“The boy didn’t try to do this,” he said. “You did not tell me it might make you hurt yourself.”
It. The madness. I nodded, ineffectually, as my chin was trapped in Valentin’s hand. It was my face, of course it was. The madness had made me disown it. I would have to be more careful not to listen to it.
“I didn’t recognize my face,” I explained to Valentin calmly, I thought. “I thought it was a lie. I thought I could get it off.”
Valentin swore violently in German. “If I let you go, will you try it again?”
I had to think about this for a moment. Then I shook my head.
He dropped my hands, muttering another, milder curse as he did, and called down the hallway for bandages.
I stared into the mirror another moment, picking out each feature in turn.
That’s yours, I told myself. And that. Not his. Not your father’s. Yours.
When Valentin came in again, my face had settled back into place. The feeling that it wasn’t mine had gone, leaving only lightheadedness and a sense of distance, of seeing everything from far away.
“I was going to call you in,” I said as Valentin lowered me onto the armchair. “It is time to seal the ovum, but my hands were shaking.”
Valentin had pressed something white and clean against my lower jaw.
“Es ist eine verdammt schreckliche Wunde,” he said. I wondered if he knew any English swear words, or if it was his disgust that tipped him back into German. He must have known he wasn’t hiding his meaning from me.
“You didn’t see him,” I said, my mind leaping. “Karl did. Karl could tell you—we have the same face.”
“What?” snapped Valentin. “You and Karl do not have the same face.”
“No.” I laughed, earning a terrified glare from Valentin. “My father and me. Mr. Vellacott. You’ll know him at once, if he comes around again. We have the same face.”
“That is no reason to try to tear yours off!”
It hit me then that I had tried to do that. That I did not know how far I might have gone if Valentin hadn’t stopped me. My breath caught. My mind crashed back into my body, and the wound on my jaw throbbed. I felt the phantom of my own fingernails, scraping away my own skin. My breath came back in shallow gasps. Something dark moved on the edge of my vision. I turned my head sharply away from it, but not before I saw. It wasn’t in the corner anymore. It was closer.
“You mustn’t leave me alone,” I said, staring up at Valentin. “I don’t know how much longer I will be myself. You will have to be ready.”
He nodded. Another Prussian came in bearing a bottle and more bandages. He uncorked the bottle, and I recognized the sickly, chemical smell from Will’s patched-up hand. Valentin pulled back the cloth from my jaw and the Prussian soaked another cloth from the bottle and began to dab at my face. It stung enough to bring tears back to my eyes. I kept my mouth clamped shut. Valentin stepped back from me, but not far. He was torn, I thought, between wanting to get away from me and knowing he must keep me under close guard. He rocked back on his heels and clasped his hands behind himself.
“Let us say your father does want you,” said Valentin. “Let us say he wishes to acknowledge you as his daughter. He could bring you into society, help you make a marriage. There are other possibilities for you.”
“None that save Will and my mother,” I said. “And none that win you your prize, either.”
Valentin rocked back again, his face a frowning mask. “Perhaps I agree with your friend Dominic,” he said. “Perhaps I do not want a prize at this price.”
I was tempted to feel grateful for his sentiment. I wouldn’t have thought this man would care enough about me to balk at this price. He had tortured Will, after all, and threatened to do worse to him and Dominic as well if I did not comply. Though I had trusted him enough last night to want him between me and the thing, even if it meant sharing a bed. I kept my stinging jaw turned resolutely away from the side of the room where it lurked. I looked down at my gory hand, clumps of skin and blood stuck under my fingernails. The gorge rose in my throat, and I squeezed my eyes shut as if that could block out the memory of what I had done to myself. It wasn’t pity he felt, I thought, but horror. Disgust. I was becoming a nightmare creature, one he did not want to tend.
“It is fortunate for both of you that this is my decision,” I said. “Not yours.”
The other Prussian had finished cleaning the wound and taping the bandage down. He stepped back.
“Now then.” I stood, marshaling all that were left of my spirits. “We must seal the ovum before the substance oxidizes any further. Will you be so good as to hold the glass steady? I am afraid I cannot trust my own hands at present.”
Valentin made no further protests. Tight-lipped and stiff, he helped me transfer the substance and melt the narrow mouth of the glass egg shut. I half buried the ovum in ash, then sat back on my heels, pressing my palms into the floor to still their trembling. I allowed myself to feel a small measure of relief. The more precise part was over. The rest I could probably do with only half of my mind. I hoped I would have at least that much.
“A sealed vessel under heat,” said Valentin after a few moments. “Will it not explode?”
“That is certainly a danger,” I said. “The heat must be kept regular, and gentle. And even so…”
The possibility frightened me. Exploding vessels were a constant threat in alchemy. I had set aside enough of the White Elixir to make another attempt should this one fail, but I feared my mind would not last long enough to complete it.
“How long now?” asked Valentin.
“Six days,” I said. My mother’s notes had been exact.
“Six days,” he repeated. Valentin’s tone was flat, but his doubts were easy to read. I shared them. Six days was a long time.
“And after the six days, there is more to do?”
“One last step,” I said.
“Your friends do not know how to do what you have done.” Valentin concealed a question in the statement.
“No one does but my mother,” I said. “Unless my father deciphered her code. He stole her notes from me.”
Well, I told myself, in fairness, that was Bentivoglio.
Bentivoglio stole them, and gave them to your father, who did not return them, said my mother. He didn’t throw you into the wall, but only because he did not have to. And then he threw you out.
You threw me out, too, I reminded her.
Yes, she said. And now you know why.
I squeezed my eyes shut and slapped my forehead until I remembered what I had been thinking about before.
“But he didn’t,” I said. “Didn’t decipher the code. If he had, he wouldn’t have come looking for me. He needs me to make the Stone, same as you, same as your Ludwig, same as Will. I am so very needed.”
Valentin stepped toward me. He had been hovering a few feet away, and apparently decided that was not close enough.
“You are right,” I said. My vision was beginning to blur yellow again, but I felt no urge to commit violence. “You are too far. I could hurl myself into the fire, or worse, hurl the ovum out of it.”
I stared at the ovum and the black, burned-looking substance within. It was a pitiful thing, ugly and dead. Strange to think that all my hope now lay in it, in that charred mess coming back to a kind of life.
“Did your mother try to hurt herself, when she went mad?” asked Valentin. He stood over me now. I considered this.
“You know,” I said. “She didn’t.”
“Move back from the fire, please, Miss Hope,” said Valentin.
I nodded. He held his hand out for me to take. I stared at it, blinking back the blurred edges of my sight. It was a large, strong hand. I remembered feeling it on mine in the carriage, the hard callouses and dry cracks in the skin around his fingers. It was the hand that had pulled out Will’s nails, a hand that had killed, no doubt. I put my own hand in it, and hated the sight of it there, trembling and weak a
nd needy. My fingers tightened on his.
The thing was next to him. I had to look at it now; I couldn’t look away, though I wanted to.
It wasn’t a man, or a woman, or a beast. It looked into me and saw straight down to the bottom. My mother had looked at me that way and thought she saw all. She’d been wrong. She had never seen all that this thing saw. No one had. I shuddered and cringed away. I wanted to weep and beg for mercy. But there was no mercy in that thing.
“Miss Hope?” I heard Valentin say as if from far away. “Thea?”
The thing was opening, turning down. Becoming a chasm, pulling me toward it. Once I fell in, I could never climb out. Despair seized me. Like hell, Dominic had said. Worse than death.
“I should have written it down!” I cried. How had I not written it down?
Valentin was asking questions. He understood as well that I was going, that I might not come back. There was one last step, and no one knew it. I opened my mouth to tell him, but the words caught, became nonsense. All I could feel was panic, all I could think was terror. I tried again and realized I did not remember. I didn’t know anything. I screamed.
I fell into the dark thing, into blackness and horror, and forgot everything but falling.
15
I was gone for an age. There was no time where I went, nothing but darkness, terror, confusion. The feeling of being consumed. Eaten, like a meal. Death was better. If I had been capable, I would have admitted it. Dominic was right. Nothing, no one was worth this price.
There was sound. For the first age, it was only a howling, like wolves or wind, unrecognizable. Then I started to hear differences. Voices, though I did not remember their names. I hated them and longed for them at the same time. I gathered myself, attending to them. It was another age before I understood the voices belonged to people, and a third age before I understood they were screaming in the same agony I felt. I was not alone here, but it was no comfort. I almost recognized them, sometimes, but there was not enough of any of us left to know one another.
Then, there were other voices from farther away. Not screams, but words with meaning. I heard with little understanding.
“She did this to herself,” a woman said. “If you cannot save her, then it is no one’s fault but yours, and hers.”
“She is a child!” The man was angry. “A child, and you forced her to destroy herself!”
“She believed you would have done the same, you know,” said the woman. “That was what she told Valentin.”
Valentin. The name made me feel … something. A tangle of emotions, fear and anger and comfort twisted into a hard, hot knot. That knot reminded me that I was a thing, a unity that felt. But it distracted me from the voices. I lost them, and continued to fall.
And then—
A mind on mine. A will, examining me. Probing. A test. A predator sniffing around its prey. I knew it. It was the dark figure, the thing. Either it would eat me, or—
It would let me go.
The agony changed, like teeth withdrawing from a bite wound. I was released.
I began to know what was around me. The screams became distinct. I knew the voices. Mother. My mother. And another—Dominic.
No.
Then, abruptly, their voices were gone, replaced by weeping. Weeping as wild as the winds. I seized it. I held it. I pulled myself out.
“Must you chain her this way?” cried the weeping man. “Look at her wrists! Have you no pity?”
“Those chains are all that kept her alive,” said another man, one who was not weeping. “She does not feel them.”
But I did feel them, as soon as he said that. I felt a horrible burning, slicing feeling. Wrists. I had wrists.
“She is more peaceful now,” said the weeping man. “Weaker. She couldn’t do much harm. Please.”
There was a silence. Without the voices, I felt myself slipping. If only I could see them, then it wouldn’t matter if they ceased to speak. But how? How did one see?
The pain on my wrists changed. It flared, and my eyes flew open.
Too much. The light burned my pupils. They closed again, but the weeping man cried out, and I held on to the violence of the sound.
“She opened her eyes!”
“That means nothing,” said the other. “Her eyes were open the whole of the first week. It does not mean she is seeing anything.”
She … her … she. Yes. That was me. A she. A woman.
I opened my eyes again, this time blinking until I could bear the light.
Two men leaned over me. I knew them, but could not place them. There was a tall, thick one and a tall, weeping one. I hated them both. I jerked forward.
“I told you!” shouted the thick one. He pulled on the chain at my wrist and fastened it hard again. I looked about me and found I was spread across a bed, my wrists chained to opposite posts. My hatred deepened. Anyone could do anything to me while I was held like this.
“Thea!” cried the slender man. He wasn’t weeping any longer. “Are you there? Thea?” Excitement filled his voice. “I see her!”
I stared. Oh yes, I knew this man. He was more familiar than he should be.
“Father,” I said.
He cried out. The other, thick man made a sound of shock as well. I stared up at him.
“V—” It was a hard word. I tried again. “Valentin.”
His mouth dropped open. He looked very foolish.
“Release me,” I said. I pulled against my chains and winced. My wrists were rubbed raw.
“Thea, my child!” Vellacott started to weep again, tears leaking out of his red-rimmed eyes. “My child.”
Irritation twisted inside me. I shook my head. I tried to form a denial, but the words caught in my thick, dry mouth.
“Water?” I whispered.
Valentin was the quickest. The water coursed into my mouth, sloshing down my throat like a river. I choked on it.
“Es tut mir Leid,” muttered Valentin. “I’m sorry, sorry.”
I remembered now, enough that I needed to know.
“The Stone?” I asked. My father’s face fell. I looked to Valentin, who shifted on his feet.
“I tried to do as you said, after you went—” He stumbled and did not say where I went. I was glad. He did not know. “But the glass burst.”
“Burst.” My heart sank, almost back into the deep. But I held it. I kept my eyes open. I fixed them on my father.
“Why is he here?” I asked Valentin.
“He came back,” said Valentin. “Looking for you. And we thought, perhaps … we thought he could help. You had said he took your papers. Your mother’s papers.”
I remembered that. I glared at my father. “He did.”
My father had the decency to lower his eyes in shame.
“Your friend broke some of the code,” said Valentin. “But it changed, halfway through. We couldn’t decipher the rest.”
“So … so…” My broken mind struggled to function. I hated its slowness. But when I finally understood, I hated that even more.
“My friend? Will?”
“The other one,” said Valentin.
“Dominic,” said my father quietly.
The way he said the name sent a chill straight through me. I half remembered a scream in Dominic’s voice. I shook my head against the thought.
“Dominic? Where is he?” I demanded.
The men exchanged a guilty look.
“No,” I moaned. “You monsters. You shouldn’t have let him.”
“He wanted to do it, Thea,” said my father. “He wanted to do it to save you. He said he owed it to you. And now that you’re awake again, you can finish what he started, and save him in turn.”
Fury gripped me, and I snarled at him. A bestial, mad sound. My father’s eyes widened in terror, and he started back as I threw myself forward and was caught by the chains.
“Let me go!” I screamed.
“I can’t, Thea,” said Valentin. “I can’t. Not yet. Look at you.”
“And Dominic?” I cried. “Do you have him chained to a bed as well? What have you done to us?”
“Nothing!” Valentin exclaimed. “You begged me to restrain you. If I hadn’t, you would have murdered yourself!”
I remembered this as well now. I remembered tearing at my own skin, screaming that I could not escape my own body. I shuddered. Horror beckoned to me. I hadn’t really escaped, not yet. I was only holding on to the ledge of my sanity by a few slipping fingers.
“The Stone,” I whispered. It was my only hope. “Is it…”
“It’s in the ovum,” said Valentin. “Just as it was when you left. Dominic broke the code, repeated the process. I was able to help him a little. I had watched your steps carefully.”
“How many days has it been sealed in the ovum?”
“Six tomorrow,” said my father.
Tomorrow. All I had to do was cling to the edge of sanity until tomorrow, and complete the process. One last step …
“Thea,” said my father. “Meg’s code changed. We haven’t been able to discern the end. We don’t know what to do tomorrow.”
I laughed, but the sound came out wrong. I could see from the looks on my father’s and Valentin’s faces. Yes, Mother’s code changed on the last step. She had reverted to one of ours, one that we had made together. It was based on the letters of my name. I stopped laughing for a moment to wonder why. Perhaps she wanted me to finish, if she was not able to. A small, warm feeling stirred in me, which I quickly squashed. More likely, she had already begun to go mad, and had reverted to an earlier code without meaning to.
“Thea,” said my father again. He was working to something, I could tell by the cowardly twitch of his mouth. I glared at it and wondered, did mine do that, when I was about to ask for something I shouldn’t? “Thea, we must know the end of the process. If you go again, before it is time…”
“I won’t.” Panic gripped me at the thought. He wouldn’t say it like that, not if he knew.
“But if you do,” he persisted. “Then we would miss our chance to save you and Dominic.”
A Golden Fury Page 19