"You're his coafor?"
"Yes. Thede came to the Order soon after we married, when he discovered his gift, and so recording naturally fell to me. Ah, and I haven't even introduced myself. I'm Nedani Tyse, Keeper of the Banebury Grove. I'd love one, thank you, lad," she added, as Griff held up a cup.
"Are you a dryw as well?" Griff asked as he poured, his chin still tucked and shoulders stiff, clearly wanting to be angry because he'd been frightened. "I thought the Keeper was always a dryw, except for here."
"Sometimes the oakfire takes them strongly," the Keeper said. She looked down at her big husband, and smoothed brown curls back from his forehead. "Then it falls to their coafor to manage the day-to-day needs of the Grove, along with recording all visions. Thede will begin to recover himself, now that he's spoken, but he is never fully in this world any more."
This seemed an awful thing to Eluned. The Keeper of the Tasset Grove, near Caerlleon, had been a sharp, humorous man, showing no sign that the poisonous brew of mistletoe and oak bark used to bring on visions had any permanent impact. His official recorder—his coafor—had been his younger brother, and had loved to tease him about whatever he might have said under the influence of the oakfire, since he couldn't remember his visions at all.
"Is it you who sends the ravens?" Griff was still trying to be angry, but revealed his sympathy by dumping several spoonfuls of sugar into the cup of tea he was preparing.
"Rav—?" Keeper Tyse stopped short, then clicked her tongue. "How senseless. Yes, if you're being plagued by ravens, it's most likely members of the Order. I do apologise."
"The folies kill them," Griff added, clearly pleased by the knowledge.
"I gather this appointment would be hotly contested," Aunt Arianne said.
"Oh yes. Outside White Hill Grove, there is none more desirable, but no need to fash yourself. The vampire Makepeace is beloved of the Horned King, and there is no arguing that, even if he doesn't stir himself over the day-to-day duties. Because Forest House has sat empty there has been a deal of talk, but nothing can come of it." Keeper Tyse accepted the cup Griff offered, and bravely took a sugary sip. "The foreseeing will complicate matters a touch."
Aunt Arianne's response to this massive understatement was forestalled by the dryw, who abruptly tried to sit up. Griff stepped forward, and Eluned decided to distract him with a murmured reminder about tunnels. Judging Aunt Arianne safe to be left, she and Eleri made their pardons, and followed their brother's bee-line for the cellar.
By mutual assent they didn't discuss the dryw's pronouncement, but simply began pushing bricks and tapping wood, regretting the sweeping efficiency of the cleaning party, which had left little in the way of helpful dust to betray vampiric entry-points.
It was at least half an hour later when Aunt Arianne tracked them down, finding them all crammed between two of the wine racks, intently pressing bricks.
"Is that wall particularly interesting for some reason?"
"Shiny spots," Eleri replied, steadily winding the dynamo torch they'd fetched for light.
"And they go click!" Griff added, avidly trying another combination. Nothing could have been better designed to soothe over upsets than the prospect of a genuine hidden door. "This can't be a new tunnel, though. This has been here as long as the house."
"Why would there be a tunnel, new or otherwise?"
Eluned started to explain the rumours of underground passages, then broke off as the entire wall between the two racks swung in. Griff let out a crow of triumph and plunged forward, but Eluned managed to catch hold of his collar.
"Could be traps," Eleri said, winding faster in an attempt to boost the inadequate beam of the torch. "Or vampires."
"There's no-one in there," Aunt Arianne said, with a confidence that spoke of night vision and an awareness of blood. "I rather think you've found the hidden safe."
"Safe? This is a whole room!"
Griff wriggled loose, and no traps stopped his excited progress. Aunt Arianne went to find a better light, and they were both proven right, for it was a safe the size of a room, and was full of treasures. Boxes of jewellery. A little cabinet of delicate ornaments. A drawer containing neat stacks of banknotes. A chest of sovereigns. And whorled, golden evidence of the long connection between Forest House and the Great Forest.
"We could have a dragonfly," Griff said, struggling to lift an amasen horn the size of a pumpkin, far larger than any they'd seen on their visit to the Great Forest. "We could have a dragonfly each."
"They did look rather fun, didn't they?" Aunt Arianne said, with an odd note to her voice, but then she added briskly: "I'll have to do a proper inventory. For now, however, there's a few matters I wish to discuss, and there's an hour or less until sunset—presuming that's relevant."
That meant she wanted to go to Hurlstone to talk: surely the safest place, even though there weren't likely to be any raven eavesdroppers in the cellar. Ignoring protests, Eluned chivvied her reluctant siblings into shutting away the hoard and heading upstairs.
"That all belongs to us, to you, right?" Griff asked. "That's what he said."
"Dem Makepeace owns this house and all its contents," Aunt Arianne said, her attention on the roofs surrounding the grove as she lowered her inevitable veil. "He has given me disposition of it, which is not technically the same thing as it belonging to me. Though I expect it will feel much the same in practice."
Eluned followed her gaze, and then nudged Eleri, for a line of eight ravens had hopped forward to the edge of the roof on the left, where the trees were thinnest, bobbing and watching.
Griff, noticing, made a rude gesture. "Sneaky snitches."
"Folies aren't driving them off?" Eleri asked.
"That spot must give them enough time to get away." Eluned considered hunting for a rock and trying her arm, but Aunt Arianne didn't linger, heading for the gate. "Maybe the Order always spies, and ravens are why it's called Hurlstone."
"Since before London?" Griff shook his head.
The bite mark on Aunt Arianne's hand had healed by the previous evening, but she still called the key without difficulty. Eluned stepped eagerly into the lead as her aunt closed the gate behind them, and they slipped through the shielding trees into a sun-drenched afternoon.
Drinking in drowsy perfection, Eluned gazed around at drystone walls and scatters of flowers against a backdrop of trees. But all her satisfaction dropped immediately away because the broken pillar that should hold an automaton was empty.
"Where—?" Eleri began, then wasted no more words, hunting for any sign of the missing experiment.
"Look for the amasen," Aunt Arianne suggested. "Dem Makepeace said it would stay here on guard. Perhaps it rained, and the amasen put Monsieur Doré somewhere dry."
Wondering if a snake would know anything about rust, Eluned gazed vainly around. They spread out through Hurlstone, even Griff daring the possibility of lurking wildlife, and it was he who called out: "Here!" only a short time later. Eluned hurried between waist-high walls, and spotted him standing with the statue—the vampire in rept.
A block of stone rested in the grass a few feet to one side of the vampire, and the automaton was seated on this, paddle-like hands arranged neatly on the stone either side of its narrow thighs, and its metal-jointed ankles crossed. The wooden head was tilted back, as if it was gazing up at the stone girl.
"Would the amasen pose it like that?" Eluned asked doubtfully, as Aunt Arianne and Eleri came up.
"Think it walked?" Eleri reached for the automaton, but Aunt Arianne touched her arm.
"Let's wait. We can talk here, and see if it reacts to us at all. Any sign of the amasen?"
Griff indicated with his chin the exact opposite side of the square of grass from him, and sunlight on gold led the eye to the horned snake, basking in the sun on the highest point of the surrounding wall.
Aunt Arianne inclined her head formally, and they all awkwardly followed her lead, and then sat down with her in the grass, ending u
p in a rough circle with the stone vampire and the automaton, as if all six of them were having a meeting.
"That was Lynsey," Aunt Arianne announced. "Leaving as you arrived."
So much had been happening that Eluned had almost forgotten the one solid lead they'd hoped to pursue—the person who had brought the artificial fulgite commission to their parents. She had barely looked at the tall, blond woman.
"Right one?" Eleri asked.
"Impossible to say. She did not react to me—or to sight of you—with any obvious awareness or guilt. But she has a very interesting connection to pursue."
Unhurriedly, Aunt Arianne took them from Lynsey Blair to Lord Fennington, a person Eluned had heard of mainly for hosting dinner parties on the Tamesas during the autumn feastings. But he apparently funded a great deal of scientific research, and so they agreed it was a good idea to pretend to be interested in going to his school.
"Can we take Melly?" Eleri asked, unexpectedly.
"Melly's left school," Eluned said, surprised. "Why would we take her?"
"Because she's left school. I asked Nabah about it. Melly loves words. She writes poetry. But Melly thinks that she has to look after the store for her father, even though Dem Ktai would far rather she did something she loved. Melly says she can write poetry anywhere."
"But that's true."
"I don't need to keep up school to make automatons. You don't need to go to that atelier you keep talking about: you can draw already. But you know that to keep on alone would be like leaving yourself still a sketch. Half the person you could be, a plant that never got enough water. Why should Melly not be everything she could be because the Crown only pays for schooling until you're sixteen?"
"How does taking her to this Tangleways place help? If it's a boarding school, won't it be more expensive than the school she was already going to?"
"So? We can pay her fees. It's not like we can't afford it."
Eleri waved a hand to encompass a distant room crammed with treasures, but Eluned looked instead at their aunt, ominously silent behind her veil. Would being suddenly rich loosen previously tight purse-strings? Or make her worse?
"I suspect you overlook the small matter of pride, Eleri," Aunt Arianne said, voice quiet but at least not sounding annoyed. "I have no objection to you inviting your friends along on a trip to the country, however. I expect you'll all find a visit to Tangleways enjoyable. The original house was inherited by a brother and sister who spent the rest of their lives competing with extravagant extensions and outbuildings. And then the whole thing passed on to a man of a very odd and secretive nature. It sat empty for a long time after his death."
That word brought them all up against the thing that none of them had spoken of, but which had filled their minds ever since they had returned home. It was Griff who asked, in a shy voice very unlike his usual manner.
"Who would be in charge of us? If—if what the dryw said is right?"
Aunt Arianne didn't answer immediately. Then she reached up and took off her hat and veil, wincing only a little in the deepening haze of the late afternoon light. She wasn't smiling.
"Tante Sabet," she said. "Your great-aunt, Sabet d'Lourien. Once things have settled down, I must take you to Lutèce so you can meet her."
"If you're alive," Eleri said, because Eleri of all of them could.
"If I'm alive." Aunt Arianne glanced up at the girl gazing forever at the sky, and her hand lifted briefly, then she dropped it down. "I own, the shadow of death looms less large when you've recently had your throat torn open. Besides, even if that was what he meant, the pronouncements of dryw are not considered inevitabilities, but instead in the nature of warnings and challenges. Did you notice that there were two separate foretellings?"
Griff straightened. "When he pointed?"
"Yes. Nor are either of those foretellings necessarily for a single person, but Keeper Tyse felt quite certain that the visual indication was to make clear that the second was for one or all of us standing inside the house. Possibly still me, of course, but we'd already established that this undertaking had risks. I must teach you three to shoot, once the trunks I'd put into storage arrive."
Without denying the danger, Aunt Arianne made it all seem far less dramatic, and Eluned felt herself relax even though the acknowledgement hadn't changed anything at all.
"The first foretelling is the larger problem," Aunt Arianne added. "The coafor are obliged to report them, you know, though given the audience we had, I wouldn't be surprised if half the borough is already discussing it over evening meal. Talk of the fate of Albion and a shattered dragon is bound to attract attention—not even counting the Unionist and the aide of Prince Gustav playing witness. That will make quiet investigation a great deal more difficult. Not, I admit, that we've succeeded in escaping notice so far. You'll find when you go upstairs that someone found a way in and started searching the attic, until the folies chased them off. That one bothers me because I didn't notice them. The attic is on the edge of my ability to sense the living, but I can usually tell when someone's up there."
"You think maybe it was a shabti?"
Aunt Arianne smiled at Griff's eager tone. "I hope not, since that would suggest we're at risk of a visit from those sphinxes as well. But at any rate it seems safest to leave Monsieur Doré here, and to never discuss things we particularly don't want overheard anywhere but Hurlstone. How did your tour of the workshops go?"
"Have what parts can be bought now. And recommendation for a foundry able to cast the others. Used up the money."
Eleri had also bought three vices, and it had been lucky Nabah and Melly had been along to help carry them back. But that surely wasn't what their aunt had meant.
"There was lots of talk of haunted automata," Eluned said. "We didn't have to ask, just listen."
"They were making it up to impress each other," Griff put in.
"Maybe. No-one there had seen any automata activing themselves, anyway." As their own automaton continued to sit unmoving—at least while they were there.
"We'll go further tomorrow," Eleri said. "The best workshops are north of the river, near the airship fields. We can look for the one that makes dragonflies."
But Aunt Arianne was shaking her head.
"No, tomorrow we'll be clothes shopping. Because the day after, we're going to the palace to take afternoon tea with Princess Leodhild. And, I hope, hear the results of Dem Makepeace's investigations in Caerlleon."
Thirteen
As Aunt Arianne paid the taxi driver, Eluned carefully straightened her new ankle-length shendy and matching split tunic, immensely aware of the guards standing behind soaring gates, and the crowds of sightseers on the enormous paved area in front of Gwyn Lynn Palace. Only visitors for the palace drove up onto this paved area, but they'd normally have the gates opened for them and drive on through, rather than walk.
Griff, the reason for the eccentricity, was indifferent to their audience, clutching his new sketchbook and spinning in a circle to drink in his surroundings, and then keeping on for several further rotations, delighting in the way his long, pleated shendy flared out into a bell. They were all rather pleased with the new clothes. Mother had been impatient with impractical clothing, so the fine cloth and exact tailoring Aunt Arianne deemed necessary for afternoon tea with a princess became a treat in itself.
It was a pity Aunt Arianne still couldn't quite manage full sunlight, and so looked odd in comparison, though entirely self-possessed as she handed her invitation to the guard standing to the left of the big gates.
"Shall I send for an autocarriage, Dama?" the guard asked, barely glancing at the invitation, and instead marking a list.
"We wished to take our time admiring the bridge," Aunt Arianne said. "If that's permitted."
"Of course, Dama," the guard said, smiling at Griff, who had stopped whirling and was now standing on tip-toe to better view the three finials that crowned the centre of the otherwise rather plain gate. A slender, stylised hare
and a coiling dragon bracketed the centre finial, a silvery triskelion, three delicate wings springing from a single central point.
The uniformed woman opened a small side gate, and summoned a page from some hidden recess, instructing the girl to take them to Princess Leodhild. In short order they were striding down the perfectly flat paved drive toward the bridge that had had Griff in a welter of excitement for the last two days. Eluned could not pretend to less eagerness, at least for the splendours of the palace, and because she was going to meet one of the Suleviae. Her. Eluned Tenning.
Wanting to rub a few noses in that fact did not fit with the person Eluned tried to be, and so she only briefly allowed herself to picture Retwold School exploding with disbelief and envy. That helped stifle nerves, and with Griff and Eleri by her side even a princess could not be so very daunting. Eluned only had to remind herself of that with every step.
"Two penny tour, damini?" their guide was asking, surveying Aunt Arianne's heavy veil with bland interest.
"Why not?" Aunt Arianne said.
Caught up in not being daunted, Eluned only listened absently to details of the vast parkland surrounding the lake, and spared less than her usual attention on Griff as he delighted in the Three Dragons Bridge, a rather dull flat arch over the widest part of Gwyn Lynn Lake. More than embarrassment was at stake with this visit. They'd had little choice but to trust Aunt Arianne's vampire, given his control over her, and he had clearly intended to pass on to the Suleviae the things he'd found out. The secrecy of their investigation would be inevitably lost if shared among whoever knew how many royal advisors and friends, and the chance of one of Them hearing about clues and a second automaton and hidden fulgite increased with every confidant. Not that Eluned expected to be attacked at the palace, but just by visiting they drew more attention to themselves.
"Step to this side, please, damini," the page was saying. "Car coming."
The Pyramids of London Page 13
