Daphne came to her side, wrapped an arm around her sister’s bony shoulders. “Grandmamma would make you,” Daphne told her sister regretfully, and then she was off again, whirling across the room, her white nightdress swirling around her bony knees. In the darkness their white nightdresses looked luminescent, lending Daphne a ghostly air as she danced around with characteristic vitality. Lorna would have liked to light some candles for light and comfort, but Daphne enjoyed the melodrama of a dark room on a stormy night.
Given the size of the castle it was hardly necessary for them to share rooms, but they had both suffered nightmares as little children, and since their mother and father slept many halls away, the two girls had been moved into the same room to comfort each other. Lorna pressed her forehead against the cold windowpane and wondered what Justine did on nights like this. She hoped her little sister’s new governess, Mrs. Tattersall, was a kind woman. Lorna certainly hadn’t cared much for the son, Spencer. She had found him inhospitable and generally quite disagreeable, glaring at them over the pages of his book like they were trespassers. Though, despite all of that, he still hadn’t deserved what Daphne had done to him.
“I hope he’s all right,” Lorna said aloud.
“Who?” Daphne asked from across the room, where she appeared to be waltzing with some imaginary companion.
“That boy. Spencer. We shouldn’t have left the book with him.”
Daphne waved her hand as though swatting away her sister’s concern. “He’ll be fine. He’s already survived the worst of it.”
“What if he tells someone?”
“Are you mad? He doesn’t want anyone to find out any more than we do. Anyway, you told me you didn’t want that book anymore. Remember? Or do you forget what started happening?”
Lorna turned back to face the window. “I remember.”
“We should get a good night’s sleep tonight,” Daphne announced, climbing back onto her obscenely high bed with the aid of a small footstool and flopping back spread-eagle on the quilt. “She won’t be back.”
“She might be.” Lorna’s voice was very low.
Daphne sat up, all traces of a smile gone from her face. “She won’t be.”
“I can still feel her.” Lorna’s breath became mist on the glass. “She’s out there somewhere.”
“Good, I hope she stays there.” With her usual abruptness Daphne rolled over onto her side, tucking her braid over her shoulder and resting her hands under her cheek. In minutes Daphne was asleep, but Lorna lingered for a while by the window. Sleep had not come easily to her since they found the book four nights ago. She was ready for the dawn, for a bright morning of rambling in the castle gardens with her sister. She didn’t want to lie down between her cold sheets and try to sleep, or lie awake wondering whether they had done the right thing today. But she grew cold standing there alone, and eventually her bed beckoned to her, reluctant as she was. She slipped quietly beneath the covers and rolled over so that she was facing her sister, and eventually they were both wrapped in dreams.
***
Spencer was sleeping soundly, the book tucked under his mattress, when a footstep and a whisper summoned him to wakefulness. His first thought was that those girls had come back to make more mischief. In his somnolent state it took him a minute to realize that it was probably his mother, up for some water or to use the washroom. Reassured by this explanation, Spencer rolled over on his cot, winced at the loud squeak as he shifted his weight, and closed his eyes. But as he lay there, waiting for sleep’s return, it occurred to him that the footsteps were quite slow, almost as though his mother was wandering the halls rather than making a trip to the washroom. And the steps echoed. There wasn’t usually an echo.
Aware that he was probably letting his imagination get the best of him, Spencer pushed his blankets aside and climbed out of his cot, stumbling a little on the cold stone floor. The chamber was likely due to be scrubbed, because he smelled wet, rotting soil. Beneath that powerful scent, was the fainter, softer perfume of a flower, teasing his nose, there one minute and gone the next.
He padded softly toward the door, aware that at the same time, the footsteps were drawing nearer. Come to think of it, the woman was walking in the opposite direction from the washroom. Her slow, faint footsteps were the only sound breaking the silence of the Haligorn. He couldn’t even hear the omnipresent ticking of the clock in the hall. Had it stopped? Spencer quietly reached for the doorknob, and as his fingers closed on the cold metal, the steps suddenly sped up, as though the woman were breaking into a sprint.
Spencer jerked the door open and peered out into the hall. The stench of earth and flowers was stronger there, as though he was closer to the source. It sounded as if the woman was running, and Spencer looked sharply left. As he turned his head he thought that he caught a glimpse of a figure in white vanishing around the corner, but what startled him most of all was the moonlight. It was everywhere, spilling down the halls, illuminating the height and grandeur of the old walls in a way that Spencer had never seen before. That was because he had never seen the corridor lit by moonlight. And that was because the corridor had no windows…
The moonlight was everywhere, silvery and unmistakable, yet it had no origin. The walls in the corridor were very thick and lacked even the arrow slits that were in many of the rooms, yet the entire hall was bathed in a soft glow. Spencer took a step forward into the silver light and the still air of the shining hall, and it struck him how silent the corridor was, how abandoned. His courage almost failed him, but then there was a sound, a breathy whisper that seemed to come to him as if on a breeze and over a great distance.
“Sssspencerrrrr.” Perhaps she wasn’t running from him. Perhaps he was meant to go to her. He followed the sound of her retreating footsteps down that bright hall, his toes curling against stone that was impossibly cold. He smelled another scent now, wafting over the earth and the flowers. He could taste brine and feel the bite of salty wind against his face, though there was no breeze in the corridor.
As he turned the corner he realized where he was going. She was leading him to the great hall, one room that had remained almost entirely undisturbed since Spencer and his mother moved into the Haligorn. The great hall unnerved him, and usually he took great pains to avoid it, but this time he was driven by a strange single-mindedness. All he wanted was to catch a glimpse of the one who had whispered his name.
He almost thought he could hear her: in a sigh that echoed through the castle, in a faint whisper that sounded in his head. She was reaching out to him, drawing him to her. He padded into the great hall, expecting his mother to call out to him at any minute, to order him back to bed. There was no sound. This room too was impossibly illuminated by moonlight, turning the room so very white that Spencer could see everything, every detail of the chamber, every mark on his own white skin.
There was no figure to be seen in the hall, no woman in white, but he could feel her in the air around him, watching him and waiting. He hadn’t been in this room more than once or twice, so he had never noticed the enormous silver framed mirror that was set into one wall. It was so large that it would have been good for a party, because all of the guests would have been able to see their reflections at once. For a moment Spencer could imagine that: an entire ball of ghostly figures dancing their way around the white, white hall. Ladies turning over their shoulders to catch glimpses of themselves as they waltzed, men bowing to their reflections….
“Ssssspencerrrr…”
“I’m here,” he told her, and his voice echoed in the hall. There was a flicker in the corner of his vision, and he looked up and caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror. He was not a very grand sight, in his striped bedclothes with bare feet and messy hair. But behind him… behind him something strange was happening to the moonlight. It almost seemed to be binding together to form a column. No, a figure, swathed in white, too blurry to see clearly, except for one long, thin hand reaching for his shoulder.
&nb
sp; Spencer jumped and glanced over his shoulder. There was nothing there, only empty floor and bare moonlight. He stared back into the mirror, but her reflection had vanished from there, too. He looked from side to side, trying to sense her presence, but suddenly he felt cold and alone in that big, empty hall. Right before his eyes the light seemed to be fading, sucked from the air and replaced by darkness. Chilled, he started back towards his room on tiptoe. It was harder to get back to his room than it had been to leave it, since the hall grew progressively darker with each step he took. By the time he was back at his own door there was no sign that it had ever been illuminated by some unearthly glow. Spencer took a deep breath and pushed the chamber door open.
He closed the door behind him, eager to climb back into his warm cot and escape the chill of the air. But he paused, squinting, before climbing back under the covers. There was something on his pillow. The room was so dark it was a miracle that he could even see it, but because it was so white he could make out the outline. It was the book, the one that had been secured under his mattress when he left the room. When he looked closer, he saw that the faint silvery gleam of the spirit frosted the cover, as though the binding itself had summoned her forth.
Chapter 3
It was a white day at Castle Wulfyddia. The rain was no more but the cloud cover remained thick, blanketing the sky in swirls of swiftly moving clouds, shining with a pale watery brilliance. A cool, sharp breeze wafted from the mountains, bearing the taste of last night’s rain.
“I think it’s cursed. I must have been sitting there with it for hours, but I don’t even remember what was inside. I just remember looking up from the book and my mother was back.” Spencer had just finished a partial retelling of the previous day’s adventures to Rolf, the moatkeeper’s son. So far Rolf was the only friend Spencer had managed to make at the castle. Out in the provinces where Spencer was from, castle folk had a reputation for being abrupt, unfriendly and intolerant. In the three short weeks Spencer had been living at the Haligorn that generalization had proved by and large fairly accurate. Rolf and his father were two of the exceptions though. Rolf was maybe eighteen years old and unusually tall. He hadn’t filled out his frame yet, and the result was that he looked a little like a beanpole with large ears. His smile was kind, however, and he had an appetite for stories, which was excellent because one of the few things Spencer loved more than reading a tale was telling one.
However, his latest story was an abridged version. He had told Rolf everything about the book except how it arrived; he had cut Daphne and Lorna out of the retelling entirely, making it sound as though he found the book in some deserted corner of the Haligorn. He trusted Rolf, as much as one could after just three weeks, but he could not afford for anyone to know about the role the princesses had played. People were very touchy where the royals were concerned, and he feared what might happen to his mother if it was discovered that the princesses had visited the Haligorn.
Spencer shuddered at the thought of what the Queen might do to his mother, and turned up his collar against the wind that whistled through the gaps and slits in the old drawbridge, shivering with the bite of the coming winter. The surface of the moat was green and foaming, lapping restlessly at the boards. He was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the drawbridge, while Rolf stood, slowly trawling through the water with a long-handled net. A white dove passed over their heads, her wings white and silent. Her shadow rippled on the water as she passed low over the moat, and Spencer took a moment to appreciate her beauty. Preoccupied as he was by the white dove, he entirely missed the sight of a tiny, misshapen reptile, like an ill-proportioned lizard, that scuttled around the corner, lost its grip on the boards beneath its feet and slid sideways into the moat. The tiny plop of the reptile’s body startled him, and he glanced this way and that, searching for the source of the sound, but the odd little creature had already sank beneath the froth.
“So what are you going to do about it?” Rolf asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The book.” Rolf reminded him. “If you need a witch to disenchant it for you, I know a good one down at the Bottoms. She’ll charge you two-thirds price if you tell her I sent you.”
The Bottoms were a maze of poverty stricken neighborhoods at the foot of Mount Wulfyddia, just above the harbor. Technically they were part of the Castle complex, but the way that people there lived, you wouldn’t know it. There were murders every day, more taverns than grocer’s stalls, and the tide washed in all manner of strange folk. Spencer couldn’t imagine what his mother would do to him if she found out that he had been in the Bottoms visiting a witch recommended to him by Rolf the moatkeeper’s son. Even the wrath of the Queen paled in comparison.
“Thanks anyway.”
“You could toss it into the Chasm.” Rolf suggested after another moment of thought. The Chasm was the deep cleft in the Earth that separated the cliff of the Castle Proper from the jagged peak on which the Haligorn perched. It was the subject of many local legends. Most people avoided it like the plague, with the exception of Spencer and his mother, who had to cross a narrow footbridge over it every time they wanted to travel from the Haligorn to the castle. Spencer tilted his head, hesitating, and realized that he was searching for an excuse. The fact of the matter was that he didn’t want to part with the book just yet.
The events of the evening before were still somewhat hazy. He remembered discovering the girls, he could recall Daphne’s sharp eyes and the way pale fear had etched itself on Lorna’s face as the minutes passed. Everything had become an enormous blur once the book was pulled out though. He vaguely remembered the girls leaving him there, vanishing into the darkness of the Haligorn, and he suspected that they had taken it upon themselves to visit Justine before they let themselves out. He remembered the painting too, the first one, but with a strange fuzziness, as though he had looked at it through a veil. Ever since he woke that morning the urge had been building in him to have another look. His next memory was of the door creaking as his mother let herself in, smelling of rain and wet wool. He had hidden the book under his mattress, where it had remained until… Well, until that night.
Next to him, Rolf cocked his head curiously as he caught something in his net. Spencer watched as the older boy slowly drew the net in, raising his eyebrows at the sight of something large and black coiled at the bottom. Without even taking the time to stand he began to immediately slide backwards over the rough planks as Rolf slowly brought the dripping net in. Rolf wasn’t a terribly expressive person, even at the best or worst of times, so Spencer took his companion’s complete silence for trepidation. Perhaps some horrible creature lay coiled at the bottom of the net, waiting to strike. When the net finally lay on the dock, Rolf let out a deep sigh. “Good grief. I thought it was a moat snake.”
As it turned out, the object that had been the source of such terror for the two of them was only a long black garment heaped at the bottom of the net. Rolf dumped it out unceremoniously onto the planks and then, reversing his hold on the net, used the warped wooden handle to poke suspiciously at the garment, muttering something about leeches, before he finally moved to touch it. It was a long black cloak, complete with a deep hood and long sleeves, and accompanied by only one black glove.
“Wonder where the other one is?” Rolf mused. He frowned. “I hate finding half of a pair.”
“Who throws their clothes in the moat?” Spencer asked.
“You’d be surprised what we find in here.” Rolf said darkly. “Anyway, I bet this belongs to Haudgast.”
“The executioner?” The man’s name alone was enough to make Spencer break out in a cold sweat. “You know him?”
“He and my father drink together after work. He wears exactly this sort of getup when he’s working.” As Rolf spoke Spencer found himself glancing over his right shoulder towards the castle courtyard where the executioner plied his trade day after day. Sometimes, when the wind was blowing just a certain way the cries of the condemned and
the fall of the ax could be heard from exactly where he was sitting now. “He’s really something,” Rolf remarked. “You’d be surprised how much you have to know to be castle executioner. He has to know how to behead people, hang them, burn them at the stake, draw and quarter them...” Rolf slowed and then fell silent altogether at the look on Spencer’s face. “Guess I shouldn’t really talk about it like that,” Rolf conceded.
No, Spencer thought, especially given that all Rolf or his father would have to do is forget to pull up the drawbridge one night and an order from the Queen could easily have them twitching at the end of the hangman’s rope just as fast as anyone else. “I should probably get back,” he said weakly.
“Yes, you shouldn’t keep your mother waiting.” Spencer didn’t miss the faintly wistful expression that passed over Rolf’s face at the mention of Abigail Tattersall. The two boys found themselves in opposite situations, since Spencer’s father was dead while Rolf was without a mother. As Spencer straightened up and brushed off the seat of his pants he could make out a tall, thin figure making its way down the drawbridge towards them. Most likely it was Halphar, Rolf’s father; Spencer hurried along at the sight of him. He liked Rolf just fine, but the boy’s father was a little odd. Some said it was because of his job, which necessitated him sleeping in that little stone hut beside the moat every night. There were rumors that in the black of midnight, dread creatures crawled out of the moat and whispered darkness into the moatkeeper’s ears. Spencer wasn’t sure about that, but he knew that his opinion of the man wasn’t much improved by the revelation that the moatkeeper spent his evenings drinking with the executioner. “Take care now,” Rolf told him, touching the brim of his cap in an automatic gesture of farewell. “Let me know if you want to see that witch.” Spencer winced at how far Rolf’s loud voice carried. He nodded abruptly and then hurried back over the drawbridge, away from the castle and towards the path that would lead him to the Chasm, and the Haligorn beyond it. He always took the same path; it was the only one he knew and he feared that if he strayed from it he would become completely lost.
Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) Page 3
