Finally, the shadowed figure moved. Slowly, the hand reached up, but this time to grab hold of the blackness which shrouded the figure’s head. It was pulled away, and Lily finally saw a face in the dimness.
Trista.
Lily’s breath caught, her pulse quickening in a fight or flight response. But she still didn’t scream. After all, why would Trista stand there, even baring her face in a show of trust, if she meant them harm? There had to be something else going on. Besides, Lily was fascinated by this young woman, her own half sister, accomplice to John Faust’s plans and yet a mundane. Or was she an accomplice? Was she more of an unwilling participant? Lily remembered how Trista had tried to help Sir Kipling, or at least had expressed reluctance to kill him. Even if she’d eventually bowed to her father’s command, she’d had enough of a conscience to say something. She certainly hadn’t seemed as arrogant or eager for battle as her brother had been. Their brother. Good grief, this was going to take some getting used to.
Taking a chance, Lily whispered into the darkness, hoping it wouldn’t waken Sebastian. “Hello…sister.”
Trista didn’t respond. She could have been considering what to say, or deciding how best to kill her, for all Lily knew.
She tried again, speaking as loudly as she dared in case Trista hadn’t heard the first time. “Why are you here?”
“Father sent me.” Even as quiet as her voice was, Lily still recognized its flat, emotionless tone. “I’m supposed to steal your copies of Morgan’s journal.”
Lily swallowed. “How did you know where to find us?”
The dark figure shrugged almost imperceptibly. “Father told me. He has eyes and ears everywhere.”
Great. Just great. “So…do you intend to do as he asked?”
Silence. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Well, that wasn’t very reassuring. But it did mean there was an opportunity here. If her sister was good enough to get through a locked door without waking either of them, she was good enough to have completed her task without getting caught. Lily wondered, belatedly, why she hadn’t thought to set any ward alarms before going to bed. Probably because she’d been so distracted…
Dragging her mind back to the matter at hand, she wondered what Trista wanted badly enough to prompt her to disobey John Faust. Was it simple curiosity? Or did she secretly want out? If so, it was up to Lily to give her a reason to take the leap.
“What has John Faust told you about me?” Lily asked in a whisper. Perhaps if she could get Trista talking, she could figure out how to turn her.
There was a long pause. “That you’re disobedient. Willful. Foolish.”
Lily cocked her head. Trista’s tone wasn’t critical or even scornful. It was almost wistful.
“All things you wish you could be?” Lily guessed.
“…perhaps…”
Lily wracked her brain, trying to think what to say next. Where was Sebastian when she needed him? A snore from nearby answered that question, and she smiled ever so slightly, not begrudging him his sleep. Yes, his grasp on conversation and social interaction was certainly better than hers, but this was her sister.
“Did he tell you that my mother took me away when I was small to protect me from him? Did he tell you she gave me a real life and taught me to think for myself?”
“He said you were stolen from him and raised to hate your own flesh and blood, your own kind. Do you?”
Choosing her words carefully, Lily shook her head. “I don’t hate anyone. I just want there to be peace.”
“Pity.” Trista breathed, a bit of scorn finally creeping into her voice.
“Why?”
“Because I thought maybe you hated wizards as much as I do.”
Lily had no idea what to say, unable to think of anything that might soothe the anger and bitterness in her sister’s voice.
Finally, she ventured, “Are you sure it’s wizards you hate? Or just our father?”
Trista seemed to consider that. Lily could just barely see her lips purse in the darkness. “I hate anyone who thinks they’re better just because of the genes they were born with.”
“Not all wizards are like that,” Lily assured her, trying her best to sound sincere while still speaking in a whisper.
“Aren’t they?”
The challenge, while not strictly true, did make Lily wince. She didn’t think she went around consciously considering herself better than anyone else, but she couldn’t deny a certain level of pride she felt in her heritage. She also had to admit to sometimes thinking of mundanes as silly and ignorant. It was hard not to, when you knew what she knew and could do what she did. The question was, did she feel and think those things because she was a wizard? Or because she was educated in knowledge that most didn’t have? Was it racism or elitism? Or both?
And she couldn’t exactly speak for other wizards. Most—if not all—thought of mundanes with either patronizing disinterest or active disdain. While it was no excuse, being a wizard herself, Lily could understand how hard it was to be humble when you had so much power and knowledge at your disposal. Her mother was probably the only wizard she’d ever met who seemed to truly treat mundanes as equals. Perhaps because she’d hidden her abilities and tried to live as one to protect her family.
Troubled by her thoughts, Lily finally responded. “If they are like that, most don’t mean any harm by it. It was how they were taught to think. But we can change that, you and I.”
Trista did not reply, so Lily continued. “John Faust is the most selfish, misguided, cruel wizard I know. I would hate wizards, too, if I thought they were all like him. But they’re not, and we can help teach them how to be more understanding…” She hesitated. “You can help teach me to be more understanding. Will you do that?”
Her sister was silent for so long that Lily started to worry she’d given offense. She tried a different tack. “You’re an adult. It’s your right to make your own decisions. You don’t have to do anything John Faust or I or anyone else tells you to. So, do you want to keep being a part of the problem? Or do you want to help me fix it?”
“I just want to be left alone. I—I want to be free.” Her voice was almost too quiet to hear.
“If you leave John Faust, I can find you a safe place to stay, somewhere they can’t find you. You’ll be free to do whatever you want,” Lily said, hoping like heck she could keep her promise.
There was another long silence.
Lily was about to open her mouth, but Trista interrupted her with one last, quiet sentence. “I’ll think about it.”
With that, she turned, as silent as the shadows she faded into, and left the room. The only thing Lily heard was the soft click of the door as it closed, though even that noise was almost masked by another snore from Sebastian.
Lily let out a breath and relaxed, her muscles stiff from sitting, tense, for so long. That hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d hoped, but it had certainly been a positive development. It had the potential to turn the tide. If Lily could isolate John Faust, she had an even greater chance of preventing bloodshed. Plus, Trista’s knowledge and skills would come in handy if they could convince her to join them. She wondered where in the world the girl had learned to be so stealthy. Certainly not from their father. He must have hired a trainer of some sort.
Suddenly nervous that Trista might still carry out her original mission, Lily slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the door. Cracking it, she could see no sign of Trista in the hall, so she slipped out and checked the door to Hawkins and Cyril’s room. With an ear pressed flat against the wood, she could hear no noise, and the knob was securely locked. Unless she wanted to wake them all up, there was nothing else she could do to improve the situation, so she went back to bed, still wondering where her errant feline had gotten to.
Lily was up, showered, and dressed before Sebastian even woke. True to Emmaline’s promise, her outfit seemed completely impervious to wrinkles and stains, including those of the underarm kind. She looked as fr
esh as she had yesterday, and went to wake up Sebastian with a spring in her step. Looking down fondly at his snoring form, she wondered if he had always been such a heavy sleeper, and if so, how he’d managed to survive this long, with all the trouble he seemed to attract.
Sebastian mumbled and groaned at her cheery wakeup call, attempting to hide under the covers. Lily leaned forward to grab them and whip them off but stopped herself just in time. Momentarily frozen in shock, she realized she’d been about to drag Sebastian out of bed. And, of course, as soon as she was aware of how perfectly comfortable she’d been with the situation, all such feelings vanished and she blushed furiously. Drat her stupid emotions.
Carefully stepping back and lacing her fingers together in front of her, she told Sebastian that it was late and they were about to stop serving breakfast, so if he wanted anything to eat he’d better get his butt out of bed. At her warning, a tousled head emerged from beneath the covers and stared about with bleary eyes.
She left Sebastian to it and headed downstairs for a breakfast that, contrary to her threat, was just getting started. As she sat enjoying a fresh cup of English Breakfast with a bit of toast and jam, Sir Kipling jumped up into the chair beside her. He settled down, able to see her but not visible to anyone else unless they came and stood directly over the chair.
“Nice of you to join me,” Lily commented, sipping her tea.
“As you know, I live to serve.”
“Of course. Though I wonder whom you were serving last night. I woke up several times and saw neither hide nor hair of you in our room.”
“Just being polite,” he said, then yawned enormously, all pink gums and pointy teeth. “The rooms being renovated were sadly lacking in cat hair, so I shared a bit of mine. All in the name of generosity and sacrifice, of course. After all, you two needed your privacy, so I occupied myself elsewhere.”
Lily choked on her tea, inhaling instead of swallowing. Now occupied with coughing the tea out of her lungs, she was unable to respond to her cat’s insinuations with the righteous indignation they deserved. By the time she could breathe again, he’d laid his head down on his paws and appeared to be asleep.
Glaring down at him, she considered whether or not to inform him of Trista’s visit. She finally decided that, if he was going to be a pain, he should get a little of his own medicine. He could wait and hear about it when she told Sebastian. She was just glad that Sebastian hadn’t been there to hear her cat’s embarrassing comment.
Speaking of Sebastian…the sound of hurried footsteps in the hall leading to the dining room reached her ears, and she looked up to see her friend’s anxious face. He stopped abruptly, looking around at the room full of busily breakfasting guests with a confused expression. Spotting her, he headed over and sat down at the little square table opposite Sir Kipling’s ostensibly slumbering form.
“I thought you said breakfast was almost over.”
“I might have, hmm, exaggerated just a tad.” She took another sip of tea, gazing out the window and doing her best to look innocent.
Sebastian was inclined to grumble but was quickly mollified by the arrival of a plate heaped with fried eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, baked beans, and hash browns that she’d ordered for him. When asked by the waiter if he preferred coffee or tea, he demanded both, advising his server to just bring out the whole pot. Faced with such a request, the waiter retreated, looking alarmed and muttering about “American tourists.”
“Really, Sebastian. You should at least try to be couth,” Lily admonished, pursing her lips so that they wouldn’t curl up into a smile.
Sebastian grunted. “It’s too early to be…whatever you just said.”
“Couth, dear, couth,” she replied absentmindedly, focusing on her own plate of sausage and eggs. “It means cultured. Refined. Well-mann…er…ed…” her words trailed off as she realized with horror that she’d just called Sebastian “dear.” Blushing furiously, she ducked her head, hoping he hadn’t noticed. But he simply grunted in reply, appearing too focused on glaring at his hash browns—as if they had personally offended him—to notice anything at all, including her wayward term of endearment.
Hurrying onward, Lily brought up something that was sure to distract him. “So, Trista came by for a word last night.”
“What?” Sebastian jerked in shock, dropping the grilled tomato he was trying to sandwich between two hash browns. “She did what? When? Where?”
Sir Kipling’s head also came up and he watched Lily closely as she set down her cup of tea and daintily wiped her lips.
“Oh, about three or four a.m., I’d guess, in our bedroom.”
“In our wh—what?” he spluttered. “She was in the room? Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Hush! Not so loud.” Lily hissed, glancing at their approaching waiter who carried a tray supporting a tea and a coffee pot. Stopping at their table, he looked at Sebastian for a moment, mouth set in a disapproving line. Then he set the tray on the empty half of the table and turned stiffly, leaving without a word.
As if the coffee would somehow clean out his ears and change what Lily had said, Sebastian gulped down three cups of it in quick succession, apparently immune to its scalding heat.
Concerned, Lily put out a hand, stopping him from downing a fourth. “Slow down, Sebastian. You’re going to kill yourself. And anyway, I didn’t know you were a coffee drinker.”
“I’m not. This stuff tastes vile, and I usually don’t need it. Of course, I’m also usually not woken up at the crack of dawn,” he said, now glaring at his fried eggs which had leaked yolk all over his baked beans. “Now stop avoiding my question. Why didn’t you wake me up?” He finally raised his eyes to meet hers, looking angry and hurt.
With a huff of annoyance, Lily opened her mouth to say something cutting, but then closed it again. Taking a deep breath, she pushed away her defensiveness and thought about the situation. Her mother had once told her that when men were scared or worried about something they couldn’t control, they often responded with anger.
As annoying as it was, Sebastian was probably just worried for her safety and upset at sleeping through a situation where he felt he should have been there to protect her. She also kept in mind that he had fought, and been defeated by, Trista before, and might be feeling insecure about it. So instead of cutting him down for being a patronizing worry-wart, she tried to respond a bit more maturely.
“Trista was not in any way threatening and seemed like she only wanted to talk. To me. I thought if I woke you she might run off, or become aggressive. Clearly, if she’d wanted to hurt us, she could have done so long before either of us woke up. I’ll admit, though, it was foolish of me to not set any alarm wards last night. I’ll be sure to do that from now on.”
The tension in Sebastian’s face eased a little, and he gave a conciliatory grunt, turning back to his plate of food. “So what did she want?”
“I think she wanted out.”
He looked at her sharply. “Out of what?”
Lily smiled a grim smile. “Out from under John Faust’s thumb.”
“Hmmm…interesting-er and interesting-er.” Sebastian chewed thoughtfully, showing a surprising level of “couth-ness” by swallowing before speaking. “So did she give you anything useful? Or just gripe about Mr. Fancypants?”
Lily rolled her eyes at Sebastian’s continued use of the irreverent epitaph for her father, but let it slide. “She didn’t turn traitor and spill her guts, if that’s what you mean. I doubt she knows most of the details herself, anyway. John Faust probably keeps both her and Caden in the dark. But her simple presence tells us a few important things. First, that John Faust is nearby. Second, that he knows where we are and probably has a way of watching what we do. And third, he doesn’t have as much control over his followers as he might like to believe. I don’t know what story Trista told him once she got back, but she did say she’d been sent here to steal our copies of Morgan’s journal. John Faust probably knows
, or guesses, that we’ve gotten a better translation of it and would rather just steal our copy than go to the trouble of finding a proper scholar of Old Brittonic. All of which means that we have the advantage but are in a vulnerable position strategically.”
“My, my. An impressive deduction, Mr. Holmes.” Sebastian winked at her, his trademark good humor starting to reemerge—no doubt thanks to the hot food and caffeine. “So, what does that mean for our strategy over the next day or two?”
Lily sat back, looking out the window toward the windswept coastline barely half a mile away. “It means we have to assume he’s watching our every move. I think Cyril and I have made a lot of progress on understanding Morgan’s journal, or at least as much of it as we can without finding and exploring the tomb itself. I’m fairly certain it’s close by. Morgan says in her journal that she prepared her resting place in ‘my mother’s bosom, from whence I was torn by treachery’s cruel hand.’”
“Wow. Sounds pretty dramatic.”
“Well, you’d be dramatic too if your father had been murdered and your mother seduced and married off to your father’s murderer. It’s an incident recounted in Geoffrey’s Historia. It claims Uther Pendragon—King Arthur’s father—fell in love with Igraine, the wife of one of his nobles, Gorlois the duke of Cornwall. The story goes that as soon as Gorlois got wind of Uther’s interest in his wife, he fled home and locked her up safely in his impenetrable castle at Tintagel. He then went and set up camp about twenty miles away at a different fort to draw Uther away. But, instead of Uther fighting himself, his lieutenants fought and killed Gorlois while Uther got Merlin to disguise him as Gorlois so he could walk right into Tintagel and seduce Igraine, who thought he was her husband. According to Geoffrey, that was the night Arthur was conceived.
“Now, we know from Morgan’s writings that she was Arthur’s older half sister. So if Geoffrey’s account is anywhere close to being true—personally I’m skeptical about the bit where Merlin enchants Uther to look like Gorlois—Morgan had to endure her father’s defeat and murder, and her mother’s betrayal. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she was then sent away, possibly to a convent or some other place to further her education and keep her out of the way. That would agree with her journal and point to Tintagel as her home and therefore resting place.”
Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus Legends Page 19
