Unspoken

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  “My team needs all the information available to conduct their investigation,” said Kami. “And they’re my friends, so I wanted to tell them the truth.”

  “Whatever you say,” Jared answered mildly, but Kami could feel his belief that they didn’t need anyone but each other.

  She caught sight of Angela and Holly, standing still up ahead. They’d stopped walking and were staring across the fields at Monkshood Abbey.

  Why aren’t they moving? Kami thought, panic spreading from her to Jared. She walked past him, and heard him follow her.

  “What’s wrong?” Kami asked as she reached the other two. As soon as she drew level with them, she realized what was wrong.

  Holly was the only plausible hiker of the bunch, in a padded coat with her sunny hair in pigtails. Angela in her fitted jacket and silk looked as if her sports car had broken down and she would never venture out into nature again. Both of them looked disgusted. Kami took another deep breath and wished she hadn’t.

  The house stood at the top of a gravel driveway, with a green field sloping up toward it and the dip of a moat enclosing that field. On the green rise, the building squatted like a glowering gnome. Emanating from the direction of the house was a thick, terrible scent of rot.

  “What is that smell?” Holly asked at last.

  “Could be anything,” Kami said. “Might be something, you know, totally normal. The moat could be full of cat food tins.”

  “Yes,” said Angela. “That would be extremely normal.”

  Kami had a strong feeling that something was waiting for them there. She expected to see a dark figure walk out, or a car drive toward them from around the back.

  Kami shook herself out of her reverie with a shiver. “I know it’s super creepy,” she said. “But I’m not even going to pretend I’m not going in there. You two can wait outside if you like.” She didn’t even think about it until she saw Angela’s sidelong look, then she realized that she’d said “you two.” She couldn’t think of a way to take it back. She could feel the same thrill coursing through both of them. She couldn’t pretend to be anything but sure that, no matter what, Jared was coming with her.

  They all went up the driveway together, and then circled around to the back of the house. They went no farther.

  “So they kind of lock up abandoned houses,” Kami said thoughtfully. “I did not know that. But it makes sense.”

  Both the front and back doors were barred with planks nailed in place over the entrance. The nails were rusted and buried in the age- and water-darkened wood. All efforts to pry them off would obviously be useless, as would hopeful jiggling of the windows, which were warped shut, with thick green moss growing along every windowsill.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of delinquent criminal?” Angela asked Jared.

  “I do have aspirations that way,” Jared answered. “Yes.”

  “Could you jimmy the lock or something?”

  Jared looked at the back door, covered with its many planks.

  “Or something,” said Angela, her voice sharp. “Get the glass out of its frame, or scale the gutters and break in through the attic.”

  “Well,” said Jared, “I suppose I could do something.” He stepped up to the nearest window, eyes narrowing. He set his leather-clad elbow against the glass.

  Kami said, “Jared, no!” She spoke an instant too late.

  The glass broke with a crunch and a tinkling sound as the shards fell inward.

  “Sorry if it wasn’t what you had in mind,” Jared told Angela. “I’m not that subtle.”

  “Well, now we have to redeem this act of vandalism by using it as a terrible means to the excellent end of pursuing truth and justice,” Kami said. “Someone give me a boost through this broken window.” She already had the mossy sill in her grasp, and even though she said “someone,” she was braced for it to be Jared. She looked straight ahead into the darkness of that house as he grasped her waist, hands light but firm. Despite her attempt to help herself through by grabbing at the window frame, he just lifted her and put her through, so she was past the jagged points of glass and standing in the dust-gray gloom.

  Holly and Angela followed her, Angela slapping Jared’s hands away when he tried to help her. Jared got in last. A shard of glass clinging to the top of the frame caught at his sleeve when he pulled himself through, and secondhand pain shot through Kami as they all looked at the bright blood beading on his wrist in the strange light.

  “I’m fine,” said Jared, pulling down his sleeve.

  They were standing in a very large room. The floorboards stretched in a pale expanse at their feet. There was so much dust on the floor that it had a pearly sheen.

  “Even you could not nap on this floor,” Kami told Angela.

  “I don’t know, a dust mattress might be very comfortable,” said Angela. “Also possibly orthopedic.”

  They were all walking softly and close together, as if afraid to disturb the dust. There was no apparent danger: just dust, silence, and gray light. The bad smell had no source, it just drifted around them in a hideous miasma. Nothing changed even when they reached the threshold of a huge desert of a room and saw a hall with shadows along the walls and the stair banister. Kami could see nothing but darkness waiting at the top of the steps. One step was broken clear in two.

  “I can get up there,” said Jared. Kami caught at his arm, and when he turned to her she saw the gleam in his eye, reflecting the spark she felt kindling in him.

  “No,” Kami told him. “Those stairs don’t look safe.”

  Jared grinned at her, teeth a pale flash in the murk. “Ah, but I can do magic now.”

  “You don’t know what that means yet,” said Kami, but she didn’t grab him. She regretted that when he made a break for the stairs.

  Kami had her foot on the first step when Angela lunged forward and caught her by both shoulders, staring down at Kami with her dark eyes narrowed.

  “No,” Angela said firmly. “You do not risk your life for that idiot.”

  “It’s holding up all right,” protested Jared, laughing and breathless, halfway up the stairs. He leaped lightly over the broken step.

  The staircase collapsed.

  There was a crash, dust rising in an explosive rush. Kami was blind for an instant. Her eyes burned with dust, and her throat burned with a scream.

  Then her vision cleared. The dust was no longer moving but held suspended, glittering in the air like a curtain made of tiny beads. The stairs kept falling, but in slow motion. The disappearance of the stairs was less a crash and tumble than an escalator that went nowhere, each step waiting to take its turn to fall.

  Jared twisted in midair and grabbed one of the slowly toppling stair rails. It held. He reached for the next rail, and the next, moving like an acrobat on a jungle gym. When one stair rail tumbled away from his reaching fingers, Kami reached out a hand as if she could catch it and hold it for him.

  Jared’s magic must have kicked in at the same time, because the rail swayed back toward him. Jared’s fingers closed around it. He swung himself onto one of the remaining steps, then launched himself down the stairs as the steps fell away almost under his feet.

  The last step collapsed just as Jared landed on the floor. Kami flew at him, and he rocked back before she could grab him, evading her hands again.

  “You’re frightened,” Jared said, his voice a little unsteady. “Don’t be. Wh-why are you frightened?”

  She felt his uncertain reach for her, inside their minds. Kami threw rage and love and relief at him.

  Of course I’m frightened, you idiot! You almost fell to your death! Don’t ever do anything like that again! I know you like taking risks—I do too, but there is a line. You are the most important person in the world to me. Don’t you dare cross it again.

  Dust and splinters were in Jared’s hair. He had a graze and a smudge of blood on his forehead, and fresh blood welling along his arm. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I will tr
y.”

  Hearing words spoken was a shock. It made Kami abruptly aware of their surroundings and especially their friends. Angela and Holly were staring at them, looking very interested but very uneasy about the fact that a silent conversation was going on before their eyes. Under their gaze, Kami felt terribly exposed. She stepped away, avoiding Jared’s eyes.

  “So,” Holly said, trying to smooth things over as usual, “I see this house has a cellar. Since the stairs just fell into it.”

  Kami beamed at Holly. She was right: there was a whole other level to explore. She moved, Jared a step behind her. He said in a low voice, “So, you like taking risks too?”

  “I don’t recall saying that,” Kami said. “And you have no witnesses to prove I did.” She went for the door on the other side of the hall and found another vast bare room. In the far corner of the room, another, smaller door was tucked like a secret.

  Kami crossed the floor.

  The others followed her, though Angela said, “The stairs collapsed. Which means this house is a death trap. Why do we want to explore all the fatal possibilities of the death trap?”

  The little door had a handle shaped like a sword hilt. The cool metal met Kami’s hand in an easy grip, and the door swung open without sticking. Concrete steps led down into the lowest floor of Monkshood House.

  “What could be unstable about concrete?” Kami asked, and took a step into the dark. She hesitated and Jared’s concern touched her mind, but the step held firm. She took another step down, and then another.

  “Why is your first impulse to find out what could be unstable about concrete?” Angela demanded. The absence of the usual bite in her tone made it clear she was relieved.

  Kami did not answer. She was busy taking each step with care, her hand pressed flat against a gray wall. She heard the others following her. She only breathed out, in a soft whoosh, when she reached the bottom of the stairs.

  It wasn’t a cellar. It was a whole other floor. In the dim light coming from the open door at the top of the stairs, Kami could see three doors in this room. One was open, and Kami went through it.

  It was too dark to see much. It was empty, like every other room in the house, but Kami saw the silvery swoop of a curtain glinting in a corner. As she drew closer, Jared behind her, she saw it was an enormous tangle of spiderwebs, hanging in a pale descent from the shadowy ceiling. Kami’s foot banged against a metal edge. She stumbled and checked herself, then knelt.

  “Kami, are you all right?” Angela asked from the door.

  “She’s fine,” said Jared, just as Kami said, “I’m fine. I just found something.”

  “You don’t need to answer for her,” Angela snapped. “She can talk.”

  “I’m aware,” said Jared. “I just knew she was fine. So I told you. I always know how she is.”

  The metal square on the floor bore ridges that suggested strange shapes. Kami traced them with her fingers, finding the square sectioned off into four parts. She was about to raise her head to ask for light, when faint greenish light touched the metal. Jared was standing above her with his phone lit up, pointing the screen helpfully downward.

  The metal square was covered in a black patina, like old grease. Beneath the grime was a house on a hill, a host of trees, a woman’s profile like a profile on an old coin, and a square that looked empty. But when Kami scratched at the blackness with her fingernail, a gleaming blue was revealed.

  There were words written in Latin beneath the pictures. Kami recognized the Lynburn crest. She recognized the Lynburn motto, could hear Ash’s voice translating it: We neither drown nor burn.

  Kami looked at the black grains under her fingernail. Held under the phone’s light, they glinted brown and red. We neither drown nor burn, the Lynburns said, but everybody died.

  She knew what dried blood looked like.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In the Shadow of the Manor

  Kami knew of two ways to find out why the Lynburn crest was engraved on a metal plate in a different house. One was from the Lynburns themselves, so Kami sent Jared back to Aurimere. She figured they were more likely to talk to one of their own than to Kami, turning up with a notebook and saying, “I hear you’re a sorcerer. What’s that like?”

  The other way was to go to the people of Sorry-in-the-Vale. Kami’s mother had done a spell with Rosalind Lynburn. Holly’s father spoke the name of the Lynburns as if he was calling on some dread power. Dorothy Cunningham at the library had said she did not trust the Lynburns, and Nicola Prendergast had asked the Lynburns for help on the night she died.

  When Holly went home and Angela and Kami split up to cover more ground, Kami realized she had not walked through her town since Nicola died. She went around the woods-bristling curve of Shepherd’s Corner, nodding to a family she babysat for who were out taking a walk. She walked down the mellow golden line of the High Street, looking up at the roof of the Bell and Mist, where a weather vane in the shape of a woman’s head spun gently in the wind. Amber Green, who worked as a waitress there, was clearing the tables outside and gave Kami a friendly nod.

  Kami felt as if someone was following her, their shadow on her back, and she did not dare turn and face them. It took her a few minutes to realize that Sorry-in-the-Vale was the shadow falling on her, as the manor cast a shadow over the town.

  Kami had never loved or hated her town, any more than she loved or hated her shoes. Sometimes Sorry-in-the-Vale was comfortable, somewhere that fit her well; sometimes it was uncomfortable, making her feel too weird or too foreign or too ambitious. It was always familiar. She’d always thought she could trust it to be that.

  The town looked different now, with blood in its past and Kami imagining secrets behind every smile. She passed by Mr. Stearn walking his elderly bull terrier, both of them walking in the same slightly jerky way, stiff legs moving in sync. He smiled at her, and she found she couldn’t smile back. What was he thinking? And what might he be hiding?

  Kami went into the next building on the High Street that she passed, hearing the musical jangle as she pushed open the door of Mrs. Thompson’s sweetshop. It was a cheerful little cave of bright colors, shelves filled with jars of sweets: tiny apple drops in scarlet and green, tan and cream squares of toffee and fudge, black wheels of licorice, the rainbow spread of allsorts, and the speckled rounds of aniseed balls.

  In the back of the candy-brilliant cave was Mrs. Thompson, small, round, and wrapped in her usual fluffy gray cardigan, looking like a very big sweet that had been dropped on a dusty floor. “Kami,” she said, in the way the adults of Sorry-in-the-Vale spoke to Kami, a little fond and a little wary, “what can I do for you?”

  Kami wondered now if that wariness was all because Kami had spent her childhood holding conversations with thin air and because her grandmother was “that foreign woman.” She wondered if people thought of her family as the Lynburns’ servants, and if anybody knew of the bargain her mother had made with Rosalind Lynburn. Mrs. Thompson’s round, wrinkled face remained the same face Kami had known for years. She just couldn’t read it.

  “Hi!” said Kami, with manic cheer. “I’m doing an article for the school paper on the history of Sorry-in-the-Vale, and I know you know everything there is to know about the town, so I was wondering if you had a minute?” She gestured with her notebook, as if it was the key to the kingdom of information. Then she surged on before Mrs. Thompson could speak. “I found a few old historical records that suggested the people in Aurimere House might be able to do magic. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “What records?” Mrs. Thompson asked, her voice sharp. “Where did you find them?”

  “Oh,” Kami said. “Here and there. Uh, on the Internet.”

  There was a pause.

  “I really don’t think you did,” Mrs. Thompson told her. “People don’t talk much about that sort of thing around here. And they would never write it down.”

  Kami bumped her elbow into a jar full of peppermints. The pain shot up al
ong her arm at the same time panic shot through her chest. “Well, maybe I heard some people talking,” she ad-libbed. “I think they also mentioned Monkshood Abbey and the Lynburns. What happened to the people who used to live in Monkshood?”

  “If you approach the wrong people and ask questions like that,” Mrs. Thompson said, “you might find out.”

  The bright colors of the sweetshop were starting to look nightmarish to Kami, garish and unreal. She tried to keep her voice measured as she asked: “Are you the wrong people? Because I’ve known you all my life.”

  “And I’ve lived a lot longer than you have,” Mrs. Thompson told her. “I remember the days of red and gold.”

  The days when the Lynburns used to kill people, and the rest of the town let it happen. The days that might be back again, if it was a Lynburn who had killed Nicola.

  Kami thought of Jared, sick in the city with the year’s passing, of the golden knives he had seen and the rhyme about the Lynburns, and the deaths recorded in old newspapers. Her stomach turned over.

  “Yeah, I’m just going to go,” Kami decided. She grasped the doorknob and pulled.

  The door did not open. Instead the doorknob slid out of her grasp so quickly that she thought her hand had slipped, then she wasn’t quite sure. She stood staring at Mrs. Thompson as the shop bell sang its jaunty tune over their heads. The walls of the sweetshop swam in a rainbow blur before Kami’s eyes.

  “Seriously,” said Kami, her voice faint. “I think I left the oven on at home. Or the iron. Possibly both.”

  “Be careful, Kami,” Mrs. Thompson murmured.

  Kami grabbed the knob again. The metal slid against her sweaty palm, making it clear to her that the wrench of the door out of her hand last time had been different, been deliberate as someone slamming it closed. This time, though, she got the door open and propelled herself through it, hurting her shoulder with how hard she hung on to the knob until she was over the threshold and into the street.