by Alma Katsu
“I—I don’t understand, Adair,” I stuttered. “What has happened to make you change your mind?”
He ducked his head, searching for words that would explain the transformation he’d undergone. “When you fall in love, Lanore, you fall in love fiercely: we have both seen its power at work. That is the love that I want from you. Having seen it not once but twice, I cannot settle for less. I cannot be satisfied with the pallid, courtly companionship that is all you give me now. So I have resolved to make myself worthy of your love. I will figure out what it will take for you to give that love to me.
“I understand that everything must be different. Everything that’s happened in the past did not work, so I must change. I plan to send Pendleton away and I’ll go away myself, to a place where I can begin anew. I will teach myself to change. Such is the power of love,” he said. “I can picture us having a magnificent life together one day—you smile in doubt, but eternity is a very long time, my dear—but it can never happen if I don’t let you go now. I must take my chances. It would seem that there is one force of nature that I cannot command, and that is your will. Perhaps one day you will understand that, flawed as I am, no man will love you as I do, and you will search your heart and find that you love me, too.”
I sat stunned and blinking for what seemed to be a long time. I was made dizzy by his speech and felt as though I’d been spun around in circles, happy and wary simultaneously. My heart leapt at the news: I was free! I could run to Luke, plead my case, try to restore his memories.
At the same time, however, I wondered if this could be a trap. Adair had given me as pretty a speech as any lover could hope for, promising eternal adoration, but at the same time he dangled freedom before my eyes, a key to the very cage he’d constructed so carefully around me. Was he testing to see which one I would choose, when there was really only one choice? If I asked for the front gates to be opened, would I be whisked away to the dungeon I suspected had been prepared in the castle depths? Would my body be fitted into the harness of straps? I began trembling at the thought.
You cannot live in fear of your beloved. Slaves cannot love their masters. I couldn’t imagine staying with Adair and eternally twisting and ducking and wheedling to stay in his good graces. I drew myself up tall and looked him fully in the face. “I can hardly believe what you are telling me.”
“Believe it. If you choose to leave, the car will depart in an hour to take you to the airport in Verona.” His gaze remained fixed on my face, betraying no inner emotion.
“If that is so, then I choose . . .” I felt a fillip in my heart. “I choose to leave.”
He tried to hide his disappointment, but a flicker in his eyes betrayed that he was crestfallen. He nodded and we rose together. I made no move when he leaned forward to kiss my cheek and then pressed our cheeks together. For that one second when our faces met, I felt the fire from the old times just under the skin. Adair’s special fire existed in no one else I’d ever met, and for a moment I almost regretted that I was about to lose it.
“The car will be waiting for you in front of the house,” he said, his voice dry, not quite his own. And then he turned and left the room without giving me a chance to speak.
I packed hurriedly, still not believing my luck, half thinking that he would change his mind and come roaring down the hall with a length of cord to tie me up and whisk me away as Jonathan and I had done the night we bricked Adair up in the wall. As the suitcase filled, I became aware that the house had grown quiet, and it seemed that I was the only one in it.
There were two matters left for me to handle, and both required something from Adair, though I couldn’t tempt fate a second time by asking him to his face. I sat at the desk in my room and composed a note. First, I asked him to release Savva, if that was what Savva truly wanted. If you want me to love you, I wrote, you must be capable of compassion. Second, I wrote that I hoped he would tell me someday about what had happened to Jonathan. I told him that I’d spent the past two months hoping to hear something about Jonathan’s fate but that he’d chosen to keep this from me. I understood that my love for Jonathan was a painful subject for him, but I told him he had nothing to fear on this subject—not anymore—and that I hoped one day he would be able to tell me what I wanted to know.
Once the letter was finished and left on the desk, it was time to make my farewells. I rushed down the hall looking left and right through open doorways, hoping to see the housekeepers or Pendleton, but there was no one. No shadows in the golden late afternoon light, no muffled conversation floating up from the kitchen, no gardener visible on the lawn through the tall windows.
I paused outside the closed doors to Adair’s bedroom and thought about seeing him, but realized the folly of it and hurried away. I passed the door to the library, too, where Pendleton normally spent his afternoons in Adair’s company, but he wasn’t there. I thought about searching him out to say my good-byes but decided against it. As I carried my suitcase over the open threshold—a black sedan was idling in the gravel courtyard—I felt like a princess in a fairy tale making her escape while the rest of the castle slept under an enchanted spell. For once, the enchantment worked in my favor.
The driver stepped out. I recognized him as the man who drove the van that transported the staff from town in the mornings and evenings. He put my suitcase in the trunk and held the door for me. As I settled into my seat, rummaging through my purse to make sure nothing had been left behind in haste, he leaned over the backseat to hand me a large envelope.
“The gentleman of the house asked me to give this to you,” he said, smiling apologetically for his unsteady English before turning back to the steering wheel.
As we drove slowly through the open gates, I looked at the envelope, made of heavy-weight cream paper with a string-and-button closure, fat as an album of wedding photographs. While the sedan bounced over the rutted mountain road, I unspooled the long red thread, hands shaking with curiosity, and then slid the contents into my lap.
I recognized the larger of the two documents immediately, as I’d seen it before: it was one of Adair’s old books of spells, just two scarred wooden covers and a collection of brittle loose sheets of paper and parchment. I sat weighing it in my hands for a moment, wondering why he’d chosen to give it to me. Maybe he meant that he’d renounced magic and alchemy, or thought it would give me some comfort, a sign that he wouldn’t use his powers against me in the future.
The second object was an envelope made of the stiffest paper I’d ever felt. After first glancing at the rearview mirror to make sure the driver wasn’t spying on me, I worked open the flap and slid out several folded pieces of paper. The sheets were covered with Adair’s handwriting, ink dragged in sharp lines and dashes across a porous, thirsty page by a pen nib. The strangest thing, however, was that it was written in a language I didn’t recognize and by all rights should not have understood, and yet, when I concentrated on it, I found it made sense. I could read it.
My dearest Lanore, he wrote:
Forgive my intrusion of your departure, but I ask for your indulgence in one last matter. In the hope that you may one day come back to me if you better understand me, I would like to share with you a few things that I have shared with no one else. I wish to trust you with this knowledge because I see that we must have nothing between us if you are to love me. No one else will be able to read these pages, only you. I am entrusting you with secret knowledge, my dear, and secret knowledge is the strongest knowledge. I will start at the beginning: 1038.
My heart sped up. If his story began in 1038, it was much earlier than he’d previously confessed. The pages trembled in my hand.
Did I really want to know Adair’s secrets? I was free of him now. I could put all that had happened behind me. But I wasn’t sure that I could make it stick—that memories of him wouldn’t visit me every night, beckoning, trying to coax me back.
One more time I glanced up at the rearview mirror. The driver’s eyes remained on the
road. In the last brilliant golden rays, I caught a fragment of the castle in the silvery mirror, a dark token jutting out of the brooding mountainside, receding quickly. The lake, lapping waves glittering in afternoon light, flashed from the valley ahead. Cocooned in the silence of the car, I settled into the deep leather seat, smoothed the pages one more time, and began reading:
I was born in a stone fortress on the edge of the Ceahlău Massif mountain range in Romania, the castle clinging to the notoriously wild and dangerous rock face as fiercely as I, a sickly child, clung to life. . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my friends and family for the outpouring of support for my debut novel and the first book in this series, The Taker. Special thanks to Barbara and Joe, Margaret and Bruce, Geoff and Janis, Diana and Bob, Linda and Dennis, John and Joann, my in-laws Noralie and John, and Barbara Webster. Special thanks to Eileen McGervey and the wonderful women at One More Page Books: Terry and Lelia Nebeker, and Katie Fransen. Thanks to Michaela Hackner and Kathy Crewe for looking at early drafts of The Reckoning. Thank you to the many book bloggers who embraced The Taker, with a special thanks to Jennifer Lawrence and Swapna Krishna for the pep talks. Thank you, Janet Cadsawan, for being my shrink. Thanks to the Writer’s Center and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley for their support.
Heartfelt thanks to Jamie Ford, Danielle Trussoni, Scott Westerfeld, Kresley Cole, M. J. Rose, Meg Waite Clayton, Keith Donohue, C. W. Gortner, and Alexi Zentner for taking time from their busy schedules to provide kind words for The Taker.
“Thank you” doesn’t begin to cover my gratitude to my editor at Gallery, Tricia Boczkowski, who poured a tremendous amount of time and thought into this novel. This book would not exist if not for Trish’s boundless determination and clear-eyed vision. I am grateful for her good cheer throughout the entire process.
I am grateful to Louise Burke, Anthony Ziccardi, and Jen Bergstrom for their strong support of The Taker trilogy. My thanks to everyone at Gallery for being such a great group to work with: Alexandra Lewis, Kate Dresser, Mary McCue, Natalie Ebel, and Ed Schlesinger. Thanks also to Liz Perl, Jennifer Robinson, Wendy Sheanin, and Stuart Smith at Simon & Schuster for their generous support.
Thanks to Anna Jean Hughes for taking care of The Taker trilogy at Century Books/Random House UK, and to Ruth Waldram and Sarah Page. I am grateful for the work Intercontinental Literary Agency does on my behalf, especially Sam Edenborough, Nicki Kennedy, and Katherine West, and to Gray Tan of the Grayhawk Agency. My thanks, also, to Matthew Snyder at CAA.
My deepest gratitude goes to my agent, Peter Steinberg, for his incredible support throughout this past tumultuous year, and to his colleagues, Edward Graham and Lisa Kopel.
And lastly, I thank my husband, Bruce, for his love and support.
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