Splinters of Scarlet

by Emily Bain Murphy

  Helene gasps.

  I sputter, “Run.”

  Dr. Holm caught Peder off-guard, but he startled the other miners, too.

  It gives us just the distraction we need.

  I grab the massive vase in the foyer and hurl it at their feet. It shatters into a hundred jagged pieces of glass and orchid petals, buying us precious seconds as the miners jump out of the way.

  I dart toward the servants’ corridor, pulling Helene with me.

  We throw open the door and stumble into Nina and Brock. They were hovering inside, listening, and Brock wields a fire poker over his shoulder. I slam the door closed behind us and Helene grabs the fire poker from Brock and wedges it through the latch just in time.

  There are angry footsteps right beyond the door. “I knew something was wrong,” Nina says, trembling. Someone jangles the handle, then bangs on the door.

  “There’s still time to prevent anyone else in this house from dying,” Philip calls through the wood in a calm voice. “We can come to an agreement that will prevent any more carnage today.”

  It is then that I notice Peder’s blood is spattered on the collar of my uniform.

  “I’m not sure how long this will hold them,” Helene says, backing away.

  We turn and sprint through the corridor.

  When we erupt into the kitchen, everyone turns to look at us. Their jovial, expectant faces turn to shock as they take in Helene’s disheveled hair, the panic in our eyes, the blood on our clothes. The clattering of preparations comes to an abrupt stop.

  “Bar the doors and windows,” Helene orders. “Now.”

  “What’s happened?” Dorit splutters. Brock springs past her and dead-bolts the ironclad delivery door.

  “The men in this house are here to hurt us. There is no way out, and there is no one coming to help,” Helene says. She strips off her satin gloves. “We have to hide and defend ourselves until the snow slows enough for us to get out or send for help.”

  “What?” There is a collective note of disbelief as the mood abruptly shifts from joyful anticipation to dread.

  “Where is my daughter?” Helene demands.

  “Here,” Eve says. She steps forward, the glass embellishments glittering on her legs. Her cheeks are flushed.

  Brock is screwing the windowpanes shut, and Rae and Declan grab wet logs from beside the stove to barricade the glass.

  “We need weapons to protect ourselves, if it comes to that,” Helene announces. “And a place where Eve will be safe.”

  Eve says, “No. I want to help.” She looks so earnest in her delicate costume, but there is steel just behind her expression. A knife wrapped in lace. “Where’s the guard?”

  Helene grimaces and shrugs tellingly toward the blood on my clothes. Rae gasps, and the room takes on a new level of seriousness, darkening like the sun behind a cloud.

  “What do they want with us?” Lara whispers. She tugs at the ends of her hair.

  “Magic,” Helene says. “It’s where the jewels come from. They’ve been harvesting magic to use for themselves.” She strips the brooch from her chest. Throws it onto the table, as though the touch of it has burned her. We stare at the stone in horror.

  “We have to move quickly now,” she continues. “They’ll hunt you for your magic, and Eve and me because we know too much. Prepare to hide, defend, and protect until the blizzard passes. We’re like fish in a barrel in here, and if we go out in this storm, we will die.”

  We hurry to pull the heavy kitchen table and the linen trunks in front of the back door to the greenhouse, stacking on chairs and my sewing machine and the heaviest items we can find. Once we’ve secured the entrances, Jakob says: “Now, weapons.”

  We scatter through the servants’ quarters, grabbing kitchen knives, emptying the cupboards of crystal and china. Nina unlocks the silver cabinet and throws heavy candlesticks onto the pile. We break the china into long shards that can be used as daggers. Brock brandishes his gardening shears, and I send my sewing scissors across the counter with a clatter. Jakob packs as many medical supplies as he can manage in a bag. “Just in case,” he says grimly.

  “This is not a death sentence,” Helene says as we survey our collection of makeshift weapons. “They came to this house expecting a performance with the king, not a fight. And we know this house better than they do.” At Helene’s nod, Liljan sets a simple rendering of the house plan flooding across a tablecloth. Jakob uses it to quickly point out the back stairways and secret nooks that are unknown to anyone but us.

  He says: “We also know our own magic better than they know theirs. Theirs is foreign—but with all those stones, they probably have magic we aren’t even aware of. We will have the best chance of surviving tonight if we can take them by surprise.”

  “How many of them are there?” Lara asks.

  “I counted six miners in the ballroom,” I say. “Then Philip, Dr. Holm, and Malthe. Our goal is to all survive until we can safely send for help.”

  Rae bites her thumb nervously. “And what are they doing right now?” she asks.

  We stop moving to listen.

  All I hear is dead silence.

  It is too quiet.

  “They know we’re in here,” Brock says. “We have to hold the kitchen as long as we can and then keep them guessing after that. We can disappear inside the main house, try to draw them apart, and form a counterattack if necessary, or we aren’t going to make it through the night.”

  We split into groups and designate a rendezvous point. Helene, Brock, Dorit, Rae, Signe, Oliver, and Nina will stay back and take the west side of the house. Declan, Lara, Jakob, Liljan, Eve, and I will take the east wing. My body may be useless when it comes to using magic—but, I think grimly, at the very least, it can still act as a shield.

  We freeze at the sudden sound of scraping along the gutter.

  “What was that?” Rae whispers.

  “They are coming,” Helene says with forced calm. “Hide, subdue, knock them out, kill them if you have to. Strip them of their weapons and jewels by whatever means necessary. Do not hesitate. They will kill you if they get the chance.”

  They are bigger than almost all of us. We have no traditional weapons to go against their pistols, swords, and revolvers. The Firn in their stones gives them magic, while our magic gives us Firn. Our cost is their gain. And then my nose pricks with the acrid smell of smoke.

  Someone has climbed up to the roof and covered the kitchen chimney.

  “Douse the fire,” Nina hisses.

  There’s a bang on the delivery door. They are surrounding us, stationed at every exit. While we were forming a plan, they were too. We are trapped.

  Lara screams as the galley windows shatter. We fall to the floor. Someone must have harvested magic like Ivy’s to make the windows explode like that. The force sends the stack of logs tumbling. They splinter against the stove and land among the fresh shards of glass.

  We crouch, trembling, as a shrill wind comes gusting through.

  Rae crawls to the stove and places a palm on the copper pot, instantly setting the water inside to boiling. She waits for a miner’s hand to reach through the blown-out panes. Half a moment later, jewel-covered fingers fumble with the window’s iron latch. The miners are going to unlock it from the inside and then climb in.

  Rae heaves the pot instead. The boiling water makes a sizzling sound when it hits the man’s fingers.

  He lets out a horrifying scream and staggers backwards.

  “They’ve surrounded every exit,” Brock confirms.

  But that means that for the moment, they’re divided. Which means this is our best chance to infiltrate back into the main house and stall for time by making them hunt for us.

  “At least if one of us survives, there’s a chance the truth gets out,” Jakob says.

  “We’ll cover you here and provide a distraction,” Helene says.

  “Then we’ll do the same for you,” Jakob says.

  “Get Eve to the re
ndezvous point safely,” Helene says to me.

  “I will,” I promise.

  “This is my home,” Helene reminds us with fierce determination. She looks around at our grim faces. “No,” she corrects herself softly. “This is our home.”

  She pulls out a serrated knife from Dorit’s collection. Rips through the satin layers of her skirts to free her long, strong legs. “And we are going to defend it.”

  Jakob hands me a candlestick that’s as heavy as lead, and Brock says:

  “Run.”

  * * *

  At the end of the underground servants’ corridor, there are men waiting for us.

  We can hear two of them talking on the other side of the door.

  Declan places his finger on a knot in the wood, creating a tiny peephole around the level of our knees. He kneels to look through it, giving him an unnoticed view into the main house.

  We collectively jump at the sound of a small explosion coming from the kitchen behind us. Eve tenses, drawing close to me. I pull her tight and give her a squeeze, feeling the rapid-fire beat of her heart. Declan peers through the peephole.

  And then he quickly backs away when we hear a sudden dripping sound.

  The door handle is starting to melt with some sort of magic. The dribbling metal conducts like lightning to the fire poker we’ve used to block the door, and the poker starts to drip, drip, like liquid mercury.

  I look meaningfully at Liljan. She is careful to avoid the drops of metal that sizzle at her feet and crouches near the bottom of the door. Beneath it, she sends red color slipping back across the floor like blood. The miner on the other side seems to pause when he notices. “What is that?” he whispers.

  Declan looks through the peephole and counts silently to us with his fingers.

  On three, we jointly burst through the door.

  The force of it hits the first man square in the jaw. Malthe is standing behind him. He fumbles to draw his pistol, but he’s outnumbered. He gets off a wild shot before Jakob hits him over the head with a candlestick.

  Liljan rips off the ties from our aprons and I quickly bind the men’s hands and feet with the strongest knots I can make. Then Jakob douses the rest of the aprons in laudanum and puts the stunned men face-down in it. We strip them of weapons and all their jewels and leave them bound, drugged halfway to Sunday, in the servants’ corridor.

  But when we reach the foyer, we freeze.

  The miners have been busy planning, just as we were.

  Because it is snowing inside the house.

  The foyer appears empty. The doors are all closed, the windows still fully intact. But they’ve set snow to fall inside by magic, with drifts gathering into an inch of powder on the rugs, sliding halfway up the base of the grandfather clock, settling like silt on the table, and still falling soft and white and steadily from the ceiling. The house is so silent I can hear the gentle ticking of the minute hand.

  It’s too quiet.

  My foot slides on the soft powder.

  Now they will be able to track our footsteps through the entire house.

  The snow will act like a map, leading them straight to us.

  “Step in each other’s footprints,” Jakob whispers. “So at least they won’t be able to tell how many of us there are.” I nod and swallow, but the snowfall makes it hard to move quickly. Icicles dangle from the chandeliers above our heads, sharp and piercing. The snow is soft and cold against my neck, settling thick as a palm’s width over the foyer table and the shattered vase. Peder’s body has been left where he fell but it almost looks as though he’s merely asleep and dusted with snow.

  Slowly, painstakingly, we make our way across the foyer. Creep past the ballroom. Its doors are closed. There is dead silence behind them.

  The grand staircase is blocked. Thorny brown vines are threaded through the banisters, crisscrossing and spiked like barbed wire to make the steps impassable. The men have done their best to limit our exits and trap us on the main floor.

  I swallow hard at their use of magic. Tonight will be a battle of power and wits.

  Whoever makes the most clever use of theirs wins.

  I take Eve’s hand. Her skin feels warm and soft, and snowflakes catch in her dark lashes. The house is starting to dim, with shadows painting the walls around us. It gives me an idea.

  “Psst,” I whisper to Liljan. “Can you fake the walls?”

  We know this house like the back of our hands; we know where the doors and rooms should be. The others have to rely solely on what their eyes tell them. She smiles wickedly. She’ll make the house change and shift around them—make them doubt everything they are seeing.

  “Stiff stuff, Marit,” she whispers.

  It’s only fitting. To last in this house, you have to earn your place.

  Liljan waits until we are all inside the hidden servant staircase, then runs her hand along the wall to mask the door. She adds several fake doors where the wall is nothing but brick.

  When she joins us, securing the lock with a click behind her, we are plunged into complete darkness.

  The staircase creaks shrilly under our weight.

  I grimace with each upward step, hoping the sounds are masked by the howl of snow and wind outside. My heart feels like a panicked bird, trying to get out.

  “Wait here,” I whisper to Eve when we reach the landing at the second floor. I squeeze her wrist. “Let us make sure it’s safe first. Liljan will stay with you.”

  Eve wrinkles her nose at me but nods.

  I push open the door. Immediately I hear the low hum of a man’s voice.

  And then it stops.

  The hallway is dim as we edge toward the room we’ve picked as our first hiding point: the large guest room in the corner. It’s a good lookout, with windows that face in several directions, a single entry point to secure, and eaves to which we can escape if Philip and his men set the house on fire.

  Except that the room is already occupied.

  I hold up a finger to quiet the others and scan the hallway. There are no drifts of snow to track our movements here. I take a few hesitant, silent steps. The candlestick I’m holding feels slick in my hand.

  A single man is kneeling at the hearth. His back is to me, but I can glimpse that one of his hands is wrapped with a fresh bandage—he must be the miner Rae scalded. In the other hand, he holds out a jewel to the flames, as if to warm it. Is that how they get the magic out? I wonder. His hair is so light blond it’s almost silver.

  My foot makes a loud crunching sound underneath my weight, and suddenly he turns.

  I look down in horror. I’ve stepped into a patch of shattered glass, dyed the same color as the floor. I didn’t see it until it was too late.

  The silver-blond man springs up from the fire, drawing his weapon. He lunges toward me, and I manage to duck out of his way just in time. He grabs Lara instead, his meaty arms wrapping around her frame. She cries out and stops struggling when she feels the cold metal of a dagger pointing at her side.

  “Get on the floor and drop your weapons.”

  I’ve put us in danger. If only I’d been more careful.

  A second man appears behind us from the shadows, short and built solid as a wall. He was patiently watching for us to appear and now moves forward to trap me, Jakob, and Declan. I don’t dare move with that knife hovering between Lara’s ribs. The second miner walks slowly, deliberately, to the door of the hidden stairway.

  My stomach drops.

  He turns the knob and peers into the darkness.

  Please stay hidden, I pray. Beads of sweat form on my forehead.

  The miner holding Lara at knifepoint barks: “Did you find another one?”

  “No,” the miner says with a strange grimace, squinting further into the darkness. The metal of his sword scrapes shrilly as he draws it out. “I found two of them.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Philip

  It’s cold as knives when we finally breach the kitchen.

 
; The loud explosion cracks through the night. When the sound echoes around the surrounding forest, I have the same thought I did all those years ago when those miners died below the earth.

  I underestimated the extent of what human greed can do.

  I rip through hanging strands of white flowers and shove in through the blasted back door.

  “Helene?” I bellow.

  I’m the first one in, with Tønnes, Steen, and Casper close behind me. We push over a barricade and find the kitchen half-destroyed and abandoned. The wind howls through the shattered window shells. Broken glass gathers in piles, like sand, on the floor. I’ve known Steen for fifteen years and seen what he can do with his massive size. He and Casper climb the stairs, their weight creaking as they methodically break down the doors of every room above our heads.

  “It’s clear,” Steen calls.

  The servants must have fled through the corridor to the main house. They must have already come upon Hugo and Malthe waiting at the other end. The rest of us will now follow from behind and trap them.

  It’s as if the past is circling back to happen all over again.

  I didn’t kill those men in the mines all those years ago.

  But I didn’t stop it from happening, either.

  I prepare my weapons—a pistol, knife, revolver, and eight types of glittering Firn—and steel myself.

  I do not think of what Aleks would do, to see me hunting his wife in his own house.

  “Tønnes, is it wrong?” I asked all those years ago.

  We are long past those questions now.

  “To the house,” I say, and point my knife to the servants’ corridor.

  We fall in line—Steen first, then Tønnes. Then me. We leave Casper behind and start down the underground hallway.

  What would have happened if that miner hadn’t snooped through the secret corridors of the mines and stumbled across those skeletons ten years ago? Where would all of us be, if not here, plunging through this house in a blizzard?

  Claus Olsen was the one who started it all. He was one of the higher-ups in command. He had never been a problem before.

  But suspicion had been simmering for a while. The miners didn’t really believe that jewels could grow in the mines. Olsen’s mistake was to believe that his fellow men would want to shine light on the truth, as he did.