The three men who had brought me there had thrown on red robes over their normal clothes and now looked the same as the other two. They closed in around me, reaching for me. I flung myself out of the circle, heading for the steps, but one of them tripped me and I fell, my face smashing into the stone floor. They seized me and picked me up. Blood streamed from my nose, staining the white of my nightgown, and I fought like a mad cat, twisting and scratching...but there were five of them in all and I didn’t stand a chance.
“This isn’t any simpering maiden,” remarked one man, “this is an urchin, right enough.”
The other men laughed nastily and shoved me down on the altar. They slipped nooses around my wrists and ankles, ropes that seemed badly positioned, as if they normally held less human victims. The staring man waved the others to their own points of the pentagram and drew an ornate dagger. I twisted, terrified, blood running down my wrists as I fought against the ropes. The devil couldn’t get my soul, could he, if I died like this?
But I didn’t want to die at all! I yanked wildly at the cords that held me. The sorcerers were chanting now, and the weight of evil in the air scorched the back of my neck. The chanting went on and on, rising and rising. I struggled and struggled with hopeless tenacity, watching as the man raised the ceremonial dagger into the air, leaning forward to line it up over my heart. But he could not hold it up forever... I refused to allow the burning tears to escape my eyes. After surviving my long urchinhood, my serious illness, after everything...I was to die like this?
It was not fair, I thought, and immediately thought of my father, who was right. Life was not fair and it seemed that my death was not to be fair either. They may be damned, I thought furiously, but I shall not be damned! I believe, I whispered in my mind, slipping into the creed. My neck prickled in a much more comforting way and that painful fear in my chest eased a little. I waited for the stroke, seeing the man’s arm muscles begin to bunch in preparation...
“Stop!” snapped a dry voice, harsh with fury.
My head jerked around, along with those of my captors. Alban Serapion Ravena stood halfway down the steps, Raven coiled on his shoulder. He did not look surprised by the place in which he found himself and my heart twisted painfully within me.
“My lord,” said the staring man in almost petulant irritation, “you have interrupted the ritual. We will have to begin all over again.”
“You shall not begin again,” declared the Duke furiously. “What do you think you are doing in the first place? Did I not make myself absolutely clear?”
He did know them. My mind was almost blank with shock.
The staring man gave the Duke an almost...dismissive…look. “We work for pay, my Lord, as you well know. Besides, I hardly thought you were serious. You should be pleased that your salvation should come at someone else’s expense. We are completing the sorcery very much in the nick of time, are we not?”
The Duke stared at them for a moment, then abruptly laughed, harshly and scornfully. “You fools,” he said. “This child is not of my blood. She is just an urchin taken from the streets for her useful resemblance to me.”
The sorcerers stared at the Duke. “Would you explain further, my Lord?” said the staring one.
“Explain myself to you?” inquired the Duke scathingly. “If you cannot understand a simple statement, I suppose I will have to. I’ll try and make it as simple as possible. I have been alone a long time. I wished for an heir. I was lazy and did not wish to be troubled with legal adoption. This urchin girl—who has very much my looks, I think you will agree—approached me for aid. I took her home as my daughter and everyone takes her as such. Including you fools, I see.”
“And her...uncle?” said the staring one. I could see he was not convinced.
“Your paymaster in this, I presume? Another fool,” said the Duke coldly. “Turns out this one,” he indicated me, “is his illegitimate child. He gave her to my wife to raise as a consolation, but he hates her himself, fearing her true lineage will be discovered. Obviously I wanted to reclaim my wife’s property anyway, so I challenged him over his treatment of my supposed daughter. He could not reveal the truth without revealing his own little secret.
“No, in short, gentlemen,” that word came very sarcastically, “all you will achieve by killing this girl is my displeasure. I will have to find a new heir, and quite how I will explain the tragic death of one long lost daughter and the immediate acquisition of another, I don’t quite know. So release her.”
The staring one regarded him for several long moments. But he lowered the knife fully. “My lord,” he said more urgently. “You must realize that the sorcery is still operational. There is nothing that can stop it. Unless you can provide us with a child of your blood...”
The Duke cut him off. “I think it ought to be quite clear by now that I cannot do so. For obvious reasons I hardly wish to discuss it further. You think I would not have tried everything? Now release the girl.”
The staring sorcerer gestured to one of the others, and he came forward and eased the nooses from my bloody wrists and ankles. I scrambled from the altar and stumbled towards the steps. Reaching my father, I stared at him in silence, still too numb with shock to really think.
“Go back to bed,” he told me coolly. “I’ll speak to you later.”
Seeing the anxious stirring of the sorcerers, I hastened up the stairs.
“Do not concern yourselves over her silence,” I heard the Duke remark. “She is a bastard urchin at heart and would sell her soul for my money.”
I didn’t know why it was so important they believe I was not my father’s daughter, but I certainly wasn’t going to say anything to the contrary. Nor was I going to leave. I went to the door, opened it and slammed it hard, but without going through it. Creeping back to the edge of the balcony, I hid in the shadows, peeping around the corner. I was afraid for my father, alone with these men, for whatever his connection with them, he was my father. And he had saved me yet again. And I was afire with curiosity.
“I do believe,” my father was going on icily, “that I said you were never to come here again.”
Some of the sorcerers shifted uneasily, but the staring one, who seemed their leader, remained unconcerned. “We thought that in the circumstances...”
“You thought that in the circumstances...” mimicked the Duke scornfully. “You think I would refuse your services should I find myself in possession of a child of my blood at long last? Blundering idiots. You are not welcome here. Now get out.”
Most of the sorcerers moved towards another door I now noticed on the far side of the temple. Perhaps the passage did eventually come out in London.
The leader stood his ground. “The sorcery...” he began.
“Out,” snarled the Duke, stabbing a finger towards the door. “Out or I’ll see you all burn.”
The other sorcerers hurried out at this, but the leader stayed long enough to give the Duke one long, sardonic look. “And you with us, my lord?” he asked softly, “and you with us?”
Then he too, slipped through the door, and was gone.
~+~
CHAPTER 21
TRUTH
My father remained frozen for a long, long moment as the sound of the key turning in the lock echoed to nothing. Then he strode down the last few steps and in a burst of savage, furious energy, he tore down each of the wall hangings in turn, flinging them onto that wooden altar. He added those old bones and finally flung the wall torches one after another onto the pile, which flared up into a violent blaze.
He stood by the pile, too close, for so long that I was ready to run down and pull him away. But he finally stepped back from it and flung himself down at the base of the stairs, his face buried against his arms. His shoulders shook, and I realized that he was weeping as I’d never seen a grown man weep.
I crouched there for a long time while he sobbed, my mind in utter turmoil and my stomach sick with what I had just seen and learned. How could he
explain it? How? But I would listen to him, I knew that. I would listen to what he had to say.
Finally the blaze sunk down to a red glow and my father’s tears ceased. He pushed himself up to a sitting position on the lowest step and turned his face towards me. There was a painful dignity in his refusal to wipe the tears away, and his face was composed, even while drawn with pain and grief. And shame.
“I know you’re there, child,” he said quietly, his voice tired and a little hoarse. “Come out.”
Unsurprised, I stood up and went down the steps, taking with me the lantern he must have abandoned there upon entering. I stopped and sat on a step a couple up from him, beginning to shake violently with cold and relief. He slipped off his chamber gown, which he had clearly not even stopped to tie, and held it out to me wordlessly. Pulling the gown around me gratefully, I noted that as I had feared, unnecessarily as it turned out, he was unarmed.
He wrapped his arms around his chest and looked at me in silence. I could tell he didn’t quite know what to say and for the first time since I’d met him, he looked very vulnerable. Raven coiled on my shoulder, and I stroked her in rather absent-minded gratitude. He might know them, but he could not be one of them. He couldn’t.
Finally, I said “Well?”
He drew in a long breath, as if he had been forgetting to breathe. “Will you hear me then? You who would never sell your soul for my gold?”
“I will hear you,” I returned just as softly.
“Very well,” he said quietly. “Then I will have to tell you everything.”
It hit me then, in a flash of dawning understanding. “This is about my mother, isn’t it?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “Oh yes. This is all about your mother.” He remained silent for a while, as if collecting his thoughts.
“After I was married... No, that’s no good, I shall have to go much further back to start this tale. My great, great grandfather lived on the family estate at Elfindale, which seems to be a place aptly named, for he married an elfin woman. Elfin female, I should probably say. It was true love, apparently, and neither regretted it, for they lived happily until finally life intervened with its usual lack of pity, and they were killed in a carriage accident.
“Leaving, though, my great grandfather to carry on our line. And he, of course, was half elfin himself.” He paused for a moment, looking at me thoughtfully. “Have you ever...felt things? Things that no one else seems to feel?”
I nodded eagerly. “Yes, I always have. And you do too, don’t you?”
The Duke nodded, a very faint smile flickering across his drawn face. “Alas, the acorns. I was careless. Yes, child, I feel these things too. My father did not, although his father did, but he taught me that I should never speak of it or let it be observed, by anyone. Although most scholars and clerics accept that creatures such as the Elfin are of nature, not of the devil, there are some who are less understanding.
“That, child, is the old slander I told you of. Our family’s elfin blood raised a lot of eyebrows at the time, for all they never admitted publicly that she was elfin; enough eyebrows that it has never quite been forgotten.
“This may not seem relevant, but it is. As well as this extra sense of ours, I was at one time visited by another elfin skill. I believe it was the sheer degree, the sheer power of my love for your mother that woke it, but I do not know so. We had been married for some years, and no child forthcoming, not that I minded, for your mother was young, and I am not a fool who will assume that a young woman who takes more than two years to conceive is barren. Far from it. I was happy to be patient.
“But the,” he broke off to laugh bitterly, “the gift, as they call it, of Foresight came to me. It began in dreams, but it got stronger, until I could see it all around her whenever I looked at her. That through some untimely accident or event, your mother was going to die. It drove me to distraction.
“I came to London—we lived at Elfindale, your mother and I,” he added, “did you know that? She liked the country. But I came to London to search for a cure to this doom. It seemed to me that if I could Foresee it, surely I could also prevent it.” He was silent again for a while. “It is possible to love too much, did you know that?” he asked at last.
“I suppose you can do anything too much,” I replied collectedly, though the talk of dreams sent a cold prickle down my spine, “although loving certainly isn’t what comes to mind as an evil.”
Alban sighed and hung his head. “It can work as much ill as any evil. The only hope I could find for your mother was sorcery.” He glanced at me. “That does not seem to surprise you.”
I snorted. “Strangely, it doesn’t.” I threw a sharp look in the direction of the smoldering heap.
“No, I suppose not,” went on the Duke, heavily. “I was half mad with love of your mother and fear of losing her. I say this to explain, not to excuse, for though I would not have been driven to it otherwise, there is no possible excuse. I learned from the sorcerers I finally managed to contact that it was indeed possible to avert such a doom; that there was a sorcery that could do this.
“Once I decided to take such a course, and in my madness the decision was quickly made, I followed their instructions. I prepared this horrible place for them, let them consecrate it with their animal sacrifices. It was an ice house, before, you know, one of the first in London. And when all was ready, I performed the sorcery. Which I suppose I must explain to you.
“The initial ritual cast the sorcery, which would prevent any accident befalling your mother for nine years and, if the sorcery was completed within those nine years, for the natural span of her life. If it was not completed by the end of the nine years, then she would die.
“But as one never gets anything from the evil one without paying at least double for it, there was to be a security as well, so that even if the sorcery was not completed in time and your mother died, the evil one was to get a price of sorts, this price being the security. Five years were allowed after the time of your mother’s death, for the sorcery’s completion, before this security would also be taken.”
He hesitated, and I knew he was coming to the crux of it, not that I expected it to be much of a surprise after what had just happened. “I pledged myself for the security,” he said quietly, “and I pledged a child of my blood as the payment that would complete the sorcery. However, your mother joined me suddenly in London, having grown weary of my absence. She found out enough that I had to confess all to her.”
His face twisted in pain. “She left; she would not stay another moment. I think perhaps I now know why she was in such a hurry,” he said, looking at me. “She did not betray me to the authorities, but that was all the mercy she had for me. And that, really, was no mercy at all. For when I understood that I had truly lost her it was only then that I really realized fully what I had done. The two combined...
“I was hard put to keep from doing myself harm,” he confessed very quietly. “I left to travel around England, to seek distraction enough to keep me sane and in one piece. Your mother sent me a letter after a time. She said that if she found herself living beyond the nine years, she would know that I had made the sacrifice and she would no longer hold her tongue. But the threat was unnecessary by then. I knew what I had done. The scales had, metaphorically, fallen from my eyes. I could never have finished the sorcery.
“If I could actually ever have gone through with it,” he added, his mouth twisting, “There is a great difference between the idea of a babe, even one’s own, and the squalling reality. But it never came to it, so I will never know, which is a blessing and a curse at once.
“The problem was, while your mother lived, there was this tiny glimmer of hope. It wasn’t a real hope, not by then. There was no child, or so I thought, and even so, it was irrelevant. My connection with sorcery was completely at an end. But your mother lived, and I still loved. When she died, however terrible this may sound, it was in a way a relief. Sometimes it is easier to have no h
ope at all.
“All the same, the British Isles were not large enough to contain my grief, so I went to the continent, again seeking vital distraction.
“Eventually I was emptied out and weary with the travel, and I wished to return to my childhood home and live quietly and with what peace I could for what time was left. And when I got here, a grimy urchin girl leapt aboard my carriage, which shows that God is indeed merciful, to send such comfort to even a damned soul. Although in truth, He was probably thinking of your need for my money. Which will all be yours,” he added, and was silent.
I regarded him narrowly. Money? I was hardly interested in his money at a time like this. But I caught the faint glimmer of fear in his eyes as he watched me, and suddenly understood. He was waiting for me to draw away from him, to revile him, to hate him. To leave him. So afraid of it that he could not help offering his worldly wealth to tempt me to stay.
How could he expect me to stay just for his wealth? He was my father! He was human, he had sinned very badly and he had been repenting of it ever since, I could see that quite clearly. It was not as if he was a sorcerer or had ever actually been a sorcerer as such, and saw no harm in it. He saw the harm all right. How could he think that I would leave him?
My mother left him, I realized. That’s why. He loved her enough to give his soul to save her, foolish as it might be, and she didn’t love him enough to try and save him from himself. Oh, it was clear why she left so quickly, she was already pregnant and dared not let him know. But she could still have tried to save him once her baby was safe. But she didn’t. She just left him.
My mother was pregnant with me. I looked at my father, who still watched me with the guarded eyes of a dog that has been beaten so badly it no longer hopes for love, or perhaps, feels that it deserves it.
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