by Jen Holling
“Now,” he said, smiling. “I will repeat my question. What witches reside in Glen Laire?”
Strathwick shook his head as if he hadn’t any idea what Luthias could possibly be referring to. So calm, so composed.
Luthias brought the mallet down hard, driving a wedge into Strathwick’s finger. He heard the bone snap, and blood spurted onto the table. The child shrieked. A righteous fire flared through him. He felt drunk from it. Strathwick inhaled sharply through his nose, his jaw rigid, but he made no other sound. Luthias brought the mallet down again and again, punctuating each blow with a question. And every time the wizard’s answer was the same.
The child cried through it all. “Da! Make him stop! Make him stop!”
“I’m fine, Squirrel,” Strathwick said, his voice tight, his baleful gaze fixed on Luthias.
Luthias started to bring the mallet down again but paused. Strathwick had braced himself for the blow and was clearly irritated to be kept in suspense of the pain. Luthias regarded his subject thoughtfully. The man’s hand was a bloody useless lump. If he were to live—which he would not, of course—it would have to be amputated. His face was lined with pain, and his hair was damp with sweat, but he’d not made a single sound of pain beyond harsh breathing throughout. This wizard was powerful. He would not crack.
Luthias set the bloodstained mallet aside. “Come here…Squirrel is your name?” What a stupid name for a child. But fitting for one who communes with animals.
The child looked at her father with enormous blue eyes. A pretty child, with glossy black curls, plump cheeks, and sinfully long black lashes. A daughter of Eve; the first deserters of Divine Law, as St. Clement called them. In a few years she would bespell grown men to evil.
“What do you want with her?” the wizard asked, his voice rough with pain.
“If you will not talk, perhaps she will.”
When the child would not come, Luthias snatched her wrist, dragging her from where she hid behind her father’s chair. She dug in her heels, and the wizard began to bellow, trying to stand, though the villagers and the penniewinks held him fast.
“I’ll talk,” he said, his voice cracking with pain and defeat. “Just leave her alone.”
After Rose dressed, took her father back to his room, and gave Hagan explicit instructions on caring for him—the Irishman seemed rather in awe of her now and more inclined to listen—she went in search of Hilda. Rose was doing her utmost not to dwell on William and his desertion, so she turned her mind to Tira. What had gone wrong? She thought that perhaps she’d been mistaken: Perhaps she hadn’t heard the woman’s voice. It still did not explain why she’d suffered with her aunt’s pain, but still, maybe she hadn’t truly healed her.
But now she knew that was not true. So what had happened? Hilda had been the only other person present at the birth, and despite what she’d told Roderick, Rose wanted to question the woman herself. There was also the nagging question of what had happened to her father. Everyone had concluded that he’d been attacked because Hagan had heard someone and William had been seen leaving her father’s chambers. But Rose did not credit this. She assumed her father had been attacked because of the gray film she’d seen around his brain. The only other time she’d seen such a thing had been when delivering Liam. Suffocation. There had been no marks on her father’s neck to indicate a strangling, but he’d been feeble from his illness. A pillow pressed over his face would have done the job just as well.
Sir Philip still had not returned with Sir Donnan, but William had indicated he might have an accomplice within Lochlaire. Hilda had already been at Lochlaire when Rose had arrived, but only for a few months—Uncle Roderick had engaged her services when Tira had become pregnant, which was about the same time Alan MacDonell had fallen ill.
Even if Hilda did work for Sir Donnan, it did not explain why she would kill Tira. Perhaps the servant fancied herself in love with Uncle Roderick—he was a comely man, after all—and was ridding herself of the competition? It seemed a rather far-fetched theory, but then people did strange things for love. There was no limit to what she would do to protect William.
Rose knocked at the door to her uncle’s tower apartments. When no one answered, she tried the door and found it open.
“Uncle Roderick? Hilda?” She stepped into the room. There was still no answer. The chamber was dimly lit with two candles and a dying fire. The scent of dried blood and incense hung thick in the air. Rose was immediately struck by how bare the room was, as if all signs of her aunt had been obliterated. She wandered about the room, looking for something, anything that would indicate Tira had inhabited these apartments—her sewing, her needles, her clothes, her comb—anything. But it was all gone, even the chair she’d sat on. Why would Roderick dispose of her things, and so quickly? The answer came to Rose with sudden, startling clarity. Because of Isobel. Isobel could touch objects and uncover all manner of information.
This opened up new, more sinister possibilities. Uncle Roderick? A witch? She remembered the things Tira had screamed during her labor. It will kill me! He put it in there—it’s unnatural! It’s a monster! Could it be that Tira knew something and could not be allowed to live? Her heart beating erratically, Rose returned to the door and shut it, then began methodically searching the room, opening cabinets, pushing aside the Turkey rugs to tap on the floorboards. Nothing. She went to the bedchamber and found that door locked.
Her hands shook as she located a stiletto blade of her uncle’s and picked the lock. Where was Uncle Roderick? What would he do if he found her in here, rifling through his things? She felt time slipping away, and yet she had to find something, some proof of this if anyone was to believe her. She wasn’t even certain she believed it.
The bedchamber was elaborately appointed, the bed piled high with furs and velvet coverlets trimmed in gold. Thick Turkey carpets covered the floor and walls. The ceiling was carved and painted with gold and red paint. As if he were already the chieftain.
Rose circled the room, searching everything. When again she found nothing, she moved the carpets aside and tapped the floorboards with a cane she’d found. She finally found what she searched for—a hollow knock. She knelt, sliding the stiletto in and around the sides of the floorboard. It pried up easily.
She fetched a candle and held it over the dark recess. Several dark shapes rested inside the hole. One item at a time, she removed the paraphernalia. A wand made of black glass, a small black bowl, smooth and gleaming like ebony. Inside the bowl rested scores of pins and three rusty nails. Also inside the recess were a small ivory casket and two lumps of dirty wax pierced through with long pins.
Rose studied the wax lumps uneasily. Both contained embedded objects—hair, fingernails, and other unidentifiable things—and a rusty substance streaked them. Blood. Hair protruded from the tops of the wax. One was a wad of black hair, as if gathered from a comb, and the other, a dark auburn tuft streaked with gray, clearly cut with shears. Both effigies were anatomically correct—one with a phallus, and the other, the black-haired one, with breasts. Rose noted on closer inspection that on the auburn one, nail parings had been placed along the base, as toenails.
She stared down at them in horrified revulsion, understanding what she held in her hands. Dark magic. Effigies her uncle used in his spells. The auburn one must be her father. Who was the black-haired one? She fingered the strands. Too long to be William or Drake; both wore their hair short. Both effigies had long pins piercing them. Rose was frozen with indecision, uncertain what to do with them. Instinct urged her to destroy them, but she feared that anything she did to them would harm the persons they represented in some manner she couldn’t begin to imagine.
She peered under the floorboards again and saw something else—a dark rectangle. She drew out a black leather book. The pages were sewn in, and the scrawl was Gaelic. Roderick’s grimoire. Rose paged through the dark spells with growing horror, stopping at one for summoning demon incubus to set on a victim—to suck the life f
rom them. A loose page fluttered to the floor. The paper was different—not parchment but smooth vellum, the corner torn. She unfolded it with trembling hands and immediately recognized her mother’s handwriting. The first line read, I think Roderick is not all he seems…
Rose heard movement in the next room. Quickly she replaced the objects in the recess, slid the floorboard in place, and covered it with the carpet. She kicked the cane away and hid the stiletto behind her back just as the door to the bedchamber opened.
It was her uncle, stunned into immobility at finding her in his bedchamber. His gaze immediately went to the floor, then darted back up to her eyes. He held his son swaddled in his arms. Liam cried weakly, a strange, warbling cry that raised the hair on Rose’s neck and arms. What was it? Was it a child? Or some product of black magic?
“What are you doing in here?” her uncle asked, scanning the room, eyes narrowed, looking for anything out of place. Murderer. Rose saw him with new eyes. Greedy, scheming, evil, out to ruin her life.
“I was looking for Hilda.”
“Why?”
“Because she was there when I delivered Liam. I thought she might be able to tell more about what happened after I healed Tira.”
“She left after Tira died.”
Rose’s heart stuttered. “Left?”
His eyes were flat, his face expressionless. “Aye. I didna need her any longer and sent her away.”
“Who is taking care of Liam?”
Roderick gazed down at his son. A small, pale fist waved from the swaddling. “He has a wet nurse. She’s in the kitchens right now. Not that it matters…he’s dying.”
The urge to cross the room and pull back the swaddling to examine the child herself was strong, but Rose did not trust her uncle anymore, and besides, she hid a knife behind her back.
“What is wrong with him?” she asked.
“I know not…I thought Strathwick healed him.” When he looked up at her, his face was hard, full of accusation and betrayal. “This is proof he’s a charlatan.”
“No. What he saved the baby from was strangulation. Liam was suffocated by the cord. Whatever ails him now developed later and can probably still be healed.”
Roderick regarded her for a long moment. “You’re no charlatan. I saw how you…resurrected Alan.”
“I didn’t resurrect him. He wasn’t dead.”
Her uncle’s eyes glinted, but he made no reply to that. His gaze swept the room again, then he looked her up and down. “What are you hiding behind your back?”
Rose’s fingers clenched around the stiletto’s hilt. “Nothing.”
“If you were looking for Hilda, why were you in my bedchamber with the door closed?”
Rose could think of no good answer to that. “Th-the door was closed?”
He gave her a reproachful look, then gazed back down at his son. “Will you heal him, Rose?”
She looked from her uncle to the bundle in his arms. “Perhaps…though I cannot now.”
“Why?”
“Because I take on the illness, you saw that. And I cannot do that now. I must remain strong.”
“Why?”
“Someone is trying to kill my father.”
As she spoke, she heard the soft tapping of toenails, and Conan’s black nose appeared from behind Roderick’s legs. Rose’s free hand went to her shoulder, remembering the marks that had been there, bruises, just like her father’s, present after a night spent with Conan in her bed. And now that she thought back, one of the dogs Roderick had given his brother had always been present when her father had had the nightmares. And when the bruises had appeared, Alan had always felt worse, weaker, more feeble. Just as Rose had been nearly overcome with lethargy. The incubus.
Rose gripped the stiletto hilt tighter, her heart fluttering madly with fear. She knew too much, and she was fairly certain her uncle was aware of it. Tira and Hilda likely had known too much, too—and one was dead, the other had disappeared. And what of William? She had been upset and hurt at his abrupt departure, but she’d refused to examine it, like so many other things in her life, putting her mind to other tasks instead. But had he departed voluntarily? Whom did the other wax lump represent?
“Why did Lord Strathwick leave?”
Roderick shook his head slowly. “I know not.”
“I think you do.” Rose crossed the room until she stood in front of her uncle. She looked down at Liam. He seemed shrunken, smaller than he’d been when she’d delivered him. His pinched face had a bluish cast. He squalled suddenly, an odd, quavering cry.
Rose called on her magic, passing her hand over the infant. His color was a pale, wavering orange, like fading sunlight. The area around his chest was black and twisted, writhing like serpents. Rose glanced up at her uncle. What was Liam? A product of dark magic? Had Tira’s ravings been more than labor pain?
“I can heal this,” she said.
Roderick’s copper brows raised with hope, and he held the child out to her. Rose did not take him.
“I will heal him. But not unless you tell me why Strathwick left and where he is now. Then you will take Liam and leave Lochlaire. Forever.”
He stared at her for a long moment, a mask falling down over his face. He moved away from her, crossing to the bed and laying Liam in the center of it. Rose clenched her fist around the stiletto, certain she would soon be forced to use it.
He turned away from the bed and faced her. “Why would you be wanting me to leave, lass?” He came toward her, hands unencumbered, his pace unhurried.
Rose backed away, toward the door leading to the privy chamber. “Don’t come any closer.” She brought the knife out in front of her, brandishing it at him.
His pace did not let up. “You’ve been meddling about.” He tapped his foot on the rug where she’d found his magic paraphernalia. “And you think you understand things, but you do not.”
Rose continued backing away, clutching the blade with both hands. “I understand you’re a murderer! You had my mother murdered because she knew what you are. You’re trying to murder my father. You murdered Tira and probably Hilda. You disposed of all their things so Isobel cannot discover the truth.”
His eyes widened. “You are clever. Too clever.”
He came at her fast. Rose stabbed at him, but he caught her wrist, twisting it and swiping her legs from beneath her. She fell hard onto one hip and knee, her arm wrenching awkwardly in his grasp. Her fingers sprang open, and the stiletto clattered to the floor.
“There,” he said pleasantly, pulling her to her feet. “I dislike talking to someone who is threatening me.” He shoved her back into the bedchamber. “I will bargain with you but not at knifepoint. You heal my son, and I will tell you where Strathwick is.”
Rose looked to the bed, where Liam made soft whimpering noises. Healing the child would incapacitate her, leave her at her uncle’s mercy. He knew this, of course.
“I won’t heal him here. I must have someone present.”
He gave her a patronizing smile. “I don’t think so. You agree to heal him now, and I will give you my word that you will recover in safety. I will also tell you about Strathwick.”
Rose’s palms sweat. Her heart hammered in her ears. She would not leave this room alive, whether she healed his son or not. He would not tell her all of these things if he planned to let her live.
“I suggest you accept my offer. Strathwick’s time is running out.”
Rose’s heart leapt. William. What had Roderick done to him? Suddenly nothing else mattered.
“Very well.” Rose’s heart calmed as a course of action opened to her, one that she would never have considered before but was vital now. One her uncle would never suspect her of considering, or being capable of.
Rose crossed to the bed and stared down at the frail child. “What is he?”
“He’s a wean, of course.” Roderick sounded mildly offended. “You speak of the nonsense Tira spouted? He’s no monster. I used spells to help her conceive and
ensure it was a son—but nothing more.”
Rose arched a brow. “Spells? No one guessed you were witch. Have you always been? Plotting and hiding?”
“Not always. My mother had a gift for spellcraft and taught me. I was not much interested until she died, until I watched Alan inherit what should be mine. My mother was noble—his was a common chieftain’s daughter. My mother’s dowry enriched the MacDonells.” His lips curled in a sneer. “It all should have been mine. Lillian should have been mine.”
Rose shook with fury. He had deceived them all for so long. She’d trusted him, never once suspected. And if she died here, no one else would suspect him and he would eventually succeed in murdering her father.
Roderick raised his brows expectantly. “Shall we get on with it? Even now your beloved Strathwick could be dying.”
Rose climbed onto the bed beside Liam. She wanted to be certain her uncle would have to get close to her to retrieve his son after she healed him. “Tell me now, before I do it. Where is William?”
“No. I’ll tell you after.”
She slammed her fist into the bed. “Damn it! That’s not fair.”
“Not fair? My only child is dying. I have waited and planned and taught myself magic for years. Everything rolled along smoothly. Alan wasted away. You latched onto the idea of the Wizard of the North like a dog to a bone, refusing to give it up. The more I warned against it, the more determined you became. He was just what I’d hoped for, a charlatan—the kind whose remedies do more harm than good. He was perfect. But now you’ve ruined everything. I’d never guessed you could do more than see colors. I’d never thought such a thing possible.”
Rose’s pulse raced as she grew afraid again. He would not be saying these things to her if he didn’t mean to kill her. And he knew she was no fool. They were both playing games, and they both knew it. Rose feared she couldn’t win this one. Roderick was clever enough to have hidden the fact that he was a wizard for years.
