Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

“Here is fine,” Daphne interrupted her. “That
will be all.”

Felunhala curtsied once more and then backed gracefully
out of the room, casting an unreadable glance at Melisande as she moved,
closing the door softly as she left.

Melisande blinked as her mistress left, and
then she seemed to shake herself awake. There were dark shadows under her eyes,
but her irises themselves were an unusual shade of very light brown.  He had
ample opportunity to study her eyes, since they were currently fixed on him.
“Who—” she began, but her voice cracked on the first word, as though she hadn’t
spoken much recently. She coughed, cleared her throat and tried again. “Who is
this?”

“This is Spencer,” Daphne announced without
preamble. “His mother is Mrs. Tattersall. She’s Justine’s new jailer out in the
Haligorn.” Spencer couldn’t help the little flush of outrage that rose in his
cheeks at that, but he did not argue. Even he had to admit that Daphne’s
description of his mother’s role was more or less accurate.

Melisande gazed past Daphne at Spencer. “I am
Melisande.”

Spencer nodded, unsure how he was supposed to
greet the Apprentice to the Royal Witch. “Greetings,” he said finally.
Melisande stared at him gravely.

“What’s new?” Daphne injected herself into
the conversation boisterously.

“Well, we’ve had a lot of the usual,” Melisande
sighed as though accustomed to giving this report. She seated herself on one of
the small couches in the antechamber, and Spencer noticed a faint expression of
pain cross her face as she shifted in her seat.

 “Love philtres?” Lorna asked eagerly.

“Eight, I think,” Melisande nodded.

“For anyone important?” Daphne asked,
practically bouncing on the edge of her seat.

“Well, two of them were noblewomen,”
Melisande revealed.

“Ooh, who? Are either of them married?”

“No,” Melisande said, and she gave their
names and titles, which meant nothing to Spencer.

“Oh,” Daphne looked disappointed. “Do you
know who the philtres were meant for?”

Melisande shook her head.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if they were both meant
for the same man?” Lorna piped up.

“It has happened before,” Melisande said
seriously. Daphne and Lorna both insisted on hearing the story, and Melisande
obliged them, launching into the tale with a liveliness that was surprising
given her wan appearance. But Spencer watched as she talked; there was a shadow
in her eyes that did not leave, even as she recounted the hilarity that had
ensued when the son of the Castle Cook ingested love potions from two different
women and proposed marriage to both of them on the same day.

“What else?” Daphne immediately asked when
Melisande had finished. “Is anything else going on?”

“We have had visitors,” Melisande began, and
then stopped herself.

Daphne’s expression darkened. “Visitors? My
mother and father? My grandmother? Does she want another opinion on the
Prophecy?”

“The Queen doesn’t come to us for her
prophecy,” Melisande said, and now there was something like anger in her eyes.
“The Prophet, and only the Prophet, has her ear. No, just various people from
the Castle. I had a doctor visit me yesterday. He’s researching a beast he
claims to have seen in the dungeon.”

“Rathbone!” Daphne looked delighted at the
physician’s reappearance on the scene. “Is he still about? After what Lorna
told me I would have thought he’d returned to whatever province he came from.”

“No,” Melisande revealed softly. “He’s still
here.”

“Any idea what the beast is?” Daphne asked
excitedly.

“Yes.” Melisande answered definitively. “A
figment of his imagination, conjured from the depths of a tormented mind.”

Daphne’s face fell. Lorna looked relieved.
“You don’t think it’s real?”

Melisande shook her head. “You’d be surprised
what power a fragmented mind holds.”

Daphne seemed particularly disappointed.
“Well, what about the Fool, is Felunhala still—” she was interrupted by
Melisande’s warning hiss, and she lowered her voice significantly before
continuing, “well, is she still seeing him?”

Melisande’s eyes were wide as she shook her
head. “I don’t know what happened between them, but she’s been upset since court
last night. He must have done something.”

Lorna shuddered. “I don’t know what she ever
saw in him in the first place.”

“What else? What other visitors?” Daphne
continued, eager for more gossip.

“Well, the Librarian visited us several
times. He wanted something, but we couldn’t oblige.”

Spencer’s spine stiffened. “Oh,” Daphne kept
her tone casual. “What did he want?”

“It’s about that book that was stolen,”
Melisande told them. “He’s absolutely desperate to have it back.”

“What did he want from you?” Lorna asked.

“There’s a ritual he wants us to perform, but
we can’t spare the time, or the energy. The Queen has many other tasks for us
and she has not commanded an investigation into the theft of the book. To do
the spell he asks of us we require a direct order from the Queen.”

“What spell is that?” It was the first
question Spencer had asked the entire visit; Melisande’s mention of the book
had piqued his interest far more than gossip about the Fool.

Melisande stared back at him seriously. He
wondered if she ever smiled. “In his haste to flee the library, the thief lost
a personal possession. One of the gloves he was wearing caught on something and
was left behind. There is a spell that would allow us to identify the owner of
that glove, but we also have a lake rising and of course there’s Blaxton.”
Spencer cared little for the squabbles of aristocracy, but he wanted to know
more about the book. However, Melisande seemed tired of the topic. “So, tell me
about yourself, Spencer,” the witch’s apprentice asked, and there was a shadow
of Daphne’s command in her voice.

Startled by the sudden change of topic, it
took Spencer a moment to find his voice. “I’m from the provinces,” he told her.
“My mother and I came to the castle about a month ago. She works at the
Haligorn.”

“Which province?” Melisande asked with
unexpected curiosity.

“Inavera.” Spencer named his small southern
province.

 “I’m from Arkestra,” Melisande said.
“Originally.” Her voice dropped a little and she spoke very quietly. “I haven’t
been back there in a very long time.” Inavera and Arkestra were neighboring
provinces in the south.

“I didn’t know that,” Daphne looked very
surprised. “You’re both from the country.”

“How did you come to the Castle?’ Spencer
asked, excited to have met someone else from southern Wulfyddia. He should have
noticed immediately that she had a Southern accent, but there had been so much
else to look at and listen to that he hadn’t picked up on it.

“I came here after my parents died,”
Melisande said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Spencer was surprised by how
much he and Melisande had in common. He and his mother had come to the castle
after trying unsuccessfully to scrape out a living in the provinces following
his father’s death.

He was about to ask another question, but
Melisande suddenly held up a hand.

“She’s returning,” Melisande whispered. “You
should go.” She still wasn’t smiling, but Spencer had the distinct impression
that she was pleased to see them go.

When Daphne jerked the main door open
Felunhala smoothly appeared from the direction in which she had departed. They
bid each other farewell while Melisande sat on the couch, silent and
stony-faced.

“Did you like Melisande?” Daphne asked later.
Spencer nodded, because he had liked Melisande once she’d warmed up a little,
but as he followed the sisters through a maze of corridors, he could not forget
the image of Melisande’s wan face and pained smile. He wondered how she had
found her way to the castle, and what had put that shadow in her eyes.

***

They
were just a few corridors from the witch’s chambers when Spencer smelled
flowers. It took a minute for the scent to register, and during that time he
simply inhaled deeply and happily and kept walking, somehow a little cheered by
the scent of something fresh in those dark, dank halls. But then the scent grew
stronger and more cloying, and began to remind him of something. Then Lorna
stopped dead in front of him and said in a voice that was higher than usual.
“She’s here.”

Lorna’s
gaze jumped from one corner of the ceiling to the other, eyelids fluttering.
Her eyes nearly rolled back in her head, but she closed them instead, bottom
lip trembling slightly. When she opened her eyes again they were fixed at a
point just behind Spencer. “She’s here.”

Agitated,
Daphne fidgeted, and Spencer suspected that she was doing her best to sense the
woman the way that Lorna could. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate,
but it was at the moment he gave up and opened his eyes, that the spirit seeped
into his brain and made him aware of her presence. She was there, waiting and
watching. She was unsettled, perhaps even more so than she had been on the
night when she first revealed herself to Spencer. The memory made him tense,
and he almost lost track of her, but she drifted closer to them, still unseen.
There was a moment of very cold air and an overpowering scent of the sea, and
then Spencer could feel her vanishing down the hall behind them, leading them
away.

“What?
Where is she? Where’s she going?” Daphne looked frantic at being left out. Spencer
could not explain because Lorna was already walking, following the spirit, her
face wiped of all expression and her eyes open very wide. “I want to follow
her,” Daphne whispered. Her face was deathly serious. Spencer realized that the
sisters not only knew about the spirit, but were as inexplicably drawn to her
as he was.

The room
the spirit led them to was quite small; it looked like a meeting room of some
sort, with many tables and chairs, but the wall she led them to was quite
different, because it was lined with reflective glass.

“Mirrors,”
Spencer said, remembering that night in the great hall. “She likes mirrors.”

He
squinted into the glass, waiting to see her image, waiting to catch a glimpse
of even part of her, a swirl of her dress or the shadow of her hand, but Daphne
gripped his shoulder and he lost his concentration. “What?”

“Look,” Daphne
said, and there was a sound in her voice, such excitement, almost rapture, that
he didn’t say another word, but followed her gaze to the mirror. It was coated
with a fine layer of dust, and as they watched, letters were traced on the
dully gleaming surface.

“S,” Spencer
said aloud as the ghost finished the curve of the letter. “A.” 

“N,” Daphne
finished, and then she frowned, because the ghost was behaving quite oddly. The
spirit traced all three of the letters again, followed by an “O.”

Sansano

“Sansano,”
Daphne’s forehead wrinkled. “What does that mean?”

“I’ve
never heard it before,” Spencer said.

The
ghost wasn’t finished. Spencer could still feel her in the air as she traced a
second word just below the first.

Book

“Book.”
This time, Spencer felt a strange certainty overtake him. “You know which book
she’s talking about, right?”

“Our
book.” Daphne breathed, fascinated. “What is she trying to tell us?”

“Maybe
it belonged to her.” He couldn’t explain why the ghost was so compelling to him.
He only knew that he could sense her in the air and feel her emotions like a
ripple in his own heart.

What he
could sense now was her impatience. She had given them a valuable message and
they had failed to grasp the significance of it.

“She’s
writing something else,” Lorna whispered, and they stood in silence as the
ghost went back and began to fill in more words in between the two that she had
already written.

“Will…
come… for… the,” Lorna read each word as it was written.

Sansano
will come for the Book

“Who’s
Sansano?” Spencer asked.

 “I
don’t know.” Daphne looked disturbed, as if for the first time she was
encountering a secret that she and her little sister hadn’t already uncovered
for themselves.

 “Well
you must. You must know him. She wouldn’t give you a clue like that if she
thought it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“I’ve
never heard of anyone called Sansano.”

But the
woman wasn’t finished yet.

He
will

Spencer
began to shake, and with a strange sort of dread he realized that the fear he
felt was the spirit’s and not his own. That terrified him, because what could
be so horrible that it would terrify a ghost? Then he heard Daphne’s sharp
intake of breath, and the fear in the room grew.

He
will kill

He could
sense the ghost’s hesitation; he could feel her trepidation as it flared
suddenly into panic. And then he could sense nothing at all. He reached out
involuntarily as he tried to feel her with his mind, but she had vanished so
suddenly that he couldn’t sense even a shadow of her in the air.

“Why did
she go?” Lorna asked softly. Her wide eyes scanned the room rapidly.

“Is she
gone?” Daphne asked. “Is she?” Lorna and Spencer stared at each other, and Spencer
realized with a feeling that was part dread and perhaps part glee that Daphne
could not sense the woman as well as her sister and Spencer. Daphne looked
distressed. “Why would she go?” Daphne asked, and Spencer found that he already
knew the answer.

“She’s
afraid.” He said. “Something scared her.”

“Who is
it?” Lorna asked.

“Who
frightened her?” Spencer clarified.

“No,” Lorna
said, her voice very low, “who is he going to kill?” They turned back to the
mirror, with its grim and unfinished message.