Silver Hollow

by Jennifer Silverwood

  Yet she couldn’t ignore the fact that he was the one who had tracked her down in the gardens the other night and carried her to bed, not Slaine, Cook or Underhill. He was the one who had been watching over her across the busy London streets and during Faye’s party. He was the one who had saved her life. Amie kept these things in mind as Emrys led her past the grounds she had roamed thus far and past the stables. Eddie peeked up at them from his current task and watched unabashed as they deviated from the path at the last minute.

  “Where are we going?” Amie offered, trotting to catch up.

  “To the pit.”

  “The pit?” Somehow she didn’t like the sound of that but soon discovered it to be nothing more threatening than a ruined amphitheater. Roman in design and make, the ground had gradually worn away at the stone over time, so that the gray steps poked through the earth like exposed bone. Amie climbed to the bottom carefully and grumbled when Emrys jumped each giant step. “Stupid long legs…”

  “Could you move a little faster? We’re losing sunlight,” he called up to her, hands fisted at his hips.

  “Shut up!” she growled, twisting to face him. More than a little out of breath, she threw all girly sensibilities to the wind and hopped the rest of the way down.

  “How kind of you to join me,” he remarked, spreading his left hand and inclining his head to the right.

  Rolling her eyes, she marched to stand in front of him and held her arms to her chest. “Okay. Let’s get on with it.”

  Smiling faintly, he shook his head and circled her slowly. “To survive inside the Vale, one must be aware of things unseen. Ye must learn to look without your eyes and to feel with this,” he said while wrapping an arm from behind her, palm spread over her heart, “and learn to trust it better than this.” His hand moved up to tap her temple as he rounded to face her.

  Amie glowered back at him, wondering at the storm brewing in those onyx depths.

  “Before I teach you anything I need to take away the sense you rely on most.” Closing the space between them, Emrys took her head between his hands and spread his fingers over the lids of her eyes until they fluttered shut.

  “What are you doing to me?” she croaked. A burning tingle began from where his fingertips connected to her skin and cooled after he removed them.

  His voice came from beside her ear. “Helping ye to see.”

  The heat of him was everywhere, but when she opened her eyes to glare at him she saw nothing but midnight. “What did you do to me?” She panicked, threw her hands at him and felt them connect to the hard surface of his chest.

  His hands caught hers at last and his voice hovered somewhere above. “Relax! Nothing I can’t fix once you are ready.”

  “What do you mean when I’m ready? I can’t see! How did you do that? It’s impossible!” Her voice wavered and betrayed her fears. Amie had never considered the fact she did depend on her sight above everything else. She had to see to believe, and now he had taken away the one thing that kept her rooted to reality. She hardly registered his thumbs tracing circles over the lines in her palms, or the trail of energy they eased beneath the skin.

  “This is coming from the woman who consorts with faeries? Come, Jessamiene, use your head. You know something is off about this place. You believed for years before giving in to the rules of the humans. You were born into this life, mother’s blood or not. And if you didn’t believe what your heart’s been telling you now you wouldn’t be wearing this.” He twisted her father’s ring around her finger. It felt cool as ice and warm as comfort on her skin, as if it belonged there. “Now, come with me.”

  She hesitated, saying, “Where are we going?”

  “Learn to trust me, love,” he said, his breath a caress over her brow.

  …

  Over the following hours she was taught more than she had ever learned in her lifetime. Amie learned to know the feel of Emrys’ scarred hand in her own. She learned what the world smelled and felt like beneath her touch. Emrys led her about the grounds by hand, taught her to know them in a way unlike anything she’d known before.

  It wasn’t long before her other senses sharpened. She could hear farther than before, from the creatures of the forest treading through underbrush to the grass bristling against the wind, even the hum of Periwinkle’s song from the gardens. Distantly she heard Slaine order Eddie about the stables, the horses talk together in their secret language and the strange creatures hidden behind the stable gate. From the great house, servants answered to Underhill’s shrill commands, and Cook accidentally knocked over a pile of dishware. Compared to the noise around them Amie also learned Emrys moved almost silently beside her. Without the presence of his hand engulfing hers she wouldn’t have known he was there.

  The wind gave sound as well as scent, carrying smoke from the castle chimneys and the heady perfume of fading flowers. Emrys made her describe each sound and scent until he was satisfied and then found objects for her to touch.

  From the sense of emptiness around them Amie knew they were sitting in the middle of a heather-swept field. Emrys held out his palms for her to grasp hold of the different samples he had found to test her with. How he managed to find so many so quickly Amie could not see to know.

  Her hands searched the current object held in both his hands, its underbelly and rippling skin, and she grinned triumphantly. “It’s a seed.”

  “Guess again.”

  Amie frowned. “What else could it be?”

  “You’re guessing too quickly. Give yourself time to feel.”

  Sighing, she kept her fingers over his, covered the foreign object’s every crevice. “Not a seed…but it’s round and prickly…ah!” She jumped when the seed sprouted two legs, stretched out its shape and began to move. “What kind of bug is that? That better not have been a spider!”

  Emrys’ laughter grew to a slightly higher pitch. Clearly he was enjoying himself too much in Amie’s opinion. “It’s only a flobbergidit, and calling him a bug hurts his feelings.”

  Amie wrinkled her nose. “Great, they exist too.”

  “Of course they do!” To the creature he murmured something unintelligible and it answered in its high gurgling voice. Setting it in the grass he turned to face her again. “You need to learn patience if you’re going to…Jessamiene, what are you doing?”

  “Patience,” she insisted with a smirk and reached out until her fingers found his face.

  He tried stopping her, tried pushing her away. “I don’t think…”

  “Calm down, Emrys. You said you wanted me to learn to see. I need to learn to see you too.” She sounded confident and felt anything but. Quite honestly she hadn’t a clue why she felt the compulsion to touch him. And to her surprise he let her set his hands back into his lap and reach up to touch him again.

  He was taller than her memory evoked, so her hands found his shoulders first before trailing up the sides of his neck. His hair was thick and unruly, sharp in contrast to how soft it really felt. He breathed in sharply once she found the hard line of his jaw, the small cleft of his strong chin and the stubble that shadowed his cheeks. Several more scars marked the faint lines about his face. His nose was straight and narrow, his brow smooth and his lashes long for a man’s. The sideburns that framed his face were a fraction uneven. When her fingers trailed his lips Amie knew that in spite of his deceptively ordinary features, Emrys might truly be the most handsome man she’d ever met.

  She froze when his fingers clasped her wrists and forced them back down, almost too tightly. Mouth thinly gaping, Amie couldn’t manage to protest when he kept her hands in his.

  …

  After a quick lunch with a surly cook watching over them, Emrys led her to another rarely used part of the castle. Here he pressed his thumbs over her eyelids and her senses exploded with an overload of color. Amie gaped at the endless racks of weapons littered on the walls. What the room lacked in furnishing it made up for in the detailed carved characters in its wooden ceiling, the s
tonework at their feet. Everything about it was foreign, echoes of Celtic influence and something older.

  Emrys’ voice echoed around her. “When they come for you, Jessamiene Wenderdowne, you’ll have to rely on more than your ability to see and be unseen. Some will wield weapons such as this.” He lifted a weighty double-bladed axe and twisted so quickly round his movements were nothing more than a blur. He shouted as he swung the axe in vivid, obviously practiced moves.

  Her nails dug into her palms to keep her from moving the closer he came, but she held her ground while he held the blade inches from her neck.

  “You won’t be able to fight metal to metal. Ye aren’t strong enough and it would take years until you were fast enough to wield them properly.” Easing into a relaxed stance, he rested the axe onto his shoulder. “And unfortunately we’re already out of time.”

  “So why bother teaching me?”

  “I’m teaching ye how to tap into something of greater value than this.” He glared at the weapon with distaste and tossed it aside. “I want ye to understand what it’s like to face an enemy you’ve never met, to fight only because you have no other choice.” He stepped closer, sneered as his gravelly voice pressed on. “There is a reason your uncle assigned me to you Jessamiene. People will hate you for being who you are, but mostly because of these.” His fingers passed just shy of her eyelashes.

  Amie blinked reflexively, ignoring the comment about her eyes. “In all the time Uncle Henry talked to me he never said anything about enemies.”

  Shaking his head, he chuckled to himself. “No, he wouldn’t, would he? Too afraid his precious jewel might run away.”

  Amie steeled herself against her mixed emotions, and the insinuation she couldn’t stand up to a fight. “I don’t appreciate the way you put him down so much. He may not seem like much to you but he’s the only family I’ve got left.”

  “Is he now?” Emrys twisted his chin over his shoulder, turned quickly to face her with a dark gleam to his eye and a wicked grin. “What of your mother’s people? Surely they took an interest in their orphaned grandchild?” He walked slowly over the ancient swirling marble. “Well?” His voice dragged her attention back to his calculated steps and the casual threat in his eyes.

  Tilting her chin up defiantly, Amie countered, “You trying to tell me you knew them or something?” She watched his face carefully, would have missed the subtle twitch of the muscles round his eyes had she not spent the day blind.

  “You talk as if you believed the impossible.” When she didn’t respond he looked expectantly to her.

  Appraising Emrys with knowing eyes, she tested him. “You were in the States. You could have met him then.”

  His lips came together in a thin smile. “Perhaps…but don’t you think I would have tried to stop the death of an old friend if I had?”

  Amie froze, clutched her heart and the marked skin of her chest with her hands. Pain she carefully hid returned fresh. She took him in, this man Uncle Henry had assigned to protect her, the man she had learned to explicitly trust and doubt in the same day. Finding her voice and a spark of old courage, she said, “I think you are a man who only lives for himself and could care less about other people. But you want to know the sad thing about that? One day, if it hasn’t happened already, you’re going to wake up and realize there’s no one left in the world who cares whether you live or die.”

  She turned away and walked out the way they had come, ignoring the fact she had been blindly led here. As with the night before, Amie seemed to know where to turn. She didn’t imagine he would follow her, was startled when he clasped her arm, jarring her steps and twirling her round to face him. She was afraid when she saw the fury in his eyes and the well of pain he too carefully hid.

  “If you believe this, you do not know me at all, Jessamiene.”

  “I never said I wanted to know you,” she bit back. His eyes widened a fraction before dulling into their usual grim irony. “Look, I get that Uncle Henry assigned you to me. I’m grateful, really. You saved my life once…and I’ll do these lessons because I owe you for that. But no one else around here trusts you, so don’t expect me to start.” Pulling apart from his grip, she escaped his hold. Emrys let his hands fall to his sides as she turned on her heel and ran away.

  Chapter 23

  Taming the Beast

  A letter came to her the following day by mail. The parchment was resting on her breakfast tray and Amie ripped the seal the instant she recognized Uncle Henry’s handwriting. Her spirits fell after she devoured its contents.

  “I am delayed by my visit to the Lowetide and Belletine residences, and regret to tell you not to expect me for another two evenings. Trouble has been brewing between the lesser houses and I am taxed with trying to mend the old alliances. We must stand united or we fall as one.

  I hope you are well cared for. Perhaps I shouldn’t relay to you the threats I made were I to learn otherwise upon my return.

  Emrys the Merlin I have sent to you only out of necessity. He shall teach you in ways I cannot. Visit the Hall of Portraits and take heart, remembering the legacy you have been born to. My faith in your promise is unparalleled.

  Love,

  Uncle Henry”

  …

  Lessons with Emrys were tense after their confrontation in the weapon room. With Henry’s return postponed, and Amie forced to deal with his replacement coach, she was too close to losing it. She hadn’t forgotten Emrys’ condescending views of her or her uncle. He might be Henry’s guest, but this didn’t mean she had to enjoy her time with him. As Henry said in his letter, she only needed to view her stalker as a necessity. Once again he stole one of her senses, made her rely on other ways of knowing, rely on him. Every time his dark orbs met hers they grew harder, more determined. For whatever reason he seemed hell bent on turning her into an enchantress, and she would have loved to know why. Every time she broached the subject he put her off with some snarky comment and proceeded to torture her with impossible tasks.

  When Amie questioned his methods, Emrys threw up his hands and said, “Ye want them to steal your nixy, be my guest. Let those addled fools pamper and primp ye into their little princess and they’ll bleed ye in the first five minutes.”

  “Sorry I asked…So what else are we doing today? I think I know enough about being blind and deaf already.” Amie picked the dirt from her fingernails to keep her hands from trembling.

  Wringing his hands at his side, flexing and clenching them into fists again, he shot her a grim visage. “Give a man room to breathe, would you?”

  Amie shrugged, wrapped her arms round her middle. “Sorry I asked.” The moment he turned his back she frowned and wondered why he seemed so nervous. From what she knew of Emrys Bane of the Vale, there was little that could shatter his pessimistic view of both worlds, in and outside Silver Hollow. A lack of emotion dulled his features as he slowly paced round her. It unnerved her, though she did her best to steel her knees and clench her fingers and above all things not to twist her father’s magically shrunken ring like she was wont to do.

  “When you are faced with an impossible enemy you have three times to nix him, Jessamiene, only once to blither him to the pitch.”

  Amie bit her lip to contain her laughter, found the task simple when his black eyes narrowed darkly. With a feather-light touch he pressed his fingers to her chest and said, “You will have no time to laugh with the world burning to ashes around you, no time for anything but your instincts in the end.”

  “Sure thing, Obi-Wan,” she replied.

  Amie was unprepared for the leg that swept her off her feet and onto the hard turf. “Ow!” Amie shouted, about to protest until she saw he wasn’t finished. Following her descent by straddling her waist and throwing himself over her, he grabbed her arm, clutched it and pulled it till it was primed to break. She winced when he turned to meet her eye. Their breath collided with the air between them until she forgot to struggle.

  “Metal is what the enemy tr
ains with in these dark years of forgetting, not their souls. The weakest have forgotten how to harness their inner nixy. When the time comes, Jessamiene, ye must be willing to use anything to stop them.” A flicker of hesitation washed his features, softened them to tempered emotion. Sitting up, he released her arms, eyes hardening as he added, “Now, fight back.”

  “You’re kidding me?” She laughed. “Not saying I wouldn’t mind socking you in the jaw, but you’re a lot stronger than me.”

  “And my physical strength has little to do with all you are capable of within. Now fight back!”

  Amie struggled to push him away, went Catwoman on him by scratching with her nails when this failed. Kicking her legs and bashing her knees only made his eyes narrow. Faster than she could catch him, Emrys flipped her so she lay on her stomach, his legs locking hers from behind. With their cheeks now pressed tightly together, it was all she could do to scream.

  “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to fight!”

  “Ye have to be better than them! Use your inner nixy, Jessamiene! Unleash it!” His words were familiar, echoed those of the old cabbie whose carriage carried her here.

  Unleash the beast…

  Amie had no clue how to unleash her nixy, didn’t understand what the nixy was, though the meaning was hinted at by the servants and in pieces in the forgotten library. Thus far she gathered it was like magic, except it went deeper, more like harnessing the energy trapped within a person. And she hadn’t a clue how to tap into it. All she knew was the morning was fading to afternoon already and she was losing her patience.

  “Do it!” his voice, hoarse with inflections, shouted roughly into her ear.

  “I heard you the first time! I don’t know how!”

  “If you don’t, then I will,” he warned, his lips brushing her earlobe as he tightened his hold. Amie gasped at the foreign feeling. It had been ages since she had been held or felt anything akin to this.