Or the loneliness; there was no one to help her face this.
“I like you all, too, Sapphire,” she said instead.
“You wont be wuf.” The words were written with such force that the chalk squeaked and shed powder.
She stared. That was…vehement. So emphatic that it came as something of a shock. “I hope you’re right,” she said tentatively.
“We wont let you be wuf.” The chalk actually broke in half.
She felt—not frozen, but suddenly stilled. There was something going on here, something that she couldn’t quite grasp. The invisibles must know something, something important, about this situation. Something that Sebastian clearly did not know.
“How do you know that?” she whispered.
There was a very, very long pause. Then, finally, the words were erased and a few shaky letters appeared.
“Cant tell.”
Now her mind unstuck, as it had in the carriage, when she had realized what must have happened to her. The invisibles did know something, and were being prevented from revealing it. The shakiness of the letters told her that, as if the hand that wrote them was fighting against a terrible compulsion merely to say that the writer could not say what was going on.
“But you can protect me, help me—”
Again, frantic erasing and forceful strokes. “Yes.”
It was as if a terrible weight had been partly taken from her. She was not facing this entirely alone. For some reason…heaven only knew why…these creatures were befriending her. Even if she couldn’t see them, they wanted to help her.
And this one was assuring her that Godmother Elena, even more powerful than the King, was going to help her, too.
She sighed. “Then, I trust you, Sapphire. All of you. Thank you.”
“Dont cry.”
She managed a very shaky smile. “I’ll try not to. But I am homesick and I miss my father terribly.”
“Godmuther fix.”
Another comforting pat of her knee through the coverlet, and the slate and chalk and blue ribbon floated away, leaving her alone, with far more questions than answers, and far more puzzles than her mind would hold right now.
Well, there was no point in trying to sleep now.
She opened one of the books at random and began to read it. At first, she found herself reading and rereading the same page, but eventually she got the sense of it. It wasn’t the sort of thing she usually read; she liked history, not stories. But this seemed to be a more serious version of the silly romantic novels that the twins occasionally picked up, and she found herself following the story with some interest. It began, as these things tended to do, with a little orphaned girl begging in the streets, but rather than touching the heart of a crusty old miser, or being taken in by a poor but kindhearted couple with no children of their own, this little girl was taken up by a gang of young thieves.
Finally, she closed her eyes for just a little, because they were still sore and tired from crying, and when she opened them again it was morning.
6
SHE WOKE TO A WONDERFUL AROMA OF FLATCAKES and honey; when she opened her eyes, she found that the bed curtains and window curtains had been pulled back, letting light stream in, and a tray was evidently floating in midair beside her bed, accompanied by the green scarf.
“Good morning, Verte,” she said, rubbing her eyes, then sitting up. “I didn’t mean to sleep this long.”
The tray ended up on her lap without a mishap. The slate and chalk levitated up from the floor.
“Not late,” the chalk wrote.
She smirked. She felt so much better this morning, it was amazing. And maybe it was false hope, but while she had it she was going to enjoy it. “Not late by the standards of a Duke, perhaps. Late for those of us who intend to get work done.” Then she sobered. “He didn’t escape last night, did he?”
She thought she remembered howling, dimly, in her dreams. She couldn’t tell where it had been coming from, though. The howling she had heard before she slept had certainly come from inside the Manor.
Was it even possible that the wolf had learned to manipulate the door mechanism? That was a startling—and unsettling—thought.
“No. Sleeps.”
It must have been a real accident, then, his escaping. Sebastian had certainly been terribly careful about the door last night before she had left him.
Now she was curious. How did it work? It was probably not very pleasant. In her mind’s eye, she imagined the wolf clawing at the door, pacing all night long, wearing itself out against its prison. Poor Sebastian…no wonder he was asleep. She shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. “I suppose turning into a wolf and then raging to get out all night does take it out of one,” she said aloud, and turned her attention to her breakfast before it got cold.
When she had finished, and Verte had taken the tray away and bandaged her ankle, she shooed the servant away so she could dress herself. It was very nice, really very nice, to have servants bringing breakfast in bed and fixing hot baths and all, but she was going to draw the line at being dressed like a giant doll.
When she limped into the sitting room, Verte, Sapphire and Thyme were all waiting there; green scarf, blue ribbon and strip of white cloth with a sprig of thyme tucked in the knot. She noticed then that Thyme’s armband was a little higher than Verte’s, and Verte’s was a little higher than Sapphire’s. If they were all knotted in about the same place, that meant that Sapphire was shorter than she was, and Thyme was about the height of the Duke. Interesting. Were there gender differences as well as height?
Or were these creatures androgynous? They didn’t eat, or at least, they didn’t eat the same thing that the humans here did. Did they sleep? Sebastian had said that they were a sort of spirit, and spirits didn’t sleep… Were they even all the same kind of spirit? Would they mind if she asked them personal questions like that?
Or would they get angry? If they got angry, what would they do? They could just take off the armbands and she would never know if they were there or not. They could retaliate at any time, in any way they chose.
I can’t believe that a creature that was as kind as Sapphire was last night would be that angry if I asked it a few things…
But they were magic, and magic creatures were known to do things that you wouldn’t expect.
This is getting more complicated with every moment. But Sebastian had summoned them, and he seemed to be a careful sort of magician. He would have made sure they were restricted from harming anyone. Just go slowly and carefully…
“Good morning, Thyme, Sapphire,” she said, and sat down at the desk, pulling out paper and readying a pen. “Just a moment and I will have the menus for you.” As she did so, she thought about the supplies she had seen. Last night had been the pie—pigeon pie, as it turned out, and very tasty. So today for dinner, she should placate the men with a nice big chunk of venison or beef. Venison, she decided, and wrote out the rest of the courses. And as for supper, she had definitely seen duck cleaned and waiting. “Is the Duke likely to be on two feet after sundown?” she asked, looking up.
The slate was in Verte’s “hands.” “No,” Verte wrote.
“Then make sure he gets supper before he changes,” she said. She thought about asking when Eric ate, and decided that she didn’t care. In fact, she didn’t care if she never saw him for the entire time she was here. “I will have one quarter of the duck—thigh and leg—and the men can split the rest,” she told the servants, and handed the menus to Thyme. “I assume that the Duke will want me to have dinner with him?”
“Yes,” Verte wrote.
“And is there any reason why I can’t explore the Manor?” she continued.
“No.” Verte was a being of few words, it seemed.
“Thank you very much, then. You may go to whatever your duties are.”
Somewhere was a place where the Duke was getting fresh flowers and fresh vegetables. The only vegetables you could find at this time of year in the m
arkets were dried or things that kept sound in a cool cellar. Beets and turnips, squashes and carrots, onions and garlic. If you could find a place where the water didn’t freeze, you might find cress. You certainly didn’t find asparagus.
It might be that he had a hothouse; she had heard of such things—the King had one—but she had never seen one, and she dearly wanted to.
Thyme and Verte drifted out the door. Sapphire stayed. Bella raised her eyebrow at the blue ribbon. “Don’t you have other duties?” she asked. She couldn’t imagine that the Duke had conjured or summoned a servant—or assigned one—just to be available to her day and night…could he?
Sapphire had got her hands on the slate again. “Serv U,” she wrote.
Evidently he had. And that was incredibly thoughtful. So his words last night were not just aristocratic fluff. He had meant them.
And with that, she had a much better idea of what to do with her time than wander around the Manor—although she still wanted to see that hothouse, if one existed. I hope he’s not creating vegetables out of thin air. I’m not sure I am very comfortable with eating magic food. What if it—does something—once it’s eaten? She went back to one of the fireside chairs and sat down. “In that case, you can serve me by telling me some more of what you know,” she said. “At least, tell me things that you can tell me. I would like to start with the Duke himself.”
Yes and no questions were easiest, but didn’t give her much detail. More detailed questions required a lot of time for Sapphire to scratch out the answers. While this examination had seemed like a good idea when she’d had it, it soon proved to be frustrating. All too often the answer was “Don’t no.” She did manage to get a rough idea of how the household functioned, but that was the limit of it, and it wasn’t very enlightening. The Duke studied, attempted to break the werewolf change, performed other magic. Sapphire really had no idea what it was he did with his magic, except when it involved her or the other servants. Eric was generally seen only at supper, and sometimes not then. He took a cart and horse to the city once every few weeks for supplies. He had his own entrance to the Manor, a suite of rooms in a kind of gatehouse—a suite that was larger than the Duke’s!—and free access to everything. Presumably his duties as Gamekeeper kept him busy. Sapphire had no idea who kept the accounts, how the monies from the mines were paid and who was responsible for them. Certainly Sebastian seemed to have no head for such things, and Eric didn’t seem the type to want to handle details of that sort. Perhaps they had a factor in the city.
After spending most of the morning attempting to get useful information from Sapphire, Bella’s head hurt. It was time for a change, something else to do. Which brought her back to her original plan. “Is there a hothouse?” she asked, finally. “A place where the flowers and vegetables are grown?”
“Yes,” Sapphire wrote.
“Take me to it, please,” she ordered. “I’d like to have some notion of what is in there.”
There was no evidence of confusion. The blue ribbon obediently led the way out the door.
More corridors—ordinary ones as well as murder-corridors. More rooms, most of them with the curtains closed and the hint of dust in the air. Then, finally, Sapphire flung open the door on what seemed at first as if it was outdoors, so bright was the light streaming inside. Yet there was no burst of freezing air—in fact, the air that puffed out toward Bella was warm and moist as a spring day.
She stepped across the threshold and into summer.
At least it smelled like summer. Green and moist and warm—it was really warm here. And she had never seen so much glass in her life—the walls, the roof, were all made of it. The place was perhaps half the size of the Great Hall of the Wool Merchants Guild and it must have cost a fortune to create all the glass panes, bring them out here and put them together. There were plants in raised beds everywhere, with narrow walkways between them, and in the middle, trellises covered with vines that reached to the roof.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been expecting something that looked like a garden. Well, it did look like a garden—a kitchen garden. There were a few beds of flowers, but most of the space was taken up with raised beds growing vegetables and herbs. Even the vines were peas and beans.
Once she got over her initial disappointment, however, she began to appreciate it. The beds of fresh herbs alone were a marvel, and the vegetables like asparagus and lettuces, the peas and beans in several stages of ripening trailing upward over trellises that one only saw in summer, here with a background of snow outside the glass—well, it really did seem as much like magic as Sapphire.
And it was so warm here, as warm as a hot summer day. “How is it kept so warm?” she asked Sapphire. Surely it wasn’t just the sun—
“Hot spring,” said a laconic voice from behind them, electrifying her with a jolt of panic. She jumped and squeaked, turning at the same time, not sure whether she should look for a weapon or utter a greeting.
Eric von Teller lounged in the door frame, arms crossed over his chest. He was dressed in his Gamekeeper leathers, without the cloak. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see a definite family resemblance. He and Sebastian had the same cheekbones, the same brow, the same nose; their hair was very different, though. And their eyes. Sebastian’s were a gray; Eric’s were dark, some color close to the slate of a storm cloud. He raised one black eyebrow as she relaxed marginally.
“Don’t bother asking anything complicated of the menials,” he continued, with a little smirk. “It’s rather like trying to teach a cow to fly. You get nowhere, and annoy the cow. They’re obedient, they will do what you ask of them provided you phrase it the way you would phrase an order to a dog, but they are of no help whatsoever when it comes to anything even a child would understand.”
“I see,” she replied, in as neutral a tone of voice as she could manage, and gestured behind her back, hoping Sapphire would understand that she should hide the slate and chalk. “Well, since you can talk, and obviously know a bit about this place, what do you mean by ‘hot spring’?”
“There is a spring of hot water underneath this place. It’s why it was built here in the first place,” Eric replied, not moving at all from his spot in the door frame—meaning that when she wanted to leave the hothouse, she would have to somehow get by him. “Originally, when this was just a hunting lodge, it was used for heat. Later, when the place was rebuilt, it was repurposed. It’s not a very big one, and once the Manor expanded to its current size, it couldn’t be used to heat the place as it once had. Now it supplies the hot water for bathing, and keeps this glasshouse warm.” He shrugged. “The glasshouse was a conceit of the late Duke’s father. I think this is a waste of effort, really, but he liked to impress his guests with spring and summer vegetables in midwinter.”
“Was that so important to him?” she asked, curiously.
He grimaced a little. “The Duchy is a farm, a forest and a few mines. The small size never troubled anyone up until that point, but I suppose Sebastian’s grandfather felt differently. I will say that getting hot baths whenever you like is very welcome. And since Sebastian’s slaves are the ones doing all the work here, it’s not as if it was costing us anything to keep it up. It would be different if we needed to keep a staff of human servants to tend the plants.” He nodded at the ribbon around Sapphire’s arm. “Clever idea. I’ll order mine to wear armbands so I know when they’re in my rooms. I don’t like the feeling there might be something looking over my shoulder all the time.”
He seemed to be making an effort to be pleasant. She regarded him with as neutral an expression as she could manage. “It is unnerving,” she agreed. “More so for a woman, I think. I don’t believe that men have our natural modesty.”
He raised an eyebrow, looking skeptical, but said nothing for a moment. Finally, he shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for our meeting in the woods,” he said abruptly. “It’s my job to be as unpleasant as possible, especially around the full moon,
to keep people out of there after dark. Now you know why.”
She frowned a little. “If that is your job, you are doing it very well.”
“It’s been Duke Sebastian’s orders,” he pointed out. “I have to do so in such a way as to prevent people from getting too curious about why I’m running them off. I’m the Woodsman, so people expect me to act as if everyone I meet is a potential poacher, so that’s what I do. It saves on explanations.”
Bella tilted her head to the side. “That—actually makes sense,” she agreed, with great reluctance.
“Of course it does—it’s the clever way to handle this situation.” He shifted his weight a little, and the leather of his outfit creaked. “If I was solicitous and warned people nicely that there might be a savage monster out there, ready to rip their limbs off, they’d assume I was hiding something besides where the deer lay up, and do their best to find out what it was. So I’m a bastard about it. Too bad, if I frighten people. I want them frightened. Just because we’ve managed to keep Sebastian locked up so far, it never followed that we could always count on doing so.” He unfolded his arms, and made a little gesture of impatience. “Sebastian assumes the best. I assume the worst. That has been my job since he changed. I don’t want potential victims in our woods, and I’ve done a damned good job of keeping them out of danger, since you’re the first accident we’ve had since Sebastian started changing.”
It was a very reasonable explanation. And she might have believed him entirely, if it hadn’t been for that other little encounter she’d had with him at the Guild festival. He was in disguise then and presumably thought he would not be recognized—and he wasn’t in the woods, trying to frighten people out of them.
So, while she would accept his explanation about chasing people out of the woods, so far as the caddishness went—
I think not.
“We got off to a bad start,” he continued, and finally smiled. “Like it or not, for the next three months, we are going to be in the same household and are bound to encounter one another. I’d like to be able to exchange civil words with you, and believe me, it will be a lot more pleasant for both of us if we can. Truce?”
Beauty and the Werewolf Page 8