Avenged

by Lynn Carthage

  “I’m Miles, and this is Eleanor. I don’t think we saw him,” Miles answers her after giving me a significant look.

  “He gave me the creeps, out here all by himself.”

  “What did he look like?” Miles asks her.

  “I don’t know, a bit approaching six foot?”

  “How old, and what color hair?” Miles doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’m speechless.

  “My age, I’d say,” Amey answers. “Dark brown hair. He scared the wind out of me. I ran as fast as I could. I didn’t think I went fast enough . . .” She trails off. “But I guess I did.”

  There is blood matted in her pale blond hair, and she, too, shows the scratches on her face. It’s as if someone had been trying to write on her skin.

  “Are those runes?” Miles asks me.

  With shock, I realize he’s right. The ancient symbols that glowed from the tree seem to be etched onto Amey’s face.

  “Are what ruins?” she asks.

  I point across the meadow. “The ruins of an old house,” I say. I can’t bear the thought of her knowing her face is a missive from the force that killed her.

  And it’s all my fault.

  “So many things to translate,” says Miles. “Prophecies and runes.” Amey luckily ignores this.

  “Can you help me get home?” she asks. “I’m pretty well shook up, aren’t I?”

  “We’d love to help you,” says Miles. “We would really love to.”

  “But you can’t?” she asks plaintively.

  “Not really, no.”

  She appeals to me, and I give her a sad smile. “You met with some trouble in the woods,” I say kindly. “Desperately bad trouble. Did you know you were bleeding?”

  Her hands go to her face and scalp and come back red. Her eyes widen. “I’m still bleeding!” she gasps. “I have to get to the hospital!” She frantically pats at her pockets. “I must’ve dropped my phone—can you ring an ambulance for me?”

  “We know you’re going through a tough patch,” says Miles. “We’ve been through that same experience. What you’re starting to realize.”

  “What I’m . . . what? Gosh, love, just call me a bloody ambulance, will you? I’ve been wandering these damn woods not knowing I was injured!”

  “I can’t call for you,” he says. “I can’t ever call again.”

  Amey stares at him. “Are you daft?”

  “I can’t do things the living can do,” he says.

  “The living . . . what on earth do you mean?”

  “I’m not living anymore.”

  “So you’re . . . ?”

  “I’m dead,” he confirms. “And so is Eleanor.”

  A significant passage of time elapses before she breaks into hysterical laughter. “Oh, you had me going there, I admit it, lad, you’ve yanked my chain and good!”

  She quiets and I see the fear quivering behind her eyes. “These woods are so frightening,” she whispers. “And now you two are scaring me, too. I need to go home.”

  “We won’t hurt you,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “The person who hurt you, we want to hear more about him,” says Miles. “We want to stop him from hurting other people.” I can’t help myself from crying out. Miles doesn’t know it’s Steven. I was the only one with that crucial information and I failed to use it properly.

  “He was just a man,” she says. “I don’t know any more than that. Well, if you won’t help me, I’ll just find my own way out. I hope I don’t bleed to death on the way home. If I make it back, it’s no thanks to you.”

  “All right,” Miles says. “Good luck. But if you change your mind and want to see us again, just think of us and you’ll find us.”

  “Not bloody likely,” she mutters, and seems to randomly pick a course through the thicket. She seems unwitting of the idea that she makes no sound. No branches break underfoot, no leaves protest at her step.

  “So the tree has human help,” says Miles. “Do you think it’s Phoebe’s father?”

  I wipe away a tear before he can see it. Servants must always keep an implacable demeanor.

  “Yes,” I say. “And I’ll tell you why.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A maid’s apron displays her pride of cleanliness and exactitude, for its wide, white expanse, however soiled from the day’s work, emerges each morning gleaming bright again, its field free from wrinkles or smooches.

  —The Governance of Servants

  I didn’t go to school past the age of eight. I know my letters and numbers all right—I kept a diary while alive although I can’t pledge that every word is spelled correctly. I think my strength lies less in book learning and more in life learning. The servants bewailed their fate; I tried to change mine.

  So I set my mind to untangling all the crooked skeins we’d been presented with. Austin and his family had talked of the pagan forces at the estate, and I now believe Madame Arnaud was aware of them, too. It seems she even built the house around an ancient sacrificial site. It’s probably why she chose to come to Grenshire when she fled France. Her friend Athénaïs must’ve told her secrets, told her of the formidable forces here.

  And . . . perhaps she, horrible as she was, somehow dampened the evil. She kept it in check while she was around, but since we removed her from her position of power, the evil has crept back in. It’s our fault things have worsened. In trying to protect Tabby, we unleashed a far worse power. It somehow fastened onto Raven and then Steven.

  So we must right the wrongs.

  “I’ve never seen you frown harder,” says Miles. “You’re developing about three new wrinkles.”

  Back to this dismal world, where my cleverness isn’t clever enough.

  “I’m thinking,” I say.

  “And . . . ?”

  “Blood was spilled at that table,” I say. “It was an altar of sorts to some god we have thankfully forgotten.”

  “But has it forgotten us?”

  I stare at him. “I hadn’t really . . . thought about that.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “The blood. The table seemed designed to capture the blood of a victim. What if vessels sat at the bottom of each tube to collect the blood? And what if that is the basis of the Sangreçu vials?”

  “Impossible,” says Miles. “Madame Arnaud built the manor after she left France.”

  “But don’t you think the altar predates the manor? I believe she built the house around the subterranean vault, to protect it and keep it under her control and power.”

  He nods, a crooked smile beginning to form.

  “So if the Sangreçu vials were created here, moved to France, and brought back, then perhaps they may be hidden in that same chamber.”

  “It seems as good a surmise as any,” I say. “If Athénaïs created them here, she knew of this place and told Madame Arnaud.”

  “Good working hypothesis.”

  “So we’ll need to explore better.”

  “The chamber that Phoebe is already exploring,” he says. His eyes narrow. “She wasn’t scared down there like we were.”

  “And she’s the only one with the corporeality to actually explore,” I point out. “We should hasten there at once.”

  “We should,” he says, but somehow we still stand there, looking at each other. He takes a step closer, and before I can stop myself, I’m in his arms. His body is so strong, so large, unlike the reedy nature of my Austin, who never ate like this generation eats, who worked like a horse from sunup to sundown.

  Miles’s hands move into my hair and I greedily drink in his gaze.

  “I so much admire you,” he says, and my lips stop a mere inch away from his.

  “Admire?” I ask.

  “You’ve taught me everything I know.”

  I close my eyes. His feelings for me are not what I wish.

  “I’m only what I am because of you,” he continues.

  “No,” I whisper. “That was someone else.”


  “You’re beautiful,” he says.

  “But not in the way you want,” I say.

  That seems to penetrate to him, and he frowns and shakes his head. But then he reverts to his strange, altered demeanor. “I always want your friendship, strong and true,” he says. “And your guidance.”

  I step away. There will never be a kiss. He is not for me. The only lad who returned my feelings is long dead and cold in the grave. Austin was my one chance at love, and I ruined everything by tying my apron around my neck. If I’d only asked him to run away with me. Maybe we could’ve sailed to France, just as Athénaïs must have done all those centuries ago. Or gone north to Scotland, or west to Ireland. I had other choices but was desperate in my fear.

  “Don’t trust me to guide you,” I say in a low voice. “I have steered my own course completely astray.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Oedipus’s tyrannical ravings notwithstanding, we do find him a sympathetic character, helpless before the grinding mechanisms of fate. And what a fate it is: to murder his father and know his own mother as a marital companion. Pressing the horror further, he comes across her body, hanged in shame, and pulls out her dress pins, revealing the nubile flesh for which he has so destroyed himself, and uses the pins to blind his eyes. And all of this while he was trying to avoid his cruel prophecy! Poor king could only decipher one of the Sphinx’s riddles, it seems.

  —Mad Women (and Men) in Attic Tragedy

  After I explain everything, Miles announces that he’ll be Steven’s shadow until the end of time. “Not that I can stop him from anything,” he says angrily, “but I’ll sure as hell try.”

  As for me, I check in with Phoebe at the subterranean grotto. I don’t like that place, and I shudder at the thought of returning, but if Phoebe’s susceptible to evil the way Steven is, I have to try to intervene.

  “Hullo,” I say as I arrive.

  Phoebe’s sitting on top of the altar, her legs crossed. She’s holding something in her hands. “Check this out,” she says. “I can’t stop looking at it.”

  It’s a beautifully wrought silver rack. It’s an object to behold even as my gut clenches with the sickening knowledge that it holds no vials. Empty and beautiful, it is left here to mock the seeker.

  A glimmer of the past comes to me.

  The man who created this. He’s the same person who fashioned Madame Arnaud’s silver straw, and the same armorer who hammered out our swords before they were magicked. Fading and brightening through the centuries as the same man in different iterations.

  We are all just scraps of souls rebuilt from parts and sent out again to see how we fare. I can see his face if I concentrate, red from the smithy fire, whatever lifetime that fire burned in.

  Where is he now? Is he yet in the world, bending silver to his will, or perhaps his trade has adapted and he sits at a computer instead of pulling beauty from molten metal. I can’t know.

  “You’re taking this well,” says Phoebe.

  “There has to be more,” I say. “It would be too cruel to keep us in this state if there wasn’t a way to repair it.”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “That’s the point of prophecies,” I say stubbornly. “No matter what, they work. Even when Oedipus is sent off as a child to be killed, the prophecy spares him so he can grow up to do the things he’s slated to do.”

  “Okay, so there are just racks and racks of the stuff stashed everywhere, right?”

  “Don’t speak lightly of this, I warn you—”

  “I know, I know, you’d be Sangreçu now if I hadn’t been so greedy. I don’t know how many times I can apologize for that.”

  I stare at her, and the old hatred rekindles.

  “Perhaps . . . once would be fitting,” I say.

  “I have!”

  “No, Phoebe, you never did.”

  “Oh my God, I must’ve.”

  I shake my head. She throws the rack, and it lands with a tinny crash. “Dammit, I’m sorry! I can’t believe I didn’t say it before, but I’m sorry. I wish I was a better person.”

  “The words are correct, but the tone is not,” I say. “You’re shouting at me.”

  “I’m shouting at myself, dammit! I screwed everything up. If I had just not died, I would’ve grown out of my selfishness.”

  I say nothing. Even her apology reeks of self-pity. She blames it all on having died.

  “From the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “Is it better when I don’t yell it?”

  “Somewhat better.”

  She jumps down from the table and kicks the rack into the dark edges of the room.

  “Can we leave now?” I ask. “This room has a very unpleasant demeanor.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Miles is on Steven duty, and Phoebe and I follow her mother as she walks with Tabby outside the manor. The air is fresh and the grass sparkles with dew. They peer over the orange tape at the swords and then wander without purpose. Tabby walks with her hand in her mother’s, such a sweet sight. There are no horses and carts to run them over—I adjust my thinking: no cars to run them over—so they don’t need to be holding hands. And yet they do.

  Tabby’s mum says nursery rhymes and pauses to have her daughter supply words in the middle. She’s visibly nervous, looking around quite a bit as if expecting someone to come hurtling toward them. I wager she is thinking of those missing teens.

  Tabby, too, seems to be looking around, perhaps trying to sense her sister after the contact with her earlier when we got her to say blueprints.

  “. . . went up the hill to fetch a pail of . . . ?” asks Tabby’s mum.

  “Waddah,” says Tabby.

  “Very good!”

  Phoebe smiles but I see pain in her face. All of this is happening without her. Tabby growing, changing, learning. Someday she’ll surpass Phoebe in age, a teenager whom they maybe won’t let swim.

  I’m feeling too raw from our encounter in the grotto. I can’t bear to feel pity for her, so I wave my hand gently and move away, aimless in the wind. I wonder if it might snow. There is a chill and bluster to the air.

  Soon enough I reach the gates of the Arnaud family cemetery with its statues of women supple with grief. I’m drawn to the elaborate mausoleums, but the macabre nature of the statues makes me want to leave. I’m just about to do so when I hear someone stepping on brittle leaves.

  A young woman in a blue wool coat.

  Thank God, she’s alive. She glows with vitality and breath.

  She looks like . . . I gasp . . . like she could be one of my sisters. She has our shape of cheek and jaw. I approach her and watch as a faint pink tinges her cheeks. Her eyelashes flutter, and she looks like someone who knows she is being stared at. She raises a trembling hand to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “Is someone here?” she asks huskily.

  She senses me! It’s been so very, very long since my spirit has registered with the living. “I am here,” I say.

  “Where are you?” She stares directly before her face, like a girl blinded by consumption. I step forward and take her hand.

  Take means that my fingers pass through hers as she shudders and steps sideways.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I say.

  “Are you speaking? I feel sound but so far away.”

  “Yes, I’m speaking,” I say loudly. I understand the depths of frustration Phoebe exhibits when trying to reach Tabitha. It’s so hard to be so close and yet not penetrate.

  “I’ve always heard the tales that this place must be haunted,” she says to herself. “So I’m tricking myself into believing it.”

  I cup both hands around her face and pursue her as she steps evasively back. I press my palm to her forehead as if feeling for fever. I yank fruitlessly at her shirt.

  “Do you feel that? And that?” I say. “It’s not your imagination.”

  She flutters her hands around her body as if she’s surrounded by a swarm of
midges, and trots backward.

  “Oh, you coward!” I call after her. My one chance at reaching a living human with corporeality and the power to help us? I’m not letting her go.

  I follow her down the rows of stones, registering her sobs with a sick pleasure. I’m causing them, because she feels me!

  “Whoa!” says Miles. He’s intentioned next to me. “What’s all this, then?”

  “A ghost hunter,” I say grimly. “And now I’m hunting her in turn.”

  “Good show,” he says with a cocky grin. “And yet, let’s try not to terrify her, shall we? I can try to gently blow in her ear.” He had told me he had been able to puff enough to bend a candle flame once.

  “Oh, do!” I say.

  “Ah God, I feel like an idiot,” she says. “If there’s someone here listening, I’m Kate Darrow and I’ve written a book about the ghosts of England . . . but I’ve never actually seen one before. I’m an expert in a field I’m not quite expert in!”

  My jaw drops. “She’s a Darrow like me!” I tell Miles.

  “She looks like she could easily be your sister,” he says. “Things get more interesting here every day. I thought all your family was gone?”

  “Indeed!” I say. “When everything here at the manor ceased, my family left. They were horrified at my role in everything.”

  “But you had no children?”

  “No! Good Lord, what do you take me for? This Kate must be descended from one of my siblings or cousins. There were certainly enough of those.”

  Kate is continuing on with me, mustering her courage and wiping away her few tears. “I’ve felt the cold air on my face just now, and the strange stirrings of air as if someone is speaking, but from so far away. I can’t truly hear. I could be a fool for standing here talking to the wind, but I must try.”