Jasmyn

by Alex Bell

  16

  Broken Violin

  Someone swore, and it must have been me because Lukas was too busy half-drowning in the bath, drenching Ben at the same time. The water was tinged pink already from the gash down Lukas’s upper arm. Judging from the colour of the water, he had obviously lost a fair amount of blood already and he was certainly going to need stitches. His wet coughing indicated that he had swallowed quite a lot of water when he’d been unceremoniously dumped into the bath. His lips were blue with cold and there were remnants of frost shards in his hair.

  I had seen Lukas twice before - once at my grandparents’ stables and then again at the Alpsee Lake. Ben, on the other hand, had always denied all knowledge of Lukas - claimed not to have recognised his name or my description of him. I was therefore astonished when, after brushing the wet hair out of his face, he said, ‘I told you not to come back here, you idiot! Why won’t you ever listen to me?’

  ‘I didn’t think . . . they would find out—’ Lukas began between chattering teeth, but Ben cut him off.

  ‘Of course they were going to find out! You can’t keep secrets from them - you of all people should know that!’

  ‘You needed my help,’ Lukas said stubbornly.

  Ben sighed and said, ‘I’m going to have to stitch up your arm. Sword, was it?’

  ‘A mace,’ Lukas replied, sounding almost proud about it. ‘Only a scratch, though. I was so quick it barely touched me.’

  ‘Huh,’ Ben grunted. ‘Any more of a scratch and it would have taken your whole arm off. Jasmyn, can you go and fetch—’ He broke off mid-sentence as he turned his head and his eyes met my accusing stare. It was as if - even though he knew I was there - it hadn’t really occurred to him what that meant until that moment. His mouth hung open stupidly for a second before he said weakly, ‘Oh. Well. You know Lukas.’

  He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the man in the bath, who smiled at me and said, ‘Hi, Jasmyn.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said - my voice sounding ludicrously stiff and formal given the circumstances.

  Considering how pink the bathwater now was, I was surprised that Lukas did not seem worse than he did. It certainly appeared that he was not in any imminent danger but, until his wound was seen to, it seemed incredibly callous to give the third degree to a bleeding man naked in a bathtub. So I said to Ben, in the iciest voice I could muster, ‘I’m going to go and fetch a first-aid kit. Whilst I’m doing that, perhaps you can come up with an explanation for the fact that you plainly know each other even though you told me to my face that you had no idea who Lukas was.’

  I was so angry with Ben that I could have shaken him until his teeth rattled. Did the man have no sense of decency? He had spun me one lie after another. Liam had told me many a time that Ben was selfish and self-centred and suddenly I felt angry with myself for ever trusting him in the first place. I had been drawn to him simply because he was Liam’s brother and he had been playing me like a fool all along. I only had myself to blame and that made it even worse.

  ‘You stupid, stupid idiot,’ I muttered to myself as I fumbled about in my suitcase with hands that shook slightly, searching for the first-aid kit. Why was my natural instinct still to trust people after all this? When Ben looked me in the eye and told me something - why, oh why did I believe him? I needed to make myself harder. I needed to put more armour on. I needed to learn from my mistakes. I was like the stupidest monkey in a scientific experiment - the one who didn’t learn and just kept on pushing the button that would give it an electric shock until it killed itself.

  ‘Jasmyn, it’s not what you think,’ Ben said, appearing at my elbow.

  ‘Isn’t it, Ben?’ I said, pleased to hear how hard and unyielding my voice sounded. ‘Because what I think is that you lied to me about Lukas. Just like you’ve lied about almost everything else.’

  ‘It’s . . . No. I lied because . . .’ He trailed off, shook his head then said, ‘I promise you there’s a good reason for all of this!’

  ‘Brilliant! Tell me what it is and if it’s as good as you say then I won’t be angry any more!’

  Ben looked down at me, smudges of blood on his shirt from the black swan - from Lukas - and his hair damp with bathwater. The seconds dragged on and he remained maddeningly, infuriatingly silent.

  ‘Just throw me the needle and thread,’ Lukas called from the other room, ‘and I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘What is he?’ I hissed, jabbing my finger towards the bathroom.

  ‘He’s . . . he’s a knight,’ Ben replied quietly. ‘A swan knight. A rogue one. He’s been exiled.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For breaking one of the rules. But he’s on our side.’

  ‘Are we on the same side then, Ben?’ I retorted - aware of splashing sounds coming from the bathroom as I spoke.

  For a moment he was silent, then his shoulders slumped and he just muttered wearily, ‘I don’t know any more, Jasmyn.’

  He glanced around as Lukas appeared in the doorway, dripping wet and completely naked.

  ‘Cover yourself up, can’t you?’ Ben snapped.

  ‘Oh, right,’ Lukas replied carelessly, grabbing a nearby towel. ‘I forget that humans don’t like nudity.’

  ‘You and I are not the only ones here,’ Ben said meaningfully as Lukas reappeared with a towel wrapped around his waist.

  ‘Don’t worry on my account,’ I said coldly. ‘It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. He can walk around starkers for all I care.’ I handed Ben the first-aid box and narrowed my eyes at Lukas. ‘You warmed up pretty quickly considering you were a half-frozen swan not that long ago.’

  ‘We’re difficult to kill,’ Lukas acknowledged. He glanced over at Ben who was turning on the kettle and said, ‘I’ll have a cup if you’re making tea.’

  ‘I’m not making tea!’ Ben scowled. ‘I’m boiling the water to sterilise the needle.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ Lukas said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘Don’t be mad with Ben,’ he said to me. ‘I wasn’t supposed to talk to you.’

  ‘How do you two know each other?’ I asked coldly.

  ‘I met him here,’ Ben said shortly. ‘At Neuschwanstein.’

  ‘So you’ve been here before,’ I said, noting that this was yet another thing he had lied about.

  ‘I’ve been here many, many times before!’ Ben said impatiently. ‘I haven’t just been looking for the swansong since Liam’s death. I’ve been looking for it ever since he hid it last year.’

  ‘But . . . your mother told me you were working in Germany—’

  Ben cut me off with an angry gesture. ‘Well, I’m hardly going to tell her, am I?’ he snapped. ‘I’m hardly going to tell her that I haven’t worked in over a year - that I’ve lost my reputation, my savings, my fiancée, that I’ve lost pretty near damn well everything - all because of your bloody husband!’

  ‘Ben,’ Lukas murmured in what sounded very much like a warning.

  ‘So, yes, I know who he is,’ Ben said, waving his hand in Lukas’s direction. ‘I know about the swan knights and King Ludwig and the swansong and I have done since the very beginning.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you just tell me?’ I said, frustrated. ‘Why did we waste time going to see Adrian Halsbach and the castles and the lake to find all this out if you knew it already?’

  ‘Surely to God it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Ben said, glaring at me. ‘If I’d taken you aside after the funeral and said, “Oh, by the way, Jasmyn, did you know that your husband stole the enchanted voice of a swan, that he hid it away somewhere and now all these people are trying to find it, and the swan knights are very angry and even more protective of the magic swans than they were before, so we shall have to go to Ludwig’s mute and exiled swan princess to see if there’s anything she can do to help or some unknown terrible thing will happen and we’ll all be even more miserable than we already are . . .” If I’d said all that, what do you think would have happened next? You’d have thought I was del
usional. So I wanted you to hear some of it from other people and find it out piece by piece the way I did. I thought it would make it easier - or at least possible - for you to accept. But now it seems I’ve done the wrong thing yet again. I just can’t do anything fucking right, can I?’

  ‘You . . . you . . .’ I stuttered, pale with anger. I didn’t think I’d be able to express how furious I was with words and so I had to resist the urge to grab the nearest thing and throw it as hard as I could at his arrogant head. ‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ I said, finding my tongue at last. ‘You unprincipled, cold, heartless, smug, selfish git! You’ve treated me like dirt ever since this whole thing began! You’ve lied to me, snapped at me and been unbelievably rude! You’ve been cruel and unfeeling and utterly without tact! You’ve made everything harder and nothing easier! Liam was right - all you bloody well care about is yourself!’

  Ben raised a hand to his head and when he spoke it was in a horribly quiet voice. ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this. It’s too hard.’

  ‘You make it hard, Ben! It doesn’t have to be. We both want the same thing. We both loved the same man—’

  ‘Love?’ Ben interrupted, dropping his hand and staring at me with such a murderous expression on his face that I actually took a half-step back in alarm. ‘Love? I did not love Liam!’

  Lukas stood up from the bed and I was vaguely aware of him saying something about calming down, but in another moment Ben had crossed the room and grabbed me by the arms, a bare few inches between us so that I could now clearly see the vein throbbing across his left temple and the horrible fury in his eyes. His fingers dug painfully into my white skin and he even shook me a little as he practically shouted in my face, ‘I hated Liam, Jasmyn! I fucking hated him! I was glad to hear that he was dead! If it hadn’t been for the lost swansong I would have cried tears of joy at the news! Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you? I loathed the man! I only wish to God that he’d died sooner!’

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. He seemed like a totally different person from the man who’d opened up to me a little last night. A mixture of fear and anger made me tremble and I think Ben must have felt it for he suddenly released me as if I had given him an electric shock. He stumbled back - the first uncontrolled action I had ever seen him take - and looked, if possible, even more horrified than I did myself.

  ‘Jasmyn,’ he said quietly - almost whispering. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t stop myself any more. I’m losing my grip.’

  For a moment there was no sound but for Ben’s rather uneven breathing. Then I said in a stiff, strange voice that did not sound like my own, ‘I’m going out.’

  I turned on my heel and left, just wanting to be as far away from Ben as possible. I went up to his room where I’d left my bag, moving quickly for I was afraid that he might come after me and try to convince me not to go, and I really needed to be away from him at that moment.

  When I opened the door, the movement must have frightened the tiny black horse under the coffee table, but it seemed to recognise me for when I walked into the room it ventured out from beneath the table, trotting happily up to me. I grabbed my bag then picked up Ben’s chess box and put the little horse inside to take with me.

  I managed to get out of the guest house and to the car without being followed and I couldn’t start the engine up to drive away fast enough. I drove blindly in a random direction, taking as many turns as possible off the main road so that Ben would have no hope of being able to find me should he somehow get another car from somewhere.

  When, at last, I felt safely hidden, I pulled up on a deserted stretch of silent mountain road and turned off the engine. I was shaking with disgust and angry tears filled my eyes. How I hated Ben for talking about Liam in that way! How could he? His own brother! Up until then I had thought his bad-temperedness was because of the way he had parted from Liam. Now it seemed that he felt no remorse at all - not even a spark of grief over his brother’s death. How was that even possible? How could you not mourn the loss of your own brother? I tried to tell myself that Ben hadn’t meant what he’d said - that he was just angry with Liam for hiding the swansong or angry with him for dying . . .

  But deep down I knew. I knew that there was something very wrong with Ben. This was the side of him that Liam must have known about all along - the reason he hadn’t wanted him in our home or our lives and the reason he hadn’t tried to make peace with him after their argument. This was who Ben was underneath - nasty, cruel and almost inhuman in his coldness . . .

  I sat there in the car until an icy chill crept in and my breath smoked before me, trying to work out what to do. After his outburst I felt I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. I certainly didn’t want to help him to find something he wanted . . . But he needed the swansong for Heidi and I felt I should continue to try to find where Liam had hidden it for her sake if not for Ben’s. It did occur to me that her mysterious illness might have been a sob story he had made up to trick me but I couldn’t persuade myself that that was true. He had been so sincere, so convincing . . . He might be a callous, cold-hearted bastard but I believed from the way he had spoken about her that there really was something wrong with Heidi and that Ben did love her. So what choice did I have but to try to help him?

  Forcing my body into action, I got out of the car, took a few deep breaths of the chill mountain air, squared my shoulders and pulled myself together. The bottom line was that the sooner we found the swansong, the sooner I could be away from Ben and never ever see him again. Then the nightmare would be over and I could go back home - back to my safe haven, surrounded by my own familiar things, eating familiar, favourite food and sleeping in my warm, familiar bed . . .

  Thrusting down the sudden surge of homesickness, I got into the car and turned around to head back to the guest house, praying that I would be able to find my way without trouble, for I had just driven to that spot blindly without paying much attention to where I was going.

  Fortunately, I managed to find my way back relatively easily. I parked up in the guest house parking lot and had to then force myself to get out of the car and go back inside. Ben and I had just started to get along and now he had completely ruined everything between us and I resented him most bitterly for it. I could only hope that he’d had the chance to cool down a bit by now, had pulled himself together and was capable of being civil once again. It certainly seemed that civility was going to be the very best I could hope for between us but even that seemed rather optimistic now.

  I took the chess box inside and went up to my own bedroom, expecting Ben and Lukas to be there as that was where I had left them. Now that I knew who Lukas really was I was eager to talk to him again. The name Henri Rol-Tanguy might mean something to him but, more importantly than that, he might know more about what had truly happened at the lake the night Liam, Adrian and Jaxon had gone there. Indeed, Lukas may well have been there himself and at the very least I could see if his story matched what the others had said.

  But when I opened the door to my bedroom it was deserted. And clean. There didn’t seem to be a speck of bone dust anywhere. A bloody needle and spare end of thread lay on the bed where I presumed Ben had stitched Lukas’s arm but the two of them were now gone. I remembered that Lukas had had nothing to wear and decided that they had probably gone up to Ben’s room to try to find him something to make do with, although I wasn’t sure how much success they would have, considering the fact that Lukas was several inches taller than Ben.

  I left my room and went up to the third floor. I had one of Ben’s room keys so I unlocked the door and walked in without knocking. Lukas was nowhere to be seen. But Ben was there. And he was holding my Violectra.

  My heart flipped over at the sight of my beloved instrument in his hands and a surge of anger rose up inside me as I noticed my open case lying on the floor - newly appeared black roses scattered over the velvet interior. No one ever touched my violin but me. It was too prec
ious and meant too much to let other people hold it. Besides which, non-violinists often failed to accord it due respect. They didn’t understand how easily the pegs could be knocked out of tune if handled indelicately. And there Ben stood in the middle of the room with his horrible hands on my treasured violin - something that he had no right whatsoever to touch, especially when I wasn’t even there.

  ‘What the hell,’ I said, in my iciest tone, ‘are you doing?’

  He glanced back around at me, an odd expression on his face. ‘This is your most treasured possession, isn’t it?’ he said in a voice that seemed to be completely devoid of emotion.

  ‘Yes,’ I said warily, suddenly having a very bad feeling indeed. ‘Why?’

  Ben turned away from me to gaze at the beautiful blue and silver thing in his hands. I did not like the way he was looking at it one bit.

  ‘Put it down!’ I said sharply. ‘Right now! You’ve got no right to be touching it!’

  He glanced back at me with a flat expression in his eyes and, when he spoke, his words filled me with dread. ‘I’m sorry, Jasmyn.’

  Somehow I knew what he meant to do even though I didn’t know why and I ran forwards, sick with fear, as he raised the instrument above his head. I crashed into him and he sprawled on the bed under my weight, the violin falling from his hands to bounce on the floor with a thump that made me cringe. Still lying on top of Ben, I twisted my neck around frantically to look down at it on the floor. The fall had surely knocked all the strings out of tune but, thankfully, it did not appear to be damaged.