Roses (4 page)

The little girl peeped over her shoulder, watching the large woman behind the desk stare at her before they disappeared down the hall.

A few weeks later, a nanny was hired and the wet nurse was permitted to leave. She had managed to secure a good place in a wealthy household, discovering that families were tripping over themselves
to hire the ex-wet nurse of Ma Dane Herm-se-Hollis. Still, she knew that she would miss her amethyst-eyed baby.

The morning before she left, the wet nurse brought the child onto her lap and stared hard into its violet-colored eyes.

“I am confused,” she admitted. “I thought you would have dropped your strange looks by now.”

The child said nothing, but continued to chew on her thumb. The wet nurse had been looking for signs of Magic Blood for the last sixteen seasons, but there had been no troublesome dreams, no twitching objects, and no wind tunnels. The child was as quiet and self-controlled as ever, playing with her hand-me-down toys, but otherwise doing little else.

“Perhaps it will come later . . .”

She said her tearful goodbyes to the child and then left Rose Herm. In the seasons to come, she would always listen for gossip and news of her amethyst-eyed baby, though for a long time there would be none.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

The Nanny

A
s a baby and toddler, the nameless little girl was shy and sweet, but this changed with the arrival of the nanny.

Ma Dane had been struck by the glimpse of the eerie being in her study that day with the wet nurse. She had not expected the child to look so much like Asha. The resemblance was uncanny despite the freakish, silver coloring, and it led her to assume that her temperament would be similar—difficult. She decided that the child would need a firm hand or else her fate would also be the same. What would become of Ma Dane’s reputation then? The standing she had bought, fought for, and dreamt of. The child would need a firm hand or else she would ruin everything.

And so the nanny arrived. Her résumé promised harsh discipline and her last place was in the house of one of the State Leaders who had five young, jostling boys, which made her seem the perfect person to control the child. Ma Dane sent for her immediately and the woman arrived two days after the wet nurse departed and perhaps if it had been just a day, or if there had been a crossover
period, then things might have been different. But it was not and it could not be helped.

The amethyst-eyed baby had not spent a night away from her wet nurse since she could remember. The sudden separation upset and confused her and she cried to herself all the dark, warm night, curled in a corner of the lonely nursery. A long, solitary day followed in which she was visited at mealtimes by a maid evidently petrified to be in her presence, and then passed another gloomy night. By the time the nanny arrived, the amethyst-eyed toddler was weak with neglect and loneliness. She had not stopped whimpering since dawn and that was how the nanny found her: cowering under the wet nurse’s empty rocking chair.

“The child is down here?” the nanny had asked, following Ma Dane down a long corridor on the third floor.

“Yes, that is correct. We keep her in Master Eli’s old nursery. I had a suite of rooms prepared for his birth, but they were not finished in time and he had to spend a few days in here after he was born. The room is sufficient for the needs of this child.”

They stopped before a plain door and Ma Dane took a key from a pouch about her waist. Her fingers were trembling although she was trying hard not to show it. When she met new staff, she liked to be as imposing and haughty as possible to terrify them into submission right away, but this was proving to be difficult. Anything that concerned the amethyst-eyed child caused her nerves to jitter. She felt like a girl again, dressed in the ancient tatters of a fashion long gone, who was laughed at in the street.

“Does the child need to be locked in?”

“She has a tendency to roam about the house if left to her own devices and it upsets the servants.”

“All unruly ways shall be punished.”

But Ma Dane scarcely heard what the nanny said. She unlocked the door and marched inside, and at first she did not see it, but then
she caught sight of a wary little face beneath the rocking chair, and she sucked in her breath. The thing was biting the nail of its thumb in that achingly familiar way.

“I will leave you to become acquainted,” Ma Dane barked, sweeping out of the room and shutting the door hastily behind her. In the empty corridor outside, she leaned against the wall for a moment to regain her composure, the back of her neck slick with sweat.

In the nursery, the nanny squared up to the thing trembling beneath the rocking chair.

“I am Nan and I want you to come out immediately.”

If the baby had been wary, she was now petrified and could not have moved if she had wanted to. She hoped desperately that her wet nurse would return and stared hard at the dark wooden slates of the floor, wishing to awake from this nightmare.

“Come out. This is the last time I will tell you.”

A moment later, a clawed hand swiped beneath the rocking chair, grasping the doughy arm of the toddler and wrenching her out in one yank. She did not have time to cry or even take a breath before she was confronted with a cratered, thick face hissing into her own.

Nan smelled of crumpled tissues and floor polish. Her limp gray hair was raked into a twist on the top of her dome-shaped head and her sagging skin resembled dribbled wax. Ma Dane had been pleased to note her horrific presence, thinking that she was just the sort of woman who could have controlled Asha, if indeed anyone could have.

“From now on, you shall do as I instruct. You are lower than a servant here. You are a dependent, is that clear?”

The child gazed back at her in mute shock.

Taking silence for disobedience, Nan thwacked her across the thigh in a sharp, cutting slap.

Tears sprang to her violet eyes.

“When I am speaking to you, you will give me the sign of respect.”

Grabbing the child’s left hand, she shoved it against her chest.

“Is that clear?”

The amethyst-eyed child did share the same temperament as Asha— Ma Dane had guessed that much correctly. But had she been cared for and shown tender affection, the child would have been merely headstrong. In fact, her initial shyness would have worked in her favor and she could perhaps have been single-minded but sensitive. As it was, this would not be the case.

Cruelty soured her. Nan was used to treating spoiled little darlings who were lavished with adoration from their parents and sorely in need of a commanding presence. The amethyst-eyed child had no one else in the whole realm and Nan’s savageness squashed her. She was shown no mercy.

There was not one striking incident that did it. There was no sense that she had been pushed past her limit. Rather, it was a slow burn of brutality that could only head in one direction. It started with the sign of respect—the child would press her left hand to her chest and stab the nails into her skin, creating tiny mauve crescents while inwardly hating Nan and clenching her teeth to bite back screams of rage. This progressed to snubbing her nose whenever Nan was not looking, which filled her with secret glee. Then she began moving Nan’s things around the nursery. Not hiding them, because that would be too obvious, but rearranging items enough to make it difficult.

Emboldened, she went further: not answering right away, not signing respect until told to, not brushing her hair, and so on. Eventually the child rebelled altogether and began sneaking out of the nursery whenever the opportunity arrived.

And every smarting slap that she received as punishment, every strict reprimand and nasty insult, was worth it. She would not stop misbehaving, for she could not bear it otherwise. Having escaped, she would scurry through the corridors of Rose Herm unnoticed, spying on the servants and, in particularly bold moments, on Ma Dane. At first this was enough to satisfy her rebellious urges, but soon she craved more. She began venturing into the grounds of the mansion and it was around this time that she first met Owaine.

Owaine had heard of the strange child, as all of the servants had, but he had never seen it. The maids often liked to whisper at mealtimes in the lower quarters of curses and demons and bad luck, but he took little heed of them. In fact, he barely spoke to anyone except to command his stable lads and to exchange a few polite observations with the gardeners. He found the outside servants easier to mix with than the house servants if he needed company, and the feeling was mutual. The house servants thought his lilting accent comical and difficult to understand. They found his manners rough and peculiar, but they did not expect much else from a Hillander.

Owaine’s homeland was many miles away, in the opposite corner of Pervorocco—a long distance from any city and different in feel, smell, and taste from Sago. In spare moments he dreamt of moist, green hills, cool fog, and the smell of drenched earth. He longed to return to his homeland, but grief and poverty had brought him to Sago to seek work and he feared returning. As stable manager at Rose Herm, he could send a wedge of sticks home each moon-cycle to his daughter, who was cared for by a relation in his village. He missed her dearly, but he told himself that he was better off staying at Rose Herm.

His job kept him occupied and his rooms in the stable loft meant that he was rarely away from it. Owaine was a skilled horseman and the tang of horse sweat and the scent of hay were his constant companions. They were also what brought the amethyst-eyed child to him.

One morning he was grooming the carriage horses as usual when he saw something flickering in the shadows of the opposite stall. Comrade, Pa Hamish’s riding horse, was whickering softly and he could hear the soft swish of straw being shuffled.

Frowning, Owaine clicked his tongue and whistled, wondering if one of the hunting dogs had gotten in there again. Comrade adored petting and would let anyone and any animal into his stall. He had not exactly turned out to be the show horse Pa Hamish had hoped for.

Owaine approached the stall and peered over the half door, expecting to see a dog or one of Sago’s street cats that often prowled the grounds for pickings. Instead, two violet eyes stared back at him.

“Urgh!”

He jumped, causing Comrade to flinch and stamp his hoof in frustration.

Owaine pressed his thumb and index finger together firmly and tried to calm his beating chest. The maids’ stories flew into his mind and he swallowed hard. Gathering his courage, he peered over the half door once again.

The child had buried her face against Comrade’s lean ebony leg, wrapping her silvery arms around his knee. She looked so vulnerable that any misgivings Owaine harbored ebbed. She was wearing a pair of slacks that did not fit and a frilled boy’s shirt with deep creases.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said in the soothing lilt he reserved for skittish colts.

She peeked at him with one curious violet eye.

“I won’t hurt yur.”

She stared at him.

Owaine wandered back over to the carriage horses and began muttering a Hilland folk song. He picked up a currycomb and started working the knots out of the first horse’s tail.