Everyone I’ve seen in England and France is just going about the task of living. The homes are not surrounded by barricades or moats against enemies. It’s a different world than the one in which Myrddin vanished from view. It really doesn’t matter that Arthur fell at Camlann, or that the yard contains a circle of swords abandoned by men who failed at their quest.
Right now, the only thing that matters is that little girl.
I steel myself to let Myrddin go. No one will ever locate that key again, and as long as the manor is in place, he will stand silent sentry in his empty well. He’ll be nothing but a myth. The only ones who know where he lies: half of us are already dead.
Myrddin will recede to being the dragon in the margins of the old books. The marking on certain tombstones. And maybe someday Austin’s cottage will be torn down to make a finer, newer home, and the bulldozer will not ask about the emblem.
Boswick will die, and his business cards with the golden foil on the dragon’s forehead will be destroyed.
The spells that rest on my tongue will stay trapped there in my mouth. I’ll forget them as soon as the Sangreçu wears off.
“Yes,” I say dully. “Only Tabby matters.”
I stand up and set my shoulders back. A servant is always good at adjusting to the whims of her masters and mistresses. Her own wants are of no importance. “It’s faster if you and I intention,” I say to Miles. “Kate can follow behind on foot.”
“And where do we intention to?” he asks.
“The source of all this evil,” I say. “The yew tree.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sometimes small cairns found near crossroads indicate magical paths. The positioning of moss-covered stones within the cairn provides another secretive sign for persons knowledgeable in moss lore.
—Secret Signs, left out for Phoebe by Steven Arnaud
We get to the pond in time to see Tabby and Steven arrive. I sag in despair. He really did take Tabby—and his intent for her can’t be any good.
Tabby’s excited to see the pond. “Watta!” she cries delightedly. She’s still dripping from her swim through the grotto, and I look at Steven in further anger that he made a child swim that tunnel.
I’m about to come forward, but I hear brush moving. A second later, Raven Gellerman emerges from the trail. “Finally,” she says. “You managed to bring Tabby.”
A chill walks up my spine.
She tries to pick Tabby up, but she hides behind her father’s legs.
“Yes,” says Steven.
“It took you long enough, didn’t it?”
Miles and I look at each other and step out so we can be seen.
“Who the hell are you?” asks Steven.
“I’m Miles Whittleby. The one whose parents you were supposed to talk to. And this is Eleanor.”
“You drank again,” says Steven, and I hear the snarl in his voice. “I thought you and Phoebe found only one vial.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” says Miles.
“Take me to the vials. I’m an Arnaud and that’s my property.”
“Sure. Give me Tabby and we’ll take you to them.”
Tabby peers out from behind her father’s legs and looks at Miles. She points at him. “He pick up.”
She remembers him from Versailles. Miles throws me a grateful look and goes to Tabby with his arms open.
“I don’t think so,” says Steven. Tabby bats at his restraining arm. Miles kneels and smiles at Tabby, his arms at his sides. “Back off!”
“Phee friend,” she says.
“Yes! I’m Phoebe’s friend. Do you want me to take you to her?”
“Where are the vials?” Steven asks.
This is too much for me. “You care more about the vials than the chance to see your daughter!” I shout at him.
He looks confused. I walk over to him and reach out to touch his cheek.
Ah yes.
Ancient knowledge floods my body.
He’s been marred.
He’s half himself, and a darkness has embedded within him. He loves Phoebe fiercely—when he’s himself.
“Take your hands off him!” snaps Raven.
I shove her away and take pleasure in seeing her stumble onto the ground. No one ever thinks the mild-mannered serving girl will pull a knife from her apron and use it. I have all kinds of violent acts I’m willing to engage in if the stakes are high enough.
“Stay down there,” I order her. “Tabby, come with me and Miles.”
Tabby stares up at me and her eyes are wide. But then they open wider, so wide it seems impossible. Her gaze shifts down. She’s staring at something behind me that is blowing her mind.
I hear it behind me.
The surface of the water breaking. Something’s emerging from the pond.
“Oh shite,” says Miles in a low voice.
I turn around slowly. A few of the longest roots from the yew are now above the water, moving around like they are feeling for something.
More roots emerge, a dark, wet sinuous twining, as if a squid rests upside down on the bottom of the pond, its tentacles coming to the surface to seek prey.
“The scratches on their faces,” says Miles to me.
This is what killed Alexander and Dee and Amey. Steven brought them here.
The roots sense us, all of them now stretching in our direction.
I turn, kick Steven in the groin with all my might, and snatch up Tabby as he bends over in pain. I don’t turn back, because I know this kind of magic is potent and fast. It’s a thousand times more powerful than me. I begin running but get only a few steps, slowed down by the child in my arms, before I feel the pulling at my skirts.
“Say a spell!” shouts Miles from my side.
The roots twine through my skirts and scratch my legs. In some distant and detached portion of my mind, I wonder if I can bleed now that I’m Sangreçu.
Miles is suddenly in front of me, and I pass Tabby to him. He begins sprinting, but already I see the root extend past me, fat and ponderous.
I sort out the words spurting into my mind. I haven’t said spells in so long that I can’t control the onslaught of language, so I say all the words, even as the roots tug me backward. They pull me past Steven, and he looks relieved.
“Yes, take her!” he says.
I snag his pant leg as I go. “You’re coming, too,” I mutter, and my mouth again fills with panicked sputtering. I close my eyes to better help my mouth.
No one has said these words since the early beginnings of time. The air is surprised. The stones listen.
And the roots pause.
I complete the garble still sitting on my tongue. I hear rustling and sliding, the crackling as of kindling being gathered. The sound of thick, wooden fibers. I almost imagine them twisting and unfolding, like a snake wending in the grass. The sounds withdraw and get farther away. I still can’t bear to turn around, but I feel the roots subsiding.
The silken sound of the grasses at the edge of the pond being disturbed.
The roots return to the water with a quiet plash.
I take in a breath with astounded elation. I pulled something out of the very blood in my veins, words that floated there, and saved us. I did . . . me. The servant who failed at her previous task.
* * *
Miles and Tabby are so far away I can’t see them. And if Kate Darrow ever gets here, she’ll have missed everything. Crawling over to straddle Steven, I press my hand to his forehead.
Again scrambling for words I once knew well, I utter the spell of removal. This is an old and desperate spell that requires another receptacle for the darkness. So . . . where to put it?
I look at Raven pityingly, still following my command to stay on the ground, her fist in her mouth. It’s not her fault. She’s a pawn of larger forces, just as Steven is.
“Don’t,” she says, crawling backward.
My hand is raised in the air, pulsing with its horrid burden. In the past, I’ve released the d
arkness into someone already unhinged, like the man who won’t wash and wanders the lanes spitting at an invisible foe. But I don’t have such a person at hand.
I look around.
A black bird sits on a branch of a rowan tree, chattering and scolding, forthright in its indignation. Would it even work, I wonder? The old books never offered the chance to spill the darkness into a creature. But I want to try. If not Raven, then a raven.
My hand covers my view of the bird as I release the foulness at it.
It flies up into the sky, cursing and flying in deranged, aborted arcs. It comes to sit at my feet and its claws dig runes into the soil.
The runes spell out hatred, murder, envy.
I stretch out one hobnailed boot and erase the runes as soon as it makes them.
It caws at me, flies around my head, returns to the soil like a student to practice its letters again.
Hatred.
I erase it.
Hatred.
I erase it again, and for good measure kick at the bird, knowing it will fly off before my boot makes contact.
It flies off to the original rowan branch and stares down balefully. I see its talons restlessly dancing on the branch. It’s still scratching out the runes.
Steven rises. He puts his arms around me and cries into my shoulder. His grief is stark and honest. I hold him up, feeling like my repair of him has actually brought him more pain.
Raven, her face showing all the shame it should, looks at me at length before getting up and running away as fast as she can.
“My own daughter,” says Steven. “I tried to . . .” He breaks down and can’t speak. His body shudders against mine. This is the worst kind of grief, with the weighty element of guilt.
“It wasn’t you,” I say.
“Who was it?”
I pause. “I’m not sure. I don’t know.”
“I gave it the others, but it only wanted her.”
Coldness fills my veins. No matter the fact he wasn’t himself, he has killed three people. And I inhale sharply as the second thought dawns. The yew wanted Tabby specifically.
“Cry later,” I say roughly. “You need to tell your wife that you didn’t succeed at killing your child.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lying prostrate on the ground before the altar is a posture that demonstrates one’s pure submission before God. With face to floor, we can be no more humble.
—www.handmaidnovice.com
Miles comes back for me. I’ve been watching the raven and scanning the surface of the pond. I’m not sure what I’m concerned about, exactly, but it seems important to keep vigil. The bird keeps scratching runes, and has added the tip of one wing as a writing instrument, which means he limps as he circles, off balance.
We put our hands on each other’s shoulders and survey each other, like men do.
“All is well?” I ask.
“Tabby’s clutching her mum and Phoebe so hard I think all their skin has fused together. Met Kate on the way in and she went back with us. I think she was scared to go into the woods herself, to be honest.”
“With good reason. Did Steven make it back yet?”
“Not by the time I left. What happened here?”
“Spells. Temporary fighting off of evil. Steven’s been cleansed until it gets to him again.”
“Raven?”
“I don’t think we’ll see her again.”
“You?”
“Still kicking. And yourself?”
“Finding myself strangely terrorized by trees.”
I laugh. “That’s our next job to tackle, since Steven let it slip that its overall intended victim is Tabby.”
He lets go of me and steps back, his eyes alarmed. “Why?”
“Honestly, I haven’t a clue. I’ve thought it over again and again. Athénaïs told us Tabby wasn’t important. She wasn’t firstborn, and she isn’t an October 20 baby.”
“But.”
“Exactly. But.”
“I think Athénaïs is Nimue,” he says. “At Versailles, she told Phoebe they shared the same soul. If Phoebe is Nimue, then she was Athénaïs, too.”
I nod, thinking. “She knew all kinds of sorcery. Perhaps under the tutelage of Myrddin.”
“Changing her name through the centuries. She told me she had had many names,” says Miles. “And she said she would follow Madame Arnaud to England, and we were told she disappeared.”
“So she changed her name? Lived here?”
He shrugs.
I reach out and tug one of those black tufts of his hair. The opposite of Austin’s golden hair.
“What if . . .” I say, thinking aloud. “The same way that Nimue stole Myrddin’s secrets and trapped him, Madame Arnaud stole her secrets and trapped her?”
“Her, as in Athénaïs?”
“Yes.”
“Was there another person in that well?”
“Ah, Miles,” I say with a grudging laugh. “Glad you’re taking all this so seriously.”
“But I’m sure that reminds you of something.”
“If we can drag her away from her family,” I say.
“I think she owes you,” he says.
* * *
Phoebe and I crouch before the capstone. I don’t have the key, but. if she can remember the spell, she can undo it.
The sound of relentlessly dripping water surrounds us.
“I’m sorry, Eleanor,” she says quietly.
I don’t answer. I am listening to the sound below me, the slow heart encased in armor. It barely beats. It is as unhurried as the cadence of myths.
I lie down on my stomach, to get our two hearts closer. He can borrow mine. It doesn’t move anymore but he can have it. My cheek to the stone floor, I listen. It is the saddest stillness. It makes me wish I wasn’t Sangreçu so I couldn’t hear it.
She lies down, too. We must look like two nuns prostrated before the altar.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say.
* * *
I ask Kate to make me tea. I crave its solace, and it gives her a job to do. She and I are both disappointed that Anne’s tea consists of dried gray flakes in a tissue bag on a string. I sniff it and it is barely aromatic. When the steaming cup is set before me, however, next to the last book Steven set out with a false lead to follow, I nearly swoon. I take a sip and scorch my tongue, and take another sip to bathe the burn.
Pain. Flavor.
Exquisite.
“What happened down there?” Kate asks.
“She didn’t remember the spell,” I say. I glance at Anne, clutching Tabby on her lap, shell-shocked at the sight of me, the dead servant girl sitting at her table. “But that’s all right; Miles is comforting her.”
Kate bites her lip at my bitter tone.
“Miles is?” Anne repeats. She rubs her forehead. Hard enough, I suppose, for a mother to accept her daughter seeking romance with a lad she barely knows, but adding in the fact that he’s dead and her child’s dead must make her feel a dull panic. “But you need comforting.”
I take another brutally hot swallow. “As do you,” I tell her. “We need to talk about your husband. Phoebe told me he locked himself in the car.”
Anne’s eyes fill with tears. “I think he felt it was the safest place, that he wouldn’t harm us if he was in a separate space away from the manor and its estate.”
I nod, although privately I think metal and glass won’t protect him if the house’s evil wants him. “I went and gave him a sickness spell—nothing too strong—to keep him from going anywhere while we take care of... what’s in the pond. I think you know what’s in the pond?”
Her hand snakes out to cover her mouth as she begins to sob.
“Mommy?” asks Tabby.
Kate and I silently drink our tea while Anne struggles to control her emotions. I had considered giving her a draught of forgetfulness, but to keep her on her guard I felt she needed to know the deeds Steven was capable of..
“Would you like me to put T
abby to bed for you, so that you and Eleanor can talk?” Kate offers.
“No!” says Anne.
I look pityingly at Tabby, her eyes red with exhaustion. She should go to sleep, but I don’t think her mother will release a grasp on her until they are far, far from this horrible manor.
“He’s a good man,” I say. “No one can resist the darkness once it worms its way inside.”
“And you completely destroyed the darkness in him?”
I hesitate. “Yes. But it could take up residence again. So we still have to determine what is sending it.”
“He brought us here,” she says shakily. “He was already under the influence then.”
“I don’t know.”
“It wants . . .” Her eyes shift downward with a subtle nod to indicate her daughter.
“It seems that way.”
“We have to go. We’ll go back to the U.S.”
Suddenly Phoebe is with us. She stands behind her mother, bending to wrap her arms around her and Tabby both.
“Phee!” cries Tabby.
“Close your eyes and try to sleep,” says Anne to her youngest, but Tabby knows better than the rest of us that if she stops looking at her sister, she may never see her again.
Miles arrives and smiles awkwardly. If he thinks staggering their entrances fools any of us, he is wrong.
“We have something to do before the Sangreçu effects subside,” I say.
“Can’t it wait until morning?” Phoebe asks. “Maybe in the night I’ll remember the spell for you.”
I bite my tongue until blood fills my mouth. So careless of Nimue, to destroy a life and then forget the words that accomplished it. I pick up the cup of tea and drink it down.
“We’ll commence a study of spells as soon as we fix things for the living,” I say. “Come on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Avenged Page 17
