Fable: The Balverine Order (Fable) (31 page)

Later, after dinner, the guests milled around, chatting with each other. Thomas saw that the Lady Newsome did not seem to be particularly interested in talking with anyone except Laird Shaw, who in turn was clearly finding the lady utterly engaging. Thomas wondered where that was going, if anywhere at all. From what he'd understood, her husband had passed quite some time ago, more than a respectable amount of time for her to contemplate other dalliances. And the way that Shaw was looking at her, like a hungry animal . . . well, if it wasn't lost to the casual examination of Thomas from a distance, then surely the lady was quite aware of it.

“Well, whatever,” Thomas muttered with a shrug. “It is certainly none of my affair.”

Dean Carter, being of humbler origin than his fellow travelers, seemed quite engrossed in chatting with the servants, particularly the one called Bell. It made sense that someone who was scholarly would be interested in speaking at length with the lower class from foreign lands. He would probably consider it a learning experience. Then Thomas reminded himself that he was from the lower class. Certainly his family—meaning his father and he—passed for wealthy back in Bowerstone, but most certainly not among this company. Mentally projecting it, he imagined that they could fit a dozen of his own house into this mansion.

Suddenly feeling a sense of disconnect from both his company and surroundings—and seeing that James was cheerfully occupied being on the periphery of the dean's discussion with Bell—Thomas wandered away from the gathering hall and strolled through the mansion, taking in the ornate sights. He wondered if living there every day of one's life caused a person to take for granted all of the splendor around: the artwork, the sculptures, the grand design of the place. Did it all become mundane thanks to constant exposure?

Maybe he could ask Sabrina about it.

That was a notion that he promptly dismissed from his mind, remembering that the one person in the entirety of the place that he needed to steer clear of was the young woman who had come close to getting both James and him killed.

Although . . . did he not bear some responsibility for that? If he had done as James had bidden, the girl would have posed no threat to their well-being at all. She would have been punished for her crime, forced to bear responsibility for her actions, and that would have been that. Thomas was really the one who had gotten them into their entanglement.

He ceased his musings about Sabrina, deciding that that way lay only madness. Instead, he focused on the new artistic marvel that was laid out before him.

He had entered a room that he could only think of as the mural room. That was because the entire room consisted of nothing but one vast mural: an incredibly accurate portrait of the very mansion in which they were. He wasn't quite certain that he understood the point of it. To his mind, aside from portraits, paintings should be of things that were far away or outside of the experience of the viewer. What sense was there in crafting a rendering of something that people could see for themselves by the simple expedient of stepping out the front door, walking five hundred paces, and turning around?

He supposed that the art was in the scope of the work, and in that regard he had to admit that it was stunningly impressive. The rendering was massive, taking up in their entirety three walls of the room. The attention to detail was meticulous: Every stone, right down to its individual shape, was represented in the mural. Some of them were irregularly shaped, and Thomas suspected that if he were somehow able to step outside and view the mural at the same time, that if he did a one-to-one comparison, the irregularities would match up. So that meant that some artist had either had a memory that bordered on the supernatural, or else that he had sat outside and first done a thorough portrait of the house that he could then transport into the mural room and proceed with his work there. The more Thomas thought about it, the more abashed he was that he had initially been dismissive of the work. One had to respect the dedication to the endeavor, if nothing else.

What was even more intriguing was that the proud spires that jutted from three points in the mansion had been done in bas-relief. Rather than being painted onto the wall, as was the case with the rest of the house, they were constructed from some other material—possibly the same stuff from which the actual spires had been made—and were affixed against the wall in exact proportion to the rest of the mural. It added a sort of three-dimensional effect to the entire thing.

“Why?”

Thomas jumped slightly, for the voice that had spoken had been unexpected and thoroughly startled him. He turned and saw Sabrina standing there, her arms folded, that same defiant tilt to her chin that she always seemed to have. “Wh-why what?” he managed to stammer out.

“Why did you interfere? When they were going to cut off my hand. You didn't need to, you know,” she added. “I could have handled it myself.”

“Considering you were about two seconds from having your hand lopped off, you certainly fooled me in that regard,” he said tartly. “You know my reasons: I said at the time. I thought it an act of barbarism that no one deserved, much less a young woman.”

“So that was it,” she said smugly. “That I'm a young woman. Had I been a young man, I'd've been on my own.”

“I didn't say that at all.”

“You didn't have to. I know your type all too well. The would-be Hero, jumping in to aid the damsel who he thinks needs his protection.”

He ignored the sarcasm. “And is aspiring to be a Hero such a terrible thing?”

“It's way out-of-date, even in this country. You heard it yourself: Heroes live on in legend only.”

“If that's how you feel, then what's the point of talking to me?”

She stared at him then, and her eyes seemed to devour him.

And then, completely out of the blue, she took his face in her hands and kissed him. It was hungry and filled with need, and at first he was startled, but then he almost melted into it.

He had kissed girls before, certainly. Flirtations, come-hither moments that ultimately went nowhere, or eager courtings from girls who he knew considered him good husband material and wished to make their interest known, almost as a matter of wise commerce.

This was not that.

There was no restraint anywhere in Sabrina. One moment she had been standing there, and the next she was kissing him with a consuming passion as hot as any flame. She thrust her tongue into his mouth, which startled him since no girl had ever done that before.

Then she withdrew, and it left Thomas staggering, as if a passing storm had just come in, pounding the area with its full and unbridled fury, then moved on just as quickly. He stared at her, uncomprehending.

And she said in a tone that sounded more accusatory than loving or flattering, “It was a stupid thing to do, but it was also brave and rather sweet. Despite appearances, and the way I am . . . that wasn't lost on me. And I am ...” She hesitated, and then concluded, “... thanking you for it. That was me, thanking you.”

She turned away then but before she could take another step, he said, “Why?”

“I told you.”

“No, I mean . . . not the kiss. Not that . . . I'm not left wondering about the way in which you thanked me. I mean . . . why did you disguise yourself? Engage in being a petty thief? You obviously had no need of whatever paltry sums you could have snatched in the marketplace. It just . . . it makes no sense to me why you would take such a terrible risk.”

“It doesn't have to make sense to you,” she said airily, “it only has to make sense to me.”

“That's true, but it'd be nice if you could at least make an attempt to explain it to me.”

“Does it truly matter?”

“Yeah. It does.”

She continued to regard him as if she were dissecting him. Finally, she said, “I doubt you'd understand.”

“Oh?”

“My father makes me crazy.”

“Believe me, I understand,” he said firmly. “In fact, one of the reasons I set out on this trip is that my mother had died, and—”

“My mother is also dead,” she said. “Her life taken by balverines.”

Thomas gasped, the entirety of Laird Kreel's attitudes suddenly made clear. “A balverine killed my brother as well, in my presence.”

“I . . . am sorry to hear that,” said Sabrina. Her voice softened, much of the abrasiveness that characterized her speech gone. “I was not there when my mother died. I have long been relieved for that fact. My father, however”—and the bitterness crept back into her voice—“was there. It was his fault that she died. Only his. I can't ever forgive him for that. But I can do things every now and then that I know are going to drive him crazy.”

“Like indulging in criminal activities.”

“Exactly like that. Unfortunately,” she continued ruefully, “I can only go so far in defying him. It's like . . . I hear him in here”—and she thumped her head—“banging around, not leaving me alone. He has learned well from his exploits, and from his perpetual quarry, for he has his claws into me right enough. I cannot tell you how much I would like to break free of him utterly, renounce him, put him and this . . . this place . . . to my back forever. But I ...” She paused, and when she spoke again, it was the heavy utterance of one who was forced, very much against her will, to acknowledge her limits. “I can't. Bottom line is, we all are what we are. I can pull against the ties that bind me to him, but they will never be broken.”

Thomas stepped forward and took both her hands in his. “I used to think the exact same thing,” he said. “You're maybe a year or two younger than I, and a couple of years may not seem like much . . . but you'd be amazed at how much they matter. What is unthinkable for you today, tomorrow you may be doing.”

“I kind of doubt that,” said Sabrina. “You don't know my father, and you sure don't know me.”

“What is your favorite color?”

Her eyebrows arched. “What?”

“Your favorite color?”

“Red.”

“You see,” said Thomas, smiling. “Now I know you better than I did before. That's how things happen in life: a little bit at a time.”

She laughed at that, and he was pleased to note that she had a rather musical laugh.
She should do it more often,
he thought.

Then she kissed him again, softer this time, but no less passionately. There was no hesitation in his returning it this time, and he felt a connection to her such as he had never known with any other living being.

They parted momentarily, and then her lips were firmly against his once more, and he felt as if he were falling into a deep, endless well, the world lurching around him.

She withdrew abruptly and it was as if he had suddenly crashed to the ground. She stepped back lightly, like a dancer, and laughed again, and then she turned and was gone from the room, leaving him wondering what in the world had just happened.

He returned to the gathering room where the social intercourse between the various guests was still going on. There was no sight of Sabrina. James noticed him returning and looked at him oddly. “Are you all right?” he said.

“Hmm?”

“You look quite out of breath. Like you've been running a marathon or something.”

“I'm . . . fine. Couldn't be better.” The words were spilling over each other and, to his own ear, Thomas sounded like a complete idiot. Apparently he sounded that way to James as well because James kept staring at him as if aware that there was something Thomas wasn't telling him. Ultimately, James turned away, apparently deciding that whatever it was Thomas wasn't sharing, it wasn't all that important to begin with.

The gathering broke up not long after, and Thomas and James went upstairs to their quarters. They talked about all that they had seen, and their impressions of the other guests. Thomas, however, kept his encounter with Sabrina a secret, close to his heart. It surprised him a little that he was doing so, for he had never felt as if there was anything that he could not tell James. James, supposedly his servant, and yet who was as much a brother to him as his actual brother, long dead.

Soon, with the lights out in their room, Thomas lay in his bed and had to admit that this was indeed quite possibly the most comfortable mattress upon which he had ever been. He expected that slumber would be quick in coming to him; it certainly had been to James, whose regular breathing and slight snoring—courtesy of his irregularly shaped nose, broken in a brawl at a rather young age—could attest.

But he was wrong. Instead, he lay there, staring into the darkness, unable to get Sabrina out of his mind. He would summon up the recollection of his lips against her, of the firmness of her body as his hands had caressed her. He was starting to think that he wasn't going to be getting any sleep at all; his body felt like it had too much blood in it.

There was a soft creak at the door.

He turned in the bed and looked, and gaped.

Sabrina apparently took after her father in one particular respect: She tended to look good standing in doorways.

She was, however, significantly less clothed than he. She was wearing a simple white shift, and somehow in the dimness of the hall light, it was practically translucent. He could see the entire outline of her slender body beneath it.

Sabrina said nothing. She simply stood there, allowing him to drink her in. He abruptly realized he had stopped breathing. He knew his heart was still beating because he could feel it thudding against his chest.

Then, ever so slightly, she gave the slightest nod before turning and walking away with that uncanny noiselessness she had inherited from her father.