Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  Ichabod, apparently relieved of duty, clambered back onto the bed and flopped mightily down.

  We left him to it. He’d earned his rest.

  Maddie Ruth labored to push the chair down the hall. “I don’t rightly understand,” she managed between efforts. I tried to help as I could, utilizing the rail built about the wheels. “If I tried to explain, I’d only bollocks it up, so best you ask him.”

  Grumbling, I held my tongue until we arrived at the gradient Ashmore had shown me. Maddie Ruth opened a small hidden panel beside the door, and pulled a switch similar to the one in the laboratory. The floor trembled as a mechanism engaged, and a clanking sound accompanied the sensation.

  I glanced at Maddie Ruth, who grinned back. “The chair-moving device.”

  I’d almost completely forgotten. Within a few moments, the device was ready for me. She wheeled the chair upon brass girders, buckled the whole in place utilizing slots I could not easily see, and pulled the switch once more.

  Although it was a bumpy slide down, the device did carry us both all the way.

  I checked that I still had all my teeth once we were upon the ground floor. “It could be smoother,” I admitted, “but ’tis clever.”

  “I’m already working on that.”

  I waved at her. “Don’t. No need to waste your talent or time, Maddie Ruth. I’ll be ensuring we leave here soon as possible.”

  Maddie Ruth said nothing. There was little enough she could say. I’d made up my mind.

  This wreck of an estate was all but worthless to me. I wanted nothing more to do with it.

  The chair creaked as we wheeled together down the corridor and into the foyer. She paused outside the library. “One moment,” she said, her round cheeks appling as she gave me an encouraging smile. She darted inside, but while I considered going after her, I could not will my limbs to obey.

  I had exhausted myself wrestling with a dog.

  Was I forever doomed to be this invalid? I grumbled as I slumped back into the chair.

  “Here we are.” A soft mantle settled about my shoulders. Fur tickled my chin, and I opened my eyes—bleary, as if I’d only started to doze but could not recall making the effort to do so—to find a blanket tucked in around me. Maddie Ruth had donned a coat.

  One of Mr. Ashmore’s, I think, for it all but swallowed her.

  I muffled a snort of laughter. “You look the part of a precocious child.”

  “You’re no better,” she replied, but without heat. “Come, Mr. Ashmore’s this way.” She wheeled me out into the halls, and towards the kitchens. The house was no less gloomy, which bothered me.

  It bothered me that I was bothered, no less.

  Had I expected Siristine to magically gain some sort of light and airy ambience with my mother and father gone?

  My good mood slipped from me with no more effort than a dream.

  Through the dark kitchen and out the door attached, we rolled down a ramp and onto a narrow path. The air was frigid, battling to creep inside my furs. It nipped at my cheeks like a creature possessed, until I was quite sure my nose had turned vibrant red with it. The gray winter sky seemed unbroken as it stretched out over the moor. Only the overgrown hedges cultivated around us disturbed the boundless sweep of brown and gray that was all the heath allowed.

  “Where are we going?” I wondered aloud.

  “Just here.” Maddie Ruth bent, gave me a quick squeeze, and pointed to the arch just ahead. “Through there. Can you make it?”

  “In this beastly thing?”

  “Or on your feet,” she allowed. As though summoned by our voices, a large, shaggy shape only somewhat smaller than Ichabod loped from the archway. This one was not black, but near enough, with hints of chocolate and toffee wrapped into his fur. “That’s Eli.” She paused. “I think.”

  The dog came towards us with a happy wag of its shaggy tail. Like Ichabod, its eyes were dark, its muzzle wide, and its expression mildly stupid.

  I don’t think the breed is known for its lack of intelligence. I simply couldn’t see past the large, goofy face.

  “Will you help, then?” I asked, skeptical.

  The dog came to a stop beside the chair, turned to face the way he had come, and waited.

  Maddie Ruth shrugged when I slanted her a quizzical look. “I’ll be inside.”

  Putting my fate in a dog’s paws seemed no less ridiculous than anything else I’d done of late. With a sigh, I seized the animal’s ruff in one hand, and leveraged myself off the chair.

  I will admit to a certain amount of appreciation when the beast matched my tottering pace and did not appear to put up a fuss when I was forced to stop for breath. He even allowed me to lean against him.

  As large as he was, I don’t know that my weight even registered.

  Clutching the furs about me with my free hand, I was certainly not cold by the time we made it through the arch. I ducked under the overhang—as did my guide, huge as he was at the head—and did not mind leaning on him to do it.

  The sight that greeted me was, in some obscure way, beautiful.

  The moor stretched on forever. Freed of the hedgerows, I stopped to take in the whole of the picture. The sky and earth clashed in a ceaseless tangle of gray that was not entirely devoid of life. Birds flapped in the frigid air, black specks too far to identify. The wind tugged at the bracken left behind.

  And in the middle of it, not so far that I couldn’t close the distance with effort, Ashmore stood before a large, open fire. Beside him, stacked knee-high with all the appearance of having already been whittled down, a pile of paintings waited.

  He wore no coat, and his shirtsleeves were folded up. They displayed the ink upon his forearms, the alchemical and esoteric symbols that I had not learned to decipher.

  The wind tugged at his bright hair, and as I labored closer, his face turned to me—as red as mine, I was sure.

  He did not smile in greeting. “Good afternoon.”

  I took his proffered hand. The dog waited until my weight was no longer fully upon him, then loped away to flop gracelessly—far from the flame, which surprised me. I would have assumed the animal might enjoy the warmth.

  Ashmore guided me to a blanket he had spread upon the ground. The fire snapped and crackled, an eerie gleam of unnatural color in the flame.

  He caught me studying it as he helped lower me to the covering. “’Tis the paint,” he explained. “Some are made with ingredients that color the fire.”

  “Why are you burning them?”

  He seemed to have trouble meeting my gaze. Instead of remaining nearby, he rose again easily—no trace of the wound that caused him such pain. When he retrieved a canvas from the pile, my eyes widened to recognize Lord Floret in all his vain posturing.

  Ashmore studied it for a long moment. “His name was James Aubry Fairchild, or Worthy to his friends.”

  I held my breath, lest I ruin this unlikely bout of honesty with the wrong word.

  “You’d never know it by looking at this, but he was quite the rake in his time.” Ashmore’s eyes looked more brown in the gray light, save where the fire flickered within like a demonic echo. “An easy man to befriend, but a difficult one to reign in. He did not take to studies well.” Before I could say anything at all, he tossed the painting into the fire.

  It snapped and popped, shooting sparks into the air that glowed faintly blue for a moment.

  I watched the flame eat at that ghastly, skeletal face and wondered what it was Ashmore was attempting to do.

  I sighed. “What is this, then? Are you making amends?”

  His laughter was soft, but not wholly kind. “I think that I am far beyond such gestures, don’t you agree, Miss St. Croix?”

  “Not particularly,” I replied. “Though I do believe we are far beyond other gestures.” I did not look at him—watching the fire slowly consume Lord Floret’s delicate stockings—but I knew he paused in the corner of my sight.

  He shook his head, pushing his hair
back from his forehead in what I assume could be exasperation. It was a familiar enough motion. “My apologies, Cherry.”

  “No need.” That I turned his words back on him was no accident. His snort of amusement could not be wholly contained. I raised my knees beneath my blanket, cradling them to conserve warmth. I turned my gaze to Ashmore instead of the fire. “Am I right in believing that these portraits are involved in your alchemical perfection?”

  As he had with Lord Floret, he studied the canvas he held. I wondered if he made an effort to recall the face, rather than the awful rictus depicted. “I became a painter, did you suspect?”

  “Your hands are artist’s hands,” I said, surprising him enough that he finally looked fully at me. I only shrugged a little. “I’ve thought so, anyway.”

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to see in his face, for he had once more drawn his usual mask down over it. Neither unfriendly nor implacable, he was different from Hawke in every way. Even his façade was amiable.

  Yet I could read neither when they chose—and in Hawke’s particular circumstance, rarely even then.

  “You have a keen eye for detail,” he acknowledged. With a final glance at his canvas, he threw it into the flame. Violet sparks shot with green flares; the fire hungrily consumed the image. Bold color surrounding a ghastly haunt. It was the same as the last. “I studied with many masters, but the man who gave me wings was da Cadore.”

  That moniker caused me to frown in thought. “Da Cadore. Italian, unless Fanny’s lessons went terribly awry?”

  A brief smile flitted across his lips. “They did not. Tiziano Vecello, otherwise known in intellectual quarters as Titian.”

  I could only shake my head at the enormity of that revelation.

  The man had almost single-handedly influenced Western art, and this during the sixteenth century. It defied all reason.

  Yet here I sat, having defied a great deal of my own.

  I sighed. “Tell me, Nicholin Folsham. Do you regret your artist’s hands?”

  “Yes, very much.” The lack of hesitation before this simple agreement caused a twinge in my heart. Two more canvases clattered into the fire, and the flames soared hungrily to the sky. “And…” He watched the embers turn crimson, gold, then brilliant green in a subtle flash quickly swallowed. “And not at all.”

  I could understand that. I rested my chin upon my upraised knees, the fur soft and warm against my cheeks, and watched him feed portrait after portrait to the fire.

  When only one remained, he crouched beside it.

  “I was ruthless in my youth,” he said, talking down to the frame, though it was clearly directed at me. “Like da Vinci before me, I was fascinated by all things regarding life, death and the cosmos. Even while I refined my art, I sought answers to all of life’s plethora of questions.”

  “This does not seem so ruthless,” I said.

  The wind slipped between us, fanning the flame so that it bent towards Ashmore as he looked up at me again. His eyes glowed unholy red; a trick of the light, though no less unsettling for it.

  “Anima mundi consumed me.” If he appreciated my encouragement, I could not honestly tell it to be so. “The concept of the world soul, and all that it connected. I suppose it was my ill fortune to stumble upon the truth of my own foolish pride.”

  Foolish pride. Again, that such a phrase would be associated with my family—with, in fact, the very progenitor of this line.

  I blew out a hard breath.

  “I sacrificed my family,” Ashmore told me, his tone matter-of-fact. “Nothing quite so literal, but I turned my back upon them. I hunted for the secrets to the philosopher’s stone to the exclusion of all else, and when I finally grasped the fundamentals, I no longer resembled the man I had been.”

  “What did you do?”

  He clasped his hands between his knees, crouched easily beside the fire. He did not look into the orange light, but tilted his head up, gaze skyward for all there was nothing to see. The wind ruffled his hair, then circled about to tug at my plait. Tendrils of wayward curls slipped free to blow about my cheeks.

  “I had not yet achieved perfection,” he said, shrugging as though it were a foregone conclusion. “I did what I must to continue on my path. Longevity is a step in the right direction, but it is not immortality. I can be killed. I can also die of age, should I cease harvesting the anima of those of my bloodline. Your mother noted it when I could not initially break her barrier.”

  “You did break it, though.”

  “Only once her anima was attached to the weakened shell of St. Croix’s body,” he said, confirming my suspicions.

  “But you broke her barrier even before,” I pointed out. Ashmore’s startled inquiry caused me to wince. “Ah, I…accidentally called upon Kronos when my mother was…” I hesitated. “She was—”

  “Utilizing Noxa, the thirteenth Trump.” He freed a hand to scrub over his face. “I did not teach her that one. She must have found someone who could, if not learned it on her own.”

  Ah, so it finally became clear. Noxa, as the symbol of the human being, but whose Latin definition was that of injury or harm. Associated with Dionysius, whose birth came from a form of possession.

  My mother had called upon it to possess me, since our bonds were already forged.

  Ashmore sighed. “You should not have been able to use such a Trump. I suspect your mother’s anima allowed it. An interesting loophole, and one I might have once considered examining more thoroughly.”

  “Once?”

  He shook his head. “To do so would require imprisoning you here until I was finished.” His eyes were dark with unspoken things when he set them upon me. “You would likely not survive.”

  “Could you do that to your own flesh?” I asked, tilting my head.

  “Did you somehow fail to understand the importance of those paintings?” Ashmore touched the one at his feet with reverent care. “Once the Trumps are unlocked within a person of my blood, they are fair game for my longevity. Few ever achieved as much as your mother—”

  That hurt.

  “But I did not require brilliance. I required adequacy,” he continued evenly. “Once assured of their ability, I painted them. I utilized Pluvia and Ruina to do it, as well as elements of Diana and Eon.”

  This was almost too much for me. I frowned hard, burying my face against my knees as I worked it through. “Empty vessel,” I said, my voice muffled. “The better to hold the anima of your subject within a symbolic womb, yes?”

  “Very good, Cherry.”

  I lifted my head to see his lopsided smile. I returned it. “So you held their anima.”

  “But the body can not exist without it,” he said. “In time, the body sickens and dies. The rate rarely repeated itself, it depended entirely on the person. Childbirth was the likeliest trigger of more obvious symptoms, which is why the women tended to sicken quicker. Your mother,” he added softly, “lasted much longer than any woman before her.”

  “You loved her.” It was not a question, and Ashmore did not treat it as such. He said nothing, because anything he might have offered might come out only a platitude.

  I respected that, at least.

  “Why did she have a child, if she knew it would mean the death of your line?”

  He shrugged. “To put it bluntly, I suspect she thought you might be the loophole to my vow.”

  “The vow that said you must protect us?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” He stood again, though he picked up the canvas with him. The back was plain, unadorned. “I was ruthless when I forged that alchemical bond, I admit this. However, I was not without awareness of it. I knew that impatience would be the death of me forever. I worked into the formula a guarantee that I would not accidentally end my own life by too soon ending the lives of my line.”

  “So you could not harm us.”

  “Not until my line was guaranteed with the birth of a child. I suspect she thought to have a solution before she
died.” His chuckle strained. “She must have been furious in those last moments before her death in that laboratory.”

  “Did you know she lingered?”

  “As a spirit?” Ashmore’s amusement, pained as it was, faded. “No. Had I known it was possible, I might have done things differently from the start.”

  I nodded, as though this were perfectly reasonable. In all honesty, I wanted to drop my head into my hands and sleep for the next few years.

  Maybe when I woke again, this would all be a dream.

  I watched him circle the fire, but he made no move to toss the canvas in. As he passed by the shaggy brown hound, the beast raised his head and watched his master pace by.

  “Ashmore?”

  “Yes?”

  “What would you have done,” I asked, “if I had birthed a child with Compton?”

  “I had hoped that you might continue your independent streak and refrain from such attachments,” he admitted. “The news of your nuptials threw me for a loop.”

  I rubbed my chin across the soft furs, seeking absent-minded comfort. “You must have been relieved when he died.”

  “I was.” His voice gentled, as did his expression as he knelt beside me. “Yet I was sorry that his life ended. As I said, he seemed a good man.” The canvas rested between his hand and the earth, its back painted gold by the fire.

  A knot formed in my throat. “He was.” Echo of our earlier conversation, but it seemed it was all we could say of the matter.

  I freed my hand of the blanket to touch his arm in gentle accord. “That canvas. Is it my mother’s?”

  The stark pain flitting beneath his façade turned the lump to something painful and cold. “It is.” He turned it, revealing the bold color and lifelike realism that I now recognized as the learned elements of Ashmore’s Renaissance master. He had only gotten better with time, this unfortunately long-lived artist.

  Seeing her again, that serene smile in such beautiful features, did not hurt as much as I expected it to. Though it tugged at my heart, it did so through a web of numb acceptance.

  “I suspect,” he said, studying the canvas beside me, “by refusing to harvest Josephine’s anima, it gave her strength to linger long after her death. I had not thought it possible. The painting is simply a container for the anima, nothing more.”