It was as though they had already dined and had done so so thoroughly that not a trace remained.
But there was no odor of a repast that had since disappeared down anyone's gullet. There were no tell-tale bones, nor crumbs of bread. No bottles of wine to leave red ring stains on the table.
As in the kitchens, there was nothing at all, if not the diners themselves.
The Marquis watched her look down at her empty plate and then at those of each of them before speaking again.
"Of course. What has my most able assistant found for our sustenance this evening?"
His voice was light and cheerful, but Melisse thought she heard his tone strain every so slightly as he evoked the subject of his assistant.
The woman had been standing behind the Marquis seated upon his odd armchair of three wheels, and Melisse has somehow not even noticed her until then. Not even when she had passed just by as she went to seat herself next to the Marquis.
The woman, mute as ever, simply nodded then moved briskly into the shadows behind her, the same shadows that had seemed to extend to her until then, keeping her presence perfectly unremarkable until then.
What a wonderful talent that must be, Melisse thought. To be able to simply fade away while not moving, to become, in a word, dim like a lantern with its wick turned down so low that it barely shed any light at all.
The strange woman moved without making a sound, another skill that Melisse admired, as she went first to Helene, then to the Marquis, and finally to Melisse, while depositing a small object wrapped in colored paper on each of their dinner plates.
The Marquis' assistant returned to her place just behind the nobleman and just as quickly, Melisse forgot all about her.
Instead, she stared at the tiny object before her.
The Marquis chuckled.
"It is a bonbon, child. My assistant arranged to have them imported from Lutèce itself, produced in one of its finest ateliers. We brought quite a few with us when your lovely sister sent her invitation for a visit at her home, and happily enough, no matter how many we eat, our stocks remain replete."
"Is it very sweet?" Melisse asked, then blushed at her own audacity.
"It is," replied the Marquis. "And I think you will find that a little goes quite a long way. But perhaps a word of caution is merited for once you've tasted its splendor, why I am afraid that you shall desire only it and nothing else forevermore."
He unwrapped his paper with shaking fingers, his eyes going unnaturally wide.
A small brown cube was revealed. It glistened with flecks of something that could have been precious metal, for all Melisse knew.
She heard a sound erupt from Helene, a sound very much like the growl of a feral cat, then she, too, tore the paper away from her sweet.
Her lips were peeled back in a way that made Melisse think that if anyone had been fool enough to approach her then, they would have quite likely lost a finger or more, for the woman's face was the twisted leer of a wild beast.
"Shall we?" the Marquis mumbled, then both he and Helene stuffed their bonbons into their mouths with their jaws working maniacally up and down.
Melisse looked down at her own sweet then decided to do nothing. As it was, she was not hungry and it might be nice to have later.
"My Lord, if it pleases you, might I save this for a bit later?"
He appeared to hardly notice her question for his eyes were closed and he chewed incessantly.
Melisse looked to Helene, and she did the same except that her eyes were not entirely closed, her eyelids fluttering like butterflies, and her head was tipped back with the cords of her neck standing out.
She was about to ask her question again when the Marquis gestured in her direction with his hand.
It was a dismissive movement, but clear in its intent.
Melisse and what she wanted were of little import to the nobleman. While she was not surprised, it stung her all the same.
After a short while, the two seemed to come to their senses following the apparent rapture of eating their sweets.
The Marquis, acting as though nothing was amiss, wore his smile once more.
"Do you know, Lady Melisse, it was not so very long ago that I was a broken man," he reached out to her and took her hand.
"That is to say, that I still am, very much, but it is my spirit that has been mended and this, in no small part, is thanks to your lovely sibling, Helene."
He gestured with his other hand toward her, and Helene simply inclined her head in recognition of his compliment.
"So it is that I would give you, our honored guest this evening, anything that you would desire, anything within my modest means to bestow.
“If you wish to keep your little treasure for later, then it is my wish also that you do so.
“Further, I think a feast such as ours is lacking only one thing, and that is a bit of entertainment.
“What do you think, my dear?”
Melisse blushed as she answered him.
"I regret, my Lord. I am neither skilled in dance nor song. I fear that any efforts on my part would fall sorely short of the mark."
She felt foolish and out of her place. She forced herself to speak in the way of nobility, but it felt forced and awkward coming from her lips.
The Marquis looked more squarely at her and his eyes positively twinkled with delight.
"You truly are exquisite, child. I did not mean to demand anything of you. Rather, I should think Helene and my assistant will prove to be quite equal to the task I set them."
"My dears," he called out, "I entreat you. Entertain us in the best way you know how."
Helene's eyes went wide and her mouth stretched even wider.
Thatis the grin of a mad beast, Melisse had just the time to think before her stepsister bounded up and onto the tabletop while hitching her skirts high.
Then she flopped onto her back, legs in the air, and laughed with a sound that bordered upon a cackling scream.
Despite her being seated just next to the Marquis, Melisse did not see his assistant leap up the way Helene just had.
Instead, she seemed to simply appear in a blur of motion coalescing between Helene's thighs.
Then the strange woman's face wore its own crazily stretched grin before it was lost to view as she bent to bury herself in Helene's crotch.
Melisse shook her head slowly from one side to the other. She could not have said why she did it, but to an onlooker, she might have appeared to be shaking away invisible biting flies, like horses do, but with so little enthusiasm that it would be obvious that her resistance was symbolic and nothing more.
Helen's hips lifted up and her legs went wider than what should have been possible as the strange woman continued lapping at the pink flower between the noblewoman's legs.
Melisse could not look away. She was transfixed, and even the effort of closing her eyes against the unseemly spectacle before her was beyond her strength.
The Marquis’ assistant continued her ministrations, increasing her tempo with each stroke of her tongue, and soon it was to the point that her head was pounding up and down more quickly than the eye could follow.
This cannot be real, Melisse thought. No living human being could possibly move like that.
A sighing scream rose in Melisse's ears. It was in a voice she recognized, that of her half-sister. A voice that had its natural place in speaking honey sweet words edged in unflinching guile and manipulation.
But Helene's days as the source of machinations were quite clearly over. It was she who was manipulated in every sense of the word as her hips pumped furiously up and down, hopelessly out of time with the inhuman frenzy blurring in and out of focus between her thighs.
"Yes!" cried out the Marquis, and Melisse realized that she had forgotten the man was even there until then.
"Have at her, my lovely!"
His voice was frantic and high pitched. In a different state of mind, Melisse would have said his was a voice rise
n in fear and loathing. Instead all she heard was a man overjoyed for the vicarious pleasure that he took no real part in.
It would have been piteous to the woman who had stood at the edge of the House Perene's grounds earlier that day. Now, however, it was something for which she had no choice in her opinion.
Helene's voice caught as her hips stopped pumping. Instead, her head rolled back with the cords of her neck standing out far too clearly as her body arched up and up, bowing like a contortionist the noblewoman had never trained to be.
Melisse shuddered, desperate to look away — desiring nothing more than to scream for all of it to stop before Helene was killed in an infernal, carnal embrace that seemed to be without limit.
The assistant's face never slowed as it streaked up and down, her shining tongue pressed firmly against Helene's sex. But then, a second image joined the first, a second ghostly head lifted separately from the first to turn back to look Melisse in the eyes, unflinching and bestial with undisguised hatred and delight.
A new voice spoke then, one Melisse did not know. It was a sound she heard not with her ears but in her mind, and the sense that she was been invaded just as thoroughly as her half-sister made her shriek inside while not a sound passed her lips.
And to think of all the disquiet you have caused, the voice said, and it was no woman that spoke, nor was it a man. To look at you now, one might wonder how you ever came to be noticed at all.
The voice snickered.
So easily coerced. So quick to fall. Where has your savage might gone, daughter of men?
Melisse shook her head. It was like having a head full of bees that buzzed words she could not fathom.
Helene's arched body quivered from one end to the other, then without preamble, she simply fell over and the moment that held each one of them spellbound fell with her.
Without remembering that she had done so, Melisse found herself standing, her chair overturned and fallen to the floor.
The Marquis' assistant was back at his side and any sign that she was anything other than an ordinary, dutiful servant to a crippled man was hidden away so thoroughly that Melisse doubted it had ever been any other way.
Then her eyes were drawn back to Helene.
She still lay upon the table, fallen onto her side, and spasms wracked her entire body from time to time.
But what drew Melisse's attention most of all were the noblewoman's fingers. More precisely, the tips of her fingers.
Every nail on both hands had broken. Blood seeped and made a sanguine trail to where the noblewoman had gouged the tabletop, clawing it so deeply during the extreme state she had just known, that she had been apparently unaware of the damage she did herself.
Melisse backed away from all of them. She refused to turn her back on them, so she simply backed away until she found a wall, then edged along it until she found a doorway.
Once there, she spun around and ran down the corridor, but before she could take even the first turn at corridor's end, she had already slowed to a sluggish gait.
For there was no reason to run, no reason to be afraid. She would simply go to her bedchamber and sleep and when she woke, she already knew she would believe it had been nothing more than a bad dream.
All that had happened was that. A dream dreamt by a woman who had thought herself powerful for a time.
But Melisse knew better now.
She was home, and she had found once more her true place in the world. All the rest was but a foolish dream best forgotten.
Chapter Seven — Silas
Silas watched as Melisse regained her bedchamber then closed the door behind her.
His heart ached as she slid a pitifully thin door bolt closed, locking the door but in a way that would stop no one but the most feeble from entering.
He looked away from the cauldron, unwilling to see her go to her bed and sit upon its edge, her gaze vacant, empty.
Silas stood, then paced from one end of his prison cell to the other.
"What can I do for her?" he asked aloud. He knew there would be no answer, but he had decided the sound of his own voice was better than the alternative.
"This cannot be," he said. "I know her name at last and it is beautiful to my ears. Melisse. But where is the fire that dwells in her lovely bosom? Where has her sense gone?"
He did not ask aloud his next thought, for it was more than he could bear.
Why has she become such a fool?
Silas stopped pacing as he reached a wall. Then he pounded his fists against it until the pain became too much.
Still, at least the act allowed him to expend his frustration, if not fully, but enough to wonder what he might do to help the woman he watched in a world so far removed from the one he found himself in.
In the end, he returned to the cauldron as he knew he would, the pull of what it would show him next irresistible.
Melisse lay upon her bed, her eyes closed, and Silas wondered if she dreamed. He wondered if she might find the strength she had so clearly forgotten in the dreamlands behind her eyes.
"If only …" he whispered, then dared the thing that had just occurred to him.
He reached his hand forward, desperate to push it into the cauldron and shake the beautiful dark haired woman awake, truly awake, so that she might see what had become of her.
So that she might end the bewitchment to which she had fallen prey.
Silas had imagined he would be rebuffed, that the dark liquid within the cauldron would be impenetrable. Instead, his hand went in to the wrist before he felt himself come to a stop.
He pushed, but he could go no further. Otherwise, he felt nothing at all, neither heat nor cold, no fire nor ice.
Fine. I cannot go further physically. So it seems I must try another way.
Silas concentrated. He gathered his thoughts. He thought of the moment when he had first met Melisse. He thought of the touch of her skin under his hands. He thought of what it had been like to be inside her as she smiled for him with the pleasure they had shared together.
He thought, too, of the fire that had come just after. It had been a ravening beast, and he had understood that the lovely stranger he had met that night was the source of the same untamed power.
He remembered that everything around them had begun to burn. He remembered the heat, the incredible soaring flames that flowed outward from the smoldering gaze of the dark-haired beauty before him then.
He could see her in his memories, just as he saw her in the cauldron before him.
Silas remembered for both of them before he felt himself physically forced backward, until his hand was pushed back out of the cauldron, unblemished and whole.
But he had felt something. He was almost sure of it. Some glimmer of connection.
Some measure of hope.
Far away and high up in a lonely, nearly abandoned noble family's home, a dark-haired woman startled awake upon her bed.
She wore a frown as she sat up.
Then, deep inside, so deeply that one might not have noticed at all but for the darkness in that bedchamber, a tiny spark sprang to life in her beautiful brown eyes.
It was nothing more than the smallest glint of flame which died back almost as quickly as it came. In its place glowed an ember that was not so quick to wink out.
As any serving woman knows, it takes next to nothing to set fire to dry tinder — and whence the smallest bit of tinder does the inferno spring to life.
Chapter Eight — Nestor and Capucine
The old man thought that it might have been the most garish blue he had ever seen.
He dipped his paintbrush into the pail and swirled it around a bit, thinking that maybe it needed further mixing.
But no, it was just as ugly as ever and he knew there was nothing for it.
His hog's hair brush took on twice its own weight with the stuff, and Nestor set to painting the garden fence.
It did not matter that it would not last. It did not matter that he had done th
e same thing last year, or that he would do it again the next.
All that mattered was that his dearest wife wanted it done.
Most years it had been various shades of yellow. Sometimes, Capucine was inspired and turned out versions of bright and cheerful orange.
But this year was the year she chose to mix up this dreadful blue.
The old man sighed as he chased after dribbles that threatened to outrun his brush to the ground.
He had half a mind to let them. For the sooner he was out of paint, the better.
Instead he smiled a crooked smile and kept about the dreary business before him.
Capucine had promised him this batch of paint would finally do the trick and turn back rabbits and other furry vermin intent on eating whatever they pleased in the vegetable garden. And, to make matters worse, the vile beasts did so long before anything was even ripe.
She said the blue would do for them where the others had not.
Nestor snorted and wondered how long it would take before they would find the carrots topped and the turnips tipped, no matter how blue the fence happened to be.
"Herb Witch, tickle me,
Stickle me, thin.
A poultice, a cantrip,
Pickle me, again."
Nestor, ever the good husband, hummed one of his favorite old rhymes. However, as he had learned long ago, he took care to do so well beyond his wife's earshot. She did not much care for that bit of verse and had threatened to pickle him for good if he sang it again.
Given the circumstances, horrid blue paint and a fence far longer than was sensible, it was the only revenge he had against his present situation.
"Tickle me, stickle me … pickle me, again!"
The old man chuckled as he worked.
Then he swore in a tongue no one in those parts had heard in a thousand years with his next breath.
"Nestor!"
His darling wife had screeched his name, which meant the jig was up.
Foolish old man that he knew himself to be, he had to admit that he might be well on his way to being a deaf old man as well, for sure as spit sticks, he must have rhymed too loudly than was good for him.
The Marechal Chronicles: Volume VI, The Crucible: A Dark Fantasy Tale Page 9