Beyond the Pale (58 page)

“There,” she said as she came to a halt. “That’s where I saw him.” She pointed to a door on the right. It was shut.

“The man in the black robe?” Travis said.

“Yes. He left this behind.” Grace reached into the pouch at her waist, drew out an object wrapped in felt, and unfolded the cloth. It was a knife with a polished black hilt.

Travis studied the knife, then handed it back to her and peered at the door. The symbol scratched into the wood was incomplete, but there was no mistaking the two curved lines.

“It’s the same as the symbol you told me about, isn’t it?” Grace said. “The one you saw on your journey here.”

Travis gave a wordless nod. He forced himself to study the symbol. Yes, it looked as if the maker had started to scratch two crossed lines beneath it. An X.

“What did you say it was?” Grace said behind him. “The symbol of some sort of cult?”

He turned around. “The Raven Cult. It’s a mystery cult, like the Cult of Vathris, only it’s new. I haven’t seen any of its followers here in Calavan, but there were a lot of them in Eredane, and in the other Dominions, from what Melia and Beltan said.”

“I wonder what’s in this room?” Grace started to reach for the door’s handle, then halted and looked up. “Maybe we should ask Lord Alerain for permission first.”

“And what will we tell him we’re hoping to find in here when he asks us? Little people with jingle bells?”

Grace bit her lip. “Good point.”

She turned the handle. There was a click, and the door opened. They glanced both ways down the corridor, but no one was in sight. Together they stepped through the door.

The room was dim—there was no window, only the light that filtered in from the corridor outside—and it took Travis’s eyes a moment to adjust. Shapes loomed all around them, some round, some square, others squat and lumpy.

“A storeroom.”

Even as Grace said this Travis realized she was right. The room was filled with barrels, crates, and sacks—the shapes he had glimpsed.

He scratched his scruffy beard. “What’s so important about a storeroom?”

Grace shook her head.

They searched the storeroom for a few minutes more, but they found nothing special. The crates contained rotten linens, and by their odor the barrels were filled with some kind of salted fish. The air was damp, and Travis soon discovered the source. Water dripped from an opening. The opening was perhaps two feet across and angled up into the thick stone wall. When he peered in he felt a cold puff against his face. It was a ventilation shaft. He remembered reading a book about castles as a kid, one that showed slices taken at various points throughout the structure. Medieval castles were supposed to be riddled with ventilation shafts. Otherwise, in
damp climes, everything inside them would have molded instantly.

Travis and Grace stepped back out into the corridor and shut the door behind them.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything important in there,” Travis said.

Grace crossed her arms over the bodice of her gown. “But the man I saw, the Raven cultist, he had to have picked this room for a reason.”

Travis shrugged. He didn’t disagree, but whatever the cultist’s purpose it wasn’t clear from the contents of the storage chamber. A thought struck him. “Maybe this isn’t the only room, Grace. After all, if the cultist marked one door, he could have marked others. If we found more, we might be able to figure out why he was doing it.”

Grace’s eyes shone, and she opened her mouth to reply. Just then the call of a dove drifted through a high window. Both glanced up. The sky had faded from blue to slate.

“Oh!” Grace said. “I need to go, Travis. I have … I have to be somewhere.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I should be getting back, too. We can look for more doors later.”

She nodded, started to turn away, then turned back and clumsily reached for his hand.

“Thank you for coming with me, Travis.”

“Thanks for asking.”

She squeezed, then let go of his hand and hurried down the corridor. He smiled as he gazed after her. It had been almost fun to wander the castle with Grace. Then his eyes flickered to the symbol on the door, and his smile faded.

Grace was certain it was no accident Kyrene had chosen this place for their meeting. She rounded a corner in the hedge maze and stepped into a sheltered grotto.

“There you are, love. I was beginning to think you had changed your mind and had decided not to come. Or that perhaps you had gotten lost in the labyrinth.…”

Grace planted her feet on the frozen ground and resisted the urge to turn and run as she had the last time she had come upon this place. “I’m here,” she said.

Kyrene moved toward her. The countess was wearing a fox cape, its silver fur turned inward. Her cheeks were bright with the cold. “Come, sister.” She held out a hand. “I have much to teach you.”

I’m sure you do. Love
. However, Grace did not speak the words. She hesitated, then accepted Kyrene’s hand and stepped into the grotto.

It had been five days since the evening Grace and Aryn had gone to Ivalaine’s chamber, and Grace wasn’t certain she had any better idea what it meant to be a witch. Once she and Aryn had stepped through Ivalaine’s door, they had been eager to learn, eager to hear the truth about who the Witches were—what they wanted … and what they could do. They had expected revelations. What they had gotten were more mysteries.

“How do we begin?” Grace had asked Ivalaine that first evening, breathless, thirsty.

The queen of Toloria had seemed hardly surprised at their arrival in her chamber. “Do you know how to weave, Lady Grace?” she had asked.

Grace had shaken her head.

“Then that is where you will begin.”

Grace had spent the remainder of that evening, and many hours after that, seated before a loom in the queen’s chamber, learning how to operate the pedals, and how to pass the shuttle back and forth through the strands of the warp. She had worked until her back ached and her head throbbed. Not since the first days of her internship at Denver Memorial did she remember being this tired, this dizzy, this consumed and overwhelmed. Yet she was good at it. Weaving was not so different from closing incisions, stitching wounds.

“Watch each thread,” Ivalaine would murmur as Grace worked. “Follow its line, see how it runs beside the other threads. Each is separate, yet all are intertwined as well. Together they create something far stronger than a single strand, yet every bit as supple.”

Soon the queen’s words would merge with the whir of the
shuttle, the
clack-clack
of the pedals. At night Grace would close her eyes and dream she was caught in the loom.

Aryn already knew how to weave—evidently that was something noble ladies were supposed to learn in this world—so she had been spared that particular task. However, Ivalaine had other work in mind for the baroness. That first evening the queen’s lady-in-waiting, the red-haired Tressa, had led Aryn away. When Grace saw Aryn next it was late, and they both had been exhausted. The baroness’s left hand had been dirty, and her cheeks and gown smudged.

“Gardening,” Aryn had said with a mixture of outrage and amazement. “She had me gardening.”

Grace hadn’t known how to respond. “What did you plant? Medicinal herbs?”

“No. Turnips.”

The last several days had offered little more in the way of explanations. The Council of Kings had reconvened two days ago, so that left only the evenings for their studies. Grace and Aryn would come to Ivalaine’s chamber when they could—and when they did not think King Boreas would notice. But it wasn’t as if Grace was betraying the king. At least, that was what she told herself. However, once in Ivalaine’s chamber, she never seemed to find the chance to ask the Tolorian queen about her motives for abstaining at the council. There was so much else to occupy her.

Like weaving. At first Grace had feared her hands would be crippled from the loom, then they had grown calluses, and the shuttle had seemed to barely touch them as it flew back and forth. A picture had begun to form beneath her fingers. It was a garden at twilight, purple-green and secret. Yesterday, when she arrived at the queen’s chamber, she had almost looked forward to weaving.

The loom had been gone.

“It is time for new lessons,” Ivalaine had said. “Lady Aryn, you will continue to study with Tressa, though you are finished with gardening, I think. And since I am occupied by the council, you will have a new teacher, Lady Grace.”

Only at that moment had Grace noticed the other figure that stood in the room. She moved forward with a rustle of emerald wool and parted coral lips in a smile.

“It’s time to learn what it truly means to be a witch, Lady Grace.”

Grace shivered and returned to the frosty garden.

“What do I need to do?”

Kyrene made a lovely frown. She must have practiced the expression many times before a mirror. “That is the wrong question, Lady Grace.” She moved closer. “What do you
wish
to do?”

Grace started to shake her head. What did Kyrene mean? It didn’t matter what she …

No, she
did
know. Everything around her, it was always so distant, so removed. But she wanted to touch it, like the threads of the loom beneath her fingers—the lushness of the winter garden. “I want to feel,” she said. “I want to feel everything.”

A smile coiled around the corners of Kyrene’s pink mouth. She took Grace’s hand, led her deeper into the grotto. They stopped, and the countess started to untie the sash of Grace’s gown.

Grace pulled back. “What are you doing?”

“You have no need of this garment.”

“But it’s freezing out—”

Kyrene’s eyes flashed, and her usually soft face was stern. “I am your teacher, sister.”

Grace tensed. Kyrene was vain, and maybe even dangerous. Yet she knew things—things Grace wanted to learn. She lowered her arms and stepped forward.

The countess moved supple hands over Grace’s gown, loosened ties, pulled straps. Grace stood stiff and stared forward into the hedge-wall. Ever since her time at the Beckett-Strange Home for Children, the thought of being naked before others had terrified her. It was logical enough, the clinician in her knew. Even long after the marks faded the fear had remained, as if others still would be able to see the places where they had touched her, like shadows against her skin.

Her gown slipped to the ground, and a soft cry escaped Grace as the winter air wrapped a new, frigid cloak around her body. She began to shiver.

“It’s
cold,
” she said through clattering teeth.

“It doesn’t have to be, love.”

“What … what do you mean?”

Kyrene gestured to the tangled garden walls. “There is no need to be cold when there is so much life all around you.”

“I don’t … I don’t understand.” The air was damp. In this environment it would take mere minutes for the first symptoms of hypothermia to set in. She had nearly frozen once in this world—she did not intend to again.

Kyrene only gazed at her, and her smile coiled in on itself like a red serpent.

“Tell me,” Grace said. She knew it was what Kyrene wanted, for her to beg, but Grace didn’t care. She had to know. “Tell me, please.”

The countess’s eyes glowed in satisfaction. “But of course, sister. You had only to ask.”

Kyrene stood behind Grace and murmured in her ear. “Close your eyes, love.”

Grace did this.

“Now reach out and touch the evergreens in front of you.”

This seemed an odd request, but Grace lifted her arms to obey.

“No, sister, not with your hands. You have the Touch. Reach out with your mind, touch them with your thoughts.”

What was Kyrene talking about? Grace shook her head. “I can’t touch something with my mind.”

Kyrene’s whisper was soft and cold as snow. “Then you will freeze, sister.”

Convulsions wracked Grace’s body now, yet she knew they would stop soon enough, and an irresistible sleepiness would wash over her. That would be the beginning of the end. Grace tried to move her feet, but Kyrene’s words buzzed in her head, and she felt rooted to the spot, as if she were a tree herself, slender and pale, leafless in winter.

“Touch them, Grace. Do it.…”

No, it was impossible. Or was it? There was that day in her chamber, the day she first met Kyrene. She remembered now. It had felt as if something—someone—had come close to her, too close, and she had pushed the presence away.

Her shivers faded, she had to try. Grace concentrated and tried to remember how she had felt that day, only this time, instead of pushing, she
reached
.

Her mind was dark, all she felt was coldness.

“Do it, sister.” The voice was an icicle in her brain. She hated it, wanted it to go away. “Reach.”

She couldn’t do it, her whole being was brittle, she was going to freeze here in the garden. She stretched, flung her mind out, but there was nothing to touch. Only ice, and blackness, and …

 … warmth. Green, golden warmth. It brushed across the surface of her mind, like a candle in a darkened room, then was gone. Desperate, she cast her mind back. There—there it was, a beacon in the barren murk. It was so beautiful, so gentle and bright. How could she have missed it before? She smiled, and it seemed so easy.

Grace reached out and touched the light.

Her eyes flew open. The air of the garden was still frigid, she could sense that, but she was warm—wondrously, deliciously
warm
. Like a balmy breeze from a summer forest, it rushed over her, and through her, until her skin glowed. She drew in a deep breath and smelled green.

“Yes, that’s it, love,” a triumphant voice purred in her ear. “I knew you had the strength.”

“But what is it?” Grace had never felt so much a part of something before.

“It is the Weirding.”

Kyrene stood before her. Grace hadn’t noticed when the countess’s fur cape and gown had slipped off, but she was naked now, her skin flushed with warmth.

“The Weirding?”

“It is the power that resides in all living things. In the evergreens, in the hedges, in the moss between the stones. It dwells in everything alive, and it flows between them in a great web, vast beyond imagining.”