The Glass Casket (12 page)

“Did you find out how long they’re staying?”

Emily cocked her head. “Oh yeah, sure. The queen’s brother rushed right into the kitchen to tell the servant girl all his business.” She handed Rowan another plate to dry.

Rowan laughed and started drying the plate, but her thoughts drifted as she gazed out the window. Snow was
coming down heavy now, and somewhere out there her Tom was dreaming of a girl that wasn’t her.

Fiona Eira was preparing for bed when a knock came at her door. She wore only her white nightgown but assumed it was Lareina, so she called for her to come in. She tried to disguise her surprise at seeing Seamus, for he was not accustomed to visiting her room. Instinctively she crossed her arms in front of her and nodded to him. He looked strange, and he stank of ale. He closed the door behind him.

“I thought I might speak to you a moment, girl,” he said.

He took a seat on her bed and motioned for her to sit beside him. He smiled at her strangely, almost as if he were leering at her.

“Fiona,” he said, his breath coming in malodorous waves. “I thought it might be a good time to have a talk, you and I.”

“A talk?” She inched away, confused by the way he looked at her.

He smiled, baring his teeth, and then he put his hand on her knee. It took all of her strength not to recoil.

“You’re a pretty lass, you know that, don’t you?”

Slowly his hand began to slide up the inside of her leg. She gasped, then froze, horrified. She felt as though she were drowning. She stared straight ahead, her insides gone suddenly numb. She could feel tears slide down her face as she concentrated on the grain of the wood on the wall in front of her.

“You keep real quiet now,” he said, and his hand continued up her leg.

And then the door opened wide, and pulling away from her, he lurched to his feet.

Lareina stood in the doorway, staring at him, her face a mask of horror. He swallowed hard, but did not speak. Lareina looked to Fiona, then closed her eyes a moment, and when she spoke, her voice shook.

“Sam and Josiah are downstairs, Seamus. They’ve come to collect you,” she said.

Refusing to look at either of them, he stood and stumbled out of the room. Lareina followed, and Fiona was left alone sitting on the edge of the bed. Below her she heard the glassblower speaking to the men, and then the door closing behind them.

Then she heard Lareina making a great deal of noise. She was opening and closing drawers, moving hurriedly. She was crying. Fiona Eira could hear all of this, but she didn’t seem to hear it from within her own body. It was as if she were floating above herself, watching the terrified girl with her disciplined plaits sitting frozen on the edge of her bed while the world crashed down all around her.

She could still feel the glassblower’s touch on her, and smell the ale, and her mind reeled, rebelling against her, trying to bury those moments before they became a part of her, before they became her fault.

She sat shaking, and it was only a moment later that Lareina rounded the corner, a travel bag in her hand. She looked at her stepdaughter with heartbroken eyes, and silently
she began moving around the room filling the bag. The last thing she tucked inside was Fiona’s stuffed lamb. When she had finished, she sank to her knees and took Fiona’s face in her hands.

“My darling,” she said. “My darling, you must forgive me.”

“Forgive you?” Fiona whispered.

Her stepmother looked her square in the eyes. “You need to leave this place,” she said.

“Leave?”

“Yes. Leave here at once.” Lareina wiped tears from her eyes. “Before he returns. Our home is no longer safe. You will go to the woods. You will go deep into the woods to the Greenwitch. There you will wait for me, and in three days’ time, I shall join you. Somehow … somehow I will secure money, and we two, we shall go together. This place is no longer our home.”

And then she stood and wrapped her arms around her stepdaughter, and together they walked downstairs to the back door. It was snowing outside, and Fiona, still numb, still lost somewhere inside herself, opened the door and stepped out into the night. She looked at her stepmother, whose face was creased with pain as if she had aged twenty years in a quarter of an hour. Lareina took Fiona’s hands.

“My wondrous child, how I love you,” she said, and pulling her tight, she pressed her lips against her daughter’s icy brow. “Now go quickly, and let no one see you.”

On the other side of the village, behind the gate and past the thicket, beyond the rose trees, Rowan was just drifting off to sleep, her mind moving far from her body, when it was as if someone leaned in and whispered in her ear:
It’s starting
.

And then there came a barrage of images, each more odious than the next, as if painted on the backs of her eyelids by a wicked hand. Wresting herself from the clutches of sleep, Rowan sat up in bed, hand to her heart, and stifled a scream. She tried to slow her breathing and calm her racing heart, but she couldn’t still the sense that some vile creature was creeping ever closer, and that no matter what she might do, something terrible was about to happen.

The snow was coming down fast now, and Fiona moved on unsteady legs. What was happening to her? Where had her life gone? She longed for Lareina. She longed for her father. She had gone only a short way into the woods when she found that a crippling exhaustion bore down on her. There was something inside of her—something broken, and without it she was unable to move any farther. She climbed atop the remains of a fallen great oak, and letting her hair down, she watched as snowflakes slowly gathered in it, dotting the black with specks of glistening white.

She searched her emotions, but she found only fear: fear of her home, fear of life, fear of herself. Lareina had told her to go to the Greenwitch, but she found that she feared her too. How was she, a girl so unused to being by herself, so used to having all of her decisions made for her,
supposed to find her way through the dark to the house of a stranger? Why should she trust her, this Greenwitch she’d never met? She put her face in her hands, and she wept.

And then suddenly she realized that maybe she wasn’t as alone as she thought. Tom. She’d only just met him, but she trusted him. She would be safe with him; she was certain. Pulling herself up to stand, she ran through the snow, a wild gallop through the trees, and a few moments later, she was standing beneath what she hoped was his window. She threw a pebble, then another, and then a third and final one. And she waited there below, tugging her cloak tight against the cold.

When Tom heard the noise at his window, he thought it must be hail, but then he saw the gentle snowflakes falling, and knew it could be no such thing. No, someone was throwing pebbles. He stilled himself and then moved to the pane. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw there beneath him. Her cheeks and lips were flushed especially red—crimson, even—and her dark eyes sparkling below seemed to call to his very soul. He opened the window.

“Hello,” she said, smiling up at him like she’d always known him.

“Hello,” he managed to say.

“Come down,” she said, and then she moved quick as an animal, darting into the trees, and she was gone.

Breathlessly, he pulled on his trousers and slipped into
his boots. Grabbing his coat, he was off and out the door as if his very life depended on it.

The snow was falling in steady swirls. The weather, which had appeared docile from his bedroom casement, now obscured his vision and made him unable to see her footprints. He headed into the trees after her, and had run only a few steps when an arm shot out and grabbed him. For a second that arm seemed otherworldly, almost as if it were there but also weren’t, caught between two realms, misshapen by his perception. And for a moment, the only thought that ran through his mind was of those men on the mountain, their bodies strewn about in the snow, and he screamed in terror. He could not help himself.

“It’s just me,” she said softly, and then he saw her again, the light of her, and moved to touch her, to press his lips firmly to hers, to crush her against him, but then he noticed that the skin around her eyes was red and swollen, and he stopped himself.

“Are you okay?” he asked, reaching out to her.

“I’m fine,” she said, but in her eyes there shone a terrible sadness.

“You’re not,” he whispered. “Please, tell me what’s wrong. Maybe I can help.”

“Tom,” she whispered, and then raising her hands to his face, she brought his lips close to hers, and kissed him deeply, truly, and in that moment, Tom felt certain he was coming home.

His head was still spinning a moment later when their lips parted, and stepping away, she looked up at him,
the snow of her complexion now mottled with crimson and plum. And then he heard it—the sound of animals fleeing, hooves pounding against hard snow, wings beating furiously on winter birds who by their very nature were not prone to leaving. And then a noise. Deep in the woods, a rumble as something very large moved among the trees.

“We should go back,” he said, gripping her hand. “These woods aren’t safe.”

She shook her head, sorrow returning to her eyes. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t ever go back.”

But just as he was about to ask her what she meant, he was distracted by a great commotion—men coming out of the tavern, Goi Flint and his fellows.

Fiona froze, and staring in the direction of her guardian’s voice, she began slowly inching away from the village, away from Tom.

“Fiona, please,” he said, reaching for her. “We need to get back.”

She looked at him with those lost eyes of hers, and she shook her head, and then suddenly she was gone, running, through the trees and into the darkness of the forest beyond.

It took a moment for him to realize what she’d done, but shaking off his confusion, he sprinted after. He yelled her name as he ran, but his voice seemed to disappear, swallowed whole by the forest.

And then that noise again—a movement through the trees too large to be any animal, punctuated by a scream, a
bright and staccato scream that pierced the night. And then a snap. And silence.

He stood there frozen, stunned.

“Fiona?” he yelled into the darkness, but there was no reply.

Pushing off as hard as he could, he raced deeper into the woods, darting through the moonlight-speckled trees. His legs burning, the snow slipped out from under him, and he slammed his arm against a tree, but he didn’t cry out in pain. He lifted himself up and pressed on. Ahead of him he saw a clearing, and he knew he needed to get there. He needed to see.

She lay in the snow, the moonlight illuminating the luscious pallor of her skin so that she almost looked like she wasn’t there at all. Her dress and cloak were spread around her in an arc, and her hair was fanned out like a pitch-black corona.

He approached slowly.

“Fiona,” he whispered, but still she didn’t move.

He saw her chest, and his stomach lurched. It had been opened up, hollowed out. Flesh and blood mingled in stringy derangement. He looked and he saw, but he didn’t really let himself see. He couldn’t. Instead, he stared at her face, more perfect in death even than it had been in life. Her dark eyes were wide and fixed on the stars above—stars that seemed to have come out simply to witness her death, clearing the clouds aside that the moonlight might make her lovely one last time.