The duke collected himself.
Heavens, I’ve just doomed her. He’ll get two for the price of one—
“Let Ashcroft go,” the duke said. “Let both bastards go. But if you get wind of them talking to someone about this… In the meantime—”
Lena looked Shea in the eye and, with the same smile, mouthed a single-syllable word. Then, in one move, she tore at the hem of her dress, leaving an ugly ragged edge. The wave of heavy fabric fell, no longer constraining her movements.
She hurled herself at the window.
He bolted to his feet and dashed to the black rectangle edged with broken glass. Below, at the courtyard, in a pool of moonlit shards, a figure stretched like a bird. Lena. Lena.
But it wasn’t over. The limbs twitched, and the figure stumbled to its feet. A step, another, a lurch forward, a stride.
Improbably, as though he observed events unfolding in reverse, she raced for the gate.
“Fucking Drakiri,” the baritone said from the other window with a shade of admiration.
“What’s happening? What’s happening?” The duke’s voice, high-pitched. “Is she alive? Go after her.”
Lena dove under the gate, legs flashing so fast they were butterfly’s wings in the torchlight.
“If I may, Your Grace,” said Aidan. “She’s probably headed for the construction site. I’ve already taken the liberty of alerting the people there.”
Over the battlements, the tower was a shape someone had cut out from the sky. No, no, no, Shea thought.
“Lena!” The only things listening to him were the horizon and the stones in the castle walls.
He took three long strides across the room, pushing aside one of the duke’s men, and darted out into the corridor.
He didn’t know how he’d gotten to the gate, how he’d crossed the first mile of the fields—he only came to his senses when a string of bleak yellow emerged from the darkness ahead.
Wives, he remembered. Fiancées. Lanterns for the foremen who’re staying for the night.
The lights picked out a tall, thin figure slurring past them.
“Lena!” He stumbled, fell, tore at the grass, jerked to his feet, sprinted. “Turn back. It’s a trap.”
But she was too far away, and of course she was too fast for him—a smudge moving at an inhuman speed. When he passed the women in linen cloaks, she was already only a rough outline, shrinking. When he finally reached the tower, there was only him.
Night hid in every little shadow between the bricks, and portals up in the circular wall, like eyes, metered out a glow which could’ve been starlight. Shea bent over, hands on his knees.
“Lena,” he cawed—then, straightening, loudly, “Lena!”
The wind came and rustled the grass.
He put his foot on the first step leading into the tower’s mouth when something moved against the sky: something plummeted from the opening directly to the left and above him. But it wasn’t like the earlier fall, a bird breaking through the glass—this time, it was like a sack being thrown out, a useless, inanimate thing.
He couldn’t run anymore; he had to make an effort not to fall.
It took him minutes to find the body: the night didn’t care for things the way daylight did, all dark malt and caked-together shapes.
His fingers touched a wet spot on her left breast.
And when he raised her from the ground, wrapping his hand around her shoulders to bring her face to his chest, déjà vu washed over him—only, unlike the other Lena from his past, this one didn’t call him by the name, didn’t ask anything, didn’t say she loved him.
Didn’t say anything.
The roundabout in his memory stopped; under the garlands, she stepped back onto the pavement, smiling at the sun that tickled her nose.
“Thank you,” he remembered her saying, and how he’d kissed her hand, and how nothing much mattered anymore.
You told me once, sis, that you could read hands. We were both kids, and it was all hogwash, of course—but to a child, things like fate do exist. I recall you said I would meet a beautiful, extraordinary woman whom I would fall in love with, and we would live happily ever after.
Funny how stuff from deep childhood holds sway over you. Looking back, now, I think I’ve always been waiting for the thing you’d told me to come true.
And hey, maybe you could read hands—that one time. Because the first part happened; it’s the ‘ever after’ you got wrong.
3
There were crows—crows straddling the tree branches and crows in coats. The Drakiri settlement didn’t look as rainbowy as it had the last time he’d been here, colors washed out by the rain into small puddles across the pavement.
Coming to think of it, the pavement wasn’t as flat as he remembered it, either.
At the gates, he’d caught a glimpse of Brielle leaving in a carriage—but other than that, no faces from the castle.
A compact graveyard, maybe a hundred tombstones, filigree gratings: a place of refined sorrow. Shea passed under the iron archway that depicted two trees fused at the top. In an oak’s shadow, a row of graves protruded from the ground like a procession of small animals that had gone somewhere but never made it.
He stopped.
A crowd of mourners surrounded a dark object he was afraid to look at. A man—a Drakiri—was making a speech, the wind only carrying individual words: ‘beautiful’, ‘talented’, ‘loss’.
I shouldn’t be here. I’m just as guilty as the people who’d killed her.
He caught the gaze of a tall woman in the front row; there was something familiar about her, something sweet and painful at the same time. Shea leaned against the oak, watching the graves, the Drakiri, the graphite clouds consume each other.
He brought himself to glance at Lena the moment before the coffin disappeared into the ground.
When everything was said and done and the people dispersed, the woman remained. She stretched her hand toward the fresh strip of earth. Then she looked at Shea again.
He straightened as she strolled up to him.
“You’re Lord Ashcroft?”
He recognized the voice. “Yes.” The pain of loss broke through the surface and sprouted. “I’m… I’m sorry we meet for the first time under these circumstances.”
Her face went through a rapid cycle of grief: twitched, dropped, hardened. “I’m sorry, too.”
He offered her an elbow, and they wandered past the graves.
“Lena told me you were a famous painter.”
“She told me about you, too. I wanted to thank you. I think she loved you.” Her voice broke for a second. “It was difficult to tell with her; she always hated showing weakness, and love can be one. But I think you were the only bright thing about her life at the castle.”
The roundabout made one final swirl, and, risking a fall, he squeezed his eyes shut.
“How did she die?” she asked. “They told me next to nothing.”
“They… they killed her. The duke’s people at the tower. I think she was trying to destroy it, and I was trying to warn her, but it was all too late.”
They walked in silence for a while.
“You taught her that story, about the Mimic Tower?” Shea asked.
“It’s not a story. It’s something, something real and terrifying.” She seemed to trail off in thought. “She was a unique child. So talented. I never lost hope she would take up painting seriously.”
“She said she painted a bit.”
“Oh.” As though sunlight had brushed across the woman’s face, and the pain made Shea shrink inside: at that moment, she was an older version of her daughter. “Oh. She was a beautiful painter. Please, you need to come by sometime—I’ll show you her works. Lena herself…” She broke off and pursed her lips.
Suddenly, even for himself, like a criminal who’d been holding out on a confession, he said, “I loved her, too.”
The woman didn’t respond. She nodded, either to his words or her own
thoughts. Then she stopped and reached into her pocket. “She asked me to give something to you. ‘You’ll know when’—I only understand now what she meant.”
Shea took an ornamental key from her and turned it over in his fingers. “What does it open?”
“I don’t… I think it’s from her quarters in the castle.”
“Thank you.”
“I would be grateful,” she said, “I would be grateful if you could bring me something of hers.”
4
The key began as a pair of hands entwined in the shape of a heart; the place where they connected to the stem so thin that Shea paused before the lock, afraid of breaking something beautiful and fragile.
Then he realized he’d already done that.
The keyhole let out a click.
Drakiri don’t let strangers in, he remembered. We have no records of where we came from, only that we’d arrived from elsewhere, and letting someone under your roof feels like sharing this vulnerability.
The windows were leaded glass with shapes of clouds and wheat ears, orange lozenges here and there letting in rays of light, autumn on autumn. Fluid cornices above the windows mirrored the pointed arches which rested on spiral columns, creating a kind of a vestibule. Past them, drapes, orange too, fluttered on the walls like wings of an invisible insect.
A thin-legged writing desk stood slashed open, as did a wine cabinet, drawers on the floor, half of them smashed into splinters—somebody had been here already, either the duke’s men or Aidan’s.
Had they taken what she’d wanted him to find? Shea squatted and picked up, one by one, things scattered across the floor: a brooch. A muff.
Papers.
The sentences, in a free, floating handwriting, weren’t in Drakiri. He shuffled through a few sheets to find what was apparently the beginning: This won’t be in my mother tongue because it’s a diary of a different life, a life among different people.
The pages were numbered, and in the setting sun through the orange lozenges, he crawled around the floor on all fours, trying to piece together what remained of her thoughts.
The duke…
The tower…
Patrick, Brielle, and the others…
That festival I’ve loved since my childhood…
The tower.
Next to one of the paragraphs stood a doodle of a face—his own.
‘We rode on that thing, a thing for children, and I felt happy for the first time in a long while. I felt like a little girl. I may need to use him (do I? Maybe the situation will resolve itself before that?), and I’m torn. He may be my sailor. I don’t want to lose that—in life, we aren’t given many chances.’
Shea froze. Then he folded the pages in two, slowly, accurately. Ran his finger across the edge, feeling the paper fluffs crumble. Put the diary into his pocket.
Something boiled down his lungs, knocked at his throat, looked for a release.
He picked up the nearest drawer and hurled it into the wall. Another. And another, each next one with greater force, finally sliding into a scream, trying, but unable, to reach for the part of himself he wanted to hurt and make stop hurting.
He leaned his hands on the table and doubled over in dry sobs. A proud, misguided child, he thought. I called her a proud, misguided child.
The senses came back after a while: the smell of chipped wood, the room, the wheat ears, the drapes. His head felt the way it does when one catches a cold.
That was it. Somehow, it was not the funeral but reading her innermost thoughts that made him realize—really realize—that he would never see her again.
“Was it the diary, Lena? Did you want me to find it?”
His gaze fell on the door into the neighboring room.
She must’ve used it—the bedroom—for art practice. In the corner, a drawing table squatted, blank sheets of paper and pencils in a fine mess. Sketches occupied every inch of the walls, sketches—
Wait a second, not sketches. A sketch. They’re all the same.
Or rather, they were of the same place: the clearing on the forested hillside where he and Lena had hunted and lost a deer.
Had the deer really vanished? he thought. ‘I saw something, in a flash. Different colors,’ she’d said.
He tore off a drawing and stared at it.
5
Brielle’s face appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb.
“What is it, Shea?”
“May I come in?”
“I’ve been at the top of the tower all day. Installing the devices.”
“Can you let me in?”
“I’m preparing for sleep.”
“It’s important.”
“What isn’t?” she said, stepping aside. “All right. You’ll need to excuse a certain degree of messiness, though.”
He didn’t mind the clothes over the couch’s back and cup rings on the table—it was everything else, the normal things, that, after her quarters, seemed bland and alien. Linen curtains, cornices and moldings he’d seen a thousand times.
“Remember, two days ago, I told you about the Mimic Tower?” he asked.
“Yes, you said it was a Drakiri superstition or something.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“Hmm?”
“Technologically, they’re centuries ahead of us.”
Brielle took a cup from the table—tea or coffee. “Doesn’t mean they aren’t…” She broke off.
“They aren’t what? Human? If you think they are, go outside and hire a drikshaw.”
“Doesn’t mean they can’t be prone to the same fear of the irrational as we are.”
“Yes, but my point is, we won’t be able to tell. We’re children playing on the beach. We won’t be able to tell their fear of irrational from legitimate concern.”
“So you believe in this Mimic thing now?” Brielle said.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” He walked up to the window and glanced outside, at the tower, the finger pushing a purple crown against the cold blue: the devices were already active, an upward pull to hold the giant together. “Listen, Lena and I were on a hunt, right after the duke decommissioned the tulips—”
“The Drakiri devices.”
“Right after he’d decommissioned the tulips. We chased a deer across the hillside—you know, the hills to the west of the castle. There was a clearing. The deer vanished.”
“What do you mean, vanished?”
“Disappeared. Dropped out of reality. No idea.”
“Shea, I’m afraid to ask, but… Were you drunk when that happened?”
“Lena…” Shea swallowed. “Lena saw it, too.”
“So she was also of the opinion the deer has dropped out of reality?” Brielle raised her hand, palm open, when he glanced at her. “Just trying to assess the facts.”
“She said she saw different colors.”
“Did you try to find out what happened? Maybe a hallucinogen in mushrooms or something, you stepped on them and—”
“She wrote it off as a hallucination too. The deer—we thought it simply ran away from under our noses.”
“So…” Brielle took a sip. “I suspect now you’ve reconsidered.”
“Now I’ve reconsidered.”
“May I ask why?”
“Because of this.” He took out from his pocket and unfolded the sketch. “There’s at least a dozen more of those in, in her bedroom. All of the same place where we hunted.”
Brielle took the drawing from him and studied it. “She had talent. And this proves what?”
“This proves nothing. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility…” He looked at the first stars dipped in the water-thin film of clouds. “Maybe a portal of sorts formed there. Is forming. A doorway.”
“To the Mimic Tower?”
“Like I said, Brielle, would we be able to tell their superstition from knowledge?”
“Okay. Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I need you to go to that place wit
h me.”
She chuckled—but, after studying him, her brows came together. “Shea, you’ve been under a lot of stress lately. You sound… off.”
“Perhaps I sound the way I should, for the first time in my life. I need you to go with me because I can’t make the decision alone—you were right the other day, I can’t shoulder any more blame. I can’t betray you, as well. If the decision has to be made, we’ll have to make it together.”
“Which decision, Shea, what are you—”
“We may need to do something about the tower.”
“Like hell we will.” She slammed her cup onto the table, and the porcelain swirled in a small pirouette. “You already did something about it, twice—you removed the Drakiri devices, then brought them back. Make up your mind already.”
“I—”
“Make up your goddamn mind!”
“I forgive you.”
“What?”
“The mistake in the calculations you’ve made—I forgive you for it.”
She frowned. “What the fuck, Shea?”
“I forgive you. It wasn’t your fault. The duke’s an asshole, he pushed you to the limit, you made a mistake. It’s human. It’s normal.”
Her face twitched.
“I forgive you, do you hear me?” He strode up to her and squeezed her arms. “Do you hear me? I forgive you for your mistake.”
Brielle inhaled sharply. “I only wanted to do my job. He’d changed the deadline—”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Others might disagree.”
“Then to hell with them. You know? To hell with them.”
She kept silent.
“Please. Come with me to the hillside tomorrow, and let’s just see what’s out there. I owe it to her. If there’s even the slightest possibility of her being right, I need to… Otherwise, I won’t forgive me.”
6
The black mane, a cloud of breath embossed by the sunlight. Their horses trudged forward, and the hillside drew nearer, a slope passing from the unformed of the waking world into some semblance of order, into the forest’s ragged outlines.
“Do you remember where that place of yours was?” Brielle said.
Tower of Mud and Straw Page 11
