As I’d hoped, we arrived to find damp stone floors and the scent of wet earth in the air: the watering had already been done for the morning, and we could expect to have a quiet corner of the greenhouse to ourselves for a few minutes. I chose a sunny nook beneath an arching trellis heavy with something blue-blossoming and fragrant, and adopted a posture of intent interest.
The baron was uncharacteristically hesitant. He looked at the flowers, and at me, and at the clear glass ceiling, and appeared to be struggling to discover what to say.
‘I need your help,’ he finally ventured.
‘So you said.’
‘On an errand of a… slightly questionable nature.’
‘I was getting that feeling, too.’
His eyes smiled at me. ‘There is somewhere I urgently need to get into. It relates to the Enclaves, you see, so it is an emergency. But the place in question is locked. Extremely locked. And there are one or two other obstacles…’ He trailed off.
‘If Jay told you I have a taste for breaking and entering, he is quite wrong, and I deny all charges,’ I said serenely.
Alban lifted a brow in my general direction. ‘He’s said nothing of the kind, in fact. Do you indeed?’
‘As I said, all charges denied.’
‘That might not be a bad thing, at all.’
‘I grow ever more intrigued.’
Alban sighed. ‘Right, the fact is… there are three keys to the place in question. I have secured two of them, at some risk and cost to myself, but they are useless if I can’t get all three.’
Uh huh. ‘Where is the third one?’
He smiled at me, hope and mischief and sheepishness mixed up into one rather adorable, hard-to-resist package. ‘It’s, um. It’s here.’
‘Let me guess: you absolutely are not supposed to have it.’
‘Let’s just say Milady refused.’
It was my turn to raise a questioning brow.
‘She threatened to throw me off the tower top,’ he admitted.
‘Just how locked is this place?’
‘Extremely, thoroughly, completely and forever locked.’
‘I might guess that it is dangerous.’
‘Probably. Maybe. Who knows, anymore?’
I folded my arms. ‘So. Milady held the prospect of your swift and inescapable death over your head if you pursue this venture and you still want to find the key?’
‘No.’ His smile broadened, turned achingly hopeful. ‘I want you to find the key.’
‘That is spectacularly unflattering.’
‘Depends how you look at it.’ He leaned closer to me, so close that I could smell the fresh, cologne scent of him. ‘Do I consider you expendable? In no way whatsoever. Do I think you are a match for Milady? Why, yes. I absolutely do.’
My eyes narrowed. ‘You cannot flirt me into it, Lord Baron.’
That smile turned wickedly mischievous, and the twinkle reappeared in his eyes. ‘Can’t I?’
Damn him, he was far too good.
Though, he did not know me perfectly if he thought he needed to flirt me into it. I would have done it just for the sake of curiosity alone. A super-locked, mysterious somewhere, filled to the brim with who-knew-what manner of juicy secrets? Yes please. You can sign me up for that, zero questions asked.
‘What is it that you needed Jay for? I possibly don’t need to tell you that he will be firmly opposed to this proposition.’
‘Quite,’ agreed the baron. ‘We do not need to tell him about this particular part of it, perhaps, if you think he will disapprove. I will need his Waymastery skills later on, once we have secured the final key.’
‘One last question, then.’
He made a show of bracing himself. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘What, or where, are you trying to get into?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘No good! Try again.’
‘Vesper. I can’t tell you that.’
‘Right. And you were planning to waltz off there with Jay and leave me languishing at Home alone, I suppose?’
He did not answer that in words, but his face told me everything I needed to know.
‘You’ll tell me, and you’ll take me with you.’
‘I can’t.’
‘No deal.’
‘Ves… you don’t understand.’
‘And I never will, if you keep me in the dark.’
He sighed, ran a hand over his hair — unwise, for those wavy locks were so perfectly ordered before, and what a shame — and eyed me with strong disfavour. ‘I could find someone else to get hold of the key.’
‘If there is a better choice, why are you talking to me?’
‘Fine.’ He made a don’t-blame-me-when-you’re-dead gesture and said, with strong reluctance: ‘Where we are going, if you really want to know—’
‘I do.’
‘—Is… is Farringale.’
11
‘Farringale,’ I repeated.
‘Yes,’ said Baron Alban.
‘Mythical, mysteriously abandoned, long-lost seat of the Troll Court for hundreds of years Farringale?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘The unfindable version, or is there some other Farringale that’s still marked on a map somewhere?’
‘Why don’t you let me worry about how to find it, while you worry about how to get in?’
‘All right. Be right back.’ I slid past him and made for the door.
‘Uh, Ves?’ he called. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to ask Milady.’
‘What? Why! She will only say no.’
‘You don’t know that for sure.’
‘No,’ said Milady.
I’d given it my best shot, honest. I had begun with a polite enquiry after her health, paired with my usual curtsey, and opened the discussion with: ‘It emerges that our excellent Baron Ambassador suspects a close connection between the afflicted Enclaves and Farr—’
‘No,’ said Milady.
‘—Farringale, and seeks an opportunity to investigate the precise causes of its demise in a more direct fashion—’
‘No.’
‘—in hopes of uncovering some new, hitherto unsuspected information which might enable us to save Baile Monaidh and Darrowdale and—’
‘No.’
‘—any others that might come under similar afflictions in the future, or even to—’
‘No!’
‘—to learn enough to avert such calamities from ever occurring again at all. ‘
‘Vesper! I do not know how many times you require me to repeat the same word before you find yourself able to comprehend it.’
‘But why! The Baron’s theory is sound and his cause is more than just—’
‘The reasons he saw fit to present to you, and to me, are just, but I suspect the Baron of harbouring a few other ideas.’
‘If he draws some other benefit out of the venture while also resolving an emergency which threatens the life of many of his people, I see no cause for complaint.’
‘His theory might be sound, or it might be hogwash. There are reasons aplenty to avoid Farringale. Why do you think it was closed in the first place?’
‘If it is sound, much may be accomplished. If it is not, we will have learned something.’
‘And the risks?’
‘Baron Alban is prepared to face them, and he has already secured two keys—’
‘The keepers of those keys cannot have been any more delighted with this plan than I am, so I am moved to question just by what means his lordship secured them.’
‘That is his own affair. I did not ask.’
Milady sighed, its manifestation a soft puff of glittering light. ‘Vesper. I understand your point of view, truly, and I applaud your passion. But consider. The risks involved in opening Farringale are not necessarily limited to those holding the keys. We do not know what may come forth, were those doors opened, and therefore we cannot consider ourselves prepa
red to deal with the consequences.’
‘The only way to learn something is to ask! To explore, to find out! No secret ever did anybody any good for long.’
‘Vesper.’ Milady’s tone turned less strident, more… resigned. Wearily so. ‘I cannot permit this.’
‘I can only continue to fervently disagree with that decision.’
‘You are one of my very best, and you know it. But I hope you understand that your job will be in some considerable danger, should you choose to disobey me in this.’
‘I understand.’
‘Very good. Please accept my regrets, Ves.’
I did, of course, with the utmost politeness. But while I understood Milady’s position well enough, I do not think she understood that keeping my job was not my primary priority. Oh, I would be devastated if she carried through her threat, and ejected me from the Society. It has been my home and my world for so long, I cannot imagine my life without it. But it is a job with a purpose. The work that I do matters. I am here because I want to save our beautiful magickal beasts, our wondrous books and charms and artefacts and Curiosities and plants and Dells and all the rest. And yes, if I get the chance, that absolutely includes the Troll Enclaves, whether they fall strictly under my purview or not.
If I lost my job, I could get another. But if we lost half our Enclaves? How could that ever be justified?
So I set forth to disobey Milady, heavy of heart but firm of purpose. And if, lurking behind all those noble ideals, there was another reason — namely, that I simply cannot resist an ancient mystery — well, nobody needed to know about that but me.
‘The problem,’ I said, having rejoined Baron Alban and borne his inevitable I-told-you-so, ‘is that I have not the first idea where to look for the key. I do hope you have furnished yourself with something along the lines of a clue.’
‘None whatsoever,’ he said. ‘But I can assure you that it will be virtually unreachable, and secreted somewhere with fiendishly excellent security.’
‘How very encouraging you are.’
He bowed. ‘Honesty is my policy. Be careful, Ves. I would not make such a request of you, were it not—’
‘Urgent. Yes, yes, I know.’
‘I have given you a way to reach me,’ he said, and when I took out my phone I found a text from an unknown number saying: ‘Tally ho!’
‘Do you take anything seriously?’ I said.
‘I’m taking this problem seriously. Just not all the way seriously, all the time.’
‘Where would be the fun in that,’ I agreed.
The baron gave me a swift grin, and tipped an imaginary hat. ‘Good luck, Ves. Text me when you’ve got it.’
With which buoying words he was gone, leaving me with a big problem and a dearth of possible solutions.
Trying to second-guess Milady is… not the easiest task I have ever been given. I mean, where to begin? If I was a disembodied voice with a penchant for tower-tops and chocolate pots, where would I hide the key to a lost Enclave? Absolutely no idea.
I thought about all the obvious places, and dismissed them as too obvious. The tower? On the one hand, at least she could keep an eye on it up there. No one was likely to be pilfering it out from under her very eyes. But it did not strike me as likely, because whenever any of us thinks of Milady, we think of the tower. It is the first place any of us would choose to look for something Milady had hidden, and therefore, I had to cross it off the list. She was too subtle for that.
Stores? That made a lot more sense to me, and I considered it an attractive possibility for a while. Where better to hide something like that than in plain sight, so to speak? Buried under so much other, random paraphernalia that nobody would ever realise its importance? Maybe. But this, too, occurred to me too early and too easily, so I had to discount it. Anything that seemed very likely probably wasn’t.
I thought about the Enchanting labs for similar reasons. They spend all day tinkering with various charms and imbuing them into various objects, so those labs are always littered with stuff — keys included. But that struck me as too random. Such a key could get lost in there, or worse yet, its operating charm overwritten with something else entirely. Milady wouldn’t be that careless.
And so I went on, eliminating every idea I came up with as too obvious, too unlikely, or too risky, until I had nothing left.
I toyed briefly with the idea of asking Jay. I’m not sure why, only that he was bright-minded and obviously saw the world very differently from me. He would probably see some possibility that would never have occurred to me. But I kept coming back to the unavoidable fact that he would heartily disapprove of the whole venture, so I stayed away from him.
In the end, devoid of further ideas, I went to see Valerie.
Valerie Greene has a job I rather envy. She’s Queen of the Library, Head of History, Boss of all Secrets, and it is her official duty to uncover exactly the kinds of ancient mysteries that I cannot resist. I applied to join the Library Division when I arrived at the Society, but Milady said my varied talents rendered me better suited to my current, rather more eclectic role, and I cannot say that she was wrong there.
Nonetheless, when I walk into the grand library at Home and see Valerie at the main desk there, absorbed in some promisingly huge and dusty tome and with her name engraved upon a shiny brass plaque, I always suffer a mild stab of regret. It is one of those libraries that dreams are made of: all soaring ceilings and shelves by the thousand, everything all ancient oak wood and leather-bound tomes. It smells like knowledge and mystery and time, and when I went in that day I paused to take a great lungful of that familiar aroma, as I always do.
Valerie looked up from her book. ‘Morning, Ves.’ She had a smile for me, as usual. She is one of the few people at Home that I would call a close friend; we’ve both been here for years, and have spent many hours chattering about books and speculating as to the truth behind some mystery or another. She and I are roughly the same age, she being the elder by only a few years. She has a neatness and a chic style about her that I have never been able to match, her dark hair and skin always perfectly complemented by her ensemble. She favours the swept-up look by way of hairstyle, which is practical; when I read, my hair is always falling all over the pages. You would think I would learn.
‘Val.’ I sidled up to the desk — a mildly undignified form of movement it may be, but it cannot be helped; sidling is exactly what I did — and sat down across from her. ‘I need to ask you something.’
‘Is this going to be one of those juicy requests?’
‘It is the questionable kind. Is that juicy enough?’
‘Plenty.’ She closed her book with great care and set it aside, laying it atop a soft, protective cushion. ‘What are we digging up today?’
I grinned. Val knows me far too well. ‘A key,’ I said. ‘Actually, before we get to the sticky part, let’s begin with Farringale. What do you know of it?’
That word definitely got her attention. ‘Farringale? Much the same things everybody knows about it, I imagine. Seat of Their Gracious Majesties, the kings and queens of the Troll Court since time immemorial, up until a few centuries ago. Its last known rulers were Hrruna the Third and Torvaston the Second, whose reign ended somewhere in the mid sixteen hundreds but who knows when exactly, because it—’
‘—inexplicably faded out of all knowledge. Exactly. That’s the part that I’m interested in.’
Valerie folded her arms and gave me the narrow-eyed look. ‘Theories abound as to why, as I am sure you know, because you have read every book we own about Farringale from cover to cover. So why are you asking me?’
‘I might be under the impression that you know something that isn’t in any of those books.’
‘I wish I did, but no. The current Court keeps that place shrouded in the kind of secrecy that can only be termed impenetrable.’
I nodded, more impressed than I cared to show. Valerie is tenacious with this kind of thing, even more so than I am,
and she has the stature and credentials to make legitimate requests for that level of information. If even she couldn’t get past the Troll Court, they were really serious about keeping it under wraps.
‘Somebody at the Court disagrees,’ I said, and I told her about Baron Alban and his proposition. Her eyes grew rather wide as I hurried through my tale, and when I had finished she said: ‘Ves, I don’t know whether you should… are you sure about this?’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ I replied, all incredulity.
And then came the grin I had expected. ‘Of course you are. As if I would make any other decision in your shoes.’
‘I wouldn’t suspect you of it for an instant.’
12
‘So you need this key.’ Valerie tapped a pen thoughtfully against her lips, a characteristic gesture. I said nothing, letting her think in peace. I have great confidence in Val. She always comes up with something. ‘I wonder why Milady has custody of it,’ she said at length.
A good question, one I had not really considered. ‘The Society’s entire existence is about protecting rare old stuff, isn’t it?’
‘Might be reason enough.’ She thought some more, her eyes straying to the books on the far shelves. ‘The House predates Milady by quite a margin, of course. I wonder why Alban is so certain Milady is keeping the key.’
A faint suspicion entered my head. ‘Predates? By how far?’
She nodded, following my train of thought perfectly — or perhaps I was following hers. ‘The House’s precise date of construction is not known for some reason, but a few particular architectural features have led me to conclude that it was built somewhere around the early 1660s. Give or take a few years.’
The Road to Farringale Page 7