Mystified

by Renee Bernard

  Except no member of their Circle had ever walked the dark path and sought to strike out at the Hamblys or their relatives. The village’s prosperity was inextricably tied to the family’s wellbeing and it would have been counterintuitive to move against the family those had respected and loved for multiple generations.

  But someone or something had turned the dark corner and the coven had been blamed.

  Naturally, wise women were always the first to take blame for any mishaps, natural or man-made, so the twist was nothing new. Except that whatever had gone wrong, all those years ago, had become a dark force of its own and had shadowed the coven until they all felt equally cursed as the poor Hamblys.

  If it could all be set right…

  “You’re sure?” Elethea asked.

  “You are the instrument, granddaughter. I am certain as stone.”

  “Then bless me, Granny. Give me your blessing.” Elethea knelt at her grandmother’s feet and was instantly rewarded with a gentle hand on her head.

  “Into the hands of the Goddess with the aim of an archer, I send you forth. Yield to your fate, Elethea Fairfax. Set aside your fears and may the merciful Aine protect and guide your spirit. Strength to you, Daughter of Daughters. In this world…”

  “Or the next,” Elethea whispered.

  Granny took her hand away and helped Elethea to her feet. “Be blessed.”

  “Blessed be,” Elethea echoed back to her and then kissed her cheek. “Don’t worry, Granny.”

  “I’ll worry and you cannot deny me the right. I love you more than anything, dearest.”

  “I know. And I love you, so don’t make me maudlin.”

  “Are you off to the village?”

  “Tomorrow morning. I have to pick up a few things from the apothecary and then I promised to stop in to see Mrs. Thackery with a poultice for her ankle.”

  “See that you don’t give your father all the credit for her recovery!”

  “Gran! Enough now. Father works very hard and is rightly deserving of praise.”

  “Bah! He’ll work you to dust and think nothing of it. Men are so prickly about these things and he is overly proud of that education of his! It would serve his soul to realize it, Ella.”

  “Gran!” Elethea laughed. “He is a wonderful physician and very skilled.”

  Maevis wrinkled her nose. “Skilled at bleeding a person to death! What a mess men make of it all! He means well, to be sure but I’ll not call for him when I come to it.”

  Elethea swept the cuttings into a pouch and tucked the ingredients into her medicine bag and prepared to take her leave. “Gran, I’ll be off while there is still light. Father will be looking for his supper and I will be sure to tell him that you sweetly asked after his health.”

  Gran blushed, a flash of sweet mischief in her eyes making her suddenly seem entirely too young to be encumbered by aching bones and the layers of age carved into her face. “I am a wicked thing not to ask after his care. Can I sweetly ask if he has bothered to take my advice and sleep with his bedroom windows open for the air?”

  Elethea smiled. “He has not and well you know it.”

  “You remind him I am as healthy as a horse and I have slept with my windows open every day of my life!” Gran folded her arms, as proudly as a queen. “Fresh air is the best tonic!”

  “Yes, Gran.” Elethea gathered the last of her things. “Why don’t you come to dinner and see if you cannot try to convince him yourself?”

  “I’m too ancient and too wise to even consider arguing with an intractable man of science. They are more set in their ways than a boar in a mudhole! Besides, I’ll not have him eyeing me with his knives in hand.”

  Elethea sighed. Since her mother’s passing, her beloved Gran and her father had drawn into opposing camps, neither one willing to yield and each equally stubborn in believing that they alone held the higher ground. Her father’s guilt over being unable to save the love of his life from the ravages of pneumonia and Gran’s anger that if only she had been allowed to use the Old Ways of healing that her only daughter might have been spared made reconciliation impossible.

  Elethea had been raised between them, between both worlds and both points of view and did her best to serve as a bridge and a path to peace.

  Not that it was easy.

  “I am off, Gran.”

  “Take care. It is a restless time, dearest, and so much is in motion.”

  “I know, Gran.”

  “Note me. We are days from that moon and no mistaking! We have the work of an age at our fingertips, my darling.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “You are such a beauty, Ella. Even more beautiful than your mother and never did I think that possible, dearest.” Maevis sighed and touched her cheek. “Keep your heart open.”

  “Always, Gran. I promise.”

  The rituals of departure went quickly and with one last blessing from her grandmother, Elethea set off toward home. She loved the cluttered comfort of her Gran’s cottage enough to make it difficult to leave but there was nothing for it. It was hard not to miss the easy embrace of a place where she could relax her guard and be herself, unencumbered by judging eyes and the endless work of caring for her father’s house and for her father.

  But she was a dutiful daughter and there was no help for it.

  Gran spoke of important magic and great changes ahead, of weddings and joy for the inhabitants of Keyvnor and the families connected to its power and Ella had to smile. Weddings, perhaps, in their future but not in hers. After all she existed in a social netherworld in between the rustic circles of the village and the unreachable tiers of their betters, the only daughter of a man who served them both. Who could she boast to about an annual invitation to the vicar’s small Christmas party where she was permitted an extra slice of cake as the highlight of her social life? The notion was laughable.

  Keep your heart open. Gran always says it, the sweet dear that she is—always hoping against hope that the world will turn another way.

  No matter.

  If the curse that lay against the castle’s inhabitants was about to fall, if the Circle could amend the wrongs that were done… And if Gran is right and I will play a part in that—is that not a good end? Even though I cannot see how it is possible, what better purpose could I ever have?

  Ella pulled her wrap tighter around her shoulders to shield against the chilling wind. “No matter what happens, we each play our part,” she told the sky as she made her way home, her steps light and lively. “So mote it be.”

  Chapter 2

  Death had once again tread the stairs at Castle Keyvnor.

  Blade’s entire life had been spent with Death on his heels. Death, madness or doom…None of which lent itself to a cheerful, light-hearted disposition or a foolish optimism about his own future. He was to be the next Earl of Banfield and to inherit all that the title entailed including the heartache and rumored burden of family curses and the sorrows that followed.

  Only an insane man would rub his hands in glee at the prospect of stepping into a title so shadowed by tragedy and Blade Hambly was not insane. And neither was he a man prone to believe in fairy tales. He’d gone out of his way to lead a life of measured control, stern caution and strict self-discipline as if to distance himself from his supposed fate or at least, increase his chances of avoiding it. He did not gamble or condone the pursuits of rakes and rogues. Instead he had given himself over only to the chases of a scholar. Where some of his peers dabbled in an education only for the sake of appearances and only as far as it made them seem respectable, Blade loved the intellectual challenges and the notion that any life, even a cursed one, could be made better through learning and an elevation of the senses and the soul.

  His library was his sanctuary and his greatest comfort but he was not a man inclined to stillness. His father had given him free rein to build his experiments and craft models of his ideas more out of disinterest and relief at Blade’s attentions being occu
pied away from his presence than a gesture of indulgence. After years the large library at their home in Surrey had come to look like a wizard’s haven and not the restrained study of a country gentleman.

  At the moment, he’d have sold his soul to be at home tinkering with his newest notions on how to automate mining and create a safer environment for the men who toiled and sometimes died in the coastal copper mines. Instead he was braced in the tight confines of a carriage lurching along a muddy and icy road on the long journey to the village of Bocka Morrow and then to Castle Keyvnor beyond it.

  He’d apparently made the mistake of going on a hard and bruising ride the day before to take one last opportunity for fresh air and solitude before heading out to meet with his extended family for the reading of his uncle’s will. It was a mistake because Blade felt as if he’d been taken out and flogged within an inch of his life. Riding in a carriage was never a comfortable experience, but today he was strangely breathless with the agony of it. He blamed the rough condition of the road for his miseries and directed his mind to ignore the complaints of his body.

  His deceased distant cousin’s last letter still haunted his thoughts, phrases leaping out from the rambling missive to snag at his conscience. ‘Care must be taken of the castle and all its precious inhabitants. It will not fall to you, Blade, not yet—and God willing the weight of it will be lessened by the time you come into your own. But when it does, when you alone stand in the dark halls, may you have the strength and fortitude to withstand the worst.’

  To withstand the worst.

  The worst.

  Dear God, what did that mean?

  The worst.

  Blade’s imagination could fire up several horrifying and ridiculously gothic options despite his best efforts. One did not grow up in the vicinity of Bocka Morrow without an inkling of how insidiously inventive Hell could be when one contemplated the worst. Between the region’s mythology, traitorous ghosts, wicked pixies and haunted paths, it was a wonder that anyone was brave enough to remain in residence.

  But I don’t believe in any of it, so I suppose Hell will have to be even more creative to catch me out.

  His mother had once said with a pained sigh that curses grew like heath on the hills of a Cornish seaside. “The Hamblys place a bouquet of death in the hands of every bride they walk down the aisle,” she had whispered from her sickbed. His father had grimly dismissed the sentiment as the talk of a feverish mind and forbidden his son to ask what it meant. They had buried her in silence and for a six-year-old Blade, his unshakeable refusal to accept family curses became as solid as the granite of her tombstone.

  A bouquet of death…

  Blade frowned at his inability to rein in his thoughts. They whipped away from his command the way fish darted from a man’s fingertips in a tidal pool. It was not a sensation he was enjoying any more than he was savoring the pounding of the horses’ hooves in a dirge like cadence. Once he noticed it, it was like a wretched melody trapped inside his head that refused to be dismissed.

  He felt restless and hot, then cold and sullen in dizzying turns that gave him no time to complain of either state. In one terrifying moment, he couldn’t remember where he was going or why but then it came back with the next lurching turn of the carriage.

  To Keyvnor Castle. For the reading of the will. The Earl of Banfield is dead.

  The new earl was to be invested.

  Not me.

  Not yet.

  Not this time.

  Run.

  Run, run, run! The horses’ hooves seemed to say.

  Almost home, the wind sighed in reply.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  His head ached with a ferocity that nearly unmanned him but Blade refused to do more than close his eyes to try to will the agony away. His mother had been sickly according to his father and after a childhood of being studied for any suspicious signs of a similar weakness, Blade was not inclined to complain. He avoided people who outlined their every malady and made their ill health the topic of endless conversation. After all, true pain did not require accounting. It was easily perceived with simple observation and a gentleman did not announce his woes with trumpets and banners.

  The carriage hit a muddy rut in the road with enough force to snap bones and Blade had to swallow a groan.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  Blade reached up to grab the strap to brace himself and rise above the misery, then forced himself to play an old game to seize his senses and bring his roiling mind to heel. In his head, he counted the stones of Castle Keyvnor, then the steps, mentally retracing every dark curve, every black line that he could remember. He walked up the road from the village and evoked the awe of his family seat. He’d visited summers in his youth but not for a long time as his second cousin had become reclusive and withdrawn after the death of his wife.

  No one blamed him.

  Heartbreak affected everyone differently. Who could say what it did to a man to lose the love of his life? His own father’s reaction to the loss of Blade’s mother had been one of icy destructive fury and self-loathing. He’d blamed the world at large for his grief and then set all his energy into fueling a way to follow her into the ground.

  He had died as angry as a man could be—furious that Death had been so slow in coming and so cruel to ignore his wishes for all those years. Blade’s existence had never dented the man’s resolve or altered his course. It had been a lonely path to walk for a young boy, trailing behind his father’s solitary fugue, never daring to mention the mother he missed, building his dream machines and soaking in the knowledge from every book he could get his hands on in a quest to find answers to questions he had not yet voiced.

  Even so, there was one piece of wisdom that had not been overlooked.

  Hambly men did not love lightly.

  Blade sighed. Hambly men loved hard and lost hard almost begging the conclusion that if Blade avoided love altogether then he might stand a chance—a curse in and of itself.

  It was nonsense. He was a member of the privileged class, wealthy and blessed by all appearances, and not an object of pity by any measure. If he was feeling melancholy, it was only natural considering the goal of his journey and if he wished to muddle on about curses, Blade was convinced it was an indulgence better put behind him.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  He let go of the strap and applied pressure to his temples. Death can dance up those damn stairs as much as it wants, but I should make a study of the castle’s layout while I am there…see if repairs…when it comes to me, I will wrestle with every stone if I must to ensure that it will endure. It was easy to dream of light, to dream of restoration, even to dream of the immortality of houses and forget about the fleeting nature of human existence when he applied himself to the task. Engineering theories and the mathematics of stone laid out a barrier against the twists of the road and pounding noise of the horses’ hooves.

  Until he noticed that all he was really doing was breathing and…

  God help me. I…can’t…

  The carriage had come to a halt and he’d missed it. When there was a knock on the door, it startled him. His eyes flew open in shock at the notion that some creature might have been clinging to the outside of the carriage the entire time and now wished to knock and come in. It was an impossibility that evaporated when the door opened and he realized that yes, indeed, nothing was in motion at all. His footman was standing patiently in mud as a cold rain began to pelt the landscape again.

  “Mr. Hambly? Would you care to stretch your legs and take a respite inside and warm yourself while we change out the horses before the last push?”

  “Inside?” Blade leaned forward and saw that they were in the yard of the Mermaid’s Kiss, the local inn. They had reached Bocka Morrow. “Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Are you all right, sir? You look a bit unwell.”

&nbs
p; “Nonsense. I am never ill.” Blade ignored the man’s offered arm to climb down, unfolded his tall frame from the carriage’s tight interior and learned that there was quite a bit of truth in the saying that a man’s pride goeth before the fall. Because even if the carriage wasn’t moving anymore, the ground wasn’t holding still. It rushed at him with a malicious force that took his breath away. His legs weren’t just numb—they were paralyzed in a seizure of tortured cramps in his calves and thighs that mocked his effort to gracefully stand. The ground jumped up and the world made a cartwheel maneuver that took him to his knees.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  Hot.

  Cold.

  And then the carriage was gone, his footman’s voice was an echo of distant concern, someone was yelling for a doctor and he would have argued, he would have told them not to be ridiculous because he was entirely healthy except the mud melted away from beneath his knees into a black inky void and Blade could have sworn that another impossibility had been accomplished.

  I’m flying.

  It was the last thought he had before the darkness drank him in and Blade fell forward onto the muddy ground before the driver and footman could catch him.

  Chapter 3

  Elethea Fairfax pulled her woolen cloak tighter around her shoulders as the clouds threatened another downpour as she walked from the apothecary’s shop down the long lane to the inn known to all as the Mermaid’s Kiss. Her father was unable to attend poor Mrs. Thackery and had asked his daughter to see if she could bring the medicinal blend for the footbath for the dear woman’s aching bones. Ever since a horse had stepped on Mrs. Thackery’s foot last Spring, it had been a plague for her as she tried to assist her husband in the running and management of the Mermaid’s Kiss. A changing station for the Royal Mail and a waystation for travelers, it was no small matter and Elethea knew full well that Sally Thackery was not one to miss a single moment of excitement, gossip or personality that trailed through her establishment or frankly through any of the lanes of Bocka Morrow.