Court of Shadows
Page 27
I couldn’t help but smile, and even allowed him to take my hand and kiss it. He then straightened and carefully reached for the pin on my frock, the one that had given me freedom. With a sigh, he undid the clasp and pulled it free, showing it to me in his manicured palm.
“You know I have to take this. You never did finish all the journal translations. A deal is a deal, Louisa.”
“Because you told me to get to the end,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Yes, I did,” Henry murmured, a bit sadly. He avoided looking at me, pouring his focus into the pin. “Yes, I did. And now I think again we have come to the end.” Brightening, he closed his fingers around the pin and tucked it into his pocket. “Until we meet again, that is. Chijioke will drive you as far as Malton. I trust you won’t get in any trouble there?”
I gave a thin laugh and nodded toward the staircase behind him. “I will not be alone.”
They had dressed Khent in one of Mr. Morningside’s old suits, and he looked exceedingly uncomfortable in it. To the rest of us, however, he looked quite dashing, groomed, wounds seen to, his beard shaved off to accommodate more modern English tastes. He had a pack over his shoulder, one of my bags, and a sturdy shawled coat under one arm in the event of rain.
“Do look out for fleas,” Mr. Morningside said with a wink, strolling toward the kitchen door, where Mrs. Haylam had appeared. I had no idea how long she had been watching us, but her one good eye was distant, hooded. She had been largely silent during my recuperation, only drawing breath to complain that she was shorthanded again and to bitterly admit that because I had died, the book no longer held sway over me.
The marks on my fingers had faded away.
Khent joined me in the foyer, picking up another bag and looking as if with his size and bulk he could carry all of them without strain. He took up a polite but vigilant stance behind me and to the left. I picked up the spider cage and one bag, hesitating. Lee had never appeared, but then, I would never dream of asking him to.
“Well,” I said, drawing in a deep breath. “Thank you for . . . for everything you’ve done. I don’t think this is good-bye, and truly, in my heart of hearts, I hope it isn’t. When we retrieve Mary, I will give her your wishes. You may all be seeing her shortly if she decides to return.”
“Oh, I hope she does!” Poppy squeezed her hands together as if in prayer. “And if not, you had better let us come see you, Louisa. I want to go to London! To the First City! All of it!”
Mrs. Haylam grunted. I could tell she was eager for me to go. After all, I had upset the balance. There was an order to things at Coldthistle House, an order I never seemed to understand. Mr. Morningside had been bending the rules he and the shepherd had set down, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the trial was only the beginning of his problems. That it might put my friends in danger, and that they had refused to join me in leaving, was the hardest jab to bear.
“Of course you can visit,” I chuckled. “Anyone is welcome, only, I have no idea where I will go. I must see to Mary, but then . . .” I shrugged. Anything was possible, wasn’t it? “I will write.”
“Yes, you will.” Mr. Morningside winked at me from the kitchen door. “Now, be off, or Chijioke will be a bearded old man by the time he returns.”
Now that it came to it, I did not want to go. But I picked up the last of my things and turned, following Khent out the door. It felt odd to be leaving with someone I hardly knew, but having read what he had done for Bennu and knowing that he had tried to warn me against Father, endeared me to him for now. It was a relief, at least, to have company, to forge ahead with this new life and this new soul aided by someone who knew the ins and outs of our curious world.
“Good-bye!” Poppy called after us. She and Bartholomew chased me to the door, waving like mad. The dog bayed, throwing his nose into the air as he wailed. “Write soon! Very soon! In fact, write when you get to Malton, and then every town after that. . . .”
“She’s saying good-bye,” I told Khent in his language. “She’s, um, very precocious.”
He grinned and gave me a sidelong look. “That was obvious in any language.”
Chijioke met us at the carriage, pulling me into a bone-crushing embrace before hauling my bags onto the driver’s seat. When he was done, he took a small wooden fish out of his pocket and gave it to me while Khent secured our bags for the trip.
“For Mary,” he said, blushingly. “The real one.”
“She’ll love it,” I replied, tucking the fish away. “You will know the moment we find her.”
Nodding, Chijioke gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then leapt up into the driver’s box. “We can say good-bye at Malton, then I can do my weepies on the way back without you there to tease me.”
I was about to take the fish and the spider cage with me into the carriage, but I heard a soft scuffle on the stones behind me. Like a shadow, Lee had come, emerging from the foyer headfirst, as if peering out to see if I had already gone. I lifted my things up for Khent to take, my hand on the door, my body twisted around to face Coldthistle.
Lee walked over to me slowly, eyes darting. Foolishly, I had thought that we were even, that now that he had decided my fate we would share some kind of intense and unique bond. But it was not so. And it was unfair to expect parity, especially when his resurrection had come with a price and so much pain, and mine had resulted only in greater power and understanding. It simply wasn’t fair, and my heart ached for the things that could have been between us were life kinder.
On a whim, I reached out my hand toward him and he took it, his fingers cold, his posture careful. I had no idea what to say, the immensity of feeling swelling in my heart almost too much to bear, choking me. There is what the heart wants and what reality demands, and they are often as incompatible as snow and fire.
I took the spoon out from the chain around my neck. It had been repaired by Chijioke only recently, but I pulled the necklace off and placed it in his palm, closing his fingers around it.
“This has brought me such exceedingly bad luck,” I told him in a whisper, tears making my voice ragged. “Please chuck it off the roof or bury it in a deep, dark hole. For both our sakes.”
Lee gifted me a small smile and nodded. “I thought I was so gallant, stealing that thing for you. My first act of larceny. No wonder it’s cursed.”
“Take care of yourself, Lee, please. I’m sorry.”
He shoved the spoon into his pocket and pulled his shoulders back. “Don’t be, Louisa. I’m not sorry we met, but I am sorry to see you go.”
Then he hugged me, as suddenly as he had in the library, and I sank into that feeling for as long as propriety allowed. When it was over, he left in a hurry, disappearing into the house with a shadow’s lively, cunning step.
It was time to go.
Khent helped me up into the carriage, holding out his huge hand for me to take and then following me inside. It was humid and quiet inside, Mab the spider sitting between us in her cage. Chijioke cracked the whip. I sighed and sat back in my seat, and watched Poppy chase us down the drive as we at last left Coldthistle House behind. I closed my eyes, listening to the gravel crunch under the wheels, feeling as if the mansion was watching me go, feeling as if it was giving a silent scream of frustration that I had managed to escape.
I did not know if I was free of the place, but I was on a path, and that was something. The sprawling parapets and long black windows of the house grew more distant as we made our way along the lawn.
The farther we went, the better I felt, as if a fog were lifting from all around me. I leaned against the window, memorizing the last of it, wondering if the melancholy weight in my heart would ever lift.
My eye caught on something as we passed from field to forest and turned toward the main dirt road. They had burned Father’s body, a tiny black sapling already sprouting where the ashes lay. A black mist hung around it, and as I looked, the clouds brought on the wind opened up and a hard rain began to fall, a rolling roar
of thunder threatening from a distance.
Epilogue
The driving wind and rain whipped hard at our faces. Even without Bennu’s journals, my feet would have carried me to this place, a path I knew in my bones now that Father’s soul was entwined with mine. To other eyes, human eyes, the road would not reveal itself, hidden as it was by tangle upon tangle of thick trees and shrubs, the path rising from the forest floor up to a long rock causeway carpeted with water. That water became falls, the rushing sound at our feet as noisy as the storm above.
“Watch your step!” Khent called over the commotion. The stones were slippery, treacherous, but I navigated deftly, as if I had walked the way a hundred times or more.
Through the wall of the downpour I saw a shape emerge, taller and grander than the trees to our right. To our left, the falls plunged toward a roaring froth of foam and sharp boulders.
The shape rising above us looked like a giant wicker basket, just like the one described by Bennu in his journals. Khent had not arrived at the city through this route, but he had taken a similar path when he fled, and his bare feet hopped across the wet stones with more grace than mine. He took my hand as the path ahead widened and became steep. If I squinted past my scarf and the rain, I could just see the outline of a pair of huge silvery doors.
“Do you think more people inside will have woken up?” I asked him. We spoke in his native language, but his English was improving by the day.
Khent shook his head, his face obscured by a sturdy hood and cowl. “I have no idea. Who can tell what Father’s death and resurrection will have done?”
That felt like the repeated refrain of these recent days. Chaos. Uncertainty. Outside the walls of Coldthistle I felt almost naked, as if some vital part of me had been stripped away. I wondered if my confidence would ever really come. Whatever the case, I pushed on toward the doors, helped by Khent’s steadying grip.
We reached the entrance to the city, the silver doors choked with vines and moss, the intricate carvings almost completely obliterated. I put my hand on the doors, expecting nothing, only to feel at once the old mechanisms engage, a loud, long creak rattling through my body. My instinct was to duck, but I held fast, breathing hard, pushing just a little and finding that the door gave inward. We dodged inside, and the moment we did, the storm abruptly ended.
Within, the air was warm and moist and fragrant, stifling but beautiful. Birdsong echoed off the round walls, the open courtyard similar to the shape and size of a coliseum. I gazed about, awestruck, feeling at once terrified and at home. Home. I did not intend to stay, and I did not know if I belonged there or if Father’s soul was simply reacting to the familiar grounds, but for a moment, I relished that warm and welcoming sensation.
“Louisa?”
I turned at the sound of her voice. It was a little thing, but so, so comforting. Mary called my name again, stronger this time, and I ran toward her across the green stones. Archways splintered off in every direction, leading to what I could not see, and in the middle of the courtyard were the stairs leading downward that Bennu had described. The city felt utterly empty, as if only we three existed inside of it. Mary stood from where she had been sitting, her skirts dirtied and torn. When we met and embraced, my face was wet now from tears and not the rain.
“You came! You’re here! How could you be here?” she cried, squeezing me hard.
I pulled back and sighed, noticing the obvious chunk of hair missing from the right side of her brown locks. “There is so much to explain. . . . So much . . .” I was breathless, elated.
“Oh, but you’re soaked!” Mary said, clucking her tongue. “You must be near freezing!”
“Hush and stop worrying about me,” I laughed, and waved her off. It was so good to see her face again, her shining eyes and freckles, and know that it was truly her. “You’re the one I’m concerned about. . . . How did you stand to be here all this time?”
“I tried to leave, I truly did.” With a frown, she gestured to the doors behind us. They had closed again. “Louisa, there is no way out! The walls are too high, and there are things that stir below, things I can only hear but do not wish to meet.”
“I scaled the walls but only as a beast, else I would not have had the agility for it.” Khent stepped forward at that, grimacing, and touched my shoulder gently before heading resolutely toward the staircase. “More folk must be waking,” he said, and I watched Mary stare at him, dumbfounded. “Stay here until I can make certain they are . . . amenable.”
“You’ll be careful.” I did not mean for it to sound like an order, but it was.
Khent grinned and tossed his head. “They will give me no trouble.”
For a moment Mary was quiet, watching him go, her brow furrowed. “How did you get here, Louisa? There was an awful man who took me from Waterford before I could think a single thought. He took my hair and locked me up in here and would not tell me anything! And who is that person? What language are you speaking?”
I put my arm through hers and shrugged. Where to begin? “As I told you, there is so much to explain, but we should not do it here. I think it’s a story for later, when we are all safe and dry and warm. It would be best told far, far away from here.”
“Oh, please,” she cried. “Please. It has been so boring waiting here. . . . It felt like an eternity. There are only so many times you can recite poems and ditties to yourself before it all becomes a sad jumble.”
“Well, what I have to tell you is certainly not boring,” I laughed. Then, remembering what I had carried so far and through so much wind and rain, I dug into my pocket and came up with a little carved wooden fish. “Here,” I said. “Chijioke made this for you.”
“For me?” Her cheeks blossomed with color. She took the fish and closed her fingers around it, blinking hard. “And . . . does his little gift come up in this wild story of yours?”
From below, I heard a disarmingly hearty laugh. Perhaps Khent had not encountered trouble after all. I steered Mary slowly toward the stairs and waited, looking down into the darkness and wondering where exactly we would all go, where exactly I would find a home.
“It does,” I told her. “I only wonder if you will believe it all.”
Acknowledgments
This was not by any means an easy book to write, and there are many people who need thanking. Firstly, Andrew and the team at HarperCollins, who demonstrated saintly patience while I finished and finished and finished. Olivia Russo organized such wonderful travel opportunities to promote the series, and did so like a total rock star. I also want to acknowledge the design team, who put so much time and energy into making House of Furies look and feel beautiful. Daniel Danger and Iris Compiet did amazingly, of course, and I’m grateful to them for their creativity and passion. A huge thanks to my agent, Kate McKean, who continues to be the rock of my professional life. Matt Grigsby and Oliver Ash Northern, thank you for helping me make some wickedly cool promotional materials for the series.
To my family—you all know how much you mean to me, and the love and compassion you showed me while I raced to write and rewrite this book is nothing short of amazing. Next time let’s not have a family emergency while I’m in deadline hell, okay?
Brent Roberts was instrumental in helping with aspects of Christian lore, and Amanda Raths provided major help with the Egyptian translations; thank you both for your generous assistance.
Image Credits
Victorian border here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here © 2018 by iStock / Getty Images.
Wall texture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here © 2018 by iStock / Getty Images.
Photographs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here © 2018 by Shutterstock.
Illustrations here, here, here, here, here, here, here by Iris Compiet.
About the Author
Photo credit Greg De Stefano
MADELEINE ROUX is the New York Times bestselling author of the Asylum series—Asylum, Sanctum, Catacomb, Escape from Asylum, and The Asylum Novellas—which has sold into twelve countries around the world, as well as Allison Hewitt Is Trapped and Sadie Walker Is Stranded. This is the second book in her House of Furies series. A graduate of the Beloit College writing program, Madeleine now lives in Seattle, Washington.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Books by Madeleine Roux
Asylum
Sanctum
Catacomb
Escape from Asylum
The Asylum Two-Book Collection
Asylum 3-Book Collection
The Scarlets
The Bone Artists
The Warden
The Asylum Novellas
House of Furies
Court of Shadows
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