Magebane (15 page)

As Brenna reached the top of the stairs, she heard voices. At the same instant the pine planks of the floor creaked beneath her feet. She froze. But, after all, the old house was full of creaks and groans, and the owners of the voices took no apparent notice.

Brenna couldn't make out any words, but recognized the bass growl of Lord Falk. Very slowly, she crept over to the door to the boy's room, and put her ear against it.

“. . . wake?” That was Lord Falk.

“I have put a sleep on him to keep him unconscious until morning,” said a voice she now recognized as that of Healer Eddigar, whom she'd met many times through the usual sicknesses and mishaps of childhood, the last time just a few months ago when she'd cracked a rib after a slip in the tub. She'd been black and blue for days, but he'd knitted the bone and taken away most of the pain in short order.

“When he wakes,” Eddigar continued, “he will be very weak and very hungry. However, I have stopped the internal bleeding and sped the healing of the wound in his leg. I have also cleaned that wound and his various scrapes and cuts. There should be no infection. I expect him to make a full recovery.”

“As long as he is able to answer questions,” said Falk.

“He will be
able
to answer them,” Eddigar said. “Whether he
will
answer them is of course beyond my control.”

Footsteps receded, and when Falk spoke again, his voice was more muffled.
He must have gone to the door
, Brenna thought. “When will he awake?”

“I cannot be more precise than I have been, my lord,” Eddigar said. His voice, too, was more distant. “Sometime in the morning, but whether early or late, I cannot say. It depends not only on my magic but on his body's powers of recuperation . . . and level of fatigue.”

“Hmm. Well, I'll leave the guards. It wouldn't do for him to wake and wander off, would it?”

“Those decisions are yours, my lord.”

Brenna heard the two men go out and the door close behind them. Falk's voice rumbled indistinctly for a moment; presumably he was speaking to the guards. Then, silence.

Brenna waited a moment for her racing heart to slow a little, then opened the servants' door and entered the room.

The curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows, twins of those in her own room, were drawn tight, so that the only light in the room came from the lamp—an oil lamp, not a magelight—barely aglow on the table beside the bed. At first all Brenna could see of the bed's occupant was an indistinct lump, but as her eyes adjusted she recognized that the young man she had last seen hanging upside down and bleeding from a tree outside the manor grounds now lay on his back beneath a thick red comforter, his head on a feather pillow and his bare shoulders exposed. Brenna stepped farther into the room and closed the concealed door behind her.

She took one step, and a floorboard creaked. The boy stirred, his head turning slightly. His breathing had become faster and louder. Brenna froze, watching, but after a moment the boy's breathing settled, and he was once again as quiet and motionless as when she had first seen him.

He's in a magic-induced sleep
, she reminded herself.
He's not going to wake up because of a creaky floor.

But there were also guards outside the door, and so she took the remaining few steps toward the bed as carefully as though she were walking on eggshells instead of pine.

Finally she stood beside the bed and could look down on the sleeping youth's face. He appeared younger than she'd first thought, now that his face was cleaned of grime and blood, but whether he was younger or older than she, she could not tell; she was not a good judge of the ages of young men, having met so few of them.

Remembering the blood dripping from the wound on his leg, and curious to see how Eddigar had dealt with the wound, she moved around to the other side of the bed and lifted the comforter to take a look.

Beneath the blanket, he was naked.

Brenna blinked, stared, realized she was staring, and dropped the comforter in confusion. Even though she was alone, she felt her face flush.
I didn't mean—I never thought—

Her thoughts stammered to a stop inside her head, and a cooler, sardonic voice said,
And if you had known, you would have looked on purpose, wouldn't you?

She couldn't answer that question. But then, she hadn't really seen what condition his leg was in. And she wasn't hurting anything by taking another look. He was asleep, he'd never know—

Her hand was on the comforter again when, horrified by her own thoughts, she decided she'd seen enough. (
More than enough
, that sardonic inner voice commented.) There was no point risking discovery when the boy wasn't even able to talk to—

And then his head tossed right and left, his eyes opened—and he looked straight at her.

FOR A LONG MOMENT, Anton couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. Where was Professor Carteri? Who was this curly-haired, brown-eyed girl looking at him with a strange expression?

He blinked, swallowed with a throat that felt like sandpaper, and finally found his voice. “What happened?” he croaked, in a credible imitation of a bullfrog. “Where am I? Where's the Professor?”

There was something wrong with his tongue . . . and his ears. It felt like heavy snow was falling inside his head, piling up, muffling everything, trying to bury him once more in darkness. Had he been drugged? But it didn't feel the same as the one time he
had
been drugged, when he'd broken his arm as a child, before his family fell apart, and had been sedated while the doctor set it. This felt . . .

He didn't know how it felt. He'd never felt anything like it before, like someone from outside himself pushing a smothering pillow down on his consciousness.

The girl appeared horrified that he had spoken. She turned in a hurry and headed toward a narrow door ajar in the dark-paneled wall, next to a gilded stove, the glow of burning coal showing through the metal grill in its round belly.

“Don't go. . . .” he said, as urgently as he could through the strange lethargy gripping him. “Tell me . . .”

She paused, her back to him, then turned and stepped back toward him again. She pointed at herself. “Brenna,” she said.

He managed to pull one arm—it felt like lead—free of the covers and laid his hand palm-down on his bare chest. “Anton. Do you . . . can you understand me?” He spoke very slowly and clearly, as though talking to a deaf old woman.

The girl put her head to one side, studying his face. “Oondehrrrshtant you? Awlmoost. . . . yoor wahrrrds ur shtrrranjuh.”

“My . . . words are strange?”
But not incomprehensible!
he thought with a surge of excitement.
They don't speak another language; it's just a dialect—an accent
.

The Professor was right. There are people inside the Anomaly . . . not monsters or ghosts as the superstitious would have it. People, people like us . . . but people from the
past . . .

The Professor!
Anton felt ashamed for not thinking of his friend and mentor sooner. “Where is the Professor?” he said. “The man I was with,” he added, when the girl gave him a puzzled look.

She frowned, as though trying to work out his words. “The man . . .” Already he was becoming accustomed to her accent. “I am sorry. He is dead. He died when your . . . flying thing . . . crashed into the trees. Was he . . . your father?”

“He's . . . dead?” Anton couldn't believe it, couldn't accept it. The Professor . . . dead?
He can't be. He can't be! He was all I had . . . Without him, I'd be all alone, back on the streets of Hexton Down . . .

But sympathy filled the girl's face, and he couldn't doubt her. She had been there moments after the crash. She must have seen the Professor's body herself . . . and arranged for his rescue.

A friend, then?

Too soon to tell. He didn't know if he
had
any friends here. A stranger from outside the Anomaly? If they had truly been isolated in here for centuries, the appearance of someone like him would hit them like a grapeshot grenade thrown into a crowded room. And if their politics were anything like those of the Union Republic, everyone who learned of his existence would try to use him for their own purposes, or at least prevent their enemies from using him for theirs.

And without the Professor . . . he would have to deal with that, all of it, on his own.

The darkness pushed down harder. His eyelids drooped. He saw the girl reach out a hand toward him, but this time he didn't fight the lethargy. Instead, he was glad to let it take him, burying him in blank forgetfulness.

Brenna gazed at the sleeping youth, pitying him—she had seen from the look on his face how much the man he had called “The Professor” had meant to him. But she was also astonished that he had awakened at all. Healer Eddigar knew his business, and he had said the spell would keep the stranger unconscious until at least morning. Here, practically on top of the Magefire of Falk Manor, there was no chance his spell had been too weak.

So how had this strange youth from beyond the Barrier managed to overcome it, even for a little while?

Brenna knew she was pushing her luck, staying so long in the boy's . . . Anton's . . . room. She went to the servants' door, but even as she reached for it to swing it wider, the main door opened. She jerked her head around to see Lord Falk looking at her.

She froze.

Falk's eyebrows rose. “I see you found a way through my security arrangements,” he said dryly. “Perhaps we should have a talk about that.”

He stepped to one side and motioned for her to come out. Mute, heart pounding, she crossed the room and stepped out into the hallway. The guards turned as she emerged. Kuff's face paled. “Lord Falk, I swear, we didn't let her pass! I turned her away myself not twenty minutes ago—”

“At ease,” Falk said. “She came through the servants' corridors. Which I had not bothered to guard because I was more concerned about the boy escaping than anyone trying to sneak in to see him, and he would have been unlikely to find them. So the fault is mine, as much as yours.” He gave Brenna a stern look. “But not,” he added, “as much as yours.”

“Lord Falk—”

“I said we would talk about it, and we will. But not here. Come with me.”

He led her down the corridor in the direction of her room, but rather than taking her around the corner, stopped at another of the guest rooms. He opened the door and motioned her through.

The room looked much like the one in which Anton lay, except that the furniture was shrouded and the air icy, the stove in the corner unlit. Falk gazed into empty space for a moment, eyes narrowed, and an untethered magelight appeared, a glowing ball of bright blue light floating in the air over his head. Falk returned his attention to her. “I should have remembered the servants' corridors, of course,” he said. He reached out and pulled the covers from two chairs and a table near the door, the floating magelight following him wherever he went. He motioned for Brenna to sit down, and she did so, though without relaxing, keeping her back straight and her hands folded primly in her lap. “I wandered them often enough as a boy,” Falk went on, sitting down across the table from her, “so I can hardly be surprised that you know them well. But I really did not expect anyone from within the household to defy my wishes and try to see the boy. . . .especially you.”

“You didn't tell me I couldn't see him, Lord Falk,” Brenna pointed out, while wondering a little at her own temerity. “And it is my home, too.”

Falk cocked an eyebrow at her again, but said nothing. He studied her in silence for a long time. She became increasingly uncomfortable under that gaze, but held still, waiting to hear her punishment.