Still in routine, we met up with the boys in the foyer, going through the automatic polite complements of each other’s outfits, though I noticed a sort of sickly undercurrent present.
“You look terrible, Avery!” Tressa noted, sounding much ruder than she’d intended. “Are you quite all right? Poor Penny passed out a few minutes ago; you look moments from doing the same!”
“Headache.” He shrugged. “And I wouldn’t be too worried; fainting’s becoming a habit for you girls, isn’t it?”
Evelyn coughed again, just to prove she was properly sick and not being pathetic.
No one said a word as we trudged into the dining hall with Beatrix and sat down on our seats. There was no squabbling, no fiddling whilst waiting for the food, and even the nervousness for the Master was somewhat dulled.
Well, until He actually came.
The rip made the toast I had eaten for breakfast almost make a grand entrance all over my brand-new dress, and I had to swallow down the bile. If there was a bright side, I had to focus so hard on not throwing up that I forgot to be intimidated when He strode behind me to His chair. In fact, I didn’t even hear the “You may begin,” as a fabulous lamb stew, vegetables, and cheese scones ripped onto the table. It didn’t matter. I was utterly famished from going so long without food and took great care in scooping out the chunkiest bits of meat and plumpest scones from the arrangement.
I waited for everyone else to serve themselves before taking a grateful hunk out of the scone. I chewed it around in my mouth thoughtfully, trying to put my finger on a strange tang that was becoming more noticeable the more I ground it up. It was almost like…
Not caring about etiquette, I spat the ghastly morsel onto my plate and chugged down my entire cup of milk. I had never before experienced the taste, but I knew what it was.
Ashes. It tasted burnt, and of death and nothingness. Ashes, with the faint coppery hints of blood.
I wasn’t the only one who had discovered the disturbing flavor, as my friends around me were following suit and gagging lumps of food onto their plates with bulging eyes widened with disgust. Even Beatrix seemed fazed, though she had supposedly cooked the foul things.
“Is there a problem?” came the cool voice from the head of the table. I groped around for words, but my vocal cords happened to be stubbornly refusing to speak.
He slowly and deliberately pushed back His chair, making no noise, and glided over to where we were all sitting.
I blanched, the old fear inside of me beginning to stir. This was all wrong; what was supposed to have been a glorious bid for freedom had gone so awfully wrong.
“Did you really think you could hide your actions from me?” He asked softly, almost pityingly. “I know all that goes on in this manor. My manor.”
The last two words hardened, and I knew a storm was coming.
“I would have thought you were intelligent enough to follow such simple rules. I would have thought that by now you’d be able to understand that it’s impossible to get away with breaking them. We can’t have you all running rampant about this place like a bunch of wild things, and rules have to be obeyed if you want to keep living your lives in the security that I see you’ve now taken for granted. You may find I can revoke it just as easily as I have given it. Despite what you think, there are some things dwelling in this estate that are the stuff of nightmares, and thanks to one stupid girl, they’re about to be awakened. For that, there must be consequences.”
I froze, petrified. Beatrix gave a small gasp of alarm, sharing a fleeting glance with me before looking away. She would not stop Him, of course. She wouldn’t even try.
“You.” The Master directed the word entirely at me, and I felt my heart pound, then stop. I was numb, incapable of dread simply because the sheer amount of it would have driven me crazy had I let it take hold. “Come here.”
His voice was so cold, so very cold…I couldn’t move.
“Come. Here.”
I set my chin, clenched my fists. I had broken the rules, I would no doubt suffer for it, but I would not show Him any regret.
Yet, anyway. I was a lot braver beforehand when it came to such manners.
I tried to keep my head held high as I approached Him, only thinking about controlling my breathing and nothing else.
“You went upstairs,” He stated, not phrasing it as a question.
“I – I did,” I said, thinking now about how hungry I was and staring at the detailing on the curtains behind His head, a trick I had learned from all those times Tressa had lectured me.
“You went deliberately into the room up there, where you touched a certain object I have been keeping in there. Against my orders.”
Again, I nodded, bracing myself.
The pain came, but this time it was very different. He narrowed his eyes, and with a casual sweep of a slender hand and I felt myself slammed like a useless rag into the sharp edge where the window sank back into the wall.
I couldn’t help but cry out, feeling my skin split on impact.
“I will not do more than this,” He announced. “What you have done to yourself is far worse than a fleeting taste of agony. The true punishment is coming, and it is you who has brought it upon yourself.”
My eyes widened, yet I felt no relief.
This could not mean anything good at all. He never let us off so easily, let alone for breaking such an important rule, and I psyched myself up for torture testing all the resolve I had.
“I understand.” I bowed my head, cringing as I felt the wound sting. I was feeling many things, but in truth, understanding wasn’t one of them.
As He whipped around, I could have sworn I heard Him hiss something about “family resemblance” to Himself, whatever that was supposed to mean.
“This dinner is over.”
As He ripped away, a particularly forceful shudder rippled through the hall causing all the food to slide off the overturned table and splatter all over the floor where it promptly turned to dust, throwing everyone off their seats.
My head banged again against the corner again, but I didn’t really feel it. I was too busy fearing the nightmares of the future to worry about flesh wounds of the now.
Beatrix shuffled over to me and helped me to my feet, trembling again as she surveyed the cut.
“Would you like me to heal it for you?” she offered. “Well, I can’t properly heal it, but I can make the stinging go away if you—”
“No,” I interrupted, a bit sharper than I had intended. A flash of hurt crossed her face, and I felt a twinge of guilt. “I just can’t be doing with this supernatural insanity right now. I want normal.”
“I meant with medicine. I’ll get something made up.”
I noticed Tressa, Evelyn, Fred, and Lucas were all goggling at me with identical expressions of confusion and betrayal, with Avery being sick under the tablecloth.
“I’m going back to the common room,” Tressa said, her voice sounding forced as if unused for a long while. She cleared her throat before continuing. “Evelyn and I can quickly change out of our dinner dresses.”
I hung my head as she clearly omitted my own name from her statement. Avery had come with me, why was he not being reprimanded, too?
I watched glumly as the five of them filed from the room in resolute silence, wondering what I had ever done to deserve such a downright rotten chance of luck.
The black night sky outside turned the windows into mirrors, and as I gazed into their depths I saw the full extent of the damage to my scalp: a nasty gash from the top of my right ear to the base of my neck steadily dripped blood. I suppose it had to count for something that all my bones were intact.
I couldn’t help it. I was done with being brave, so I did what any other fifteen-year-old girl would do; I cried.
“What went wrong, Beatrix?” I sobbed, turning away from the windows and throwing myself into her arms. “What’s wrong with me? All of my friends hate me now, He’s madder than ever, and whatever tha
t thing was upstairs only made everything worse! The food, the hallucinations, the dreams…I feel like I’m going crazy!”
Beatrix didn’t say anything, but I knew she was listening.
“Y-you t-told me to p-pull the lever!” I accused when my tears subsided into hiccups, wanting to find somebody else to blame.
“I did.” Beatrix did not falter. “And you promised to accept the consequences. I swore not to tell you this, but since Madon clearly knows I’m involved now, there’s no point in hiding anything I’m not bound to protect. What you did was trigger a series of…well, I suppose they’re like tests. If you can stay strong throughout them, then I am certain the Boundary will fail and you will be granted your freedom.”
“Really? Just like that?” The hope came bubbling back again at the prospect. “Were the hallucinations part of the trials?”
“I would assume so, a very minor starting point,” Beatrix said ominously. “By the way, what was it you said about having dreams? I wasn’t aware that you were troubled by nightmares.”
“Oh, they’re not nightmares, so to speak,” I corrected, wiping my eyes with a palm. “More like really vivid daydreams. I’ve only had two, each the same, based on this scene where a man and a woman are murdered for this bundle thing. It’s odd.”
Beatrix’s arms tensed around me, and I felt her steady heartbeat quicken nervously.
“I am sure that is all they are,” she said firmly. “Daydreams. I would not dwell on them if I were you, as there is much more you will need to focus on. You haven’t told anyone else?”
“No,” I replied, curious that if they were simply normal daydreams why it should matter that I had shared them.
There was a moment of almost awkwardness between us, until I untangled myself from her arms and got up.
“I should go clean this up.” I gestured to my cut.
“Yes. And I should do the same with this,” Beatrix swung her arm in the general area of dust and overturned furniture, the ruins of what had previously been a marvelous dinner.
With nothing else to say, we swiftly trudged our own ways.
I was almost at the exit when another question popped into my churning mind and I pivoted back to face Beatrix, who was ripping away the debris and manually picking up the chairs.
“Beatrix, what happens if we don’t, or can’t withstand these trials?”
“I don’t know. But you can be certain it won’t involve leaving the Boundary.”
That was all I needed to know. Whatever it took, I wasn’t going to let them beat me. Not for stakes like this.
Part Two
12
“One more time. Urgh, I still can’t believe you would do all this without telling!”
I sighed and repeated my story from when I had first confronted Beatrix. We were all gathered in the common room in front of the fire, munching on some biscuits that Beatrix had left on the table.
Tressa set down her plate and listened to my story lividly, her face alternating between different shades of red as I spoke. She lived to be in charge of things, and for her to be left out of such an important turn of events was little less than a huge insult. Lucas, Fred, and Evelyn had not made a single comment since we had sat down more than two hours ago, not giving away more than a satisfied crunch of biscuit or slight adjustment of pillows on the sofa. Avery had also remained mute, and I supposed it was because most of my tale was news for him as well.
“Well, then,” Tressa said icily, when I finished for the umpteenth time. “I’m charmed that you would think to ask before altering the course of our lives. Perhaps I’m just being harsh; maybe your adventures matter much more than our petty, simple little lives, which were clearly dragging you down enough to—”
“Don’t be angry!” I pleaded. “You must understand that it could have meant the difference between freedom and a lifetime of imprisonment, and you would have stopped me! This could be good for us!”
“But it isn’t, is it?” Fred volunteered hesitantly, speaking for the first time. “From what I’ve gathered, this is not good at all. In fact, it seems rather dangerous.”
Tressa nodded in agreement, eyes flashing. “It wasn’t your choice to make.”
“Lucas?” I campaigned for support.
He was uncomfortable being put in the spotlight, fidgeting and mumbling something about Tressa and Fred being right.
“I agree!” Evelyn announced, as if her words made all the difference.
I beamed at her support, but my smile faltered when I realized she wasn’t agreeing with me, but with everyone else.
“Penny, how could you even call this imprisonment? Look at all we have, our clothes, our food, our jewels and furniture! Have you not read about poverty during lessons? It is restrictive, and sometimes oppressive, but it is not a bad life we lead.”
I glowered at this. Why did their arguments all have to be so darn reasonable?
“Is this the price we have to pay?” I jabbed at the rag I’d been holding to the back of my head. “What do we have to lose? Come on; please stand with me on this! There’s nothing you can do to change the past, so can’t you just accept what I did and work with me to get through the future?”
Avery clapped his hands dryly from where he had been perched on the arm of the sofa, crowing, “Good speech, Penny. Now we can all slowly die knowing that—”
“Shut up, Avery, and stop pretending you didn’t have a part in this. I haven’t finished with you either,” Tressa interrupted, and he fell immediately silent. She sighed, running her fingers through the few flaxen waves, which had escaped her plait. “I have a feeling that moving forward is all we can do now, since what you did seems pretty much irreversible.”
“Exactly.” I nodded, trying to contain my inner excitement. Together, united, we would work it out. We always had.
“Well, we should all get to bed now, it’s getting late. See you all in the morning.”
It was an excellent proposition, considering my head was fit to burst it hurt so badly, and my whole body felt drained from the chaotic events which had so rapidly befallen me in such a short space of time.
I snuggled under my duvet, feeling the soft pillows envelope my head and the mattress gently cradle my body in the same comfortable way it had done every night, closing my aching eyelids and trying to blank my mind. The candles were all out, so the smell was replaced by the sweet scent of fresh laundry. I imagined the black forest outside dipping into absolute silence, falling asleep and waiting for the sunrise…
And what should have been a peaceful night ended abruptly when I found myself bolt upright and shaking like a leaf, covered in goose bumps and breathing heavily. I had had the most horrendous dream, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember it! It was nothing to do with my usual one, and the only recollection I had was a nightmarish jumble of…well, a nightmarish jumble.
Taking deep gulps of calming air, I glanced around for some sense of time, assuming that it was perhaps just past midnight or another wee hour of the morning. Contrarily, I was blasted with rays of sunshine seeping in from the translucent blinds across the room, indicating that despite my calculations I had indeed slept soundly through most of the night. Odd.
I winced as my head gave a cheerful pound to remind me of its existence. Surveying the room, I saw that Tressa’s usually neat bed beside mine had been ruffled and unmade, the occupant no longer lying amidst the sea of pea-green covers. She must have gotten up early.
I slipped out, curling my toes at the cool wooden planks and hopping tentatively over to my cupboard to select a nice day dress out of a newly updated rack.
“Tressa?” I whispered, loudly enough for her to hear me yet softly enough so not to wake Evelyn.
“Yes?” She popped her head round, hair half-done, face wet from washing, and eyes…I did a double take as they changed from total black to their ordinary hazel. “Are you quite all right? How is your head feeling?”
“I – I…um, was just wondering…erm.�
�� I struggled to speak, bewildered by why I kept seeing her this way. “You’re up early. Did you have a bad dream too?”
“No.” Tressa shrugged dismissively, offering no other explanation and disappearing back towards her changing area to finish her hair. “Wear something loose, Penny, it’s a lovely day again and I thought we might play croquet outside to lighten the mood up a little bit before lessons.”
If she hadn’t had a nightmare, then what on earth had she been up to? I pushed any unsavory ideas out of my mind, firmly reminding myself that Tressa would never do anything stupid or against the rules, and that she had probably had trouble getting to sleep after the tumultuous events of the previous day.
I loathed croquet, even when I’d been young enough to still find games fresh, but I wasn’t in a position to argue with Tressa.
“What an abominable night’s sleep!” came the tired voice that signaled Evelyn’s arrival to the awoken world.
“Beg your pardon?”
She shuffled over, bags under her eyes and plait so unruly it hardly seemed there. Scathingly, she reminded me, “It means despicable. Remember from handwriting?”
“Not really, I can’t remember many of those long words when there are perfectly satisfactory shorter options which mean exactly the same thing,” I said. “Did you have bad dreams also?”
“I did,” she retorted. “Oh, and I like your new dress.”
I thanked her for the forced compliment and continued weaving my way into the sleeves. If Evelyn had nightmares, then maybe Tressa had too, which left only one question – why would she lie?
We met up with the boys for breakfast, who spoke nothing of being disturbed by nasty nightmares but all looked tired and disheveled, especially Avery. We then gulped down the food as fast as possible so to get the longest amount of time playing croquet.
The equipment was stored in a small cupboard under the grand staircase.
Boundary Page 9
