St-Noire was the village of the Castle Noirell: so much I knew. It was the only village within the bounds of the Woods, so far as I knew. It had once been considered a very picturesque and beautiful place, its architecture running to two-storied timber and white plaster buildings in comfortable, gracious proportions, the roofs covered not with the thatch commoner out in the barony but with wood shingles weathered to a pleasant silvery-brown. The windows were diamond-paned, the coloured glass here and there evidence of the wealth flowing into the village from the travellers passing by on their way to Astandalas the Golden.
I just remembered, from that one visit to my grandmother, that the village had been warm and welcoming and full of flowers even though we had come the week of my birthday. My birthday was in the spur weeks between winter and spring, on the come-and-go day meant to stop the seasons from precessing too much. Even so, St-Noire had been full of sunlight and honey and the singing of the bees working all those tiny jewel-bright flowers of the earliest spring.
Today it was full of sunlight and flowers, but the air was heavy and still and silent and smelled of nothing other than some faintly pleasant bitterness.
“More saffron,” Hal murmured.
“Are they ... asleep?” said Mr. Dart.
I blinked again at the scene before us, my mind switching as if from the mode of mortal danger to the mode of ordinary confusion (though neither seemed quite appropriate in this case), and I saw that the village was ... still.
“Are they ... stone?” said Hal.
The houses were in good repair, the plaster glowing gold in the slanting light, the timbers pleasingly dark in contrast, the windows gleaming without hint of dust or cobwebs. Each window had an overflowing window box of flowers, each doorway a half-barrel full of blooms, each yard blazed with colour. And yet there was no breeze: no bees: and then there were the people.
I dismounted and led my horse slowly down the highway. On each side of us were the houses, windows gleaming, doors open to the lambent air, people posed as if caught in a moment of time.
A woman leaned over her fence as if to speak to us: but her smile was for some distant vision.
A boy sat on the step of a house with a great bowl of peas he was shelling, but though his hand was reaching into the bowl, his fingers never closed on the pods.
“It isn’t pea season,” said Hal.
Three little girls, about the age of my sisters, in the middle of a game of marbles, the player with her finger curled back to flick the white tolley, one of her admirers with her hands clasped anxiously.
“There aren’t any bees,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s the only problem here,” Mr. Dart said.
“Actually, a lack of pollinators would lead to—” Hal stopped when Mr. Dart and I looked at him. “Probably not this.”
They followed me up the road, not leaving the Imperial Highway, our shadows shifting before us as we came in and out of the houses, across the green. There were gnats and flies; but there were no bees.
St-Noire had been known for its honey. But the highway no longer led to Astandalas, and the Gentry had always coveted the Woods.
At the other end of the silent village we curled around another artificial knoll, this one with a tiny chapel to the Emperor as Sun-on-Earth on its crest, and on the far side we saw suddenly looming above us the Castle.
“Are you still feeling this is a welcoming place?” Hal asked.
I rubbed the ring with my thumb and stared up at the Castle. It was made of the same white stone as the highway, but where the road gleamed, the Castle looked scabrous and diseased. Its pennons were flying in the wind, but they were tattered and faded, no longer the brave white bees on the green field. Only the upper windows of the highest tower caught the reddening light, like the echo of that famous song.
“Do you think anyone is there?” Hal asked. “There’s no smoke or anything.”
Mr. Dart touched his stone arm with his good hand, but stopped as soon as he saw me looking. “Perhaps they’re also, uh, cursed.”
I might not have been the bright and brilliant Jemis of Hal’s fond memories. Nevertheless, I found that even if I could not precisely call myself eager, I did have the niggling sensation that—quite apart from anything so inconvenient as family sentiment—I was the grandson of the Marchioness of the Woods. If she was no longer capable of doing her duty (whether through disinclination, illness, enchantment, or death), then as her eldest living descendant it was my responsibility to do so. No matter how erratic my education as a gentleman might have been, the villagers of St-Noire were clearly under the Marchioness’ care.
“I am going up to see,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
They exchanged a look, and then Hal smiled and Mr. Dart quoted Fitzroy Angursell: “‘We may be children of a lesser age, but we should not let that inconvenience us altogether.’”
“In our search for adventure?” I said dryly, remounting my horse and setting her down the road to where the Castle approach met it.
“In our search for greatness,” said Mr. Dart, following me.
I was about to retort that greatness was not really my ambition, but just then I turned my horse onto the Castle lane, and the sunlight winked out in an immediate and quite thoroughly impressive thunderstorm.
A stuttering flash of lightning revealed clouds boiling out of nowhere into blackness. The thunder cracked like a whip. Our horses bolted straight up the hill towards the Castle. We reached the postern gate in what must have been record time. The thunder must have made it impossible for our knocking to be heard clearly, but I had not thumped the knocker more than three times when the door opened.
We tumbled inside to find ourselves in a rain-blasted courtyard of near-night gloom. A figure in a strange green hooded robe stood there, face hidden in shadows. He or she held a flaring torch that hissed in the rain like the wolf-knight’s horse’s slobber. Thunder cracked in crazy echoes around the stone court, making our horses restive.
I dismounted so I could take mine by a firm grip on her bridle. “We have come to see the Marchioness,” I said after I’d caught my breath. “Where can we stable our horses?”
The green-robed figure stared at us in what seemed total shock.
“I am Jemis Greenwing,” I added.
At this the figure gave me a long and dismissive once-over—it was amazing how expressive the shadowed hood was—and said, in a voice as gravelly and rusty as the wolf-knight’s: “Another one.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Marchioness has an Idea
“IT SEEMS,” I SAID A little later, “that not only is my family life literally the stuff of melodrama, it is in fact the stuff of high gothic melodrama.”
Mr. Dart turned from his intent perusal of the dusty and shrouded furnishings so he could grin at me. “You sound so surprised, Mr. Greenwing. For a day that has included a dragon’s challenge, a knight, a cursed village, and mysterious warnings from a strange peasant, it would be decidedly disappointing if it did not take an even stranger turn when it came to the accommodations. You can’t have been expecting things to be normal.”
“I was not expecting this.”
“Nobody was expecting this,” murmured Hal, who was standing with his back to the sputtering and smoking fire. This left me to stand awkwardly in the centre of the room, directly beneath a discoloured and mildewy plasterwork medallion surrounding a tarnished and unlit chandelier hanging somewhat askew. On that thought I took a step away. My boots seemed to be sticking to the carpet. I clutched at my basket of comestibles for fear they would be immediately contaminated if I set them down on anything, then for good measure covered them with my hat.
Hal went on, sounding as if he were discussing the merits of a dubious wine. “It is the most revoltingly filthy place I have ever seen. Worse than the witch’s cottage.”
“Too bad it’s Jemis’ grandmother’s,” Mr. Dart said, chuckling. “Come now, Mr. Greenwing, don’t be sour.”
>
“Sour? Sour?”
“Or have an apoplexy. You were the one who wanted an adventure.”
“I don’t think I was.”
“No, that’s true,” he said imperturbably; “I suppose that was me and Mrs. Etaris. Do you think the gatekeeper is ever coming back?”
“What do you think she meant by saying ‘another one’ like that?”
“Do you think that was a woman?” Mr. Dart asked doubtfully.
“Yes,” Hal said immediately and somewhat surprisingly. “It sounded as if there were more than one person claiming to be Jemis Greenwing.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
Mr. Dart uttered a short cackle and came over to join Hal by the fire. “Your life isn’t that awful, my boy. It’s tremendously interesting. And you are, as Hal reminded us, the Viscount St-Noire.”
I uttered a few choice words, and then said: “Do you find your stone arm tremendously interesting?”
“It’s somewhat inconvenient,” he allowed.
“And I have to say, while my life may seem tremendously interesting, all those interesting affairs can be more than somewhat inconvenient at times. One might go so far as to say they become tedious.”
“Might one?—Hold up, there’s someone coming.”
We turned as one to consider the door by which the green-robed person had led us into the room. It had presumably once been some sort of waiting room, furnished as it was with worm-eaten chairs and mouldy cushions of Second Imperial Syncretic Style; the typical bargello needlework and hook-and-eye woodwork showed even through the decay and dust and gloom and dirt and cobwebs.
The door swung open to reveal a woman wearing a strange wraparound dress in what had probably once been a very startling orange but had mostly faded to a dull rusty tan. She had salt-and-pepper hair in wild corkscrew curls, her skin tone somewhere between the tan of her garment and Hal’s near-ebony. She was perhaps in her late sixties, and though her features were thin her eyes were large, luminous, and quite startlingly lovely.
She did not at first accord me more than a passing and dismissive glance: she focused on Hal and Mr. Dart by the fire, both of them looking like two models of a modern gentleman, Mr. Dart with his auburn beard and freckled pale skin and burgundy-and-silver skirted coat and dark breeches, the short-haired dark-skinned Hal in dull gold and ivory knee breeches and velvet coat. My red-ribboned hat was by far the best; but, alas, we were indoors where that didn’t matter, and my bottle-green coat seemed to disappear into the shadows even to myself.
She said, “You will find the Castle does not host guests as often as in the days of yore. The staff will do what we can, of course, but our hospitality is sadly diminished.”
“I am sure we will be well looked after,” Mr. Dart said gallantly, with a bow.
“Do not be too sure,” she said. “The very stones of this house are steeped in grief and guilt.”
I found that I was beginning to get irritated with the turn towards the gothic. “Why?”
She swung around to gaze at me with those luminous eyes, her face very stern. It did not seem a face made for sternness. I thought, She should be dancing—and a memory flashed into brilliant life around me.
“You’re Savela Uvara,” I cried triumphantly. “The Beekeeper. I remember, you took me into the garden to look at the bee-house—”
For a moment there was a sharp, arrested sensation in the air, as if I had said something half-magical. The ring on my hand flared, and I sneezed once, sharply. Savela Uvara’s glance dropped to the ring, then back up to my face, and she said, very slowly, “But the boy died. They both died.”
I spoke with a strong effort to be firm and clear. “My mother was Lady Olive Noirell of this house, my father Jakory Greenwing of the Arguty Greenwings. I am their son Jemis Greenwing. I have recently returned from university and I thought I should pay a call on my grandmother. These are my friends, the Duke of Fillering Pool and Mr. Dart of Dartington.”
“You died in the Pestilence.”
“I am no ghost, ma’am.”
My words hung in the air strangely, as if I had said something magical, though the ring felt no different than it had since we entered. Savela Uvara walked over to me, her beautiful eyes wide with conflicting emotions. She peered closely at my face, as if she were searching there for the nine-year-old boy she had met once. As I looked at her, my memories stirred, woken by her face, by the place, by the electric currents of storm and magic and chaotic emotion. I swallowed.
“My mother brought me here to be presented to my grandparents on my ninth birthday. My grandfather took me for a long walk through the Woods, all the way to the Lady’s Heart. My grandmother was arguing with my mother. But we had honey and walnut pastries and you took me into the gardens to see the bees.”
“That was a dozen years ago.”
“Four years ago I wrote to my grandmother that my mother had died from the influenza,” I said, “and received in response only a note saying My daughter has been dead these five years since. Since my father’s disgrace, it seemed.”
Mr. Dart turned his head suddenly to look at a footstool beside him. I blinked, distracted; he flushed and then frowned. A mouse, I assumed, and was about to continue speaking when a voice came from the doorway.
“Nine years ago the Pestilence came, followed by the letter that my daughter and grandson were dead. Shortly after that came the first of the impostors.”
It was a thin, elderly, aristocratic voice whose thinness held an undercurrent of pure steel.
I looked past Savela Uvara to the woman who had just entered. She was about as far from a cozy grandmother as you could get: she reminded me in a sudden leap of fear and wonder of what Lark could end up like in fifty years. She was tall and lean and pale, her eyes a glittering sharp brown, her elaborately curled hair streaked icy white and black and pinned up into a high mound anchored with glittering jewels and tarnished silver.
When she was satisfied she had our attention, she stumped in. Her cane was ebony and silver, matching her hair and her dress, which looked as if it had been in the first stare of court fashion a decade before the Fall, and as if she hadn’t taken it off since. It was made of dozens of layers of silk and lace, white and black and silver, embroidered with blackened silver and beaded with jet, corseted, tattered, and with six inches of grime at its hem. She wore fingerless gloves of black lace up to her elbows. Her face was painted in fashion of the Last Emperor’s later court, familiar from the illustrated plates in a few of the books and old periodicals in Mrs. Etaris’ bookshop. Her eyes were heavily outlined in kohl, eyelids and lips both painted a brilliant if now-cracked crimson, skin white with rice powder or arsenic.
I produced an elaborate bow, with heel-click and curlicues slightly hampered by the basket I was still holding. “Lady Noirell.”
She ignored my greeting and thumped her way up to me. At closer quarters she smelled overpoweringly of rotting flowers and the heavy bitter-honey odour of the dragon. The hand that was not holding the stick curled like a claw. Arthritis, I told myself firmly; and it had once been the fashion for the upper aristocracy to grow out their fingernails, to show they need do no manual labour. My grandmother’s red-lacquered nails were over an inch long.
She lifted her hand to my chin. I didn’t resist as she lifted my face, none too gently, so she could examine me even more closely than had Savela Uvara. It was almost impossible to believe I was related to her, except that I had seen those sharp brown eyes a time or two in my own mirror.
She said nothing and did not remove her hand. I gazed steadily back into her eyes, seeing the cracks in the make-up, the way that the lipstick had seeped into the fine lines around her mouth, the great lines of experience and bitterness carved into her face.
There was no warmth and no hope in her eyes that I might truly be her grandson, and even though I had not expected a warm welcome I found that I was nonetheless furiously, bitterly disappointed.
I said, “I presume i
mpostors come for what remains of the wealth of Noirell. Do they leave when they see the enchanted village or the decrepitude of this castle? Do they flee when the man collecting firewood warns them off, or the wolf-knight says they are accursed, or a dragon gives them a riddle? Do they come here and presume upon your grief? Madam, you treated my mother evilly and have ignored me my whole life. I have no interest in toadying up to you or pretending to a respect you have in no way earned. I might ignore your treatment of me, of my half-sisters your granddaughters, of my mother—but I cannot ignore the fact that you are the Marchioness of these woods and you have failed in your duty to your people.”
She dropped her hand abruptly. “How dare you speak so to me, whelp?”
“How dare you fail your people so utterly , madam? They stand cursed in the village below. It is your duty to redeem them.”
There was a short, sharp, ringing silence, and then the Marchioness began to cackle with laughter. “Fool,” she said. “You might be fool enough to be my daughter’s son. You want to know what the curse is? How to break it? How to win your inheritance?”
“I care nothing for any inheritance from you.”
“The more fool you! Uvara, throw the boy and his friends in the cellars, and let them puzzle out what curse lies on this house of mine. If you succeed, boy, then perhaps we will speak again.”
“Perhaps,” I said noncommittally, but it was drowned out by another cackle and crack of thunder.
Chapter Eighteen
In the Cellars
I SAT IN THE CELLAR sulkily for a while before I realized that was what I was doing, whereupon I decided that I was not, in fact, fifteen, and decided to stop. At first this was not very effective, as Hal and Mr. Dart were deeply engrossed in their conversation—and the basket of pastries—although for that I couldn’t blame them. After a bit I caught the line of what they were saying.
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