Things had just got about as bad as he could imagine them getting. A hot flush ran over his skin, and his eyes began to feel dry and itchy. Veleur thought he had done something, something like what Archer had been ranting on about. What was it ...
Holding out so that the others won’t know who I really am.
Who I really am.
Peter felt like he had the answer at the very tip of his fingers. What could they possibly think he was hiding? Well, it was ridiculously obvious, really. They could think he was still with the League. As much as he wanted to tell them, shout at them, berate them with the truth, how could he make them believe it? Who amongst them could know with any certainty that he wasn’t lying?
Bear would be an obvious choice because he was an empath, but Bear had said that he couldn’t feel anything from Peter. He would listen sympathetically, but in the end the others might not believe him anyway. That was the trouble with everyone in the group. They trusted each other, but only so far. Only the dyads of lovers showed evidence of any absolute kind of trust -- with one notable exception.
If he could get in to talk to Veleur, maybe he could somehow break through this recent mood and make the connection he knew still lay between them. Much as his heart hoped so, he knew Veleur. When he had made his mind up about anything, he was intractable.
He could go to Archer, foolish as that might seem, and try to find out what had set the young man off in the first place. That might be the best place to begin to untangle what was going on.
Peter paced the width of the corridor, just wishing somebody, anybody, would come out and speak to him. As if in answer to his hopes, he looked up to find Giffen standing at the top of the stairs.
“And what were you off doing?” he asked, but not in a hostile tone.
“After that thing with the quickening, I saw a spirit, or something. She told me to go and fix the church pale.”
“The what?”
“The fence. The fence around the graveyard up on the hill. Oh ... damn. Just damn. I can’t be talking about this with you. It will just make things worse.”
Peter took a step backwards and lowered his hands. If he was going to salvage any of this, the person he had to talk to was Veleur. Anything else would just drive a wedge deeper between them. After all, Veleur had already shown signs of jealousy towards Giffen.
“I know what you mean, really.” Giffen leaned his tall frame against the wall. “But there are a few things you need to know about Veleur -- things I would surely have told you if I had thought about it.”
“Giffen, no. Whatever I need to know, he’ll have to tell me.”
Giffen scowled. “Just like he warned us that you were Maewyn? You really think he’s okay with that? Deep down?”
“He came to find me,” Peter said. “He knew what I was from the very beginning, and he, more than anyone, should know the kind of man that I am.”
Giffen seemed a little taken aback at the vehemence with which Peter spoke. “Perhaps,” he said. “Just consider what he might feel if he thought you had fooled him, if you were with the League all along.”
“But that ... he must know. No. I can’t be talking about this with you. Giffen, please.”
Giffen looked down at the floor. “At the end, to the right, you can find my rooms. If you need somebody. I don’t know if you’re still with them, or not. But I reckon we aren’t exactly going the right way about turning you, even if you are. I will say this, Peter -- you don’t know what they did to him.”
He brushed past Peter and continued on down the corridor, leaving Peter alone again. He watched Giffen go and heard his footsteps move away into the distance. He turned and put the palm of his right hand against Veleur’s door. His face felt flushed and his whole body feverish. It took a conscious effort to focus his eyes upon the glossy paint. He turned around and looked at the wide, uncurtained window overlooking the garden.
The woman from the League had been there. Even now they could be watching him, outlined by the yellow light of the fluorescent tube above his head.
“Veleur?” he said quietly. “Veleur, please. Let me in. Let me explain.” He rapped his knuckle against the thick wood. “Veleur, you can trust me. Please.” His legs felt weak, and he slid to sit with his back against the door. “Veleur, I’m not going anywhere. Let me in.”
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Veleur had never entirely opened up to him. There had always been an invisible barrier, like emotional cling-film, that Peter could never quite get past. He leaned his cheek against the cool, smooth surface of the door. ‘What they did to him’? All he could see in his mind’s eye was the flash of fire as the power poured upwards from the earth and through his body -- a feeling that had taught him for the first time just what ‘ecstasy’ means.
He needed Veleur; he wanted Veleur so much he couldn’t piece together the rational thoughts he needed to work out how to get to him. How to really get to him. The door seemed to be getting stronger by the minute -- or to put the issue more logically, he was feeling weaker and weaker.
Inside the room, he heard a scuffle. The door flew open, sprawling him across the carpet. Veleur raced out and jogged smoothly down the hall and off down the stairs.
Peter struggled to his feet. “Now what the ...”
Wolfy pounded around the bend of the corridor and tore past him after Veleur. Peter could hear the massive front door swing open, and he moved to the head of the stairs. “What the ...”
Roman was behind him, without having made a sound. “Tania has called the soldiers,” he said. “She needs them.”
Archer passed them and went down the stairs. These were the soldiers, apparently -- two elves and a young Australian thug. God help Tania, whoever she might be.
“Keep an eye on him,” Archer said as he led Wolfy and Veleur out, neither of them offering so much as a backward glance.
Peter didn’t have to guess too hard to realize that meant him. The door slammed hard. Veleur hadn’t even looked at him, not once. Peter knew there was no point trying to follow them, much as it rankled to wait behind like some spurned war-wife. He turned to Roman and saw Giffen was there, as well.
“There’s a hunt,” Giffen said.
“A hunt?”
“An unseelie elf has murdered. Normal justice could never apply.”
“So they catch him?”
“They kill him.”
Peter looked down on the inside of the dark, closed door.
“Nothing more for us to do,” Giffen said with a resigned shrug. “I guess I’ll be the only one left to see if you hang in with us, or go skulking back to your League masters.”
It seemed like Giffen was speaking more in jest than accusation, but Peter had so many pointless emotions running around inside him that it was almost a relief to have an outlet. He turned fully around.
“The League? I never knew them that well, but you know, if they can’t take you down, they must be a joke. Because you lot haven’t got a clue.”
Roman turned to him. “Oh, do enlighten me,” he said sardonically. “What is it exactly that we have missed?”
“So I’m a League plant, am I? What for, what to get?”
“The League can’t work free magic. They sent you to find out how.”
“Oh, brilliant. They send someone immune to magic to learn the details of your instruction technique.”
“To sabotage the house.”
“And you’re stopping me from doing that ... how? You don’t know why I’m here, you’re not trying to find out, and you’re leaving me wandering around the place. Well, that’s just bloody brilliant. The forces of darkness must just curl up and die at the very thought of your immaculate might and efficiency.”
Roman was glaring two holes in him, but was distracted by Giffen’s snort of suppressed laughter.
“He’s got you there, mate,” Giffen said. In a loud aside to Peter, he added, “I did suggest that they might like to hear the other side of the story, but a mere unp
artnered human isn’t really a full member of the club, you know.”
“Oh, I’m well sick of your whining, Giffen. You are treated the same as everybody else. As are you, Peter. You are Veleur’s partner, and so you have a right to be in this house, whatever else you might be doing. But don’t expect me to be pleased about it.”
Roman’s voice stayed quiet and was all the more menacing for it. “And as you and Giffen have so much in common, he can have the job of keeping an eye on you.” He turned back to Giffen. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Roman stalked away down the corridor.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Giffen said. He was lying slumped on the leather sofa as Peter drifted about the room.
Peter had never found it easy to put his thoughts together sitting still.
“Archer sees Marley going to the church, comes across me, and thinks we’re meeting up. Does his best to fry me, gets whammied with some spell that stops his fire, and comes back to expose me as a liar and Judas.”
“In essence.”
“The lying part being because I whammied him and I’m pretending to not have the art.”
“Yup.” Giffen was incorrigibly blasé in his mannerisms, but Peter thought he had his attention all the same.
“It must have been the League. Where there’s one, there’s bound to be others.”
“They can’t work free magic, just what we inaccurately call alchemy -- spells cast and bound to objects. That wasn’t what happened to him. It was a cast spell to just knock him back for a while -- a well-cast one, at that.”
“It could have been the Marys,” Peter mused. “The Marys, I reckon they’re ghosts.”
“Kid, I hate to tell you this,” Giffen said, “but there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“I saw them when I was out during the quickening. They told me their names, they told me to fix the pale, and their tombstones are up on that hill. I haven’t seen them since, but I have to believe my own eyes, not what anyone else tells me.”
Giffen left that idea alone, but it was obvious he though Peter’s insanity a better bet than ghosts. Peter wandered around the glass-fronted shelves, looking at the outlines of the books within. Magic, fine -- but no ghosts. That didn’t seem right.
“So, what’re you going to do?”
“Well, depending on the unconditional support of Veleur would be nice, but it’s pretty apparent that I’m in love with what we’re meant to be together, not what we currently are. At the first hint of trouble, he believed the worst, clammed up, and disappeared.”
“To be fair, the current queen summoned him. You don’t ignore that.”
Peter opened one of the bookcases and looked at the cracked leather spines of the disparately sized books lined up inside.
“All the same, it’s clear the League is up to something. They could have reeled me in at anytime. I was all but destitute on the streets of London before Veleur came back for me. They waited until I was here before making themselves known. I figure they’re working up to asking me to do something, get something from this house -- and all I can think of doing is trying to figure out what that might be.”
Of course, if he were a League mole, that would be the best cover story he could come up with for getting hold of whatever it was. Peter walked over to the foot of the sofa.
“Do you believe me, Gif?”
“To be honest -- no.”
“Are you going to stop me?”
“Hell, no. I’ll just watch. You do what you gotta do.” Giffen crossed one long leg over the other and lay back with a smile. “I’m rather enjoying not having the faintest idea what you’re up to, and if that gets me in trouble, it won’t be for the first time. I’ll just tell you one thing. A lot of the people in this house act like real arseholes most of the time, but they’ve saved a lot of lives, and deep down they’re an okay lot. So if you’re up to doing them any harm, you had better not turn your back on me.”
He said it all in a relaxed drawl, but there was a serious core to his warning.
“You think I want to hurt them?”
Giffen shook his head. “Nah, my best guess is that you’re a dupe. You’re meant to come in here and stir things up, give them a chink they can work on to rip us apart once and for all. It’s no real secret that Scott House is the Society’s weak point. We’ve never really sorted our shit out and learnt how to work together. So you’ll distract us, and then they’ll rip our heads off. It’ll be something a little more specific than that, and keeping an eye on you might just help me figure out what.”
“So what stops them from just coming in and doing it themselves?”
“The ward of Merrin around these grounds. The previous queen cast it, and it means only those we invite can even step onto the grounds, and nothing that belongs here can be carried outside. So there is something in what you say. You were invited in here, and there are two obvious options: you brought something in, or you’re meant to take something out. Next time you have an assignation with a League minion, you might want to ask about that.”
Chapter Seven
Peter spent the next few days thoroughly investigating the large house and its outbuildings. Bear was quietly compliant, turning up with sandwiches and drinks and making whatever suggestions occurred to him. Giffen had less to say unless it was off the topic of the search, but he was normally present. Roman locked the doors to his own suite and remained within. It was clear after a few days that there was very little of obvious value other than the contents of the library. It was also clear to Peter that something was wrong with him.
He experienced sensations of heat and sudden chills. At night he could barely sleep. It was becoming increasingly difficult to focus his thoughts on anything but Veleur. Nobody seemed to know how much longer he would be gone.
“Until it’s done,” Giffen said. “It’s not improving Roman’s mood any, either. God knows why; that Archer’s nothing but a little scrote. Bear at least manages to put up with these little separations without taking it out on anyone else.”
Peter turned his attention to the books, and it was quite a formidable task. Many were in some form of English, but an equal number were not. Most were obviously very old, and he took time out to go to the shops to get some cotton gloves to handle them with. After quick triage, he started to make the best sense he could, starting with those books that the League would be more likely to know of.
Two long days had passed, his task barely begun and of dubious worth anyway, and midnight had just passed. He pored over the pages of a book whose pages had darkened and ink faded to an almost indistinguishable shade of brown.
Giffen wandered past listlessly. “You read church Latin?” he commented.
“Where do League officers come from?” Peter asked rhetorically, without looking up.
“Oh, certain families and cults, the devout, and ex ... oh.”
Peter wasn’t paying a great deal of attention, as a passage had secured his attention. He would translate it roughly as ‘the binding of spirits and their use in great ... works’?
“Were you really?”
Peter scowled and gave up for the moment. “What?” He sighed and stretched to relieve the ache in his back.
“A priest?”
“For a little over a year, I served the parish of March,” he said. “And a rather poor job I did of it. But the seven years in the seminary did wonders for my Latin. Antonius here seems to disagree with you on the matter of ghosts, too, you know.”
“Well, church magic. They study it at several of the continental houses, but it is a terrible melange of parable, superstition, and the smallest germs of knowledge.”
“So why are there so many old books here? I’m pretty sure some of them should be getting proper conservation and care.”
“The library of Merrin,” Giffen said as he came to stand opposite Peter across the tall drafting table. “She was a historian of some note, but after she died, the books of value all went to London House.
This is just the rump, the bits and pieces they didn’t want.”
Peter couldn’t help but feel he had a bit too much in common with the books. Everyone in the house, in fact, was just rattling around at loose ends. The text blurred before his eyes as he felt a hot sensation prickle across his skin.
“That’ll do for today,” Peter said as he gently closed the old tome’s cracked covers and replaced it on the shelf. He could keep his low spirits from showing. It was late; he felt ill and tired; and in any real way, he was alone. It seemed ridiculous to pine for Veleur, who was clearly acting like a perfect fool. But in the end, so much in life comes down to faith. Peter had faith that if he acted according to his conscience, he would never be distanced from God; he had faith that he was meant to be with Veleur and that somehow Veleur would come to his senses long enough for that to happen. Until then, he simply had to find someway to pass through his current purgatory productively.
“I’m keeping you up,” Peter said as he picked up his jacket.
“I don’t sleep much anyway. Besides ...” Giffen grinned. “... perhaps I should be keeping an eye on you twenty-four/seven. Who knows, you might be sneaking out the window and getting up to all sorts of trouble.”
Peter knew that Giffen’s innuendoes were largely in jest, but he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the attention. But Giffen had set him up one of the empty rooms to stay in, as Veleur clearly didn’t want him in his own ivory-toned domain. Peter just sighed. “You’ll just have to take that chance,” he said as he headed out of the room.
As he walked up the stairs, Peter’s vision blurred over. He clutched the banister and stood a while. Something was seriously wrong, and what kind of idiot was he to say nothing about it? If it was something to do to with the arts of magic, he was hardly likely to work it out for himself. And if it was a perfectly ordinary ... brain tumour or something, then he wasn’t doing himself any favours just putting up with it.
Maewyn's Prophecy: Pilgrim Heart Page 6
