“You’re probably right, Mr. Pilchard. And Mr. Dow might like the chicken later,” he added, but dubiously, “after Hesper tends to him.”
“Hesper?” Mr. Pilchard queried, flipping a chop.
“Hesper Wood. He asked to see her. Our local version of a wood witch. She knows everything there is to know about both the dangerous and the healing properties of anything that grows out of the ground.”
“Ah.”
“Even Dr. Grantham consults her.” He took another bite of cake, then paid heed to the shouts and laughter rolling down the kitchen stairs. “I’d better go and help Mr. Quinn in the taproom.”
He spent the evening ensconced behind the bar, except to escort Hesper Wood upstairs when she came, and back out again, when Mrs. Quinn said she was leaving.
He met her at the door; she told him, “I think he’ll sleep peacefully now.”
“What was it?”
“He said it was a kind of family ailment,” she said only. “Something he inherited.” She shook her head when Judd offered payment. “He’ll pay me when he’s well, I’m sure. Don’t fret, Judd. He’ll be all right now, as long as he is careful about what he eats.”
“All right. Thank you, Hesper.”
The long evening finally drew to a close. Visitors called for their horses to ride back to Aislinn House by lantern light; guests drifted to their rooms, or were carried by their friends. Judd left the mess for Mrs. Quinn in the morning and locked the taproom, feeling the weight of the long day and the brief previous night. He went upstairs, berating himself for not having sent a note to Gwyneth, a wildflower, a book, anything to tell her he had thought about her. Tomorrow, he told himself. Without fail.
He saw the light under his father’s door and opened it, surprised. His father, put to bed by Mr. Quinn, rolled sleepily toward him.
“Judd?”
“Me. Your lamp is still burning. Mr. Quinn must have forgotten about it.”
Dugold grunted. He lifted his face off his pillow then, an odd expression on it, maybe left by a dispersing dream. “Who was that, then?”
“Who?”
“Who brought my supper?”
“The cook, I suppose.”
Dugold grunted again, dropped his face back onto his pillow. But his eyes stayed open, as though he saw something puzzling in the dark. “I couldn’t tell. He sounded human enough. But when the door opened, I couldn’t tell what was coming through. Something felt bright, burning maybe, and roiling like a wave, glittering yet full of shadows . . . Just beyond eyesight, so I could almost see it . . .”
“You were dreaming,” Judd said gently, and turned down the lamp. “It was only Mr. Pilchard.”
He remembered Dugold’s odd description early the next morning, when he found Mrs. Quinn in the kitchen, crossly scorching porridge for her hungry family, and discovered with stark horror that his cook had vanished.
So, he found later that morning, had Ridley Dow.
Nineteen
When Ysabo went to feed the crows that morning, she found the tower door locked.
She stared at the unmovable iron latch in her hand. She wrenched at it frantically a few times; the door, thick wood bound in iron, did not even rattle in its frame. She could hear the crows gathering on top of the tower behind the door, their faint, harsh cries, as though they were calling for her.
Terror weltered through her, turning her fingers icy; she nearly lost her grip on the scrap bowl. In all her life, the door to the tower stairs had never been locked. She had no idea where to find a key.
She had no idea whom to tell.
Maeve? Aveline? They were sitting tranquilly in Maeve’s chambers, shortening the dress for Ysabo’s wedding. When the moon was full. Whenever that was. To a man whose name she was not exactly sure she knew. Who barely spoke to her. With whom she was expected to beget a child.
Who could feed the crows every morning for the rest of her life.
A cold tear rolled down her cheek, dropped into the scrap bowl. She looked down at it, the shreds and bones of last night’s supper, bloody bits of meat, wilting salads, torn bread smeared with drippings and butter, fruit with the mark of someone’s teeth in it. She was trembling, frightened nearly witless by the broken ritual, the disastrous unknown looming in her life if she did not feed the crows.
Deep in her, a thought surfaced, colder than the terror riming her bones.
Somebody had locked the door. So she couldn’t feed the crows the unappealing leftovers of people’s suppers. They probably wouldn’t drop dead, if she didn’t feed them. They probably wouldn’t eat her instead. And even if they did, it was likely better than to be married to a knight whose heart, from what she could tell, was colder than her terror, and so tangled in the web of ritual he didn’t have a thought in his head that hadn’t been shaped by it.
Still shaking, she put the bowl down very quietly on the floor. The crows could find an open window if they were truly hungry. Anyway, they were birds. There was a great wood all around them. They wouldn’t starve.
They’d think of something.
She turned stiffly, her steps as nearly soundless as she could make them as she walked away from the scrap bowl into the unknown.
The door didn’t slam suddenly open behind her; the crows didn’t pursue her. She went down and around, down and around, making her way through empty walkways and inner halls, past the great hall with its noisy, clamoring, thoughtless knights. She couldn’t go back to Maeve and Aveline, not sit there quietly and embroider, not hiding such a monstrous deed from them while they hemmed her wedding dress.
Why should she marry this knight? She didn’t want to. Why not be condemned for two failed deeds as well as one? Or for three? Or five?
What if she didn’t lock this door, unlock that, light this candle, leave the sword across the chair? What if she did everything backward, and at the wrong time?
So what if the roof fell in?
She felt another tear roll down her face, warmer this time. Grief was mingling with fear now, kindled by the loss of the only life she knew. It burned her throat, her heart. What if she destroyed her world?
What if she didn’t?
She ignored the doors, the candles. She would leave the ancient sword in its scabbard. Let someone else take it out if it were truly needed. If not, let it gather dust. She went down, hours too early, as deeply as she could go, to the subterranean chambers where the water, if nothing else in the entire place, could at least find its way in and out of the house.
And so will I, she thought suddenly, fiercely. So will I.
She yielded to one point of the ritual: lighting a taper before she went underground. It was not the one she was accustomed to lighting. But it looked no different and burned just as equably; the lantern hanging beside the entrance to the rock-hewn steps accepted its fire.
The little boat with its mast and furled sail was moored as always in the dark, slow water beneath Aislinn House. She studied it a moment. The water that welled up among the stones and ran down to the sea would carry it, but only as far as the grate running across the passage into the wood. But, she thought stubbornly. You are a boat. You are meant to follow water, not sit on it in perpetual gloom. Someone made you to go out into the world. You cannot pass beyond the grate unless it opens for you. So. It must open somehow. How?
On the boat a little flick just on the edge of the lantern light, quick and soundless as an eye blink, made her breath catch. She lifted the lantern higher, trying to see what had startled her. There was a very human murmur from the air. Then a figure took shape, sitting in the boat, darkly cloaked from hood to heel, holding a book open. A page had turned, she realized. And then she recognized the book.
She raised the lantern abruptly, recognized the face within the hood.
“Ridley,” she whispered.
He looked astonished. “How did you see me when I was invisible?”
“I didn’t. I saw the book.”
He grunted, murmured puzzledly, “I thought it
was invisible as well. Perhaps it has a mind of its own. What are you doing down here? It’s not time—”
“For what?” she asked evenly. “Time for me to leave the lantern on the prow of the boat and go away again so that someone else can come and put out the light and hang the lantern back on its hook by the entrance so that I can come back again tomorrow and light it and leave it on the prow of the boat so that someone—Did you lock the door to the crows’ tower?”
He thought about that; his face, stubbled and smudged with shadows, grew suddenly rueful. “I did. When I passed it earlier to get this book. I didn’t want them attacking me again. I was going to return the book and unlock the door before you got there. But I lost myself in this book...” Something in her still, blanched face made his voice trail away. He rose quickly. “I’ll unlock it now. It’s a simple spell. There’s time.”
“Is there?” She shook her head, her eyes glazed with unshed tears. “Is there, Ridley Dow? You made me step beyond the ritual. I can’t go backward. I can’t stop thinking what I think, or wanting what I want. I think the crows are something more than crows, and what they want most is not their breakfast. I think the boat goes nowhere after I put the lantern in it. How can it? It is chained. Trapped by the grate. I want to know why. I want to know what you see in the book.”
Gazing at her, he tried to say something, gave it up. He held out his hand. “Come and see.”
She took it, stepped into the gently rocking boat and sat down beside him. The thick, heavy book, whose blank pages she had turned, one after another, every day since she could walk, had, in Ridley’s hands, finally begun to speak.
It said colors; it said wonders, marvels drawn with ink and painted with such hues that melted into life, spilling across every page like a tide of ancient, forgotten treasure. There were words among the images, each letter a tiny work of art, each word, extravagantly decorated and totally incomprehensible.
“I think it’s a spell book of some kind,” Ridley said. “Maybe poetry as well. I’m not sure. It’s all in a secret, or perhaps an ancient, language. But the book itself was spellbound, probably by Nemos Moore. That’s why you saw only blank pages.”
Ysabo touched a bird the color of dawn, perched among the golden leaves of an immense tree.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “All this time I never saw it. I turned empty page after empty page, never knowing... Why, Ridley?” She stared at him, her eyes wide, burning again, as though he might have an answer to her life. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he answered softly. He turned a page, looking for answers there, maybe, then another. And then she stopped him, touching something familiar: a feast in a great hall, tables filled with knights and ladies, bright banners hanging above their heads. “Is that us?” she wondered. But no: the hall doors were open to reveal a meadow full of wildflowers, birds flying across a cloudless sky. And a crowned figure sat at the center of the table, an old man with hair like gray tree moss beside her. She turned another page, lingered there again, gazing at the dark water, sky the color of silver, trees loosing their last leaves. Upon a tiny island in the middle of the water, a silver shield lay like something lost, a torn pennant beside it.
“I know this,” she whispered. “Why do I know it?”
“How could you?” Ridley asked with wonder. She lifted her eyes, looked at him, but saw Maeve and Aveline instead, embroidering the air with memories as they sewed.
“It’s a place they described, Maeve and Aveline. As though they’d been there.”
“How could they have?”
“I don’t know.” She turned another page, her fingers trembling. “I don’t know. Here.” She stopped at another image, of huge, worn stones in a wild wood, ancient trees around them tangled together like brambles. Queen Hydria was there, too, with an entourage of knights and nobles, and the strange old man in his long robe. “It was a place full of magic, Maeve said.” Her voice shook. “She said she could feel it.”
“But how?” Ridley’s own voice vanished for a moment. “How could they have left this house?”
“I don’t know, Ridley. When we sew together in the mornings, they talk about other times, other places, as though they remember them. As though they had other lives beyond Aislinn House. Or in this book, somehow ... But if they are part of the ritual, they must have been born here, like I was.”
Ridley’s voice returned abruptly. “Can you ask them?”
“They wouldn’t answer anything. They would only be furious with me for taking the book out of the tower, disrupting the ritual. That’s all they would see. Not the strangeness of their lives, their memories, but the ritual.”
“They may know who made the book.”
“Never ask. That’s what they have told me all my life. They don’t answer even if they know.”
Ridley was silent, his eyes on the painted stones, his mind elsewhere, Ysabo guessed. He said finally, “Princess Ysabo, is there a place you can stay safe and out of sight in this house while I work?”
“I don’t know where to go to be safe,” she answered, taking a bleak look at her life. “Can you raise the grate in the river at the wall, so that I could leave Aislinn House in this boat? I could wait for you beside the sea. The knights and the crows might not find me there.”
“I doubt that you would find the sea through those woods,” Ridley said grimly. “They’re part of the magic. When the knights leave the house at midday, where do they really go? I’ve watched them. Wherever they go, it’s into a different wood. Or a different time. They vanish the moment they ride away from the house.”
She stared at him, chilled. “Then there truly is no way out of this house?”
“Unless you go through the stillroom pantry door into Emma’s world. But I have no idea what would happen to you, even if you could. From this side, that door might just as easily open to nowhere as well.”
She was silent, her thoughts threading their way through the maze of her life, coming up again and again against solid walls, locked doors, passages that spiraled endlessly and went nowhere. “Well, then,” she whispered. “Well, then, Ridley Dow, we must find our own way out. You must undo what Nemos Moore did. You must unbind the spell.”
“Yes.”
“But what—Where do we begin?”
He was gazing at her, his lips parted, his eyes invisible behind reflections of light in his lenses. “You’re sure,” he said finally. “I could unlock the tower door, you could feed the crows, you could wait for me safely within your life.”
She shook her head wearily, looking down at the shadowy stream flowing silently out, away, into. “I don’t want to pretend anymore. Not even to the crows. Where should we go from here?”
“That bell,” he said slowly, “has enough power in it to disturb perfectly comfortable lives as far away as Landringham. It is the single strangest, oldest, and most consistent link between two worlds. I want to find it. Do you have any idea where it is?”
“No.”
“Who rings it?”
“No,” she said again. “I never wondered about it. It’s part of the ritual, part of our lives, a piece of the pattern of someone’s day. Light this candle, lock that door, ring this bell.”
He nodded. “I watched many pieces of the ritual. Most of them, like yours, were either absurd or hauntingly evocative, like the midday ceremony of the knights. I followed everyone I could, including Maeve and Aveline. No one led me to the bell. I spent much of yesterday trying to find that bell in books. Nemos Moore heard it; it’s what drew him here. But if he saw it, he kept it hidden between the lines.”
“How can we find between the lines?” she asked, her red brows crooked. “It isn’t part of the ritual.”
“No. It’s not. That’s the point...” His voice faded; he stared at her with absolute intensity, and without seeing her at all. When he spoke again, his voice had no sound. “That’s where you are now. Between the lines.”
“What?”
He saw her again, but slowly, as though he were struggling to waken from a powerful dream. “And that’s where the bell is. Between the lines. It isn’t part of the ritual at all. That’s why I didn’t see anyone ring it.”
“But, Ridley, it is,” she protested. “The bell calls me to the great hall to arrange the chairs, fill the cups. It summons others to the table. It is what we listen for, at the end of every day. It rings the sun down.”
“It is hidden, disguised within the ritual. But it is not part of the ritual. It’s like the book. When you see it as part of your ritual, it is blank. But if you look at it as it truly is—”
“It is full of treasures,” she breathed. “Outside of the ritual, it is itself.”
“And that’s where the bell is. Outside of the ritual.”
The Bell at Sealey Head Page 20
