Winter’s Light

by M. J. Hearle

  He turned and asked the other guard something. The guard scowled past Marcel so he too could see Winter sitting in the back. Feeling uncomfortable with the attention, she sank lower in her seat, hands twisting in her lap.

  Marcel said something further, and the guard reluctantly stepped back from the car, barking an order to the other guard to do the same.

  ‘You see? That wasn’t too painful, was it?’ Marcel said. ‘Now we eat and drink and get out of this damned car.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ Jasmine said, stretching her arms out in front of her. Winter was also tired of being cooped up in a small, confined place. First the sixteen hour car ride down from Hagan’s Bluff, then the flight, followed by another four hours on the road. That was a lot of travel for a girl who wasn’t used to much more than driving ten minutes at a time. An uncomfortable numbness had seeped into her backside which no amount of wriggling about seemed to cure. Her neck also felt stiff and sore.

  Despite this, Winter didn’t share Jasmine’s enthusiasm for venturing outside. The car might be restrictive, but it had grown familiar to her, and thus safe. Outside the door was nothing but uncertainty. As they drove through the entrance into the main courtyard, it wasn’t the dangers outside Castle Vled’s walls – the Skivers and Demori – that played upon her fears, but the unknown danger within. Winter was now with the Bane.

  Chapter 40

  As they passed through the courtyard towards the stables, Winter studied the castle. There were two main buildings with tall arched wooden doors leading into them: the great hall and the keep, Marcel explained. Adjoining these imposing stone structures were smaller buildings – offices and such. While these were clearly modern additions, the architect had gone to great lengths to blend these constructions in with the original medieval dwellings.

  The three towers were positioned roughly on the north, east and west points of the compass – the keep occupying the southern point. Winter could just make out the shapes of these towers against the sky. Twilight seemed not to exist in this part of the world, night falling with the speed of a book being snapped shut.

  Marcel parked in the converted stables next to a dozen or so other vans of the same make and model and switched off the engine.

  ‘Leave your bags, my friends,’ he said. ‘The Bonnaires will take them to your rooms.’

  ‘Bonnaires?’ Jasmine asked, brow puckered in curiosity.

  ‘Forgive my turn of speech. We are all Bonnaires in Castle Vled,’ Marcel said, his eyes straying to Sam. Winter caught the stiff nod Sam gave in response before she was nudged out of the car by Jasmine.

  ‘C’mon, I need the bathroom. Like – desperately!’

  They piled out of the car, both girls giving a little jump as a tall figure stepped from the shadows. As spindly as a scarecrow, the white-haired man in front of them had a grey, pinched face, freakishly bright eyes, and was dressed in a suit so old-fashioned, it might have suggested a sense of whimsy, if not for the wearer’s mouth; stern, small to the point of invisibility and not shaped for smiling.

  ‘Good evening, my name is Radermire, head of the household staff,’ he said in an accent that wasn’t French or Russian and may have been German. ‘On behalf of Mistress Bonnaire I would like to welcome you to Castle Vled.’

  ‘Ah . . . Radermire, I trust you have organised a feast for my friends and I?’ Marcel said, coming around the side of the car.

  Radermire nodded at Marcel. ‘Dinner will be served in the dining hall at approximately six pm. After you refresh yourselves I suggest you make your way directly to the keep. Madame will be waiting for you there.’ As he spoke his cold appraisal shifted from Sam to Jasmine and finally to Winter, where it lingered for a second longer than she liked.

  ‘A word of warning,’ he continued, his tone forbidding. ‘During your stay with us, the Bonnaires will do everything in their power to ensure your safety. However, should you venture beyond the castle walls, we will not be responsible for anything that might happen to you.’ His thin lips twitched into a smirk.

  ‘Of course, of course. We are all aware of the dangers,’ Marcel said, his booming voice and personality seeming even larger and more cheerful next to Radermire’s gloom. ‘Now, if there is nothing else, we must refresh ourselves. Follow me my lovely ladies, and I shall take you to the facilities. If you have any questions along the way, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

  Safe inside the walls, Marcel seemed eager to resume acting as Jasmine and Winter’s unofficial tour guide. Already he was gesturing to the great hall and explaining how King Louis XIV had ordered the beheading of a cook there after being served cold soup.

  ‘Nice meeting you, Mr Radermire,’ Winter said as she passed him.

  ‘It is just Radermire.’ He gave a perfunctory little bow, his gaze never leaving Winter’s. Glancing back just before they entered the servants’ quarters to wash up, she was unnerved to see he hadn’t moved and was still staring at her, the whites of his eyes luminescent in the stable’s murk.

  ‘You mean they’re just beyond the wall? Floating in the air? How many?’ Jasmine asked in a high-pitched voice, drying her hands with a towel.

  Worried about scaring her, Winter didn’t tell her there had been more Skivers than she could count. ‘A lot.’

  Jasmine folded the towel in silence, frowning thoughtfully. Not possessing Winter’s gift of the Sight, she’d never seen the Skivers so had only Winter’s words and her own imagination to go by. Judging by the look on her face, this was apparently enough to form a pretty scary picture.

  ‘But they can’t get in,’ she said, looking to Winter for verification. ‘Right? They’re stuck outside?’

  Winter shrugged, taking the towel from Jasmine and drying her own hands. ‘I think so.’

  ‘And even if they did – my occu-thingy is blue, right? I’m safe? So are you?’ She paused before adding, ‘And Sam?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re not here for us.’ Winter flexed the Sight just quickly to check this was still the case and was comforted by the strong blue flames dancing in Jasmine’s pupils. The idea of seeing the red Occuluma in her eyes – in Sam’s – was horrifying.

  Jasmine exhaled, the lines in her forehead smoothing. ‘Well, I guess we shouldn’t worry about it, then. I mean if none of us are in danger then we’ve got nothing to fear, right? Still, not exactly a good omen.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Winter said, thinking that was about as big an understatement as you could make. She frowned at her reflection in the spotty mirror over the basin. Her skin was pale and her hair’s deep red colour seemed flatter somehow. As though she’d lost some of her colour and vitality. The bags under her eyes were there and looked heavier. Still, the light in her eyes was a vivid blue and that was all that mattered. She could worry about looking pretty later.

  ‘Let’s go meet this mysterious Madame Bonnaire,’ she said, opening the door for Jasmine.

  ‘If she’s anything like that Radermire guy, I’m sure she’ll be a ball of fun,’ Jasmine responded with a roll of her eyes.

  Chapter 41

  The first few drops started to fall just as they came into view of the steps leading up to the keep’s entrance. The wall fanned out on either side of the crumbling stone structure, disappearing into the darkness like the wings of a giant bird. Rose-coloured lights glowed in the arched windows, giving the keep a malevolent character. Lightning suddenly forked across the sky directly above them, followed by a tooth-rattling crack of thunder. The lights sputtered and went out. Only the flickering torches along the parapets were visible now. As Winter squinted, picking out the shapes of her friends in the gloom, the smell of burnt copper pricked her nostrils.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Marcel said, his voice floating somewhere ahead of her. ‘The joys of living in a medieval castle.’

  The space in front of them was suddenly washed with white light. Elena was holding a torch in her hand. ‘This way,’ she said, motioning with the torch towards the steps.

  ‘What would we do wit
hout you, comrade?’ Marcel said, slapping Elena on the back. She regarded him with a bored expression, which only seemed to amuse him further.

  Watching Marcel push open the doors, Winter was reminded of a movie she’d caught one sleepless night. It was The Tomb of Dracula, and began with the hero and heroine stepping through a set of medieval doors a lot like the ones she was now approaching.

  Dracula wasn’t there to greet them as they stepped inside. Instead, there were two more guards – Bonnaires as Marcel would have called them – holding lamps, crossbows slung around their middles. These two po-faced men with identical thick black beards gave Winter, Jasmine and Sam the once over before stepping aside, revealing a floating staircase leading up to a mezzanine level. The top of an archway was visible behind the banister. Winter could see firelight dancing along the borders of the archway, and heard the sound of plates and cutlery clinking together.

  Marcel grabbed a lamp off one of the Bonnaires and started speaking as they took the stairs. His voice echoed around the chamber, bouncing from the walls. The subject of his talk was not the history of the castle or the kings and queens who had deigned to visit, but the tall paintings hanging in gilded frames above the stairs, paintings which were invisible until Marcel’s lamp threw them into grim relief.

  ‘The pictures to your right depict every patriarch of the Bonnaire family starting with Victor Bonnaire, the father of us all.’

  The lamp’s ghostly light crept over a faded oil portrait of a middle-aged man with white hair and sharp, unappealing features. His nose was too long, his chin too pointed and his eyes too big. Victor seemed to be staring maliciously out from the canvas as though daring the viewer to meet his gaze. Winter could see Caleb’s features in Victor, in the hollow of his cheeks and the crooked, mean mouth peeking out from beneath the white moustache.

  Father of us all, Marcel had said, the phrasing sticking in Winter’s mind like a burr. Up until this point, she had regarded Marcel, if not affectionately, then as something of a benign entity. She liked his big smile and friendly personality. With that one comment, though, he had effectively darkened her perception of him. Anyone who held Victor up as some kind of saint was not to be trusted.

  ‘. . . of course the Galerie Schmit has lobbied tirelessly for an opportunity to exhibit the collection, but Madame believes as long as the castle remains in the Bonnaire name then so should the family portraits.’ He paused, glancing back at them. Satisfied with their appropriate expressions of curiosity, he continued. ‘Next we have Antoine and his son Christophe.’ They drew closer to the next two paintings, each a little smaller than Victor’s. Winter wondered if this had been on purpose.

  ‘It was Antoine who arranged for the purchase of Castle Vled when the original owners became embroiled in scandal.’

  ‘What sort of scandal?’ Jasmine asked, always eager for some juicy gossip – even if that gossip was more than a century old.

  Marcel lowered his voice. ‘A baron named Alistair Le Roache had been living here for some years when the state authorities arrested him. Apparently some girls from the village had gone missing, their mutilated bodies turning up later.’ His eyes flicked momentarily to Elena before adding in a hushed, dramatic manner, ‘He was executed as a warlock.’

  Giving his audience a moment to dwell on this, Marcel then resumed the art history lecture, mentioning the various artists’ use of brush stroke to evoke mood and character. Jasmine raised her eyebrows sceptically at Winter – can you believe this guy?

  Winter studied the portraits of Christophe and Antoine as she passed below them. Both men were less ghastly-looking than Victor, yet neither was conventionally attractive. They might have been if their expressions were less forbidding, their eyes less dark. Antoine was the son of Madeleine, making him Blake’s half-brother, so some of their mother’s beauty softened his features, his mouth especially was more generous, less cruel, yet he was clearly his father’s son.

  ‘So, that’s where you get your looks,’ Jasmine whispered to Sam.

  ‘I always thought in the back of my mind I might be adopted,’ Winter heard him reply in a tone so dry she couldn’t be sure if he was joking or not.

  ‘And of course, Caleb Bennet,’ Marcel said, looking back sympathetically at Sam.

  Sam nodded, but didn’t pause to regard his father’s portrait. Winter didn’t want to see Caleb’s face again, but couldn’t help looking, just as she couldn’t help looking up at the Skivers earlier. Something inside her clearly had an appetite for horror.

  The man in the gilded frame was not the wild-eyed fanatic who had kept her prisoner. This Caleb was younger, a man in his late thirties – his features, while sharp like his forebears, were not skull-like yet; his eyes did not stare from grey sunken sockets as Winter remembered them. The years between the painting of this portrait and when their paths had crossed had been unkind to Caleb. Only that dangerous light sparkling in the depths of his black pupils was consistent. The artist had managed to capture that aspect perfectly.

  ‘And that concludes our art history portion of the tour,’ Marcel said, holding up the lamp for them as they stepped off the staircase onto the shadowy mezzanine. ‘If you will follow the lovely Elena through the archway, we now enter my favourite room in the castle. The dining hall.’

  ‘I feel like I’m at a theme park. The Haunted Mansion or something,’ Jasmine whispered in Winter’s ear when they had moved away from Marcel. ‘Any second now a guy in a sheet is going to pop out.’

  Elena and Sam disappeared through the archway and the two girls followed. Winter heard Jasmine’s short intake of breath and felt her own heart skip a beat.

  There was a dragon in front of them.

  It sat crouched at the far end of the chamber, flames roaring in its gaping mouth. Winter had never seen a fireplace like it. Standing taller than she was, the dragon fireplace was carved completely out of stone – eyes, horns and fangs rendered in exacting detail. So lifelike did the dragon’s head appear that at any moment Winter expected the thing to twitch and vomit a jet of fire across the chamber towards them.

  ‘Ugly beast, no?’ Marcel said, coming up behind them.

  Winter nodded uneasily in response. Tearing her eyes from the fireplace, she took in the rest of the room. It was a vast stone chamber, the walls and ceiling hidden in shadows. Suddenly a blazing circle materialised out of the darkness halfway up the far eastern wall, winked at them and then disappeared. Lightning outside a stained-glass window. For some reason, the window reminded Winter of Pilgrim’s Lament. The Madonna stared sadly from a jagged shard of coloured glass.

  ‘This place just keeps getting better and better,’ Jasmine whispered with false bravado.

  ‘Where’s the guy in the sheet?’ she replied, smiling weakly.

  Their voices hung in the air. The only other sounds were the crackling coming from the dragon’s mouth and the storm outside.

  Winter had been so distracted by the fireplace she hadn’t noticed the appetising aroma hanging heavily in the air. Following her nose, she looked to her right and saw just outside the fireplace’s flickering red light a long table spread with an impressive collection of food platters and dishes.

  It was surprising that she hadn’t noticed it immediately as it was the only real fixture in this immense space. Four candelabras had been placed along the table to offer enough light for her to quickly guess that almost every kind of animal and vegetable seemed to be on offer. Looking at the food, her stomach growled in anticipation, forcibly reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since the questionable cuisine they’d served on the plane.

  ‘They don’t do things by halves here, do they?’ Jasmine said, staring at the table greedily.

  ‘Ah! What did I tell you?’ Marcel clapped his hands together in pleasure. ‘A feast awaits us. We French know how to eat, yes? Please —’

  He was interrupted by the sound of chair legs scraping across stone. All eyes went to the figure seated at the end of the table. Winter’s h
eart began to quicken in nervous apprehension as the figure slowly stood and began to walk towards them. Even Marcel seemed a little nervous in the way he was licking his lips.

  A woman – an elderly woman by her slow, slightly pained amble – stepped out of the shadows. She was dressed entirely in black, not a patch of skin visible. Even her face was covered in a veil, the charcoal lace obscuring her features. She looked like a mourner at a funeral. Like a living shadow. The closer she came towards them, the stronger Winter’s unease grew.

  Marcel turned to them, forcing a smile. ‘Allow me to introduce Madame Magdalene Bonnaire.’

  Chapter 42

  The matriarch of the Bane didn’t speak straightaway. She simply stood regarding the four of them ominously. As the silence stretched on, broken only by the sound of wood popping in the fireplace, she finally said, ‘Thank you for bringing them safely to me, Marcel. I imagine the journey went well?’ Her accented tone was soft, yet carried with it a deceptive strength. This was a woman who would never need to raise her voice; she could command with a whisper. Marcel went to her and gently kissed her proffered gloved hand.

  ‘Very well, Madame. There were no incidents to speak of.’

  ‘I am pleased. And you have brought me back Elena, I see. But not Yuri?’

  ‘Madame,’ Elena said, and Winter was surprised to see her bow her head deferentially. Elena didn’t seem the type to recognise status. ‘My husband will be joining us later tonight.’

  Magdalene Bonnaire nodded, her attention swivelling towards Winter, Jasmine and Sam. Opening her arms, she drew Sam into a stiff embrace. ‘My dear nephew, it’s wonderful to see you again after all these years.’

  ‘It’s good to see you, Aunt.’

  ‘So much sadness. Your father . . . I still mourn him,’ she said, her voice betraying no emotion. ‘He is a martyr to the cause.’