Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

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.

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.

It was
difficult to appreciate, as he hurried down the narrow streets and cramped
alleys, just how tremendous the royal city really was. Castle Wulfyddia was
anchored to a small, rocky peninsula known as Castle Point. Bordered on the
east by the icy Veiderling Sea and on the west by the black expanse of the
Chronyddia Ocean, there were only two ways to reach Castle Wulfyddia by land.
The less favored path was to ascend the Black Cliffs. The Black Cliffs were a
mass of jagged volcanic rock, left over from some long ago eruption. Castle
Wulfyddia was carved from the black rock of the highest peak, while the
Haligorn clung to the dark rock of its sister cliff. The cliffs were difficult
to navigate and nearly impossible to grow anything on, which meant that Castle
Wulfyddia was largely dependent upon fish and meat for sustenance. Fruit and
vegetables were a luxury made doubly rare by both the rocky terrain and the
harsh winters.

The
second, and generally the preferred route to Castle Wulfyddia, was to follow
the black cliffs to the east, where the cliffs suddenly plunged downwards into
a forested valley, where the royal family hunted and fey folk were said to
wander, searching for unwary humans to snare in unearthly enchantments. Even
from the Royal Forest, the road to Castle Wulfyddia was not easy, though it was
not nearly as steep as the path across the Black Cliffs. The castle’s inaccessibility
was a large part of its defensibility, and so none of the royals had ever seen
fit to build a wider road from the valley, or to carve a less treacherous path
through the cliffs. Thanks to the difficult terrain, when the castle was
besieged, it was usually by sea.

To the
north and the west of Castle Wulfyddia the cliffs met the sea in a sheer drop
that made it a favorite spot for suicides, and the site of many a shipwreck. At
some point some monarch had decided to combat the problem of shipwrecks by
commissioning an enormous lighthouse, carved of dark granite, which loomed atop
the cliffs and sent piercing beams of light into the night, warning away those
who otherwise might have dashed their ships on the rocks.

To the
east, the shore was gentler, and the cliffs were reduced to rolling hills, and
then to a mild slope which stretched down to the beach. That was where the
ancient port of Castle Wulfyddia lay. Reportedly the first area settled in the
earliest days of the Castle, long before the Lucretius family ruled the
country, or even before Wulfyddia was called Wulfyddia, it was also the most
frequently rebuilt, since constant naval battles throughout much of Wulfyddia’s
history had seen the port razed many times.

The
keep, the innermost fortress, was where the royal family lived. The keep
benefited from many additional defenses, including the moat, a deep and wide
body of dull green water. The moat was ancient, one of the first defenses to
have been put in place, and it was at the center of much local mythology. In
addition to the many ghost stories concerning the moat, an entire cohort of
dark beasts were said to reside under the noxious water. There were even some
who claimed that the moat had its own spirit, though usually it was only
natural bodies of water which could claim the protection of a water spirit. Personally,
Spencer had never seen anything particularly remarkable on his walks past the
moat, and the only moat-creatures whose existence he had ever heard confirmed
with absolute certainty were leeches.

The keep
itself was an ugly thing, at least to Spencer’s eyes. It was uniformly black,
largely undecorated, and quite squat, save for a number of spindly towers that
poked up towards the sky like spikes. The interior of the castle was not
particularly aesthetic, either. Many of the royal chambers were quite lavishly
decorated, and the largest chambers, such as the great hall where court was
held, had a certain eye-popping grandeur, but the architecture itself was rather
hideous. Windows were few and far between, since the castle was built first and
foremost to withstand a siege. Instead, there were arrow slits everywhere,
which let in very little light and often leaked when it rained. 

The
sprawl of the city spilled from the keep in every direction except the north,
in which direction the keep was so close to the sea that on stormy nights the
spray of the ocean kissed the stone of the keep. Beyond the keep there were a
series of walls, some in better states of repair than others, most sporting
battlements and guard towers. Each wall dated to a different year, and often to
a different century, and many of them had entire stretches of masonry which
were either crumbling, or missing entirely. It looked as if after each
devastating battle, the ruling monarch had simply put up a new wall rather than
repair the old one. The result was a rather patchwork mismatching of walls.
There seemed little rhyme or reason to their construction, save for a vague
pattern which seemed to spiral inward. The people who lived among the outermost
walls were the poorest, many of them refugees from provinces stricken by
famine, disease or flooding. Closer to the keep, the roads improved, the stench
of sewage and rot faded, and the buildings transitioned from shacks to cottages
to large houses with multiple chimneys. The chasm cut across it all, isolating
the Haligorn from the rest of the city.