The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil

by Heidi Cullinan

  He had drained or spilled all his brandy. When Timothy leaned forward to pour more, Charles swiped the bottle from his hands and took several solid glugs before handing it back. Timothy cleared his throat and tucked the bottle back into his lap. “What is he doing here, in this parish? Why does he seek Jonathan? What is his goal?”

  “I don’t know. Or rather I don’t understand. He keeps talking about what happened ten years ago, about how we have to go back to the beginning.” Charles ran his tongue drunkenly over his lips before returning his gaze to the fire. “I don’t see what good it will do, unless he intends to raise the dead.”

  “Tell me what happened ten years ago,” Timothy urged, sensing he might at last be nearing the heart of the mystery. “Tell me everything.”

  Charles studied him carefully, looking surprised. “Jonathan didn’t tell you, then. I suppose I can’t blame him. It doesn’t make him look very good, no matter what angle you take. But yes. I’ll tell you. First, however—” He extended his hand and motioned for the bottle.

  Timothy handed it back reluctantly. “Go easy.” I don’t want you unconscious just yet.

  Charles winked at him as he took another deep swill, but when he lowered the bottle, there was no more smile in his eyes.

  “Ten years ago was the first time I came north with my family. I’d made a larger than usual mess of things, and Grandfather decided he didn’t yet hate me enough to see me pilloried, so he handed out bribes and dragged me up here by my ear for the summer. Jonathan came too, though it was not his first time. He was to babysit Father, which meant he lived here with the madman at the abbey.” Charles waved a hand generally at the room. “It didn’t look quite this bad then. It’s odd, actually, how very much it’s decayed in ten years’ time, but given the legends and everything else, I suppose it makes sense. Anyway. Jonathan had to stay here with Mad Old Dad, making sure he didn’t escape and go raping and killing. It was a full-time job and grueling work besides, so when Father passed out, Jonathan tended to take long walks on the moor to clear his head. And that was how he met Madeline.”

  Charles had settled back onto the cushion, and he grinned as he recounted the next. “I used to tag along just to watch them fight and to see her smile at me. All my life I’d been the nasty, incest-born bastard no one wanted to touch unless they were looking for something kinky in the bedroom, and Jonathan was the golden boy. Not here, not with her. She shouted at him like a fishwife. She wouldn’t give him the time of day, but she always took my arm and led me back for tea. We both fell for her because of the way she treated us. I was her puppy because she was the first person to truly be kind to me, and Jonathan fell for her because she was the first person he wanted to impress who told him he was a bastard. It was, of course, he who got her in the end, because he always does. I sat at her feet, but he wooed her. Tried honeyed words, tried flowers and courting. At first she had none of it. Then one day, furious with her for spurning him yet again, he shouted back at her, saying how if she was determined to spar with him, he should teach her to fence so she could bleed him proper. You’d have thought he’d offered her a castle. He had her with a foil in hand that very afternoon. The rest just sort of tumbled into place.”

  Timothy took the bottle from Charles after he took another drink. “But he didn’t stay. He went to war.”

  Charles wiped the back of his hand across his lips, nodding. “Yes. To escape the murder charges.” When Timothy’s eyes went wide, Charles grinned, swaying from the drink and the drug as he held up two fingers. “Two murders.”

  Timothy stared at him, wanting to deny it. He took a swig from the bottle himself and said, “Explain.”

  “I told you about Madeline,” Charles went on, “but not Andrea. Andrea Carlton was a cousin to Madeline, and like her, she was the last of her House. Did they tell you about those? We’re all cursed, apparently. Old magic blood, though you rarely see it do anything but encourage us to kill and cheat each other. My father cheated Madeline’s father, for example, out of this abbey when she was just a girl, then used it as his wicked little playground. They say that’s why Hamilton Elliott killed himself, but it’s difficult to know for sure why he did it. Just being one of the Houses seems to be enough to drive you mad. Or maybe we of the Houses are all pawns to some daemon gone demon, like they say, just doomed. All I know is we were all there that summer, all four Houses. And that summer we nearly all killed one another. If it hadn’t been for Madeline, I think we would have.”

  He eased back onto the cushions. “When it was clear Jonathan had wooed Madeline out from under me, I had to find something new to do besides watch them fall in love, and I ended up with Andrea.” He smiled a feral smile. “She was a deliciously wicked girl. She didn’t feed me tea and cakes. She hauled me off to the hayloft and fucked me senseless.” He let his eyes fall shut and smiled, clearly reliving old memories. “She didn’t mind my…particular tastes. She seemed to enjoy them—she encouraged them. I was thrilled my grandfather had decided to banish me to the north. I never wanted to leave. I had fantasies of marrying her. But as always I was naive in thinking it would last.”

  Charles laced his fingers over his chest and studied the ceiling intently, as if it might coach him through the rest. “I didn’t mind her sleeping with Jonathan exactly. It’s difficult to split hairs over infidelity when you’ve not only encouraged your lover to take a footman up her back passage but had the same treatment right beside her. But she knew how I felt about my brother. And worse, she knew how Madeline would feel about it.”

  Timothy didn’t like the direction this was taking. Infidelity—Jonathan? “Were Jonathan and Madeline engaged?”

  Charles shook his head. “She was a novice: no marriage, no sexual contact. It isn’t essential to enter the Craft a virgin, but Madeline’s the type who would have insisted. And that was the rub, you see. He was trying to convince her to abandon the Craft and come away with him. I assumed she would eventually, but then he went and slept with Andrea. It wasn’t like him. Much as I hated him, even I was shocked. And he was an idiot if he thought that would induce Madeline to anything. But the biggest problem was what it encouraged in Andrea. She wanted more than one time, and she kept after him. And one terrible night, she sought him out here at the abbey.”

  Charles motioned for the bottle. His grim expression incited Timothy to take his own hit as well. “The abbey, where your mad father lived,” Timothy said quietly. Whom Jonathan was to keep from raping and killing.

  Charles nodded. “And worse, Jonathan was out trying to woo Madeline back the night Andrea appeared. She found Father instead. By the time Jonathan came back—” His expression became wooden. “He said he killed her as a kindness. He said Father was taking too long to do it himself, and he couldn’t bear the look in her eyes. He said it would have been a cruelty to keep her alive after what he had done, even if it could have been managed. And then he killed Father and was sent to war because even Grandfather couldn’t hide two murders. Not without time.”

  Timothy waited in silence as Charles drank again, but his mind was reeling. He tried to imagine cool, proud Jonathan finding a girl he had led on in the hands of the man he was meant to be shepherding. He thought of the deep shadows he had always seen in his friend’s eyes, and he began to understand them.

  “That is what happened ten years ago,” Charles said. His words were beginning to slur, but not much. “I don’t know why the devil Smith cares. I thought maybe it was all the sex, but that was Andrea and I, and she’s dead. Does he mean to bring her back? I would have thought it was impossible, but Smith has taught me to believe in the impossible. I get ill if I think about him bringing back Father. But what is he after? And what did he do to us in the yard? All I remember is Jonathan going all red and strange, but I assumed it was some drug Smith had given me. The only other thing would be the curse, but that’s nonsense, and anyway, what good would it do? He can’t sodomize it, so he can’t strip the power.”

  Timothy was get
ting lost. “Curse? The witch spoke of one.” But he’d already forgotten the particulars. He glanced at the bottle. Or perhaps he had just drowned them.

  Charles waved a hand, and the gesture nearly took him off the couch. “If a member of a House kills another member of his House, it’s supposed to consign their soul to their family’s daemon, which will turn demon and eat him, and then run mad about the world unless it’s contained or placed in another of the House. Or something.” He made a face. “I hate the daemons. They’re ridiculous. I’m my own man. I may be a patsy, but I’m my own patsy, or I was until Smith tricked me. I’m not the puppet of a decrepit old mystical force serving air and earth. What would they want, anyway? More air? More earth? People to breathe less? Stop digging? Bah. It’s all stuff.” He fell back against the couch, flicking the broken spring with his finger.

  Timothy sank against the back of the couch too. He’d learned essentially nothing. If anything, he’d made himself more confused. “So we don’t know why Smith is here.” He shifted his leg that was pinned against Charles. “What does he intend to do?”

  “I don’t know. But it involves Jonathan and maybe Madeline. Without question it involves power.” One of his hands fell onto Timothy’s leg, and he began to massage it absently. “Which implicates Madeline, and yet Smith talks as if she is disposable to him, an issue only if she gets in his way.”

  “Could she be working with him?” Timothy didn’t remove his leg, not even when the massaging became more regular. He drank again from the bottle, trying to be mindful that he was edging too close to his tolerance. “Could the witch be in league with the alchemist?” And did I just leave her sealed in that room with Jonathan? He took another drink.

  “No.” Charles reclaimed the bottle. “To start, she is a witch, and he is an alchemist. They hate one another on principle alone.”

  “But Jonathan betrayed her.” Charles’s fingers were starting to affect Timothy, and so was the baetlbeth. He shifted his leg in a sort of stupor, trying to reclaim it. “She could see this as her opport—oppor—chance for revenge.”

  “Not Madeline.” Charles took Timothy’s leg gently in his hands, lifted it, then swung the entire thing into his own lap. “She doesn’t take revenge. I wanted to kill Jonathan after what he let happen to Andrea, but Madeline held me down, told me no. Told me it wasn’t anyone’s fault, told me Jonathan had been punished enough. When I asked what about her, what about what he did to her, she just went quiet and said it didn’t matter. She took her Apprentice vows the day after he left, and that was the end of it. She has the magic in her now. Smith has to coax it and charm it, but she has it in her blood. Once they put it in, it doesn’t come out. Witches are for life.” He had been running his hands idly over Timothy’s calves as he spoke, but he looked down now and grinned lopsidedly at Timothy’s bare feet, catching his big toe between two fingers and wiggling it. “Don’t your feet get cold?” He nodded at the sandals Timothy had discarded on the rug.

  Timothy fought the urge to shut his eyes as Charles ran his thumb down the center of his sole. “A little.”

  Charles made small circles in Timothy’s instep. “They’re soft. Or this one is.” He pressed harder, and Timothy had to bite back a groan; distracted, he didn’t realize Charles had reached for his other foot until he’d swung it into the air, bringing it to rest against the hard length of Charles’s inner thigh. “No, both are soft.”

  “Oil. I use oil.” Timothy tried to withdraw his feet, but Charles held them fast. He resumed his massage on the new foot as he tucked the right one under his groin, though not before Timothy’s toes had raked the erection he sported there. Timothy pushed himself up and flexed his free foot against Charles’s insistent hands. “Stop.”

  Charles ignored him. “You can trust Madeline. I swear to you. She will only help him. She is not in league with Smith.”

  Timothy was feeling dizzy. He’d had too much drug; he must have tipped too much in. Yet Charles seemed nearly unaffected. Timothy had lost control of this somehow. He had so many questions, but he could barely think of anything to ask. And Charles’s hard hands moving so cleverly over his feet helped nothing.

  He yanked them back with force and tucked them beneath his legs.

  “Sex,” he blurted, feeling his own throb in response to Charles’s manipulations. “You keep saying Smith is after sex. Sex and power and magic.”

  “Yes. Smith is a sex magician.” Charles reached for the bottle again.

  Timothy frowned at the bottle. They’d both had too much, but Charles had had more. Why was he not passing out? “What does that mean, ‘sex magician’? He has…magical congress?”

  “He uses orgasms to tap into other people’s power.” Charles waved a hand. “Not just magic, though I suspect that’s his favorite. I saw him once with a woman who wanted a charm to catch a rich husband. He stripped her down and painted symbols all over her, then made her ride a dildo until she climaxed seven times, right there in front of him, with me watching from behind a screen. Then he gave her a bag of stones and told her to take it to the park, and the richest unmarried man there would propose to her. When she left, he told me Lord Wondley would send him regular checks and work hard to keep any reform legislation from passing in the Golden Lane district for seven years and would never know quite why.” He drank again, but he made a face as he swallowed. “Smith is sick. That woman sobbed the entire time he had her fucking for him, and he treated her like his performing monkey, telling her to touch herself, to come harder. She was so pretty and so young.”

  “Why didn’t she just leave when he told her his price?” Timothy asked.

  “Because he’d decided she was useful to him, and he enchanted her into staying. He has to use tricks until he gets the henna on you, but then you’re done.” He shoved up his sleeves and held out his forearms. “I don’t know what these say, but it might as well be ‘I am Martin Smith’s bitch. Run fast.’”

  Timothy reached out and caught Charles’s hands and leaned forward, squinting at the symbols. He felt sick. “These are Catalian symbols. These are the katkha moor, but they never—” He tilted his head to one side and turned Charles’s wrist back and forth as if this would right the symbols. “They’re perverted. The true symbols are beautiful; they bring peace just by looking at them.” He looked up at Charles, then let go and shoved up his own sleeves. “Here. Look.”

  Charles was quiet as he took Timothy’s hands in his, but where Timothy had just stared, he ran his fingers tentatively over the designs tattooed on Timothy’s wrists and forearms.

  “They’re beautiful,” Charles said at last. “But I thought Catalians didn’t believe in magic.”

  “These aren’t magic. They’re symbolic.” Timothy guided Charles’s finger up his wrist. “The four colors denote that I worked in the royal palace; the leaves around the symbols indicate I worked in the garden. The paisleys are because I came to the garden from the south, where these designs are popular.” He switched to the other arm, where the tattoos began on his palm and ran all the way to his shoulder. “These tell my talents, my trainings.”

  Charles looked up at him without lifting his head. “Smith said you were a pleasure slave.”

  “Court concubine.” Timothy tightened his grip, then realized he was holding Charles’s hands. He deliberately let them go. “It’s a position of honor, one of the highest, and as I was in the garden, I was practically untouchable. Only an appointment by the Cariff could bring you to me.”

  Charles was still watching him intently. “And were you good, court concubine?”

  “I was the best.” Timothy sat back against the arm of the couch, trying to look calm. He wasn’t. The drug was permeating his system now, and since he had not taken enough to pass out, he was rather uninhibited, and since he was attracted to Charles, this was trouble.

  Charles leaned back too, but his eyes were still hooded. “Whom did you pleasure? Women? Men? Both?”

  “I am li,” Timothy said, his v
oice huskier than he wanted it to be. “I pleasure only men.”

  “Never a woman?” Charles pressed. “Not even one?”

  Timothy’s legs were beginning to cramp. He wanted to stretch them out, but he didn’t dare. “Not in the garden. There were a few on occasion, but generally they were mistakes. I am attracted only to men. That is what li means.”

  “I like both,” Charles confessed. He took another drink. “In Etsey, they call you a goat and they put you in the pillory. They’d put you there too, but me—oh, the goats usually don’t live past the first night, whereas mollies usually live to hang their tattooed foreheads in shame.”

  “In Catal, you would be called lilon,” Timothy said. “And you would not be put in a pillory for it.”

  “Lilon. That’s pretty.” Charles handed him the bottle. “I think I would have liked Catal.”

  The past tense depressed Timothy, as it always did, and though it was foolish, he accepted the bottle and drank. Then he drank again.

  His lips felt numb when he lowered the bottle; Charles took it away and set it on the floor. “I think you’ve likely had enough. You’re enchantingly tousled, but you look close to sleep now.”

  Warning bells sounded in Timothy’s mind, but they were dull and echoed because of the drug. He tried to retreat into his corner of the couch. “What—” His foot slipped off the edge, and he nearly fell off.

  Charles caught him and righted him, keeping his hands on him once he had him seated again. “You put baetlbeth in the brandy, yes?” When Timothy gave a distraught cry, Charles laughed and brushed a kiss against Timothy’s knuckles. “I’m a hopeless addict of every illegal substance Hain can smuggle into Etsey. Baetlbeth was a luxury item even for me, but Smith uses it in his henna and laces my tea with it every morning. I don’t notice it beyond a faint disorientation until I reach the fatal dose, and something Smith did nullifies even that.”