House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  Elic withdrew his bloodied organ slowly and carefully from Adiega’s body. Sitting up, he reached for his cloak.

  “Elic.”

  Bran was smiling at him as he held Adiega in his arms. He said something that didn’t require Powder of Tongues to translate.

  “You’re welcome,” Elic said.

  “There she is,” said Bran shortly before noon as he and Adiega walked hand in hand through the village, with Elic, Artaros, and Frontu following behind. All around them, people paused in their packing and preparations to stare. He heard whispers about himself and Adiega, whispers about Elic…

  Vlatucia stood in front of her house with her hands on her hips, her expression furious, the golden torka around her neck gleaming in the frigid morning sun. Behind her stood her three Germani thugs.

  She turned to them and said, “The woman, Adiega—take her and burn her.”

  Bran thrust the trembling Adiega behind his back as Artaros stepped forward. “You can’t burn her, Vlatucia. It would be anathema. She’s your daughter by marriage.”

  “What?”

  There came a chorus of excited murmurs from the crowd that was gathering around them.

  “I married them myself just this morning,” Artaros said.

  She raised her hand; like well-trained dogs, the three Germani stopped advancing.

  “You’re lying,” she told her father. “You wouldn’t have done that. Bran must wed Briaga. You know that. You’ve told me so yourself. His children must be gifted.”

  “His first child is gifted,” the old man said. “He’s curled up in Adiega’s womb even as we speak.”

  “Impossible.”

  “See for yourself, Vlatucia. You have druidic gifts of your own, though you dismiss them. When you were a child, you saw the brightest, most colorful auras. Concentrate on Adiega. Tell me if you don’t see silvery ripples, little sparks…”

  Bran stepped aside so that his mother could study Adiega.

  Vlatucia shook her head in disbelief as she stared at her son’s new wife. “It…it’s not possible…How could she…?” Her expression turned venomous as her gaze lit on Elic. “You.”

  Elic smiled and bowed.

  “You were forbidden to do anything of the sort. I expressly forbade it! How dare you?”

  Elic, who couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, stood calmly by while she ranted at him.

  “Perhaps I can’t burn that worthless little vassa who married my son, but I can burn you,” she said, pointing a quivering finger at Elic.

  “Only the chieftain can order such a punishment,” Bran said.

  “We have no official chieftain,” she said. “There’s no one who’s qualified, so I’m serving until—”

  “Give me the torka.” Releasing Adiega’s hand, Bran walked toward his mother, his arm outstretched.

  “It’s rightfully Bran’s,” said Artaros. “You know it.” Gesturing to the onlookers, he said, “They know it, even if they’re too afraid of you to say it out loud.”

  “It’s mine!” she cried, clutching at the torka with both hands, her face flushing crimson. “The gall of you,” she told Bran, “thinking you deserve to wear this. You’re a child, a cripple. You can’t even put this on with one hand. You need two to pull it apart.”

  “If you don’t give it to me, I will take it from you,” Bran said.

  She let out a burst of hectic laughter. “I’d love to see you try, cripple.”

  Bran pointed at the torka while saying an ancient, simple, but very effective spell.

  Vlatucia’s eyes widened in alarm as she felt the torka grow warm, then hot. “Get it off,” she told her three Germani, clawing at it. “Get it off! Get it off!”

  They yanked it off her and threw it on the ground, then clustered around their mistress as she rubbed at the livid ring around her neck, whimpering.

  “Frontu.” Artaros, knowing the torka would be cool to the touch now, pointed to it. The wolf obediently loped over, picked it up in his mouth, and brought it back to his master.

  Artaros strained to widen the opening in the torka with his feeble old hands, but finally he gave up and handed it to Elic, who bent the soft gold easily and closed it around Bran’s neck.

  It felt so cool and heavy and right that it took Bran a moment to notice that his fellow Vernae were cheering him.

  The villagers spent the next few hours loading up their belongings, and then they all left together, in a long string of carts and wagons—except for those few who had chosen to stay behind with Bran and Adiega.

  “Do you hear that?” Bran asked as they stood at the edge of the village, watching the last of the carts disappear far beyond the valley.

  It was the ground beneath them, beginning to rumble with the thunder of distant marching feet.

  Dawn,

  July 31 of this year

  CAN YOU hear what they’re saying?” Emmett Archer asked Adrien Morel, Seigneur des Ombres, as they stood at an open window in le seigneur’s gate-tower study. Forty feet below and some distance away, barely visible in the morning mist enveloping the castle courtyard, Viktor Larsson and Heather Armstrong stood beside the large central fountain with their luggage at their feet. They weren’t the first guests of the chateau to slip away before sunrise without saying good-bye; they wouldn’t be the last.

  “He’s apologizing for being such an ass.” Extraordinary hearing was one of several gifts, both sensory and extrasensory, with which Morel had been graced at birth, and which he referred to in toto as The Gift. He retrieved a pack of Sobranie Black Russians from the pocket of his dressing gown and flipped it open.

  Igniting Morel’s gold-tipped black cigarette with his monogrammed lighter, Archer said, “You should quit those things, mon seigneur—now, while there’s still time for it to do you some good.”

  “As should you, my friend,” said Morel as he offered the open pack to Archer.

  Accepting the cigarette with a wry nod of thanks, Archer said, “At my age, it’s not so easy.” What he was thinking, but didn’t say, because theirs was not that sort of relationship, was Thank you for calling me your friend. Acquaintances of Archer’s—especially the Americans, who rarely understood such things—sometimes asked him if he didn’t find it demeaning to address a man twenty-seven years his junior as “mon seigneur.” He would explain that it was similar to his experience as a flight lieutenant in the RAF, in that one is expected to show deference to a man of superior rank, regardless of age or personal feelings. Of course, it was actually a bit more complex than that. A glance at the golden torque and gnarled oaken staff encased in glass on the wall opposite le seigneur’s desk was enough to remind Archer that Adrien Morel was not so much of superior rank as of superior…everything. Young he might be, and a mortal human just like Archer, but there was ancient magic flowing in his veins, and if that wasn’t worthy of homage, what was?

  “Do you sleep in a suit and tie?” Morel asked Archer as his administrateur tucked his lighter back into his inside coat pocket. “I ring you before the sun has even risen, no one up at this hour but myself and our departing guests, and you arrive ten minutes later looking as if you’ve just stepped out the front door of…What is that Savile Row shop you like so much?”

  “Huntsman’s. And for your information, sir, this is not a suit, but a blazer and trousers—summer-weight worsted, quite informal, really.” Morel was probably wrong about no one else being awake yet, Archer thought. Darius preferred to do his roaming at ungodly hours, the better to avoid contact with visitors. Elic and Lili were sometimes up early, as well, but Inigo would sleep until noon today in his air-conditioned suite in the southwest tower, as was his custom, with Kat and Chloe curled up on either side in his king-size Tempur-Pedic.

  Nodding toward the couple below, Archer asked, “Are they still talking?”

  Morel waved a hand across the open window. “Uediju rowero gutu.”

  “…not blameless myself,” Heather was saying softly. “The way
I flirted with Elic yesterday, in the bathhouse—”

  “I’d been begging for that,” Larsson said. “I don’t know what came over me, letting that woman get to me that way. It’s this place, no? Not to say I’m without fault, but this place…It’s like there’s something in the air here that makes you…You don’t know what’s real and what’s…” Archer could hear Larsson swallow. “Last night, b-before you came to bed, I…I awoke and—” He shook his head, groping for words.

  “You, too?” she asked. “I dozed off in the bathhouse, and when I woke up, I’d had this…I guess it was a dream, but at first I thought it had actually happened, ’cause it felt so…”

  “But it didn’t, right? It was just a dream?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. Sure. Of course. I mean, I did things in that dream that I would never…” She looked away. “Things I couldn’t imagine doing if I were…”

  “Ja. Me, too,” he said, but there was an edge of uncertainty to his voice.

  “Listen,” she said, “as long as we’re clearing the air, I’m sorry I brought that up about Lars in front of everybody yesterday. I know how you feel about—”

  “Nä, you were right to do so. He’s my brother, and the problem—if there is a problem—is mine, not his. I need reminding sometimes not to be such an åsna. You’re good that way. You make me a better person.” Burrowing into the front pocket of his khakis, he produced a glittering little object—Miss Armstrong’s engagement ring, Archer realized when he lifted her left hand. He hesitated, as if waiting for permission; almost made Archer feel sorry for the poor wanker.

  She smiled and nodded. Sighing in relief, Larsson slid the big diamond onto her finger, then gathered her in his arms for a lingering kiss.

  Clearing his throat, Archer drawled, “How very stirring,” through a plume of smoke.

  Morel waved his hand again, turning off the “surround sound,” as Inigo called it.

  “Did it take?” Archer asked as he watched the couple stroll through the tree-lined courtyard toward the gatehouse, Larsson hauling their matching leather duffels.

  Le seigneur nodded as he drew on his cigarette. “Her aura is filled with little silvery sparks. She’s carrying Elic’s child—a druid.” He always called them druids and druidesses, the gifted ones.

  “A boy,” Archer said. “Excellent.” There’d been an unusually long run of girls lately. Which was fine, but one did like to maintain a certain balance in these matters.

  “A boy with extraordinary powers, judging by the energy.”

  “It’s not just Elic’s child Miss Armstrong is carrying,” Archer pointed out. “It’s Larsson’s, too. It’s entirely his DNA, after all. Elic just supplied his—”

  “Just?”

  “Point taken, mon seigneur.” Archer executed a conciliatory little bow, which set off a mild wave of dizziness. Steadying himself with a hand on the windowsill, he straightened up to find Morel studying him in that unnervingly intent way of his.

  “Are you all right, Archer? Your aura, it’s been looking a bit…dark in parts.”

  “Encroaching old age,” Archer said with a mild shrug. “Damned galling, really, but what can one do but stiffen one’s back and carry on, eh?” No point worrying le seigneur about a problem even he was helpless to do anything about.

  Leaving his fiancée to wait with their luggage by the gatehouse, Larsson sprinted across the drawbridge and up the driveway to the stable-cum-garage.

  “Do you think they’ll ever return to Grotte Cachée?” Archer asked.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Morel as he drew on his cigarette. “But as you know, one can never predict these things.”

  Miss Armstrong chatted for a moment with the gatehouse guard, Mike, an American like herself. She crouched down and made a beckoning gesture, which was when Archer first noticed the cat lounging nearby, its dusky fur blending so perfectly with the volcanic paving stones that it was all but invisible. When it made no move to rise, she walked toward it, only to have it dart away.

  “So Darius is awake,” Archer said. “I thought he might be.”

  “So are Elic and Lili,” Morel said, pointing through the mist to the northeast tower, where two shadowy figures, one quite tall, stood in the top-floor window of Elic’s suite.

  Morel watched, seemingly riveted, as the figures merged in a lengthy embrace, Elic’s chin resting companionably on Lili’s head. Le seigneur took a puff of his Black Russian, expelling the smoke in a lingering plume, then crushed the cigarette out with a melancholic frown.

  Archer reflected for a moment, weighing the wisdom of bringing it up; they rarely discussed le seigneur’s personal situation. Reasoning that he might not have that much more time to address the matter, he said, very quietly, “There is a way, you know.”

  Morel looked up quizzically.

  “You needn’t be alone, mon seigneur,” Archer said carefully. “You needn’t die childless.”

  A testy edge crept into Morel’s voice as he said, “I can’t die childless, as you very well know. I need an heir. Grotte Cachée needs it. The follets need it. You must redouble your efforts, Archer. Find someone.”

  “With respect, mon seigneur, if it were a simple matter to locate a woman with The Gift, I would have long since—”

  “There are druidesses all over the world—hundreds, perhaps thousands of them.”

  “But how many of them realize what they are?” Archer asked. “And of those who do, how many are willing to make their true nature known? Even you can’t always spot them, if they’re in deep enough denial. But the thing of it is…there might be another way.”

  “If you’re suggesting I wed some ordinary woman and risk siring a civilian…” That was le seigneur’s term for those without The Gift: civilians. Shaking his head, Morel said, “The follets need a gardien who can see beyond the surface of things, probe the hearts of strangers and listen to their distant whispers—a gardien who can sense danger in time to avert it. No civilian can be entrusted with the welfare of living gods, only someone with The Gift—a druid or druidess.”

  The problem was that The Gift was a recessive gene. There were mutations from time to time, druidic children born of civilians, or of a civilian and a druid or druidess, but such instances were rare. For countless generations, Morel’s ancestors had been careful to wed their children to others with The Gift, thus ensuring the best possible guardianship of the follets who’d been in their care for over two thousand years.

  “There might be a way you could marry an ordinary woman,” Archer said, “just someone you met and fell in love with, not a druidess, and still sire offspring with The Gift.” Morel was a handsome fellow, with his soulful eyes and unruly thatch of brown hair. Archer had seen the way women looked at him on those rare occasions when he mingled with the visitors. If he would just open himself up to the possibility, he could have his choice of desirable women.

  “Barring an unlikely stroke of luck,” Morel said, “any union of a druid and a civilian is destined to produce civilian offspring. After twenty years in my service, I hardly think you can have forgotten that much.”

  “Nineteen,” Archer corrected as he stubbed out his cigarette. He had assumed his present post after the previous administrateur, his father, perished along with Morel’s parents in the crash of their private jet. The eighth generation of his family to serve as second-in-command to the high druid or druidess of the ancient Vernae Clan, Archer regarded the position as more of a sacred calling than a job. When it came time for him to join his predecessors in the little cemetery in the woods to the north—which could be months or years from now, depending on which doctor he listened to—Morel might actually be forced to look outside the Archer family for a replacement. It was a prospect that Archer found excruciating.

  Had he no offspring to carry on the ancestral vocation, it would pain him less, but in fact, he had a thirty-four-year-old daughter. Isabel was the only good thing to come out of a marriage that had ended nineteen years
ago when his socialite wife decreed that he could either remain in London as her husband or step in as administrateur to the newly orphaned Adrien Morel. There was no way she was following him to some “dreary old pile of lava” in the most isolated and rural region of France. He would have fought for custody of Isabel, but the child’s few visits to Grotte Cachée during the separation had “creeped her out royally,” and she’d sworn never again to set foot in “Château des Freaks.”

  Archer’s ex had remarried with unseemly speed and moved with their daughter to New York City, where Isabel now worked as a freelance graphic designer. Archer visited her often in New York, but whenever he brought up the possibility of her succeeding him in his post, she rolled her eyes and changed the subject.

  “Here’s the thing,” Archer said. “It’s ultimately your child who needs to have The Gift, not your wife.”

  “Yes, but if she doesn’t have it, how can the child—”

  “You know the tale of how your ancestor, Brantigern the Protector, begat a druidic son with Adiega even though she was a normal woman without The Gift—how Elic transformed himself into Elle to extract Brantigern’s seed, which he then imbued with his essence and transferred to—”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Elic is a dusios, mon seigneur. It’s what he’s meant to do. He’d be a female when he…when you…”

  “When we fuck?”

  Archer was struck dumb. He’d never known Morel to utter a vulgar word.

  “Elic was a virtual stranger to Brantigern and Adiega,” Morel said. “They hardly knew each other. But I’ve known him all my life. I grew up with him. He used to carry me about on his shoulders when I was little. I could no more share my bed with him than I could share it with, well, any old friend, regardless of how female he looks. I’d know it’s really him.”

  “You won’t remember,” Archer said. “He can make you forget. He can even keep you asleep while—”