Seventh Bride (6 page)

“…this…is a murderer’s…house…”
 

whispered the dead bird.
 

Rhea stumbled backward. Her foot turned on one of the round stones, and she sat down, hard. In her pocket, the hedgehog squeaked in alarm.

The thing to do at this point, she knew, the sane and sensible thing, would be to get up and turn around and run down the white road until she was home.
 

She didn’t, for a couple of reasons.

The first one was that nothing had actually changed. Peasants still didn’t disobey nobles, and if she came back to her family with a demented story about sewn-up dead birds with stone eyes talking…well, they might believe her, but then again, they might not. And she would have failed to turn up at the appointed time, and Lord Crevan did not seem like a particularly forgiving man.
 

The second reason was that the whole situation was just
wrong
.
 

It didn’t make any sense.
 

Crevan had gone to all the trouble of setting up a half-dozen bird-golems to guard the entrance to his house, and given them a bit of rhyming doggerel to memorize, presumably to warn off intruders. Certainly they would have been quite effective against traveling salesmen. But he’d invited her here—ordered her, if she were being honest—and it made no sense to invite her here, just to warn her off with his creepy dead birds.

Either he was mad—or stupid—or this was some kind of test.

Rhea was quite sure he wasn’t stupid. He had handled her father much too efficiently for that.

He didn’t strike her as mad, either. Young Brad, the wheelwright’s son, had been a bit of a fool and walked through a fairy ring one night, and when the fairies threw him back a week later (Rhea suspected they’d found him as boring as everyone else did), he was as mad as the mist and moonlight. He spent most of his time dancing very slowly in the middle of the road, and was generally harmless. Occasionally he’d take it in his head to put his trousers on the pig, much to the annoyance of both his mother and the pig.

Lord Crevan was not mad, as she understood it. He had probably never put trousers on a pig in his life.
 

That left the possibility that he was testing her.

Perhaps he was trying to see if she was brave.

“On the other hand,” she said to the hedgehog, “this could be a test to see if I’m sensible, since the sensible thing to do is probably to go home.”

What was the worst that could happen? If she turned and fled, maybe he wouldn’t marry her. That wouldn’t be so bad.
 

If you were a murderer, would you really guard your home with birds saying, “Hi, I’m a murderer!” though? It seemed a little unsubtle. But would anyone believe you?

No, they wouldn’t. That’s the beauty of it.
 

You probably
could
say, “I’m a murderer!”, and get just as many houseguests. People wouldn’t believe you’d admit a thing like that. They’d think you were joking. Rhea didn’t quite believe it herself.
 

She sighed, and ran a hand through her hair. Up on the arch, the bird golem had resumed its post, stone eyes gazing into the distance.
 

“Do you think I should go on?” she asked the hedgehog, who had climbed out of her pocket to sit on her knee.
 

The hedgehog nodded, then shook its head, then lifted its front paws in the air and let them drop.
 

I don’t know why I’m second-guessing Crevan’s sanity—I’m sitting here talking to a hedgehog mime.

“You don’t know? The answer’s complicated?” she guessed.

It nodded.

“Should I go to the house?”

It shifted from foot to foot, and looked over its shoulder at the house. Then it nodded, although not with much enthusiasm.

“Is there some reason I shouldn’t go back?” she tried.

The hedgehog nodded violently, and rippled its quills with a shudder.
 

“Something bad will happen if I go back.” (More nodding.)

“But it won’t happen if I keep going.” (A shrug.)

“Will something bad happen if I go forward?” (Another shrug.)

Rhea rubbed her forehead. She was getting a serious headache. “Is whatever will happen if I go back worse than whatever will happen if I go forward?” (A definite nod.)
 

You do realize you’re listening to a hedgehog,
the voice in her head said.
Just thought I’d mention that.
 

“How do you know this?” she asked

It tapped its nose and spread its paws.
 

“Too complicated a question, sorry.” This was worse than when the girls tried to tell the future by throwing pinecones in the fire and watching how they fizzled and popped. You couldn’t get much more than “yes” or “no” out of the pinecones—and even that required some imagination—but the questions were at least frivolous ones like “Will I marry a rich man?” not “Am I about to be horribly murdered?”

“Am I about to be horribly murdered?”

The hedgehog shrugged, but then reached out and put a gentle paw on the back of her hand. It looked at her solemnly. Its eyes were dark and kind, and held hers for a long moment.
 

Its sympathy was oddly steadying. Rhea squared her shoulders and nodded. “Okay. I can handle this.” She paused. “Are you
sure
you’re a hedgehog?”

It threw its paws in the air and huffed in evident disgust, before returning to the safety of her pocket.

She stood up and took a step forward, then stopped as if she’d run into an iron bar. A thought had occurred to her, and not a pleasant one. She held the pocket open and looked down at the hedgehog.

“If I did go back—is there something on the road behind me?”

The hedgehog nodded.

“Something bad.”

The hedgehog made a kind of grabbing, swooping gesture with both paws in front of its chest. Rhea couldn’t quite make out what it was meant to show—there are limits to the expressiveness of hedgehog feet, particularly when they are on their backs in somebody’s pocket—but when the hedgehog then rolled into a tight ball, she got the gist well enough.
 

“Ah.”
 

She let the pocket fall closed. She didn’t look over her shoulder, even though the skin between her shoulderblades was crawling. Looking over her shoulder could not possibly help matters.

She walked forward, under the arch. Overhead, the two bird-golems held each other tightly, and the third one stared off into the forest and clicked its dead claws against the iron.

Click…click…click…

She entered the courtyard of Lord Crevan’s house.

The fountain threw spray ten feet in the air. The patter of water on the basin was too much like the click of dried leaves on the white road for comfort.
 

The figure of a winged woman stood atop the fountain, wings extended. Rhea had seen statues of winged people before—the churchyard had several angels carved on top of tombstones—but unlike the angels, the wings of the figure on the fountain sagged exhaustedly.

Rhea gave the fountain a wide berth. She was cold and miserable and scared, and being wet wouldn’t help in the least.

A broad cobblestone circle led around the fountain, probably suitable for carriages, if one ever came up the white road. It seemed unlikely. There was moss growing between the stones, and plants grew in a thick tangle around the edges. Late flowers bloomed in what was clearly some kind of garden, although their cheerful colors were bleached by the moonlight.

“Those are black-eyed susans,” Rhea told the hedgehog. “And ploughman’s wort and love-choke and asters. I don’t think evil people grow black-eyed susans, do they?”

The hedgehog was not inclined to comment on the gardening habits of evil people.

There was a door.

It should have been a large and impressive door, perhaps something like the great carved church doors, but it wasn’t. It was just a door. There was a short flight of steps, shallow and elegant, but the door at the top was dark wood, with only a little carving around the door handle. The handle itself was brass, and looked no more complicated than the door handle on the burgher’s door back in the village.

Rhea walked up the steps. No dead birds challenged her. Nothing jumped out of the clumps of black-eyed susans to eat her. The stone angel did not come down from the fountain to carry her off, although honestly, being carried off by an angel did not seem like that terrible a fate at the moment.

She set her hand on the door knocker.

This is a murderer’s house,
whispered the dead bird in her memory.
 

Rhea gritted her teeth and rapped the knocker sharply against the wood.
 

The door opened.

At first, Rhea thought the woman who had opened it was wearing some kind of high laced collar. Then the woman stepped back and the light spilled over her.
 

Black leather thongs crossed and re-crossed over the woman’s throat in a tight lacing. Down the center ran a stark purple scar, a river of jagged tissue running from the underside of her chin to the hollow at her collarbone. The thongs were punched through holes in the skin, and they looked as if they had been anchored deep.

There was a long, long moment when Rhea nearly broke and ran. Never mind whatever thing had followed her down the white road, never mind Lord Crevan’s rank or what her parents might do—this was too much. Rhea’s sanity was a fundamentally solid thing—she had never in fifteen years had cause to question it—but this was one shock too many, and something inside her head was whining like a dog.

She took a deep breath, then another, and said in a high voice, “Lord Crevan sent for me. He—he said to come—he said this was his house—”

The woman looked at her in silence.

Rhea thrust out her hand with the silver ring on it, as if it were a token of safe passage.
 

The woman looked at it. She nodded, but said nothing.

Of course. She can’t possibly speak, not with that scar—how did she even
survive?
It would be a mortal wound on anyone, a scar like that.

Maybe it
was
a mortal wound.

Maybe she’s like the golems.

She couldn’t quite deal with that thought, so she set it aside again.
 

The woman beckoned. Her face was marked with pain and irritation, the hard lines running like knife wounds down from the sides of her nose.
 

“I—”

The lines deepened as the woman frowned, and she made a deeper gesture, waving Rhea inside, clearly annoyed. The hedgehog shifted restlessly in Rhea’s pocket.

Rhea stepped inside.

The woman pushed the door shut behind her.

It was warmer inside, but not by very much. The door opened onto a long balcony running the length of another, much larger room beneath it. It must be built into the side of an unsuspected hillside, or perhaps the room had been excavated like a root cellar.
 

The floor below was laid with a black and grey checkerboard of tiles and swam before her eyes.
 

The silent woman gave Rhea a sharp nod, and another beckoning gesture, then turned on her heel. Rhea scurried after her. The floor was carpeted with thick red rugs, and their feet made a soft sloughing sound:
uff chuff uff chuff uff chuff…

She’s taking me to Lord Crevan.

Oh lord, she didn’t know if she could deal with Crevan. She was exhausted and, she suddenly realized, ravenously hungry. The hedgehog was probably hungry too. Of course, it would want slugs, and Lord Crevan’s pantry was unlikely to have those, although if he was a sorcerer, maybe he did. Sorcerers had lots of nasty things lying around, didn’t they? Slugs and bugs and worms and dragon blood and…

uff chuff uff chuff uff chuff

The woman turned down a hallway that led off the balcony.
 

I’m going to see him and I’m going to babble like an idiot, or scream or cry or something horrible. I know I am.
 

The silent woman stopped before a door and pulled it open. Rhea braced herself.
 

The room was a tiny chamber, perhaps six feet on a side, with a bed, a basin, and a small wooden chest. The woman pointed to Rhea, then to the bed, and turned to leave.

Relief struck her so strongly that she felt weak in the knees. She didn’t have to face Crevan tonight. She could rest.
 

She was so overcome that the door had almost closed before she called “Wait! Hang on—wait!” She pulled it open again.

The silent woman gave a tiny sigh and gazed upwards, much like Rhea’s mother did when praying for strength.

“I’m really hungry,” said Rhea apologetically. “I didn’t eat—I mean, dinner was—ah—”

The woman looked at her and shook her head—not a negative shake but a
how are you so stupid
shake—and then turned and walked back the way they had come. Rhea hurried after her.

They went through another door, then another, and down a flight of stairs, and then they were crossing the enormous hall. The giant tiles were hard underfoot, and Rhea could feel the cold through the soles of her boots. The woman was moving hurriedly now, almost running, and Rhea could barely keep up.

And then there was a noise.

It sounded like the end of the world, like the great church bell being crushed by the millstone, a noise of screaming metal and grinding gears. It was the loudest sound Rhea had ever heard. She let out a shriek and almost fell.

The silent woman halted in her tracks, reached out, and grabbed Rhea by the scruff of the neck as if she were a kitten.

Rhea started to squirm, but the woman hauled back on her collar and dragged her close.

Then the floor fell away.

Rhea watched the stone tiles drop out of sight. They fell away into nothingness, into some dark abyss, first a few, then more and more, while that horrible grinding clangor came again and again until her head rang with it.