The Duke In His Castle (5 page)

His eyes are dark with widened pupils, violet, black. He looks at her, then glances at a far window, where the multi-colored sky shows the sun beginning to set. “I envy you . . .” he whispers. “You, who are free and not one of us.”

“Then you must learn my Cousin’s secret. And then the others. So, swear!”

“The holiest Oath? No.”

“Yes . . . that one, why not. And I will also.”

“Oh. . . .”

The Duke feels something begin to move inside him, a familiar pull, the same restless urge that he has learned over the years to rein in, to stifle with complacency and the illusion of serene occupation. The call is like a fly caught in a jar; it beats against the glass, buzzing in fury, then settles for a moment in infinite stillness, then begins to struggle again. Such is rebellion—not a single act but a series of bursts and refractory periods that together comprise a pattern of directed
change
.

The Duke realizes that his own pattern is calling to him, calling him to initiate its making. Liberty is on the other side of the glass jar, and he merely needs to beat against the glass—relentlessly, periodically, occasionally, even just once—until he either comes forth in a paroxysm on the other side or dies.

The other side is so close. . . . If he stands at the castle courtyard, at the edges of the gates (he has done so, many times), he can breathe the air flavored by it, air that pours at him from the free outside, past the invisible enclosure.

With a wrench, the Duke takes his thoughts out of the stream of familiar longing and directs himself to stand up.

The servants attend him immediately, hurrying to open doors for his exit while others begin to clear the table. And yet, he merely stands, his gaze directed at the child-woman across from him, and they watch each other, already engaged in a contest of sorts.

“How shall we swear?” the Duke says.

And Izelle’s rosebud mouth warms into curvature, for she has already won.

She approaches him. The world is suddenly dreamlike in the way of the bizarre, with Izelle pulling out her long knife (it’s tucked at her belt, screaming of smoky kitchens with soot-covered walls and brick ovens). First she bares the wrist by pulling up her voluminous shirtsleeve and doublet below which her arms are skinny sticks. Then she uses the point of the knife to draw a bead of blood from her wrist. In the moment of piercing skin she is fearless. The blood wells immediately, an angry little poinsettia berry against the Dresden pale skin.

She passes the knife on to Duke Rossian, who watches her in surprise. Up to this moment he does not believe in the reality of what’s unfolding, but the blood is so final; blood is always real—which makes him serious and solemn. If he pays attention he can hear the rush in his own veins and arteries, the circulation and the clockwork pump underlying all movement. While in the distance, above, below, he senses the echo of subterranean waters and sky waters. They comprise the outside world.

The Duke takes the knife, pulls up his lace-trimmed sleeve, and proceeds to do the same to his own white flesh. There is a moment of dull unexpected pain, for the knife tip is more blunt than he thinks.

And then his own blue blood comes forth crimson. He watches the inside of his wrist, strong and graceful, and stained with the red. He has been careful not to prick a vein, but the blood seems unwilling to be contained and now he is frightened for a moment of his own vigor, of what he has done—slit his own wrist, by heaven!—and for what?

But before he has another moment to be consumed by doubt, Izelle moves her own bloodied wrist with its perfectly round globule specimen of life-juice, and with an odd beastlike cry (its nature is half-forgotten, but sends shivers through them both), she presses their hands together at eye level between them (he leans down from his height to meet her), wrist to wrist, controlled blood drop to exuberant blood smear.

There is a mingling of pulse-beat. The Duke knows her own smaller, quicker, lighter clockwork mechanism through the contact of wrist to wrist, past the skin. In that mingling he also knows the bellows of her lungs and the churning of her bones in their sockets of tendon and flesh, the fierce glow in her womb, her odd corresponding fire of
animus
that sits in warm slow simmer at her solar plexus, her blazing other center past her throat and, higher up, the suddenly gaping twilight place in the maw of her skull—

Something pulls him back violently, and he is made aware that he has seen too far inside her, must not know any more, and that she is dangerous. It happens in a blink, of course, or even a span less, a fractured space between heartbeats. And then the contact is broken, and he is himself, and now his wrist is stinging, stained with their common blood.

She is breathing fast, watching him, and he can almost sense the bond drawn in a line between them, from her wrist to his, and the expectant pause, also strung in the air.

“I swear,” he says in a faint voice.

“I swear,” she echoes.

“We are kin.” They complete the oath together.

And for the duration of their deal, even if all this is nonsense, they are now bound.

The Duke feels the peculiar urge to chortle and cry out, to hyperventilate, and something in the expression of her eyes tells him she is equally wound, although neither would admit to it. They are sudden children at the brink of engaging in a forbidden act.

“And now,” Izelle exclaims, “we can play!” She claps her hands together, ignoring the wrist upon which the blood has already began to coagulate and heal, and the white linen shirtsleeve is lightly stained in sprinkles of red as it slips back down. . . .

“What are the rules?” he asks, tense as a string. “Who’ll decide the rules? Shall I?”

“I suppose it would only be fitting if you did,” she replies. “Considering you have graciously agreed to my idea.”

Rossian thinks that grace has nothing to do with it.
Why am I doing this anyway? Why, really? This is idiot insanity.
His instinct of suspicion reaches out, nerves pulling at others in bundles individually it seems, a delicate agonized state of alertness, of tingling knowledge in every cell of his skin. But his blood is racing now, and he does not want to stop himself, because for the first time since he can remember, he is feeling fiercely
alive
. . . .

“I can read your thoughts, you know,” she says, clearly taunting him.

“Then the first rule is, you’ll do none of that!” he exclaims in a suddenly harsh voice without a blink of surprise and begins walking out of the hall. “And neither will I. I do not—
pry
. We, both of us, will not pry into minds.” Each word he speaks now is strongly punctuated, distinct, like a weapon thrown.

His strides are long and she is startled into keeping up, half-running behind him as they move through the large open space via double doors of mahogany, into a smaller elongated chamber that has a number of chairs lining the walls and decrepit ancestral portraits hung above each, the oils having dulled and the varnish yellowed into an overall tone of funereal brown. The servants stand aside as the Duke passes, then light the tapers in the wall sconces and disappear discreetly, one after another, with the last closing the doors to the grand hall behind them.

If you could read my mind
, he thinks,
we wouldn’t be doing this now, this pretense. Although, I myself am to blame. I want to do it, I now realize. My blood quickens . . . My blood. Maybe all of this is my doing.

He stops in the middle of the chamber and she follows suit. She stands before him, hands clutched together, rubbing palms unconsciously, her forehead and brows moving in nervous reflex. “Agreed. What else, my Lord?”

“What else? Why, the rest of the rules, of course,” Rossian says. In a peculiar reaction to his own outburst, his perfect face has loosened with sensuality and he is on the verge of smiling in anticipation. There is quirky pleasure to be gained by such word play as now, and he allows himself to take advantage of the moment. “How shall we go about it, my Lady Izelle? Do you recall Hide and Seek, that children’s game you might have played when you were a tot, or whatever the urchins call it? We will borrow the rules and make them our own. Our game will be identical. Except,
acts
of power are added.”

She gasps, in equal semblance of pleasure. “Of course! How very silly and simple and clever of you, my Lord, a game with so many possibilities.”

“I’ll do you the courtesy of allowing you the first move.”

She smiles lightly inclining her head. “So generous.”

The Duke decides there is an undertone of sarcasm. But he is so eager to begin that he is beyond fine analysis or regret.

“Hide,” he says. “Hide anywhere within the grounds of my castle. In any
way
you can. And if, within the duration of ten minutes, according to this timepiece—” he points to a corner cabinet grandfather clock with carved molding and a small hourglass insert that floats in a recessed niche built precisely for it, an unusual one-of-a-kind piece—“I am unable to find you, then you win the round.”

“Marvelous!” she exclaims. “When may I hide?”

“Now,” he replies. He walks to the cabinet, reaches forward with his elegant hand and turns the tiny sand-filled glass within its niche. Then he inhales deeply and shuts his eyes for the sake of proper courtesy, knowing intuitively it is not quite necessary.

For, the next second he opens them, she is gone.

Rossian glances once about the hall of portraits, and there is resounding silence. The long runner carpet of Turkish wool covers the crude wooden slats of floor like a faded peacock’s tail. The slim candles flicker alongside the walls and cast parabolic effusions of light upon the oils; the deeply carved patterns on the old gilded frames are cast in sharp relief. He senses the breathing of ancestral ghosts as they reside in the walls between the slabs of granite, and fill the air with a permanent sense of someone else’s memory just out of reach.

The clock in the corner reclaims his attention, for now it is the only source of movement in the room. In the niche the sand falls from one glass compartment to the other while above it the rounded face of the clock stares like a sleeping moon, and the hands move in stately microscopic precision. Just below, the brass pendulum swings with a clean rhythmic click to mark the seconds.

The Duke watches the clockface and the polished wood of the cabinet and the pendulum and the thin stream of the flowing sand.

And then he laughs, a patrician arrogant sound. “Oh, come now, you insult my capabilities. Come out, my dear. Come out of the little glass chamber, before you drown like a fly in the running sand—which might not be such a regrettable thing at all, considering it would rid me of you.”

One blink of the eye, and the shapes of the room waver in his vision like objects seen through heated air before a furnace, a desert mirage, and Izelle again stands before him in her tasteless attire.

“Really,” he says. “Couldn’t you be a little more ingenious? We’ve decided upon ten minutes, not ten seconds.”

She smiles lightly, as though not hearing the sarcasm. “I was testing the deep waters. The depth of you.”

He snorts. “More likely, deep sand. Shall we disregard this then and start again?” His tone is polite, even. Within, his blood pounds.

“Oh, no, no. By all means count it as part of the round. Your turn.”

“Very well, although I must say, an odd decision on your part to relinquish this opportunity. And now, don’t even bother to close your eyes, simply mark the time.”

But she is already before the clock cabinet, turning the glass nodule with its sand in the other direction, allowing the few seconds of time that has elapsed in the first round to be returned back to origin. “It is done.”

And then she turns the glass again, and time resumes.

He responds by inclining his head in a mock bow, and then he is not there.

Sorcery has unfurled, and it is now rampant in the castle. If one can only sense it, there is a clamor of force in the air, and the stones acquire lungs, pumping the breath of life to animate them. Everything resonates underneath the surface. Even the dust motes are primed to take off and swirl with more energy than normal, in secret opposition to the air currents.

If one can sense it.

Izelle gives a big sigh, whether in relief or resignation, is unclear. It is also unclear what, if anything, she can perceive happening in the metasphere around her. She shrugs to herself, then carelessly starts looking about.

She does not tarry in the hall of portraits but quickly walks the length of the carpet to the great carved doors on the side opposite that of the Hall of Violet. She pushes against the smooth wood with one petite hand and is in the hallway. Here she stops the butler, Harmion who is waiting, and now exhibits the same sort of distaste for her presence as his master. He carries a single candle in a polished brass holder that has the odd shape simultaneously reminiscent of a Dutch clog shoe and an Arabian Evenings Aladdin’s lamp.

“Where is my box?” she asks, staring at him with the intensity of a vulture.

“M’Lady?” The man’s one greying brow artfully rises in a dissonant combination of barely concealed horror and civility as he attempts to edge away from her without dripping hot candle wax upon his gnarled fingers.

“The box with the remains, I mean. Do you recall our conversation regarding a certain ancient beauty, possibly irrelevant to all of this, or possibly not? Nairis the Fabled One? My means of Ducal blackmail?”

“How could one forget. . . .”

“Where is my Lord the Duke, by the way?”