The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil

by Heidi Cullinan

  Timothy swore, and Jonathan murmured something about the tower being as good as a fortress and talked about how to bar the door, but Emily could not stop looking at Stephen. His face was so battered, and now he was cut under his eye as well as down his cheek. Her careful stitches had been broken open too. “Stephen,” she said, reaching up to his face again. “Who did this to you?”

  He touched his cheek self-consciously before hardening his expression once more. “Whitby’s cane has sharp corners.”

  “But why? Do you mean he hit you with it?” She wished he would let her touch him. “Why?”

  He smirked, then winced at that effort as well. “Because I was fool enough to defend you to him. Then he and that stupid Lennox whelp told me all about your Catalian marriage and how willing you were to reenact it in front of them!”

  Emily turned eight shades of red and couldn’t speak. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jonathan’s eyebrows lift into his hair, but Timothy only glared at Stephen and spoke sharply. “You fool. Did it not occur to you that they lied or omitted pertinent details? That perhaps they were meant to be deceived?”

  “Whitby was going to search the cottage for the cup, apparently,” Jonathan said to his brother. “He wanted the Perry daemon back. Be glad he did not find it, or he would have tried to put it into you.”

  Stephen sobered a little at this but still bristled when he looked at Emily. “So he didn’t kiss you and make you swoon in his arms in front of Whitby and Lennox?”

  Emily quickly lowered her eyes.

  “Poor Stephen,” Timothy said acidly. “Afraid a foreign molly might have done a better job of wooing the lady than you?”

  “Enough,” Jonathan said, but Emily thought he sounded amused, and she blushed harder. “This isn’t the army, nor is it a war.”

  “I’m not quite certain,” Timothy said, not backing down. “Quite obviously there is nothing between Miss Emily and myself—though if there were, little boy, here’s a tip: pouting and tossing insults won’t win her back to your side. But even without this clumsiness, I have to wonder why you were let go so easily. The man I fenced with this morning at the cottage would never allow you to come and give this warning.”

  Stephen looked confused and a little apprehensive. Emily frowned, privately agreeing with Timothy. Uneasiness spread inside her, darkening her thoughts. If Whitby had let Stephen go—

  “Stephen is not a spy,” Jonathan said a little tightly. But when he said this, Emily saw Stephen blanch. It felt like a blow to her stomach.

  Timothy saw it too. “You’ve come to visit quite often, Stephen. You came initially because you said you had something vital you must tell Jonathan, and yet I don’t recall this conversation ever happening. In fact, the other day I asked what had come of that, and Jonathan admitted you had never asked him anything at all.”

  “Then how could he be a spy if he asked me nothing?” Jonathan snapped, making Madeline stir again. But Emily saw the doubt on his face as he looked at his brother.

  “He could tell Lord Whitby what was happening here.” Her heart broke as she went on. “And at Rose Cottage.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything important!” Stephen backed away, looking terribly guilty but also very miserable. “He kept telling me how worthless I was, kept telling me I was supposed to ask you all these things, and I wouldn’t, so he’d beat me until I gave him what he wanted to hear.”

  “You didn’t look beaten before,” Timothy snapped.

  “Whitby beats you on your back,” Jonathan said. “So the marks do not show.”

  Emily remembered the day in the cottage when Stephen had flinched from her touch, and her empathy shifted again. She stepped closer to Stephen and tried once more to reach for him. This time he met her halfway, but he held her hand very tentatively.

  “Why didn’t you come to me?” Jonathan asked him.

  “Because he said he’d tell you my secret,” Stephen whispered. “He said he’d tell everyone. But now he will for certain, so there’s no point in hiding it any longer.” He lowered his eyes to the floor as he continued. “I’m not a Perry. I’m a bastard. We found out last month; he was in the process of rewriting his will, and I had to retake the blood test as a formality, and it came back flagged. I’m not Neil Perry’s son. Mother apparently had an affair with the Minister of Foreign Affairs—Whitby had him killed, so I can’t meet him. They tested me when I was born, but I had cleared, so they didn’t bother inquiring further. Apparently Mother tricked the test somehow.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “He’ll tell everyone. Absolutely everyone.”

  “But why would that matter?” Emily asked, feeling a bit piqued. “And why didn’t you tell me? You knew about me—”

  “It’s not the same!” he snapped. “You didn’t build a life around a lie!”

  “Hush,” Timothy snapped. He managed to extricate himself from Charles and stood, reaching for the knife on his belt. “Jonathan, we must assume he was followed. If this is all true, then Stephen is expendable to him. He would only have let him out to suit his purposes, and his purposes are to find both you and this daemon. We need to secure the tower—unless Stephen was forward thinking enough to lock the door behind him?” His tone indicated he believed Stephen had done nothing of the sort, and Stephen’s hot flush confirmed that, in fact, he had not.

  Madeline still twitched when Jonathan laid her down, but he did not linger with her this time, glancing instead to Emily in silent request that she take his place, and Emily did so without hesitation as Jonathan fished within his clothes for his own weapon. He hesitated over the sword stick on his way to the door. Emily waited for him to pick it up and take it with him, but instead he passed it, handle first, to her.

  Emily took it without a word, being careful not to slice open his hand. She felt a little dizzy as she held the gleaming blade as if she had just been knighted by a king. He smiled at her, then followed Timothy out the door.

  Stephen moved to the farthest wall and sat down heavily in the corner. He did not look at Emily.

  They sat in the heavy silence, listening for sounds on the tower stairs. They heard no footsteps of any kind, only odd echoes that could have been anything, even their imaginations. A sharp scream made them startle, and Emily held tight to the pommel of the sword; there was a great deal of noise, but no footsteps running to the tower. The next silence made them tense. Emily’s grip began to weaken, and her sweat made the pommel slippery. Beside her Madeline stirred, and Emily began to feel very afraid.

  Stephen rose and came quietly to her side. He took the sword gently from her and put it in his left hand. He took hers with his right.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She couldn’t speak, but she squeezed his hand in answer, and they stayed joined that way until they heard unhurried, somewhat weary footsteps echoing to the top. But it was only Jonathan who opened the door.

  “Timothy will be along in a moment, once he’s put things in order below.” He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the blood from his knife before replacing it in its sheath on his belt. Then he nodded to Stephen and the sword stick. “Take that and stand guard at the bottom of the tower. Let Timothy in when he returns. Don’t open the door to anyone else.”

  Stephen squeezed Emily’s hand again, hesitated, then leaned over and kissed her softly on the cheek before rising and doing as his brother told him. Emily touched the place where his lips had met her skin, and she smiled despite it all.

  Jonathan was crouching beside her, gathering Madeline into his arms, but he caught her gesture and smiled back a little sadly. “Stephen is a good man. Anyone who can face Whitby like that and not be destroyed or suborned has mettle enough for anything, whether or not they will let themselves see it.”

  “The same, then, can be said for you,” Emily replied.

  His face shuttered, and he looked down at Madeline. “None of this would have happened,” he said, “if I had not come. If I had not come, she would be sa
fe. If she had not risked her life, if I had not—” He shook his head. “I should not have come back.”

  Emily paused, considering her words carefully. “I was seven, Mr. Perry, when you went away. I remember the Madeline before and the Madeline after, and I see the Madeline now. She has been sick and tired and strange since you have come back, and she has suffered as I have never seen her suffer. But the truth is she suffered before you were gone as well. I remember that. I remember her crying all the time. But laughing too, sometimes. While you were gone, Mr. Perry—well, she didn’t cry. And she didn’t laugh. She might as well have been one of the ghosts, because she didn’t live, not truly. To be honest, she was barely alive at all.” She looked Jonathan directly in the eye. “It’s not that you should not have come back. It’s that you should have come back a long, long time ago.”

  The door opened as Stephen and Timothy returned to the room. Emily rose, but not before she caught the stricken look upon Jonathan’s face.

  “Let’s get them settled,” Timothy said. “Now that the tower is secure, we can pool our intelligence and try to sort out exactly what is happening. We’ll need to gather supplies from elsewhere and get them stored before dark falls. We can set up the study as a kitchen and meeting area.”

  “You and I will need to do the gathering first,” Jonathan said. He had put Madeline down again, and he stood. “There might be more of them out there.”

  “No,” Timothy said with a glance at Emily. “That is for Miss Elliott and myself to do.” When Jonathan started to object, Timothy said something in Catalian, and to her surprise, Jonathan said nothing more on the subject.

  “I don’t think Stephen should stay here alone with Charles,” Emily said. Timothy gave her a dark look, but she lifted her chin. “You saw him too. There’s something wrong.”

  “He’s not unsafe,” Timothy said a little sharply.

  “And how do you know this?” she asked.

  “Because I know,” he shot back, but there was doubt in his voice.

  “Both of you stop,” Jonathan said. “Goddess bless, but we need to appoint a general to this little mob, and swiftly. Very well—we’ll sort intelligence first, right here and now. Timothy, you will go first.”

  “No, I will.” Madeline’s voice was soft and tired, but she pushed herself up from the floor and brushed her hair from her face as she looked Jonathan in the eye. “You won’t need anything else once I tell you what Charles told me.”

  Emily’s speech was still echoing in Jonathan’s head as he watched Madeline right herself and prepare to speak. Had he not woken to the sight of her raw with pain and exhaustion and held her as she recovered in a fitful sleep, he might be induced to believe the cool, collected front she was presenting now. Her sister was apparently of the same mind, but when Emily tried to convince her to rest, Madeline quickly shut her down.

  “I am not ill; the aftereffect of casting with Charles forced me into a recovery, and now I am well enough to function. Charles will take longer, as he’s had little practice at it, but he too will come around.” She looked at him, still twitching in his sleep; Jonathan watched a flicker of pain flash across her face once again as she reached for Charles and murmured a spell, but the emotion passed as quickly as it came. When Charles quieted, she lifted her hand again and continued, serene and collected.

  “She didn’t cry. And she didn’t laugh. She didn’t live, not truly.”

  “When Charles fought the demon,” Madeline began, “it showed him truths about himself he did not know, presenting them in the form of memories and implanting them forcibly into his mind. This was done to shock and disarm him, and from my understanding, it seemed largely to have worked.” She kept her eyes moving between Emily, Timothy, and Stephen; she looked only infrequently at Jonathan, never meeting his eyes. “Charles is not the son of Neil Perry, though Annette Perry was indeed his mother. She was secreted away from Whitby Hall every night for nearly a month and forced to take part in dark rituals, which included rape and painful blood enchantment. Her memories of these times were erased, though she would have been plagued by feelings of unease, possibly recalling some of the acts as nightmares. When the rituals succeeded in getting her with child, she was placed by the same technique of magical illusion and memory regression into the bed of her brother, who was nudged into raping her yet one more time. The rest of the history is known.”

  Emily and Stephen were looking a bit green, and Timothy’s attention was on Charles, but Jonathan’s eyes did not leave Madeline. “Who performed the rituals?” he asked quietly, but he was afraid he already knew the answer.

  “Lord Henry Carlton,” she said, then more quietly, “and my father.”

  The room became heavy with silence. Emily looked struck, Stephen didn’t seem to be able to get his mind around the concept, and Timothy was a wall of blankness, superseded only by Madeline for lack of emotion.

  “Are we able to know the reason for this?” Jonathan asked to break the pause.

  “Not precisely.” So cool, she was. As if it had been a total stranger who had done this thousands of years ago to no one she ever knew. “The effect of the ritual suggests it was to ‘win,’ to be the last House standing, and with the most power. What they managed to do in conceiving Charles this way was to combine the blood of all four Houses in one male—and the gender was essential. The hormones present in a male child would feed into the spell. It isn’t that women are not powerful, but for this sort of thing, for swift, hard, possibly radical change, the male energy is needed. A female would be too subtle or would run too high a risk of claiming the power for herself or passing it on inside her womb. And Charles’s blood would make him test positive for any of the Houses. By crude paternity, he is half Elliott and half Perry, but because of the merger of the Perry and Whitby lines, because of the blood enchantments done on his mother, he has all four bloodlines inside him.”

  “None of the House tests are to see what House,” Stephen said. “Only to confirm or deny the presence of the one desired.” He looked at his hands, turning them over and over again. “Poor Aunt Annette,” he whispered. “I never knew her, but—”

  “Does Whitby know of this?” Jonathan asked, cutting him off. Much as he was unnerved by Madeline’s reserve, it was serving well to get the information out.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes went dark. “If he did, he would be fighting harder to reclaim him. By giving him the blood of all four Houses, they also infused Charles with a great deal of magical power, designing him to be what I can only describe as a ‘magical sponge.’ Through his entire life, he has been absorbing energy and magic from others, from experiences, and from the very air and earth around him. Not since the days of the androghenie has anyone walked the earth with this much power inside of them, and he may possibly exceed even them.”

  “Why?” Timothy’s question was very quiet. He looked placid, but Jonathan knew him well enough to know this was upsetting him a great deal. “Why would anyone do such a thing to any living creature?”

  “To make him a tool.” She was looking at the ground before her now. It was clearly becoming more and more difficult for her to remain distant. “He was raised with no instruction or understanding of who or what he was. In addition to this, he was raised in an environment where he was marginalized, emotionally neglected, and taught over and over again that he was less than those around him. His bisexuality reinforced this further. Everything in his life was designed to ensure he was as emotionally starved as possible, nearly guaranteeing he would have no self-esteem or confidence.”

  “Why?” Timothy was losing his battle with appearing calm. “What end would this serve anyone but a sadist?”

  Madeline looked up at him. Her eyes were glassy, but her voice was still even. “It creates a perfect subordinate.”

  Timothy’s knuckles were white from his clenched fists. “But why would anyone do this?”

  “As she said: to make him a tool,” Jonathan finished for her, h
olding back his own bile. “He is nothing but power, but he knows no way to control it. Therefore anyone who controls him, by default has access to his power. And because Charles carries the blood of the four Houses, he may command and control all the androghenie. He is Lord Carlton and Lord Elliott already, and he can access some of the other blood now. Were he to become the last Perry and Whitby as well, he would be, in one man, the Lord of all the Old Ones. It was for this he was being groomed.”

  “Smith.” Timothy aimed a shaking finger at the door. “That mathdu ghora said something like this, but it made no sense to me then. Now I understand. This potential power was why he had Charles on his leash.”

  “He was leeching power from him. He didn’t have all four Houses yet, but he was working toward it,” Madeline said. “That is why he lured everyone here to the parish. He did not require my death because I am not male, but Jonathan’s is necessary, as is that of any other male Perry. In the meantime, however—” She paused, shut her eyes, and took a second to control herself. “He used black acts, most of them sexual, to contain Charles and to steal power from him. The more pain and despair Charles felt—” She had to stop again.

  Timothy was practically foaming now, and he began to pace back and forth as he switched back and forth between Etsian and Catalian. “Que’tah! Like an animal! Sonat de metara mathdu ghora resti’li maudtha! To what end? To what end! They destroy him, set him up for all this, then abandon him? For whom were they preparing him? Where are these two madmen?”

  “Dead,” Jonathan said before Madeline would have to answer. “Lord Carlton died in a carriage accident before Charles was born, and Lord Elliott killed himself when Charles was six or seven.”

  “Perhaps suffering an attack of conscience?” Timothy sneered, and Madeline shut her eyes.