When She Said I Do

by Celeste Bradley

  Callie turned with them and held her breath as Archie stepped forward to address them all.

  * * *

  Ren had frozen at the midnight chimes, then began to breathe again when Archie stepped forward, his arms flung wide.

  “In days of old,” he intoned, “when Daedalus flew and Perseus slayeth the minotaur!”

  Ren did not see what Dade had to do with any of it, but the guests were enthralled and even Callie was looking a bit impressed. Additionally, if it kept everyone from remembering the dreaded unmasking, Ren would dance a jig around the thing himself.

  Except that Iris was already doing so. Rather, she was wafting and drifting to and fro, waving her arms along with the music. The dance reminded him vaguely of a snake charmer.

  He noticed that the pretty sister, Elektra, was near the musicians, her stance cajoling. Sure enough, a new tune had begun. It was eerie and dreamy and entirely inappropriate for any normal sort of dancing.

  Archie was just getting started. “There lived a great creature, a magical being, the symbol of birth, renewal, and—” With a great sweeping bow, Archie drew their attention to the covered cart.

  At which moment the twins, working as one, whipped the cover from the large object just as the chimes struck twelve.

  Gleaming metal, nearly ten feet high including the cart. It was an egg … of sorts. Or possibly a raindrop. Ren peered more closely at the richly embossed sides of the thing, all hammered out in brass and steel. Flames? Ah, it was a flame … raindrop … egg … thing.

  The music swelled. Ren glanced over at the quartet and saw that Elektra had managed to inspire the tired musicians to new heights. Well, pretty girls did tend to have their way.

  At a creaking sound, he turned back to the display before them all. The flame … egg … thing was spinning slowly. Ren could hear the resonant clunk-clunk of giant clockworks inside, beneath the music. It was as if the hunk of metal had a heartbeat of its own. That explained the music. Otherwise the thing would be making a severe racket.

  Callie clapped her hands in delight. “It’s moving!”

  Her brother Orion, the arrogant-looking fellow in the spectacles, merely nodded. “Of course.”

  Ren relaxed. If Callie was happy then it didn’t much matter that he found the entire thing foolish and time-wasting. Except that it was rather marvelous, in its mad way. The rotating flame-egg began to part in great triangles, as if the centrifugal force were spreading its shell.

  Ren found himself just as captivated as the villagers, holding his breath to see what lay inside.

  It was a bird. It was sculpted of brass and iron, each feather cut and applied separately. From where he stood, Ren could see the shining raw edges of the metal feathers.

  The beak and claws were crimson and the eyes glowed like green jewels. It was an engineering marvel.

  Artistically it was hideous. The bird looked like a sort of eagle, except that it also looked a bit like a parrot had mated with an ostrich. The feet were extremely large, but Ren supposed they had to be to hold the entire metallic thing up. He smiled slightly at the pleasurable lunacy of it.

  An egg hatching a bird. A lovely ten-foot egg hatching an ugly eight-foot bird.

  “Oh, my. I always say, Why do, if you can overdo?”

  Ren glanced down to see that Button had joined him. The little man had his hands clasped before him like a delighted child and his eyes were alight with mischief and glee.

  Ren drew his brows together. “Was this some notion of yours?”

  Button shook his head. “I invited milady’s family because she seemed rather lonely for them. I did not ask them to provide entertainment, although perhaps I should have realized. They are quite notorious, you know.”

  Ren frowned. “Really? Notorious for what?”

  “For being entirely mad, of course.”

  Of course. But then, Ren had already known that.

  Button’s smile widened as the bird began to shudder. “Oh, it’s doing something!”

  The great brass-feathered wings were lifting. Ren’s brows rose with them, impressed in spite of himself. It really was a sight. The crowd gasped and a few people cheered.

  Ren, who was a bit less enamored of the spectacle than most, spotted one of the those insufferable twins down behind the contraption, preparing to pull on some sort of lever behind the base of the egg.

  At a signal from the opposite twin, he pulled sharply. There was a loud scrape and a puff and then a great whoof!

  The bird was aflame.

  “Oh, a phoenix.” Button sent a sly glance in Ren’s direction. “How … astute.”

  Ren watched the flaming bird and thought about his fine house which he had only recently begun to enjoy. Then he thought about it lying in piles of charred timber and rubble. He glanced across the room at Callie, who had drifted closer to where her family stood, watching the show. Another treasure he didn’t want to see damaged.

  “If you’ll excuse me…” He didn’t wait for Button’s pardon, but began to make his way through the crowd to Callie’s side.

  Just as he was about to reach her, the bird made another creaking, groaning sound … and began to spin counter to the spin of the eggshell.

  Chapter 30

  Except that this new motion of the bird itself was no graceful rotation. The flaming phoenix swayed and lurched and ground around in an uneven spin. The squeal of abused metal rose above the soaring music. Even as Ren watched, he saw the twins glance at each other and then take simultaneous steps backward to disappear into the crowd.

  Oh, hell.

  Not far from him, he heard the little sister pipe up, her tone critical. “It didn’t make that noise when we tested it at home.”

  The bird began to spin faster, and now the imbalance in its rotation turned it into a lurching pillar of flame. The wings rose higher in response to the speed. The grinding grew louder. The spinning became faster—and so off balance that it began to move the cart in a broken circle with the force of it.

  Bloody hell! “Get back! Move away!” Ren shouted to his guests.

  The bird began to gyrate wildly. Gobs of whatever the boys had used to make the wings burn began to shear off and fly through the air to splat onto the marble floor, creating a ring of fire around the monstrous shuffling contraption. With gasps of fear, the crowd shrank back, away from the hellish beast.

  Ren found himself pinned behind the compressed throng, unable to reach Callie, unable to do anything but watch helplessly as the grinding noise became a hideous groaning and then parts began to fly.

  A flaming feather skittered across the floor almost directly at Ren’s position. The crowd melted back, finally giving Ren the room to push through. A shove here, a polite lifting and shifting of a stout matron there, a leap onto a potted plant, and then a step on one fellow’s broad shoulder.

  He landed on his feet onto the ballroom floor with only the circle of burning gobs between himself and the flame-spouting monstrosity.

  And I thought my unmasking would be the height of terror this evening.

  He began his assault by making a run for the table where sat a great cut-crystal bowl full of lemonade. There was a lump of ice still floating in the center. Ren picked up the entire weight of it and ran at the bird.

  He slopped a large splash across the burning gobs, but it did little to dismay the happily burning wads of paraffin. He was forced to dance through them as best he could without catching his shoes afire, blessing the impulse that prompted Button to dress him in boots instead of flimsy dancing slippers like the other men. His ankles felt the heat but then he was through, dodging flying brass feathers like white-hot blades, to fling the giant bowl across the top of the bird’s back.

  It worked … in a way. Unfortunately, the cold liquid on the hot metal did something alarming to the clockworks inside. The spinning slowed, but the bird began to fling itself to and fro. The thing looked to be in a tantrum, groaning and flinging and tottering about. Ren hurriedly stepped b
ack, away from the furiously lurching bird. At least it no longer spat fire, though areas still flickered with flames. Most of the paraffin had flung away to burn fitfully in little piles around the room. He needed something that would jam the gears and stop the motion. The thing was beginning to lose parts at an alarming rate, each missile a potential injury to one of Callie’s guests.

  His shame had prompted him to leave his walking stick in the shadows of the alcove. The ebony wood stick would likely be turned to sawdust by it anyway.

  Something metal and long …

  There were no sword-bearing military men among the guests tonight, unfortunately. There were swords above the fireplace in the library but that might as well be a mile off in the great house.

  Then, through the haze of smoke, Ren spotted a giant fellow in a vast white apron emerging from the crowd across the room. The cook.

  With a flick of his wrists, the giant secured two long knives from somewhere on his person and flung them in quick accurate succession.

  The knives hit the bird full in the breast, right over its demonic clockwork heart, but even with the great force of the mighty giant’s arm they merely dented the metal feathers and fell uselessly to the floor.

  Ren rolled beneath a great slicing wing and retrieved one of the blades. Not a sword, but close enough.

  But where? The knives had already proven the thing was well armored. Then he saw it. During the creature’s gyrations, Ren spotted a hole high on the thing’s back where there were no feathers. The clockworks were exposed in a clean square, as if a concealing panel had come off.

  Of course. It couldn’t be easy. Ren sighed. He was entirely certain that he was going to look ridiculous.

  Then he backed away, watching for his opening.

  The bird’s progress had slowed to a groaning off-center twisting motion. Ren timed his moment … not yet … now.

  He ran forward, ducked the triangle of shell flapping loosely at waist height, grabbed the bottom of the bird’s gaping beak and used it to hurtle over a great slicing wing. He took a ringing blow to his bad thigh, but it threw him precisely where he needed to be, astride the great bird’s back.

  The hot metal hissed beneath his wrist when he laid it down on the bird. Ignoring the searing pain—except for lifting his groin away from the danger—Ren stared down into the alarmingly intricate and large iron gears and prayed that the long knife would stop their turning once and for all.

  Raising the knife high with both hands, he plunged it down into the mass of churning metal as hard as he could.

  The bird jolted and jerked and flung Ren right off onto the floor. He scrambled backward on his buttocks and hands, unable to tear his gaze from the shining metallic death throes. The phoenix groaned, its gears sprung, and made one last half turn before it rolled gently to a stop, the cart wheel bumping the toe of Ren’s boot as if in playful hello. Oh, yes. Every bit as absurd as he’d feared.

  The ballroom erupted into cheers.

  Ren stood, winced at the pain in his thigh muscle, decided not to bother trying to dust off his smoking singed clothing … and then found ready hands there to do it for him.

  When they stripped off his surcoat and waistcoat, he realized with a start that he was aflame. Then a hand reached out and yanked off his smoldering mask. He drew back in horror.

  “You’re on fire, man!”

  Ren found himself gazing into eerily familiar blue eyes.

  The tall man, dancing with the dark-haired woman, the man who’d kept his face away from Ren …

  “Simon.”

  * * *

  The blue-eyed man removed his mask and extended his hand. “Hello, Ren.”

  Ren stumbled backward, away from that hand. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, even knowing what they were capable of.

  “You dare come here? In secret? To my house?”

  Simon opened his mouth, probably to explain such hideous betrayal of the privacy that had been promised him—a promise that had been broken, just so they could come and stare at their handiwork—

  The rage was so intense, so sudden, Ren felt as though the very air of the ballroom had been poisoned. He was indeed surrounded. The past was all around him. Why was he being tortured with everything he’d lost?

  Pain and betrayal, agony and loss—all fighting within him like a pack of wild dogs turning on each other. He couldn’t breathe for the crushing weight of the memories, as fresh as yesterday, shimmering and sharp as if to prove to him that he could never outrun them.

  His lungs burned, his heart pounded, his gut twisted. He had to get out—

  Get out.

  * * *

  Breathless with alarm, Callie watched from a few feet away. When the first flaming blob of paraffin had sailed through the air, she’d instinctively run to yank Attie away from the fiery chaos and had watched Ren’s wild triumph with her arms wrapped protectively around a reluctantly impressed Attie and a romantically swooning Iris.

  As soon at the danger had passed, she’d released her charges and run for Ren, seeing the singed and smoldering coat, thinking he would burst into flame before she could reach him, thinking only about his danger now.

  The strange man got to Ren first, pulling off the smoldering surcoat, whipping the smoking mask from his face …

  It was Ren’s evident rage that stopped Callie’s headlong rush. His damaged face was so twisted with fury that she could barely see the Ren she knew in those livid features.

  She saw him turn, then turn again, as his icy-blue gaze swept the crowd around him.

  Oh, no.

  It was the first time most of the villagers had ever seen his face.

  Oh, please, she silently begged the crowd. Please don’t be foolish.

  That was like asking fish not to swim. And could she blame them? Her own reaction the first time had been no better.

  Yet she could hear the indrawn breaths, the sounds of revulsion and distress. She could see the automatic flinching, the looking away, the horror and, yes, pity, which for Ren she knew was worse.

  She felt each gasp, each gaze, each twitch hit him like an arrow though the heart. She could feel the blows as if they struck her own flesh.

  He turned again and this time his hurt, furious, betrayed gaze fixed upon the clump of Worthingtons standing nearby.

  Of course, her father chose this moment to give an uncomfortable laugh and clap her brothers Cas and Poll on their respective shoulders. “‘Why, this is very midsummer madness!’”

  Ren fixed Papa with all the fury and hurt and betrayal in his soul burning in his eyes.

  Iris opened her mouth. Oh, Mama, not now.

  “Twelfth Night,” Iris announced gleefully. “Act three, scene four!”

  “Get out!”

  Ren raised his hand and pointed toward the door. “Out. Of. My. House! Now!”

  “Oh, no!” Callie started forward. “Darling, no! They meant no harm—”

  He whirled on her, his gaze too shrouded in dark emotion to even see her clearly, she knew.

  “You!” He waved a wild hand at the smoking, scorched, and tattered ballroom. “How can you even stand to look at them after what they’ve done?”

  She went very still. “Because they are my family.” She said quietly. As you are. My family. My heart.

  His eyes narrowed, focusing that brilliant burning gaze upon her and her alone. “Then you should know that they shall never again pass through those doors. Ever!”

  “You cannot banish my family.”

  “I can and I will.” He cast his gaze around the room, for some reason focusing on some of the servants as well as the stately couples in the Royal Handful. “I can banish whomever I like.”

  Callie raised her chin. “Ren, don’t—”

  His furious, icy gaze shot back to her. “If you prefer your preposterous, insane family, then feel free to join them in their departure.”

  Oh, no. No, darling, please …

  She said nothing. What was there to say? He
’d forced her hand, publicly and cruelly. One heart could not be torn in two. She turned on her heel and walked back to her mother, taking Iris by the hand and leading her from the ballroom. Worthingtons fell into step all around her, like a wall of love between her and pain.

  Unfortunately, even family solidarity did nothing to shield her from the agony in her own heart.

  Ren watched Callie’s exit with shock and disbelief hammering at him, turning his hot rage into something icy and solid in his belly.

  Blinded by it, he turned and strode away, away from the place where his heart lay in mangled pieces on the floor, next to the smoking remains of the great brass phoenix.

  Chapter 31

  Callie paused in the entrance hall of Amberdell Manor and the Worthingtons gathered in a circle about her. Iris babbled on. “I know I brought the purple cloak, dear, just ask the nice butler who let us in where he put it.”

  Archie, slightly more aware than his wife, took Callie’s hand and patted it a little too hard. “Now, now, dear. We’ll be home again by the morrow and you can forget all about this terrible place and that terrible fellow.”

  Aunt Clemmie wasn’t quite so kind. “The man ought to be shot! I’ve my tiger-hunting musket in the carriage. I’ll hang his head on my wall, see if I don’t!”

  Archie nodded sadly. “‘He’s a rank weed … and we must root him out.’”

  Iris waved a hand. “The Life of King Henry the Eighth, act five, scene one!”

  Elektra, for once with nothing to say, merely wrapped Attie up in a slightly too-large cloak and took her outside. Cas and Poll, silent and shamefaced for perhaps the first time in their lives, followed. Orion and Lysander stayed back, flanking Callie protectively but offering no sort of solace. Not their style, she supposed dully.

  Mama carried blissfully on. “But didn’t he look dashing, astride that flaming beast? Just like Saint George slaying the dragon!”

  Dade leaned down to Callie. “I ought to’ve shot him when I had the chance,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever left you behind.”

  Still debating Ren’s heroism with all the practice of decades of sisterhood, Clemmie and Iris left, having found the purple cloak—which Iris donned inside out.