young man whose heart seized nothing at all anymore but this new macabre purpose was no longer her son. He was no longer the sensitive boy who had loved the wrong woman by moonlight. He might never be again.
They milled around, attempting to look busy, transferring pants from one stall to another, dropping used linens in large baskets. All the while, they kept their eyes open for anything that might prove useful.
The Guardians were on their side, for it did not take long before this happened.
“Around here, by the vats,” Ash whispered, nodding toward where he witnessed two workers arguing. The younger one, no more than a boy, hung low with a weariness that had come from the heavy mantle of an ill-spent night. The other barked orders, indifferent to the bedraggled state of the poor kid.
“It’s someone else’s turn,” the tired boy whined. “Been at it all night. He ain’t stopping anytime soon, neither. He never tires. Never quits.”
“It is an honor to serve the sorcerer,” the boy’s superior hissed. He shoved a pail at him, and the boy stumbled back several steps. “I’ll fill it with your blood, you give me another word that isn’t yes, sir!”
Drystan exchanged a look with Ash and made toward the boy. Ash followed him, but not before a woman dropped a pile of clean linens in his arms. “Delivery. Dining room. Yesterday.”
Ash nodded, trying not to lose sight of Drystan. When he didn’t immediately move, the woman kicked him, and he stumbled into his next steps.
“Go on, then! The rich can’t eat without ’em!”
Ash had never been in the kitchens before. It was Gretchen who used them to slip away in the night to meet him. In all his visits to Arboriana, he knew only
those places where the nobles of Whitechurch spent their time. This was as unfamiliar to him as stepping into Beyond.
“Are ye deaf? Dumb?” With a disgusted groan, the woman took the linens from him. “Fine, off to the pigs with ye, then!”
She’d moved her attentions elsewhere as quickly as she landed them on Ash, so he used the distraction to search again for Drystan. He caught sight of him moving into a back room with the pail boy.
With one last glance into the busy kitchen, Ash ducked into the same room.
“I said, I’ll do it for you.”
The pail boy’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “And then you’ll tell on me, get me kicked back to the pigs.”
Drystan shook his head. “I won’t say a word to anyone.”
“What’ll it cost me?”
“Cost you? Nothing.”
The boy grew more apprehensive. “Nah. I don’t believe you want nothin’. No one ever wants nothin’.”
Ash stepped forward. “You’ll scrub the privy for the next three nights. That’s what it’ll cost you. Four if you don’t take the offer now, knowing what’s good for you.”
“And who are you?”
“His father, here to keep him from being a spot too nice to someone who doesn’t deserve it.”
The pail boy faltered. He blinked the heavy sleep from his eyes. Drystan started to insist there was no need for reciprocation, but Ash stayed him with a hand.
“O’right, then,” the boy said. He shoved the pail at Drystan. “But you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat while you sleep.”
Drystan nodded. “Go get your rest. And... thanks for taking the privies.”
The boy grunted and stumbled off.
“He said we need wine. Knives. And more water, for this pail,” Drystan said. “Do you know where to find those things?”
Ash’s mouth parted. “He’s torturing someone.”
Drystan nodded. He looked away. “The prisoner he’s torturing is Brandyn Blackwood.”
“How could you know that? You weren’t in here seconds before I joined you.”
Drystan tapped his head. “From his mind. I can do that now, too. I just learned it.”
“Brandyn,” Ash whispered. “That poor child. If he survives this, he’ll never be the same.”
“He’ll survive it.” Drystan hoisted the pail. He nodded to the table, where the wine and roll of knives waited. “Seems the Guardians continue to work alongside us.” He slipped them both into his satchel. “The closer we get, the more clear the signs are to me that I was meant to be here. Brandyn is my cousin. He’s all alone down there, but he’s alive, and if that isn’t a sign that I was meant to save him? Then I don’t know what is, Ash. I don’t know if anything means anything if that means nothing.”
Ash swallowed. “He’ll be expecting these things. Mortain.”
Drystan nodded. “Do you know the way, or shall we again beseech the Guardians to guide us?”
* * *
Lisbet and Eavan hunkered in the woods beneath the cover of a large pine tree, awaiting Gabi’s word that the men had left camp. Lisbet hadn’t liked the idea of timid Gabi off by herself, so Meadow joined her, but that didn’t ease Lisbet’s nerves any. Lisbet supposed she had no more right to say no than yes, so she let them go. Meadow could read the flora, she said. Maybe there was some use to be found in it.
“Godfrey is a peculiar man, wouldn’t you say?” Eavan asked.
“I don’t think that’s his name at all,” Lisbet answered. She pulled an apple from her bag and cut it down the middle, handing half to Eavan. “Do you?”
“Definitely not. But I don’t think he hides it the way Ash did, to be deceptive. I think he hides it to protect something.”
“There was something very strange about the way he talked to us.”
“Very strange indeed.”
“And the way Law talked to him.”
“Even when he was arguing with him, it was as if he was walking upon a bed of broken shells. Afraid not to speak out of turn,” Eavan said.
“Yes,” Lisbet answered. She took a bite of the apple. “Exactly that. As if Godfrey were not his peer, but his superior.”
Eavan’s eyes widened in excitement. “What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know yet.” Lisbet pulled the blanket around them both as the first of the rainstorm peppered the ground in the clearing beyond the trees. It sent a chill through her. “But it matters.”
“What you whispered to yourself back there, about Drystan...”
“Yes?”
“If he’s come to do what Brandyn and Lord Warwick have also come to do, then perhaps... that is, maybe Kian was wrong. About what will happen.”
Lisbet shook her head. She tossed the rest of the apple into the forest. She’d had no appetite since they left the Drumain. Forcing herself to eat was as futile as sleeping more than a few hours. “Drystan saw enough to know he must come here. But Kian? Kian sees everything. Yseult sees everything. They would have already known about Brandyn and Lord Warwick, and Law, and even the strange Godfrey who might be someone very important. They would have known, and so Drystan’s... his death... well, it could be that it happens because there are others here. You know?”
Eavan nodded, looking down at her half-eaten apple. She threw hers away too. “Kian said that Drystan could still fail. If he does, then we should step in and take his place, shouldn’t we? Finish what he started?”
Lisbet was caught off by the question. She told herself their purpose here was a final goodbye, and the return of a body that her mother could visit in the crypts. “I don’t know, Eavan.”
Eavan nodded as she looked away. “I think I do. I think I know. If Drystan fails, then it falls to the Quinlanden who failed to stop this before it got so bad.”
Lisbet reached for her arm. “None of this is your fault.”
“Maybe not, but I can’t live with it, either. I can’t live with this.” Eavan’s hand lingered over her belly, recoiling as if it was on fire. “I won’t let my father’s cowardice take even more from Longwood Rush, from the Medvedev, from anyone. I don’t know if I have the power to do anything, but I will know. When the time comes.”
Lisbet didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
“Do you think my mother is still alive?” Eavan asked after a pause. “That she’s in there, a prisoner? Or perhaps even joined with Mortain?”
“She would never join with him.”
“Lisbet, people would do anything to survive.”
“Then we cannot fault her for doing what she must to live another day, to be there for her children,” Lisbet said. “For you.”
Gabi appeared from the copse of trees across the clearing, waving.
“We’ll finish this later,” Lisbet said.
44
Recollections, Continued
Jesse reached for his mother as she was ripped from his view, fading into the dizziness of a vision that was quickly shifting to something else, something new. He cried out, a swell of emotion trapped deep in his throat, but his voice was soundless. To see her once more, even in the terrible state she’d been in when Hamish came upon her, was a blessing he hadn’t known he was so desperate for until it was cruelly taken from him.
Hamish, too, disappeared. Jesse was left alone in the vacuum of darkness.
But now he was himself again, no longer his father.
He didn’t dare step forward, or back. He was weightless, but also weighted, rooted to nothing and everything. Alone, but filled with the sense that he was surrounded by enemies. Called by and repelled by an unknown too perilous to explore.
The light didn’t return altogether, but the darkness turned to gray. Stones. A whisper of moonlight behind a cloudy window. The chill of a room too vast to trap heat in the elaborate tapestries lining the walls.
He was in the chambers of a woman he didn’t recognize. Her long red hair fell in cascading waves down her back, curling around a cobalt gown made of the ric
hest velvet he’d ever seen. Her beauty was as striking as her sadness, which she wore like a veil. She glanced toward her door, fearful, but upon confirming she was still alone, her anxiousness faded, replaced by cooling relief. He sensed now her thoughts. She was safe, tonight. He would not come to her bed. Her bruises could take at least one more evening to heal.
The woman went to her dressing table, wincing as she lowered herself to the ivory bench. She ran the soft bristles of her brush through her waves, watching them in bland curiosity as they sprang in response. She wanted to cut them off; to throw them into the sea, where her husband sent so many of his enemies. She was his enemy, too, but he’d never throw her there. Not until her use was spent, and so far, she had not proved she had any.
The door opened. She suppressed a gasp, but the sharp sound dissolved when she saw the image reflected behind her in her looking glass.
“It’s you,” she said, dropping her brush on the table.
“It’s me,” a man replied. Jesse recognized this one, but the answer was just beyond his grasp. His dark hair was soft and wavy, as beautiful as the woman’s, but it was his eyes that could not be ignored. Not the green, or even the flecks of amber within, but the sense that behind them one might travel anywhere. Elsewhere. Beyond.
“You know what he’ll do if he finds you here alone with me.”
The man pulled her strawberry hair through his fingers, letting it fall piece by piece. He leaned in, inhaling. “I know what he believes he will do.”
“There you are again, saying the words but not showing me what they mean,” she accused. “You don’t fear him enough.”
The man leaned over the top of her. He reached for her chin, tilted it high, and then kissed her from above.
“I’m more interested in what you will do now that I am here,” he said.
“We cannot. You know this.”
“And I will not come unless you ask me.”
The Broken Realm Page 49