An Unlikely Match

by Sarah M. Eden

  She noted as she looked around that none of those gathered there were among her closest associates. Seldom were all of her friends sleeping or on guard duty at the same time.

  “Gwenllian.”

  She spun at the sound of Father’s voice above her. He stood, the very model of a warrior, halfway up the flight of stairs leading to the tower room.

  “I heard you calling for me, Dadi.” She forced a smile. She had the oddest feeling of foreboding. Do not be absurd, she silently scolded herself. Father did not appear angry or overset or worried. So why did her skin seem to suddenly crawl? “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is,” he replied, holding a hand out to her. “There is something you must do. For all of us.”

  It was a strange thing for him to say. Something that she must do? What did he mean? And for all of us. Everyone at Y Castell? That seemed unlikely, nigh near impossible, even.

  Gwen walked to the stairwell and climbed, placing her fingers in the massive hand of her father. His hand closed around hers, and a deep, chilling shiver snaked down her spine. Gwen impulsively pulled back on her hand, intending to chafe at her cold arms, but her father’s grip tightened.

  “I am cold, Father.”

  “There is a fire built in the room. You will be warm enough.”

  He pulled her rather forcefully up the remaining stairs and led her through the door to the tower room. It had, over the hundred years since Y Castell had been built, served as a bedchamber and was still furnished as such. The large four-poster bed was hung with heavy, velvet curtains. A table and chairs occupied another portion of the room. In the fireplace, built directly into the wall, a fire crackled, but Gwen did not feel any warmer. She had the almost overwhelming urge to wrap her arms around herself the way she had as a child when a storm or a dream had frightened her. But Father had yet to release her hand. His grip, if anything, had tightened further.

  Behind her, Gwen heard the door lock. She turned to see Arwyn ap Bedwyr, dressed in his usual priest’s attire, slip the key into his pocket. Gwen looked from her father to the priest, her heart pounding in her chest. The look the two men exchanged was heavy with unspoken meaning, and suddenly, she felt afraid.

  Arwyn nodded to Gwen’s father before turning and walking to the table. He lifted from its surface a length of deepest black fabric. Out the tower window visible to the awaiting invading army he unfurled it, securing the end he held to nails already driven into the stone along the bottom of the window.

  A black flag? Gwen silently asked herself. Why black? What does that mean?

  “Are you truly willing to do this, Cadoc?” The priest turned back to face them, looking piercingly at Gwen’s father.

  “We are both determined.” Father seemed to be reminding the other man of a previously determined fact. “Y Castell must not fall into the hands of the enemy.”

  The priest nodded. “Then we will protect this land at all costs.”

  “At all costs,” Gwen’s father answered. His hand shifted to wrap around her wrist, his other hand doing the same with her other arm.

  “Dadi?” Gwen whispered, her fear causing her voice to shake.

  He ignored her plea, his eyes focused on Arwyn ap Bedwyr. Gwen watched the priest lift a heavy tome from the table and carry it slowly to a wooden lectern that Gwen had never before seen in that room. The book he carried was not a Bible, she knew immediately. As the priest opened the book, a warmth-stealing chill permeated the room.

  “Dadi!” Gwen pled in anguish. She knew beyond a doubt that something horrible was about to happen if her father did not stop the priest.

  But her father’s reply was directed to the other man. “Begin.”

  * * *

  The closer Nickolas came to The Tower, the stranger the night became. All around him, things and people began to materialize. Ghostly figures dressed in the style of centuries before—Gwen’s time, he was certain—appeared, walking about, working in the open fields around him. Shadowy images of walls and buildings, tools and weapons took wispy form before his eyes. Only their slightly translucent appearance and the fact that Nickolas could walk through these visions indicated they were not real.

  The Tower still stood as real and solid as it always had and glowed more bright by the moment. All around the sinister edifice, an eerie mist re-created the walls of Y Castell as they must have appeared on Nos Galan Gaeaf nearly four hundred years earlier. Serfs and knights, peasants and workers busied themselves in the courtyard.

  The base of The Tower, where the heavy wooden door stood, was now enclosed in the phantom walls of the ancient castle. How solid had the illusions become? Could he simply walk through them?

  “Where is the entrance to the castle?” Nickolas asked a passing specter, but he received no reaction, no response, no acknowledgment. They did not see or hear him, Nickolas realized. Just as Gwen had not.

  Thoughts of Gwen pulled Nickolas’s eyes to The Tower once more. He knew she had gone there. There had to be a way to get inside. He would not leave her there alone.

  Then his gaze fell on a sight that sent chills through every inch of his body. A ghostly black flag hung ominously from a tower window. Nickolas remembered Dafydd’s account all too well. The black flag was hung as a symbol of death, Gwen’s death.

  “No.” Nickolas gasped. Never mind that Gwen was a ghost. Never mind that she could not die again. Desperate to reach her, he ran as fast as he could toward the ghostly castle walls.

  “It is only an illusion,” he told himself.

  He slipped through the misty walls. Nickolas breathed a sigh of relief as he headed toward the outer door of The Tower. Among the phantom figures and ghostly walls, only Nickolas and that tower were physical. He couldn’t simply slip through the heavy door as he had done with the illusionary barrier of Y Castell.

  The Tower’s outer door hadn’t been locked when he’d spent the night inside. He prayed it would not be now.

  He pulled the heavy door open. Its ghostly double did not budge. Nickolas slipped through the door of mist as easily as he had the phantom walls. The once-empty tower was furnished as it must have been the night Gwen died. Several anxious-looking men paced the floor. Everything and everyone inside the very real walls of the old tower was no more substantial than mist rising off a meadow at sunrise. The combination was eerie.

  The ghostly figures around him wore solemn, tense expressions as they sharpened their weaponry. They were living in a castle under siege.

  But where, he asked himself, was Gwen? Was she “alive”? Was he too late?

  A crash like the sound of a chair being toppled echoed from above his head. All around him, the spirits of warriors long dead looked up to the source of the sound. They had heard it too. The sound, then, had occurred in the past. But he could hear it. Was he part of the scene playing out? No one seemed to see him there or notice his presence. Perhaps he was only a spectator, able to see and hear but do nothing. The idea sat cold and painful in his heart.

  He knew where he had to go. Up the stairs to the room Gwen feared most. He instinctively knew she would be there. What place would hold more pain for any person than the room in which she had died?

  Nickolas ran for the stairs only to be felled by the paralyzing coldness that permeated the narrow stairwell.

  Nickolas pulled himself up one step at a time, fighting the freezing pain that hampered his every movement. He sent words of supplication heavenward with increasing frequency and intensity as he pushed closer to his goal. He would need divine intervention if he were to make it there.

  He all but collapsed at the landing, cold sweat trickling down his forehead and between his shoulder blades. He shivered violently. The atmosphere beside the door was beyond cold—it was oppressive, grasping.

  Nickolas leaned heavily against the wall in an attempt to regain his strength. Never had a simple flight of stairs so entirely exhausted him.

  His own drained body was forgotten in the
next moment when a voice, piercingly familiar, penetrated the closed door.

  “Please, Father,” the voice begged. “Please don’t do this.”

  The words, he registered, were Welsh. He heard them not with his ears but almost as if with his very soul. And his soul, despite the limits of his brain, understood what was said. Even if the words had been completely uninterpretable, the tone and voice were unmistakable. Gwen was terrified.

  Nickolas pounded on the door when he found it locked. He shouted to be permitted entrance. But as with the ghosts below him, his efforts had no noticeable effect. Both fists thudded repeatedly on the unyielding door.

  “I cannot come this far and leave her in there to suffer,” Nickolas pleaded in a frustrated and anguished whisper. “A locked door shouldn’t—”

  Locked door.

  Good heavens! What was he pounding for? He had a key—a key hidden inside the statue that Gwen had sworn was erected in apology for whatever those two men had done just beyond the unyielding door.

  “Stop! Please stop!”

  Gwen’s voice begged once more as Nickolas fumbled with the key, using what little strength he still possessed to push it into the ancient lock. With a squeal of protest, the lock turned. Nickolas shoved the door with his shoulder, and it flew open, though the ghostly door remained locked and shut, precisely as the outer door of The Tower had.

  All around the room, heavy pieces of furniture and their exact duplicates in otherworldly form seemed to vie for the space they both occupied. The effect was dizzying, as though he were seeing double and could do nothing to realign the sight.

  At a lectern in the middle of the room, the ghost of a priest—that priest, he was sure—read what sounded and felt like a curse, a spell of darkest, blackest magic, while across the room Gwen was held fast in the enormous arms of a man who, Nickolas knew from sheer deduction, was her father.

  Her eyes were wide with terror as she struggled against him, but the man was twice her size. Dragging her across the room, despite her efforts at stopping him, was proving all too easy for him.

  “You must do this, Gwenllian,” her father barked, momentarily stopping the priest in his recitation. “Y Castell must be saved.”

  “Father, please.” Tears choked Gwen’s words. “I will fight alongside you. I will. I will defend Y Castell. But I do not wish to die this way. Please!”

  Nickolas rushed to her side, intent on pulling her from her father’s lethal embrace. But his arms simply passed through them both, doing nothing to free her from the anguish she was living. How many times had she been through this? Had she endured such terror three hundred ninety-eight times before? He closed his eyes against the horror of the thought, against his own impotence in the face of her suffering.

  There had to be a way. There had to be something he could do, something to save her from enduring this once more. He now knew, based on her own words, that Gwen was going to die in that room, that very night, at the hands of her father and the priest. That, no doubt, was what they had done that had caused so much guilt—the evil act that still haunted The Tower. If Nickolas’s impression of the priest’s role was accurate, this was an attempt to protect their home with the worst sort of witchcraft.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “You will serve us far better this way than as an incompetent fighter,” Gwen’s father grumbled. “Now enough of your protest, child.” He clamped a hand over her mouth. “’Tis an honor to defend one’s home.”

  No sooner had the words left the ghostly man’s mouth than he yelped out in pain and inadvertently released his captive. Gwen ran at full sprint to the door, tugging at the ring that served as a handle.

  “It is open, Gwen!” Nickolas shouted to her, running to where she was struggling. The physical door was, indeed, open. But she, it seemed, could not pass through the still-locked ghostly barrier.

  “She bit me,” Gwen’s father sputtered in shock.

  Good for you, Nickolas silently saluted as he desperately tried to open the door for her. His hands simply passed through, touching nothing, changing nothing.

  “The door is locked, Gwenllian,” the priest told her, his voice calm, almost apologetic. “You must remain inside until this is finished.”

  “No.” She spun around, facing them both.

  Emotional pain like Nickolas had never experienced radiated through him at the expression in her eyes. It was stark and desperate fear.

  “If it is such an honor to die for one’s home”—she snapped her face toward her father—“then you do so. You allow your very soul to be traded for a pile of stone!”

  “You will not defy me in this, girl,” her father angrily retorted.

  “Of course she will,” the priest countered. “But time is short, and you must see that she is made to do her duty.”

  The priest stood in his position at the lectern as if delivering a sermon in church.

  “How dare you!” Nickolas shouted at him, knowing he would make no impact but unable to hold his tongue. “You, a man of God, would mock Him this way!”

  Be ye chastised and warned all ye who disregard the laws of God.

  Those words took on weight. This priest, this fallen, despicable priest, had done more to violate God’s commands than taking his own life. He’d taken the life of an innocent young lady and done so as part of a very ungodly ritual.

  Gwen had returned to tugging at the door, no doubt her panic stealing her ability to realize the futility of her actions. Not ten steps away, her father tore a tablecloth into long, narrow strips.

  The priest’s voice began again, speaking words that chilled Nickolas to his bones. He and Gwen’s father were offering up an innocent soul for the protection of dark forces, vowing to repeat the ritual throughout time in order to continue the protective state.

  That, then, was the reason this was happening once more. They were, in their deaths, fulfilling their vows and forcing Gwen to do the same. Had they, Nickolas wondered fleetingly, returned to this place during their lifetimes as well? Returning to the scene of so much suffering and having to face again and again what they’d done to Gwen would have driven guilt into the coldest of hearts. Suicide probably had seemed a ready escape from such an obligation.

  “Stop her!” the priest suddenly shouted.

  Nickolas turned, along with Gwen’s father, to see her climbing to the window. Laws! She hadn’t jumped out, had she? Was that the reason she wasn’t buried in the churchyard? She had, in desperation, killed herself?

  But she was pulled roughly back inside by her father, her screams for help echoing through the room and, no doubt, into the courtyard below. Did no one hear? Nickolas ran to the window himself. Below, the ghosts of Gwen’s long-ago friends, neighbors, servants, and associates talked to one another, occasionally looking up in confusion. They didn’t understand? Or they did and were unwilling to help? Why did no one do anything?

  “If you would cooperate, child, this would be far easier on us all.”

  Nickolas turned to see Gwen’s father dragging her, though she struggled valiantly, to the bed.

  “Cooperate?” Nickolas spat at him, furious. “You are killing your own child!”

  And I can do nothing to help her.

  The priest began again, and Nickolas wished with all his might he could simply strangle the man and stop his cruel words from killing Gwen. But Arwyn ap Bedwyr had accomplished his horrific curse nearly four hundred times over. What could Nickolas possibly do to change that now?

  The fog that had followed Nickolas from the house began to crawl across the floor of The Tower room. To Nickolas’s surprise, the priest took note of it, pausing long enough to glance at the swirling mist around his ankles.

  “The rest is crucial, Cadoc,” Arwyn said ominously. “There is but one chance. Midnight is nearly upon us.”

  Cadoc nodded and, still cruelly clasping his daughter to him, reached up and yanked back the heavy curtains surrounding the chamber’s bed. The physical curtains, those ex
isting in Nickolas’s time and sphere, moved as well.

  Cadoc pushed Gwen toward the bed. “I hadn’t intended to tie you down, Gwenllian, but you leave me with no other choice. You knocked over a chair rather than sat in it. You bit your own father—”

  “Who is attempting to kill me!” Gwen shot back.

  Same Gwen, Nickolas thought fleetingly. She was no wilting flower to accept her lot meekly.

  All feelings of pride in her fire and bravery fled from Nickolas’s mind as he realized the next truth: Gwen’s father, Cadoc, intended to tie her to the bed so she couldn’t flee. Which meant she had died on that bed. Everything else, he realized, looking around at the now both physical and ghostly items in the room, had remained where they were after Gwen’s death.

  Gwen—his breath caught in his throat at the thought—would have too.

  She wasn’t buried in the courtyard because she hadn’t been buried at all. Nickolas knew that she had been left, tied down, on that very bed. There would be little left after four hundred years, but the thought that she had been given such an undignified final rest was sickening. Despite the sudden nausea he felt, Nickolas’s eyes turned toward the bed where the curtains were pulled back.

  His heart lurched to a halt when he saw, clearly defined, the silhouette of a young lady lying deathly still on the bed. This was no skeleton, neither was it a ghostly illusion, for Gwen the specter was being pushed by her father at the very edge of the bed.

  Nickolas moved to the side of the bed, opposite where Gwen and her father, in ghostly form, struggled. He stared in awe at a lady he recognized in an instant. She looked as though she had only just fallen asleep. Nothing in her coloring or countenance suggested that she was dead, though Nickolas knew she was. Her eyes were closed, but her expression was one of surprise, as if caught off guard by the suddenness of her departure. At least he saw no pain written on her features.