The Master of Heathcrest Hall (58 page)

Rafferdy thought he should say more, but he could not think of what. He supposed he should have been aghast to have made such a confession, but he was not. Sometimes a truth is so precious that it cannot be disowned, no matter the consequence.

For a long minute, both men were silent. At last Sir Quent nodded.

“Get her away from the city, Lord Rafferdy,” he said at last. “Do whatever you must to accomplish it. Promise me you will do this.”

A feeling came over Rafferdy then which surprised him. It was not sorrow, or regret, or any sort of dread. Rather, it was a determination that was so grim as to be peculiarly satisfying.

“I will,” he said. “I swear it.”

Both men gazed at each other and saw that it was settled. There was only one thing left to do. Rafferdy withdrew the small, colorless gem from his coat pocket. Quickly, he explained its use. Then he knelt and slipped it into Sir Quent’s boot.

“Keep it hidden,” he said, rising. “And if you should determine there is some other way to proceed, use it as I have described to send a message, and I will do what I can to come to you again.”

“I may use it,” the other man said, “but there is no other way.”

Rafferdy bowed, not wanting Sir Quent to see the anguish upon his face, then he turned and went to the iron door.

“And, Dashton,” Sir Quent said behind him.

Rafferdy paused, his hand upon the door.

“Make yourself worthy.”

Rafferdy squared his shoulders and arranged his face into a solemn but calm expression. Then he opened the door and went to inform Lady Quent that her husband was ready to see her.

T
HE IRON DOOR shut behind Ivy with a knell that made her recall the thunder rolling across the moors around Heathcrest Hall.

She was aware of the figure of a man sitting in the center of the dim, windowless chamber, but she could not bring herself to look at him directly. It occurred to her that she should have gone to him at once, and flung herself down to put her head upon his knees, but she did not. Or rather, she could not, for a terror gripped her.

“It is all right, Ivoleyn,” said a low, familiar voice. “You need not fear what you see when you look at me. I am well.”

Slowly, through great force of will, Ivy turned her head and lifted her eyes. At last her gaze reached him, and what she saw filled her not with dread or sorrow, but with a sudden and piercing joy. Now she did rush forward, and knelt down on the cold floor before him. For a while they only looked at each other. No other sort of exchange was necessary. Eventually he let out a sigh, and she reached up to touch his face with both hands.

“Your beard is like a thicket of brambles!”

It was a silly thing to say, not in any way appropriate for the situation. Yet it caused him to laugh, and she would have laughed herself, if she had not already been weeping.

At last she withdrew a hand to wipe her cheeks. “You are too thin,” she said. “And your face is pale. It is so dark in this place.”

“Not anymore,” he murmured, looking down at her. “Now it is exceedingly bright.”

“You sound like Rose,” she said, “seeing lights around me.”

“But I do see a light around you, Ivoleyn. I always have.”

She looked up at him, and his brown eyes shone, so that she almost could believe they did behold an illumination besides that of the smoking, sputtering oil lamps.

Ivy rose then, and proceeded to make an examination of him with light touches. She brushed her fingers over the familiar landscape of his shoulders, across the rugged crags of his face, and through his hair, which had grown into a long and tangled thatch like his beard.

“Are you satisfied I am well?” he rumbled at last.

“No, I am satisfied you are my husband. It might have been anyone beneath such a disheveled exterior.”

Again he laughed, and this time she was able to echo him, if briefly. But quickly she grew solemn again.

“Dearest, what must we do?” she said softly, urgently. “What must we accomplish to have you released from this place?”

“I have already discussed such matters with Lord Rafferdy,” he said in a low rumble. “There is nothing more that needs to be arranged on that account right now. The soldier will return for me soon. I would rather spend what time we have left in better ways. Learning how you have been, for one thing.”

Ivy could not say she was entirely satisfied with this request. She wanted to know, without delay, how they were to effect his release. Yet she could not deny his request, not in his current state. Besides, she could ask Mr. Rafferdy later about what he and Mr. Quent had discussed.

“Now, bring that other chair close,” he said. “Sit, and take my hands in yours, and tell me everything that has happened since I saw you last.”

Ivy obeyed, sitting and twining her fingers with his, braiding them together like twigs of Wyrdwood. At first he gazed at her lovingly as she spoke, but his expression soon became one of growing concern. Ivy had not intended to burden him with the grim details of all that had happened, but once she began speaking about them, she found she could not stop.

Hardly pausing for a breath, she told him how they had been cut off from society, but that her sisters were bearing it well, and
that Lady Marsdel and the Baydons had not abandoned her; only now they were gone from the city. Then she spoke of more troubling matters: the manner in which Mr. Fintaur and Mr. Larken were murdered, her conversation with Mr. Mundy, and her visit from Lady Shayde.

It was as she described this last happening that his expression grew especially grim. At last she was finished with her bleak litany. She wished she could have brought him news to lift his spirits in that awful place. But that she could have kept anything from him was, she knew now, impossible.

“So Ashaydea came to you again,” he said, the furrows on his brow deepening. “And she offered to aid my cause if you would help her injure Lord Rafferdy’s.”

“But I could not,” she said, and now she hung her head, suddenly unable to look at him.

“No, Ivoleyn, do not have any regrets. Your choice was the right one. To betray Lord Rafferdy for our gain would have been an abominable crime, one for which you would never have forgiven yourself. Besides, I can assure you that, even if you had held true to your end of the bargain, Lady Shayde would not have done the same. To release me, she would have had to undo the very laws which grant her master his power. She could no sooner do that than a knife could, of its own will, turn itself on its wielder. In the end, she would have betrayed you.”

“Just as she betrayed you!” Ivy cried, her voice rising with anguish. “How can she see you come to this? Does she care nothing for your common history, for the years you spent together?”

He stroked her hand with his thumb. “No, Ivoleyn, there is no use in feeling anger for Ashaydea. She cannot be anything other than what she has been made into. Better that you should pity her than hate her.”

“Why?” Ivy said, looking upon his face again. “Why should I not despise her?”

He gave a great sigh. “It would take a long time to explain, more time than I fear we have. But you spoke of our common history, and you should know that, while what happened to her that
day at the circle of stones near Heathcrest was Mr. Bennick’s doing, I cannot claim that I had no part in it. All of us in Earl Rylend’s household did.”

As he spoke, some of Ivy’s anguish was replaced by curiosity. She remembered the old elf circle near Heathcrest Hall, and the way the great stones appeared as if they had been cracked and burned. What had happened all those years ago, when Ashaydea was a ward of Earl Rylend, and Mr. Quent was the son of the earl’s steward? That the two had been close friends once, Ivy was certain. Only then Mr. Bennick had come to tutor the earl’s son, and everything was altered.

Yet as curious as she was, her husband was right. This time was too precious to waste it upon discussions of Lady Shayde. Instead she asked him about his treatment in the prison, which though hard and oppressive, was not unbearable. He in turn inquired after her sisters, and she spoke more of what she had learned of Rose’s ability to see light around certain people. This both fascinated and worried him, and he told her to keep her sister away from any others that might be curious about this peculiar talent—a matter upon which she agreed. When both of them were satisfied, he glanced at the door opposite the one through which Ivy had entered the chamber, but still the soldier had not come back for him.

“I wonder,” he said, “if Lord Valhaine has taken any actions against the Wyrdwood yet. I did not have a chance to ask Lord Rafferdy about it.”

“I do not believe so,” she said. “Or at least, no actions that have been made public.”

Ivy thought of the door Arantus in the upstairs gallery at the house on Durrow Street. It occurred to her that she could unlock it, step through, and look through the other portals that still opened onto stands of Wyrdwood to see if they had been disturbed. Though she could not help thinking, if they had in fact been attacked, somehow she would know it.

“But would it not be folly for him to do so?” she went on.
“Surely Lord Valhaine knows the reason why the Wyrdwood has been left all these years, and what would happen if it were attacked. No doubt you have told him that the more it is harmed, the more it will rise up and fight back.”

“Yes, so I have told him, many times. I told him what my own father told me long ago, that the only way to win against the Old Trees is to lose something to them. But I fear that, in his heart, Valhaine has never really believed me. He was never a man who could accept any sort of defeat. And now he is greatly influenced by the magicians of the Golden Door.”

“What of this?” she said, gently touching his left hand, and the thick scar where the last two fingers should have been. “Doesn’t he believe this?”

He let out a low grunt. “He thinks it only a sign of my folly and an unnatural fascination with the Old Trees. Valhaine does not know the particulars of what happened.”

“Neither do I,” she murmured, stroking his wounded hand. “You told me it happened when you spent a greatnight in the Wyrdwood. But you’ve never told me what took place that night.”

“No,” he said gruffly, “I have not.”

“But why?”

“I do not know. It was not something I had a wish to conceal from you, but nor was it something I have ever been eager to relate. Perhaps it is simply because, when I am with you, it is not the past and its hard lessons that I care to dwell on.”

Still the soldier had not yet come. Ivy tightened her own fingers around the three that remained on his left hand. “Please,” she said, gazing into his brown eyes. He looked away from her, and for a moment he was silent, so that she thought he would not speak at all.

Only then he did.

“My father gave me a small pocketknife the day I turned twelve,” he said, then smiled fondly. “I do not have the knife anymore, but I can still picture it clearly. The blade was on a hinge, so that it could be folded inside the haft, which was inlaid with ivory
he had brought from the Murgh Empire. It was exceedingly fine and was exceedingly sharp as well. As you might imagine, there was not a boy in the West Country who was prouder of a knife, and I used it to whittle many a stick and skin many a rabbit.”

Ivy smiled herself at this image of her husband, not as the hale and powerful man she had always known, but as a boy of twelve, hunting for rabbits among the gorse upon the moors.

“Not long after my birthday came the start of the new year,” he went on, his voice louder now. “It was still the custom then in the country, on the first umbral of the year, to beat the bounds of the village.”

She shook her head. “Beat the bounds?”

“A bit of West Country superstition. Mrs. Seenly would know what I speak of. Beating the bounds is a tradition in which all the men would march about the edges of the village, banging pots and hammers or the like in order to make the greatest racket possible. The idea of old, I suppose, was to scare off any ghosts or spirits that might have slipped through the crack between the old year and the new. Of late, it was more an excuse for a noisy revel. But as I was twelve, I was now old enough to go with the men as they beat the bounds, and I was very excited to do it.”

Fascinated, Ivy listened as he described that night more than thirty years ago. It seemed she was no longer in a dank chamber beneath Barrowgate, but there on the West Country moors, as people reveled in the village of Cairnbridge and bonfires leaped up toward the black sky.

At that time, the elder Mr. Quent had been the steward of Earl Rylend for many years, and the Quents dwelled in Burndale Lodge, in the hollow of the slope beneath Heathcrest Hall. Despite his service to the earl, Mr. Quent had not forgotten his ties to Cairnbridge. While the people of the manor did not participate in such quaint folk customs as First Umbral, Mr. Quent never failed to attend—his duties allowing, of course. So that year, young Alasdare Quent and his father rode down from Burndale Lodge to the village to join in.

The elder Mr. Quent was not game for beating the bounds of the village himself. By then, he was already under the grip of the illness which, though they did not know it then, was afflicted upon him by the curse of Am-Anaru. But the illness was not so severe then, causing only a bit of weakness and palsy, and he was happy to find a chair and a cup of wine near the bonfire. He gave his son permission to go with the other men on their rounds, and young Alasdare eagerly ran off to join them, the ivory-handled knife tucked in his pocket, just in case.