He had wanted me to use the key.
Dear God.
Rathford had set me up.
I looked at Will, seeing him in a new and horrifying light. “Why did you come after me?”
“What are you talking about?” He yanked a lever hard to the left.
“When Rathford sacked me.” I stared at the back of his slightly curling hair as if somehow I could discern his expression. His shoulders bunched and the dread that plagued me rushed through my entire body until my vision blurred and my hands shook. “What made you come out after me?”
“Meg,” he said in a dismissive way, as if this conversation were over. But I would have none of it. I had to have it out plain.
“Did Rathford send you to follow me?”
I waited for his answer, holding my breath. I needed to know if Will was on my side and my side alone, or if he had alternate motives for being with me.
Will turned slowly to face me, his eyes heavy with frustration, but in them I could see the truth.
“He did,” I whispered. My breath left me in a sudden rush. I closed my eyes, unable to bear the terrible pressure suddenly weighing down upon my whole person.
When I dared open my eyes, the look on Will’s face increased that pressure until I felt I would shatter. He appeared defeated. “The night you were sacked, Pratt came in with a note. She threw it at my feet then demanded I do right by you and marry you at the nearest churchyard.” He leaned his elbows on his knees as he produced a crumpled bit of paper from his pocket.
Neat blocked letters had been written as clearly as possible, but there was no mistaking Rathford’s mark in the corner.
Keep her alive.
The coach lurched. My hands shook as I dropped the paper to the floor. I hugged myself as Will came down from his seat and knelt before me.
“You’re working for him.” My voice barely escaped my constricting throat. “I trusted you and you’re working for him.”
I looked him in the eyes, even as mine burned.
His face twisted with regret. “I have one task. I told you before. I’m here to protect you.” He seemed so sincere, but I felt crushed under the weight of this betrayal.
“He’s the murderer, Will. He wants me to unlock the machine, and he wants you to help me do it. How could you?” I felt a tear slip and tumble down my cheek.
“He’s not a murderer,” Will said.
“By God, Will!”
“Dammit, Meg. Listen to me!” he shouted. “There’s been a man prowling around the estate from the day you arrived. That’s why Rathford gave me a pistol, to keep him at bay. He nearly caught up with you the night you were sacked, and he may still be out there. If you’re looking for your murderer, you need look no further. I have been protecting you since before you knew I existed. Yes, I have answered to Rathford. He saved both our lives by taking us in.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I cried.
Will dropped his head, his hand clenching. “It wasn’t my place, and I didn’t want you seeking out the bastard trying to kill you, looking for answers.”
I shook my head. “How do you know he’s not my grandfather trying to reach me? At every turn, Rathford has manipulated me, and he’s manipulating you now like some mad puppet master.” The words scratched out of my throat like the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels. “What are you to do once we find the machine? Do you aim to drag me back to him like the good little henchman you are?”
Will stalked back to the controls. I could feel his anger radiating off his stiff back. “You saw my only orders. Either you trust me, or you don’t.”
He had said that to me once before. I had made the decision to trust then, but I wasn’t sure I could do it again.
What was I to do? I didn’t know how to continue without knowing if the one person who had stood beside me, albeit reluctantly, from the beginning, was truly on my side.
We didn’t say another word the rest of the carriage ride. I watched the sun rise, bloodred over the lingering shadows of dawn. Outside the window, the landscape darkened with the thick overhang of woods as the coach rolled to a stop. This was a country estate in the deepest sense of the word, and it seemed the wilds had attempted to pull the house back into their embrace.
I didn’t want to look at Will, but as we lingered in front of the ghostly manor, I realized I had no choice but to try to find the lock. Knowing he was here on Rathford’s orders didn’t change anything. I still needed Will’s help. “Is anyone here?”
He glanced around, looking more unsure than I had ever seen him. “I don’t think so, but we have to be careful.”
We jumped down from the footboard of the coach, and immediately I wanted to retreat back into it. Tavingshall had clearly been abandoned years ago. It wasn’t usual for an estate to fall into such disrepair.
The small country retreat had been swallowed by ivy, and the lawns were overgrown, becoming meadows just beginning to regain the fresh green look of spring. A buck spotted us and crashed into the tangled woods beyond the house.
My heart broke for what must have once been an elegant house.
Will kept a tight hand on Oliver’s rifle as we walked back to the gardens. I had to remind myself that he’d saved my life at least twice. I had to trust his word for now, but that trust was thin. As soon as we returned to Chadwick Hall, I had every intention of sending him on his way. I honestly didn’t know how to feel about that decision. I wanted to feel strong and in control of everything, yet I found myself feeling hollow and so very alone as we reached the back of the house.
I had to focus on the matter at hand. The gardens were menacing in their squalor. Great topiaries that had once been shaped as whimsical animals had overgrown and died. Now their misshapen forms reminded me of monstrous beasts with grim skeletons of wire and dried branches.
Mildew blackened the garden statues, streaking down white marble faces as if the classic nymphs and muses shed an endless stream of dark tears.
We checked the house but all the doors were locked, the windows shuttered. We saw no signs of people at all. The gardens, too, were empty. I wondered who had inherited this place and why they would leave it in such disrepair.
A hedge, so thick and solid it seemed like a dense green wall, rose before us. It reached so far in either direction that my eyes couldn’t see the end of it as it gently curved toward the forests beyond. The entrance was little more than a gap the hedge sought to close with its stretching branches. This was a hedge maze? It was enormous. We could be lost within for days.
“Oliver was right. If I were going to hide something, I’d hide it in there,” Will concluded. I didn’t want to agree with his assessment, but I had no other choice. A labyrinth was the perfect place to hide something one did not wish found.
I stepped through the entrance to the maze and inspected the wall of hedge in front of me. “I wonder if we can push through.”
Will stepped to my side. “Try it.”
I eased away from him. Donning the leather gloves Lucinda had given me, I pushed my hand into the thick hedge until my cheek brushed against the scraping branches. My hand pressed against something solid and coarse.
Stone. It seemed the late Thomas had little patience for cheaters.
“The bushes are growing over a stone wall. We’re going to have to find our way through.” It didn’t seem anything about this adventure would be easy.
“Well.” Will looked one way, then the other. “Right or left?”
I shrugged, then turned to the right. Will followed, our boots scraping the weed-ridden bed of pebbles that served as the maze’s floor.
With every step the tension between us grew. Each turn forced us together, reducing the world to narrow halls of greenery and dead ends. For hours, we wandered in painful silence. Eventually, the shadows from the western walls covered the path.
The shadow turned the air cool and worried me. I didn’t want to be lost in the dark. Will stared at the tops of the shaggy hed
ge walls with determination.
“People honestly do this for fun?” he grumbled.
His words were flippant, but I agreed with his sentiment.
“It is a frivolous venture.” I turned and walked backward, since it didn’t matter what direction I faced. We were just as lost going forward as backward. “So long as one isn’t attempting to thwart a murderer.”
If his words had been an olive branch between us, I had just snapped it.
“At least if anyone is following us, he is unlikely to find us in here,” Will quipped, but his eyes narrowed as he watched me.
“And we are unlikely to ever find our way out again.” I sighed. My hand brushed the sack at my hip. What was I doing? Starting a fight wouldn’t do any good. “Perhaps Oliver’s goggles can help.”
Pulling out the goggles, I inspected them. Oliver said they would help in the dark. I figured it was better to figure out how they worked before the darkness set in, or they would be useless. Constructed in an oddly elegant fashion, the goggles bore tiny levers along the brass casings that held the lenses.
I fit them to my eyes and peered through. At first, they only made things slightly blurry. Then I remembered Oliver’s spectacles. Finding a knob between the two casings, I twisted it, and everything became clear again.
Will stepped in front of me and studied the outside of the goggles. “Do they work?”
“That depends, have you ever wished to have the perspective of a beetle?” I felt a bit like an insect with the goggles on my eyes.
“Here.” Will shifted a small lever above my left eye. Suddenly the goggles hummed, tickling a bit on my nose. Everything lit up very bright in shades of green. What should have been shadow appeared eerily light.
“How strange, everything is green.”
“We’re in a hedge,” Will grumbled. “That’s not likely to help. Let’s see what these do.”
He flipped another lever and I looked around. It appeared as if I had my nose buried in the hedge of the dead end over thirty feet in front of me. “How remarkable.” I stared down at a pebble, and could see every speckle, each stitch in the seam of my boot. “Try another one.”
He set that one back and flipped another. This time everything around me appeared eerily blue, save Will, who glowed bright red. “How is this accomplished?”
“What do you see?” Will asked, but I had no answer for him. I handed them to him, and he peered through, though they didn’t sit right across his nose. “I’ve never.” He took them off and handed them back to me. “You wear them. Oliver gave them to you.”
I put them back on and Will turned another lever for me.
“Will!” I squeaked. A glowing yellow line appeared beneath our feet. It went straight then turned sharply to the left.
“What is it?” He touched my cheeks, turning my face up to his.
“No, there’s a thread at our feet.” I pulled away and crouched, then dug into the pebbles, thankful for the leather gloves. The yellow line glowed brighter until I unearthed a metal cord buried only inches under the stones. “It’s Ariadne’s thread.”
Will knelt beside me to inspect it. “What’s Ariadne’s thread?”
“Come on, I’ll explain as we go.” I told him the story of the prince Theseus who had to solve the labyrinth of King Minos on Crete to save his people from having to pay tribute to the king in blood. The king’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and gave him a golden thread to help him find his way through the maze.
Will hung on my every word, and for a moment, I forgot our circumstance and remembered what it felt like to trust him as a friend.
We wound through the maze, right, right, left, straight, the golden thread leading us forward. The walls of the hedge all blended together, but I never took my eyes off the yellow thread. We followed it relentlessly, even when the turns seemed to defy logic. Suddenly we came to a gate.
It glowed so bright through the goggles, I had to lift them from my eyes. Will approached it cautiously. Like the plates we were trying to find, the door of the gate seemed made entirely of gears.
I eyed the gate warily. I’d learned one thing rather quickly. Gears were never an ornament for the Amusementists. If we pushed the door, the wheels would turn, and something in the maze would change.
Will tested the gate with a good deal of caution. “It’s not locked.” He opened it further and peered through. “I don’t see anything on the other side.”
“I guess we go on.” I joined him at the gate even though part of me wanted to turn around and follow the thread out of the maze altogether. Reluctantly, I leaned my weight against the gate. The further it opened, the more difficult it was to move. The gears in the door turned as a sharp ticking punctuated the deep quiet of the maze. We slipped through, and watched as the gate eased shut behind us.
“I think we just wound something.” A sinking feeling settled in my boots. I hadn’t forgotten Lucinda’s first rule of Amusements.
“We should go slowly,” Will stated. I fitted the goggles over my eyes and continued along the thread’s path, but now with trepidation.
The farther we wandered into the maze, the closer the hedges seemed to press around us. The untamed fingers reaching out from the feral hedge gripped at my clothing. Spiders had spun webs across the path. Will knocked them down, but on occasion a wisp would cling to my cheek, and it was hard not to scream.
We passed through two more gates. At the third I hesitated.
I thought I’d heard something stomp the ground. “What was that?”
Will’s expression was unreadable through the goggles. “There’s nothing on this side.”
“Are you certain?” Foreboding had me in an ugly grip. I didn’t want to take another step forward.
“Come on, Meg.” I followed him through the gate and we let it go. It swung shut with a click.
I thought I heard another thump. This time, Will must have heard it too, because he hesitated. Ahead of us the glowing thread led straight through a very narrow slot in the hedge.
I lifted the goggles and perched them in my hair. “Will?”
Something dark moved just on the other side of the slit. “Meg, is there something you’d like to tell me?”
A bellow, loud and monstrous, rang through the labyrinth, followed by the clang of metal striking metal.
My heart dropped into my shoes as I realized what it was. “I may have forgotten to mention the Minotaur.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
MY LEGS FELT WEAK, AND I WASN’T SURE IF I HAD THE courage to take another step forward, but I managed until I reached the gap. In the center of a circle of hedge, a dark bronze beast with curling brass horns lifted his ringed nose to the sky. He snorted, pawing at the sand with his human-shaped foot.
Constructed like the automaton in Gearhenge, his body was a remarkable puzzle of sliding plates, geared joints, and sculpted metal, blackened and worn from neglect.
Only this creature terrified me.
Directly across the circle, the hedge had grown over the edges of another gate. That’s where we had to go through.
The Minotaur swung his head, slashing his tarnished horns through the air. Along one wall of the hedge, a metal encasement housed a cutout of his body. Great gear pins jutted where the bull-man’s shoulders would have rested.
“Look.” Will pointed to the creature’s back. “It’s the plate.”
The plate was fused to the creature’s massive shoulders as if it were part of the beast’s suit of armor.
“We have to find a way to wind down the beast.” It was the only way we’d get the plate.
“We?” Will peered at me with one eyebrow raised.
“So, you’re not going to join me?” I asked. Fine, I could figure out a way past that thing. It had no source of outside energy. Once it spent the energy we had given it by opening the gates, the beast would have to stop. I just had to keep it running and hope it wore down before I did.
“You’re not going in there at a
ll.” Will leaned into the slit to get another look at the monster. “He can’t fit through this gap. You’re safe here.”
He slipped his body into the opening. A sudden panic overcame me. I grabbed his sleeve, unwilling to let go. “No.” For as much as I felt Will had deceived me, I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing him harmed by that thing. “There has to be another way.”
He placed his hand over mine. “I’m quick on my feet.” He handed me the rifle as he slid into the beast’s pen. I couldn’t believe he was the one being rash.
“Will!” I screamed. I couldn’t help it. As soon as he hit the sand within the Minotaur’s circle, the beast turned its red stone eyes and focused on its prey. How did it see? It was just a machine.
It charged, roaring with the mechanical squeal of metal sliding over metal. The beast moved with the grace and fluidity of a real bull. I couldn’t believe the speed of it. Will dodged to the left, hopping on his toes in the sand. He kept his feet moving as he raced to the other side of the arena.
He reached the gate and yanked on the latch. Nothing.
It was locked.
The Minotaur turned with surprising agility before it thundered toward Will again.
“Will, look out!” I shouted. Will dodged again, jumping and rolling right in front of the bull’s feet. The Minotaur thrust its horns into the sand, catching Will’s waistcoat and pinning it to the ground. I gasped, my heart thundering in my ears. Will shucked the sleeves and ran.
“This is not amusing!” he shouted as the Minotaur shook its head, stamped the ground, and charged again. It wasn’t slowing. I needed to confuse it somehow, give Will time.
Gritting my teeth, I shoved myself through the gap. The Minotaur stared me down.
“Dammit, Meg!”
“Now’s not the time, Will,” I called, holding my hands out to my sides for balance. The Minotaur took a slow step toward me.
Will jumped, waving his arms. “Over here, you bloody bastard!” The beast turned its head. That’s when I saw them, levers at the backs of his horns.
“His horns!” I shouted at Will. “Grab his horns.”
Legacy of the Clockwork Key Page 15