Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

Spencer had never heard that version of the
story before. “I thought he took the throne in a great battle.”

“Yes,” Daphne blinked. “That’s probably what
they’re supposed to teach them in school out in the provinces. The truth is
that we don’t really know how he took power. The records are ambiguous at best.
Anyway, the whole thing is just a story, but that’s how the legend of Lucretius
magic got started. Over the centuries there have been a few royals in
particular who have been rumored to have had the gift. I have my doubts. Apart
from the first Lucretius, it doesn’t appear to have gone well for them. They usually
ended up dead or exiled.”

“You don’t believe it then?”

“Well, I certainly don’t think Cornelia was
one. She’s said to have been mad.”

“But what if she was?” Spencer asked. “The
book is full of paintings and it’s certainly enchanted. What if Cornelia is the
one who’s responsible for its creation?”

“And Lavinia is haunting her sister’s book?”

“If it is Lavinia.” Lorna amended.

“Think about it. A bewitched book full of
paintings and a girl with a gift for painting and magic?”

Daphne studied the painting before them
thoughtfully, turning over his words in her mind. “I think we should go see Cicely.”

***

The sisters led Spencer deeper into the castle than he had
ever gone before. Daphne appeared quite determined, but Lorna trailed behind,
lacking confidence in their mission. “You know she won’t tell us anything. She
won’t talk to a soul. Not since she got Justine locked in the tower.”

“I’m going to ask her anyway,” Daphne said
definitively.

She stopped at a door with a big brass
knocker and before knocking turned to warn Spencer, “let us do the talking.”

In the wake of her knock, Spencer heard a
faint chime. Daphne pushed the door open and led them into a small round room,
entirely dominated by a spiral staircase. “Cicely?” She shouted. “It’s Lorna
and I. We’re coming up.”

Spencer listened for a response, but Daphne
and Lorna didn’t seem to expect one. They pushed past him and started up the
spiral staircase. The sound of chimes grew louder as they climbed higher, and
sometimes Spencer thought that he could almost hear a voice beneath it,
sometimes over it, not words, but just a dreamy humming, sweet and maybe a
little sad, just like the song of the chimes. “Do all of your sisters live in
towers?” He asked, panting, as they finally reached the top of the stairs and
Daphne pushed the door to the top room of the tower open.

The room that the open door revealed all but
rendered him speechless. It was perfectly round and perched at the top of a
tower, much like he pictured Justine’s room at the summit of the Haligorn. It
took Spencer a moment to find the furniture. It was all but impossible to see, because
of the carpets hanging from every rafter in the room, swaying in the strong,
freezing wind that swept in from the windows. There were windows everywhere,
all around the room, hardly a foot went by without another one, and they were
all thrown open. This was why there had been the persistent sound of chimes as
they climbed the stairs; there were wind chimes in almost every window, many of
them crystals, casting dazzling beams on the floor, the ceiling, and the
carpets.

But they weren’t carpets, Spencer realized as
he took another step into the room. They were tapestries, which was why they
were hanging. They hung from every available wall space, either above or below
the many windows; they were folded on the backs of chairs and on two small
desks. There was a bed in the corner, which he had missed at first, and the
quilt was embroidered as richly as any of the tapestries. As Spencer put his
foot down he felt something soft under it, and when he looked down there were
rich folds of material under him, all embroidered. It was a lovely room, though
if it were Spencer’s he would have boarded up the windows tightly against the
cold.

He looked up just in time to dodge a swaying
tapestry that nearly hit him in the face. He jerked his head backwards, then
reached out to steady the tapestry and stared in concentration at the great
detail sewn on it. It was an extraordinary depiction of Castle Wulfyddia at
night, so beautiful he wondered if it had been copied from a painting. It was
impossibly intricate, so vivid that it didn’t seem possible it could just be a
tapestry and not a window into another world, another version of the castle in
which he stood. There was a single light on in the castle, high in one tower,
and if Spencer ducked his head and squinted he could make out a little face
sewn against the cloth, peering out of the tower, lips parted in a scream, long
hair streaming.

“Sisters,” Spencer flinched at the interruption
of his study of the tapestry, glancing over his shoulder to see who had spoken.
Then he nearly dropped the end of the tapestry, because before him was a woman
who was strikingly familiar. Her auburn hair was long and straight, and her
blue eyes were wide and clear.

Where had he seen her before? Then, slowly,
he glanced from her face, to the tiny face embroidered on the tapestry, and
back. Hardly daring to believe his eyes, he gently released the tapestry. Cicely
had done a tiny self-portrait with needle and thread. Mad or not she was truly
remarkable.

Even as he watched Cicely was spinning. She
had set herself up by one of the few windows that weren’t almost completely
obscured by tapestries, and there she sat with her wheel, needles, thread and a
pile of half completed tapestries. “My lady,” he bowed, unsure what to say to
this princess. After what he’d seen of the others he had no idea what to expect
from her.

She glanced at him only once, as though not
even curious about him, as though they’d met before. “Hello Spencer,” she said
by way of greeting, and he assumed that Daphne and Lorna must have told her
about him.

“Cicely!” Daphne and Lorna hugged her one by
one, and they had scarcely released her before she was spinning again, pausing
every once and a while to glance out the window at whatever lay below. She did
not look up as they spoke to her, but swayed back and forth, absorbed by her
own task, humming quietly.

“How are you?” Daphne asked, shifting from
one foot to the other as she spoke. Spencer bent to examine another tapestry as
the sisters murmured to each other. This one was also a night scene. It
appeared to be deep in a forest, and a young woman was standing, bow drawn,
arrow pointed at a stag that stood in a patch of silvery snow, nose down,
breathing warm steam into the cold night. The woman’s face was in profile, so Spencer
did not recognize it at first, but then the cloak gave it away. It was Anise,
the Royal Heir, with her bowstring pulled taunt and her face just as tense,
focused in a way that made her look like the maiden huntresses of old.

He turned to the next one; this one was a
rich, warm tapestry depicting an indoor scene. The Queen sat, not on her
throne, but on an expensive armchair, perhaps somewhere in her royal apartments.
She was surrounded by her Ladies, and attended by Dimity, whose face was serene
as she embroidered at her grandmother’s side, save for her eyes, which had the
same focus that Anise had displayed while she stalked the deer. The gold
circlet Dimity wore matched the gold of her thread, and the rich red of her
dress was the exact shade of blood… the same shade of red that Cicely had used
on the next tapestry, this one a dark depiction of someplace that Spencer had
never seen, though it didn’t take him long to guess that it was the wing of the
Castle dungeons that was in present use. Many of the cells were full, few were
empty, several had huddled occupants in such dire conditions that it was
impossible to tell if they were living or dead. Every room had a drain, and it
was the swirl of liquid at that drain that Cicely had captured best, with the
red oil of blood, every drop glowing against the sloped stone floor.

“So,” he heard Daphne saying from behind him,
“we decided to come see you.”

“How kind,” Cicely said. Outwardly she seemed
calm, though there was a strange echo to her voice, not quite sadness,
something else, maybe…

Spencer was still analyzing her tone when her
newest tapestry caught his eye, and he stopped dead. He recognized the narrow
footbridge over the Chasm before he noticed anything else, and that alone
brought him up sharply. She was depicting the Haligorn in great detail, as if
the roof had blown off and allowed some giant to peer into his home like it was
a dollhouse. As usual, she was showing great skill, but it was when he saw the
figures that she was embroidering there that his heart nearly stopped.

Cicely had stitched a golden-haired figure in
blue and white bedclothes. Over his shoulder hovered a pale figure, sewn of
whitest thread. The spirit! But how could she possibly know about that?

“We have something to ask you,” Daphne said
carefully. “It’s about a book.” Cicely did not say a word, but her shoulders
stiffened noticeably under the blue fabric of her gown. “You probably know all
about what we’ve been doing. We still have the book. We told the librarian that
Mollfrida couldn’t find anything, and we still have it hidden. We’re holding
onto it because we know that it’s important. What we can’t figure out is why.
Tell us why, Cicely.”

Cicely finally ceased her weaving, but she
could not quite meet her sister’s eyes. Daphne knelt at her sister’s side.
“Cicely, you must tell me. You must make an exception, just this once.”

“Go now, you’re young and can do whatever you
will. Don’t be bothered with me. I have my weaving.” Cicely gazed at the
tapestries around her and the expression on her face was like a mother gazing
at her children.

“Cicely…”

“You don’t need me,” Cicely said, “of what
use could I be? You have all the books in the library, the papers in the
stateroom… Go now, and leave me be.”

“But—”

“Daphne!” Lorna interrupted. When Daphne
threw her a questioning glance, Lorna shook her head. “Leave her alone.”

“Very well,” Daphne said shortly. She moved
to squeeze Cicely’s hand, but her sister’s weaving made that impossible, so she
squeezed her shoulder instead, and then backed slowly from her sister’s room.
Spencer and Lorna followed her, and then they were all retreating down the
stairs, hearts heavy.

“This is ridiculous,” Daphne complained as they
reached the bottom. “It’s not like we’re going to lock someone up based on her
prophecy. She probably knows everything that’s going on, and she won’t tell us
anything.” Next to Spencer, Lorna muttered something under her breath.

“What?” He asked.

“The stateroom,” Lorna repeated aloud.
“Cicely said we had the books in the library and the papers in the stateroom.
What papers? The stateroom is for documents of state.”

“Mostly,” Daphne agreed, nodding. “There are
some other papers though. Mostly old letters of political significance, that
kind of thing.”

“Maybe she’s trying to tell us something.
Maybe there’s something there we can use.” Lorna suggested, hope lighting her
eyes.

“Maybe,” Daphne agreed, but she didn’t sound
convinced. “I’ll look, if I can get in. Sometimes I wonder if she even has the
gift anymore.”

But Spencer remembered her depiction of his
meeting with the ghost, and his chest tightened a little. Whatever Cicely’s
talent, it was nothing to scoff at.

Chapter
13

His boots echoed in the haze of the black
alley. The fog from that morning was back, and combined with the shadows of the
growing night, he could hardly see his hand in front of his face, let alone
make out the face or figure of the one who pursued him. He was too old for this
kind of exercise, too old to hurtle down back alleys in a city where he had no
allies and no safe harbor to retreat to. But this was very likely a matter of
life and death, and so the old priest ran, ran though his thundering heart
could hardly take it, ran though his knees were weak and his bones brittle. He
fled because it was more than a matter of life and death, because there was
Truth at stake, a truth that should not die with him, a truth that was owed to
the world, and he would see the debt paid, if only he could make it to the
break of dawn alive. 

He ran with the best of intentions, but his
body was betraying him, showing its age, longing to cease, longing to rest, and
if that meant that the Great Rest came a day sooner, then so be it. The Priest
ran until he could not any longer, until the blood was pounding through his
spidery old veins and thrumming in his ears, until it almost drowned out the
cry from behind him, the voice of a child.

“Who are you?”

The voice was far more girlish than he had
expected, surely not the tone of an assassin or guard sent to slay him. He
slowed, and the change of pace brought more agony than even the running had. She
halted when he did, her breath coming in billows of steam as she pushed back
her hood and stared at him.

“Who are you?” In the moonlight she looked
even younger than she was, but despite her wide eyes there was something in her
bearing vaguely reminiscent of the Queen, some echo of a command in her tone
that brought him up short. She had the Queen’s eyes, that much was immediately
clear to the man, even though he was old and it had been a long time since he
had last locked gazes with Tryphena of Wollstonely.

“Why are you watching us?” She was recovering
much faster than him, her breathing slowly evening out as she cocked her head,
expecting an answer from him.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Her gaze sharpened. “Don’t lie to me. I saw
you from the Haligorn. I’ve seen you before, many times. What are you waiting
for?”

“The Haligorn.” He stared at her, startled,
and saw her regret when she realized that she had revealed herself. “You’re the
child she keeps locked in the tower.”

She recovered quickly, tossed her head. “What
of it?”

“You’re not supposed to be out.”

“I go out sometimes at night. Not often, so no
one has ever noticed.”

“You could be punished.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“No. No you’re not,” he agreed. “She’s afraid
of you.”

“Who?” The girl said, unconvincingly, for
they both knew who. She hesitated. “Why?”

The priest didn’t answer at first, instead he
glanced over his shoulder, as if he worried that there might be someone
standing there. He caught her curious gaze, and smiled faintly. “There is a man
hunting me— I thought you were him. But I think I am free of him for tonight.
Walk with me, child, and I will tell you a story.”  Justine stared down at the
hand he offered, unconvinced. “Come now, you want answers, don’t you?” She
hesitated a moment more, then took his hand. There was a full moon shining down
on the black mass of Castle Wulfyddia as the old man and the child wandered off
into the night.

***

The Ratcatcher boy knew first, as always. He
could feel something bad in his bones, could sense it in the way that the rats
suddenly came scuttling through the sewers towards him, even scrambling over
him in their panic. Something was terribly wrong if they feared anything more
than him, more than the one who devoted his entire existence to their demise.

Though the Ratcatcher was just a child, and a
small one at that, he had encountered many horrors in his endless travels
through the tunnels and sewers of the castle, and he knew that there were times
when he could not explain the evil, only shelter himself from it and hope that
he lasted the night.

He could not know whether the danger lurked
within the sewers or outside of them, but he knew which way the rats fled, and he
scrambled along with them, bloodying his knees on rough stone as he pulled
himself along, unfazed by the ghastly, bony little rats and their sharp teeth.
He had been bitten by them before and survived. But something in the night was
making a wretched snarling sound, like a mad dog but somehow more human in its
ferocity. He had never heard that sound before, and that in and of itself was
cause for terror, for he had been crawling through the tunnels for so long
there was little that was new to him. At first he could almost feel the hot
breath of the beast on his ankles as he pulled himself towards the mouth of the
sewer.

But as he neared the grate that separated him
from the rest of the castle, he realized that the sound was muffled, not quite
clear enough to belong to a creature that was inside of the sewers with him. It
was muffled by the wall. The beast, he realized, was above him, above the
sewers. It was loose in the Castle, and while it was indeed drawing closer
every minute, it was still separated from him by thick stone. The sewer meant
safety. It was the world on the other side of the grate that was dangerous. The
Ratcatcher boy stopped crawling and sat back on his haunches as he neared the
grate. The room above had windows and so silver moonlight filtered down into
the grate, illuminating a silver sphere on the bottom of the sewer tunnel. The
boy halted just short of that circle and blinked up through his eyelashes at
what little he could see of the room above, as the rats scurried past him,
heedless of everything in their terror.

Whatever the creature was, it had to be
almost directly above him, for he could hear the scrape of its claws just over
his head. Then there was another sound, softer and somehow more dreadful. It
was the tinkling of a little bell, chilling in its purity, and oddly familiar.
His mind could make no sense of the sound, but it frightened the boy for some
reason that he could not articulate, for he shrank back against the stone
tunnel, his heart seeming to shrink with him, to contract painfully in his
chest. His pulse thudded beneath his ear and he could hear the creature above
him sniffing. There was a low growl, and the sniffing intensified, accompanied
by the sound of nails scraping on stone, as though as it was eager to get to
something or someone.

The beast, he realized, with a sudden,
horrifying certainty, was trying to find him. It could smell him, and it was
trying to get to him, but the Ratcatcher could not imagine what sort of beast
it could possibly be, for he could not reason away the conviction that the
creature was going to
lift
the grate to get to him, and what animal
could do that? Then he heard another sound, a set of human footsteps. The beast
growled low in his throat as a man approached the scene. Isolated in his little
tunnel, the Ratcatcher’s eyes grew wide as he realized that whoever was coming
had no idea what waited for them.

Turn back
. He thought frantically.

Turn back turn back turn back.

But the footsteps continued, slow and leisurely
and he heard a man whistling easily. It was likely some member of the castle
staff, released from duty and finally returning to his own bed in hope of a
quiet night’s sleep, much as the Ratcatcher did every night when he was finally
finished. But rather than end his evening in bed he was going to end it on the
cold stone floor at the mercy of a creature that had now fallen completely
silent, waiting for its unsuspecting prey. The little boy’s mouth opened to
shout some warning to the unsuspecting man, but then a shadow fell on the grate
and he grabbed his own throat instead, silencing himself, his nails digging
into his flesh as he realized that warning the oncoming man would tell the
beast where he was.

The child, not unused to making difficult
decisions even at his tender age, struggled with himself. He was a brave boy,
but too young to have the inclinations of a martyr, and his stout heart
faltered at the thought of the creature that loomed above. The whistling grew
to a crescendo, and the Ratcatcher’s face sank into his grimy palms, his
shoulders shaking.

“What the…” the man’s startled exhalation and
his murmured expression of wonder was barely loud enough for the Ratcatcher to
hear, but he heard the screams that came next. He heard the struggle, the man’s
incoherent cry and the roar of the beast. The beast must have lunged for the
man then, for he heard them both tumble to the ground, and the sounds of a
struggle filtered down to him through the grate. Then the man cried out, in
fear and pain, and the Ratcatcher boy knew that it was almost over. He wanted
to cover his ears to protect himself from the worst of it, but the terrible
guilt in his heart kept his hands on his chest, and he heard the man’s last
scream and the horrible wet sound of his bloody death.  There was a great
slurping from above, and the Ratcatcher stared at the grate above him, for in
the midst of the struggle, as the man and the beast grappled with each other
over his head, he had caught sight of the creature. Garish face paint and a
coat of many colors, fangs in a familiar mouth, flesh rending claws and that
hat…

Oh God, there was a hat still clinging to
that malformed head, and there were bells on it. That thing had once been a
human… what’s more; the Ratcatcher boy knew which human it had been. But there
was no trace now of the person it had once been. It was only a creature now,
seemingly driven only by mindless hunger. The little boy waited in that tunnel,
longing for the moment when the sun would come up, but he could not bring himself
to wait that long, and the minute that he heard the beast move away, vanish
down some distant corridor, he lifted the grate himself with shaking arms,
pulled himself out of the tunnel, and ran the entire way back to his room.