The Glass Casket (6 page)

Before their journey to the mountains, Seamus had told them that they were leaving to be closer to Fiona’s family. He had intimated that her long-lost relatives would greet them eagerly and with open arms, but they had done no such thing. The scholar, her uncle, had turned them away with barely a word. And just now at the square, the look in her cousin’s eyes … she recognized it. Her cousin had been told not to speak to Fiona—that she was dangerous. But what dangers could she possibly present?

As Fiona walked the forest path back to her new home,
her mind drifted to memories of her father. He had been a quiet man, a man not accustomed to showing affection, and yet he had been a good man, providing for her, always giving her a kind word when she was most in need. She missed her life by the sea—the warm winds and clear blue ocean swells.

Her heart ached when she thought about the morning walks she used to take with Lareina, their bare feet sinking into the sand still cool from the night. There, they would comb for seashells to string into necklaces that her father might sell at the weekly open market. In the afternoons, they would sit in the sand outside their cottage, the warm sun beating down on Fiona’s shoulders as they worked. Lareina made a habit of setting the loveliest necklace aside for Fiona. Fastening it around her neck and kissing her on the cheek, she would say,
An ocean bloom for my ocean rose
. Those necklaces were gone now too. In the end, Goi Flint had sold even those. The past year had been a dark one, but Fiona was beginning to suspect that things might be changing. Perhaps her gentle stranger, that solid, earthbound boy, augured the start of a new kind of happiness.

Lareina looked up from her sewing the second Fiona pushed her weight against the heavy wooden door. Setting down the needle and thread, she smiled at her stepdaughter.

“Hi, Mum,” Fiona said, and kissed her on the cheek. “You were worried, weren’t you?”

Lareina laughed and shook her head. Fiona’s eyes fell to
the knitting needle on the hearth, and a heaviness settled over the girl’s face. Her mother, Malia, had died an agonizing death—sepsis—and the root of it had been the prick of a simple knitting needle. Such a small thing to destroy the lives of a woman and child.

When Lareina had first met the girl, she was barely a slip of a thing, ashen and traumatized, huddled by the hearth fire, in need of attention and serious grooming. She had been five, and it had been three months since her mother’s untimely death. Her black hair had run wild, and her large coal eyes had pockets of gray beneath them. To Lareina, she’d looked like a withered and grieving old soul trapped within the body of a child. Lareina’s first thought upon seeing Fiona was that she was somehow cursed—a witch’s spell gone awry. The girl had looked at her new stepmother with unseeing eyes, and Lareina, being not much more than a girl herself, and not knowing what she could possibly do to help the child, had sat beside her, removed a comb from her bag, and had begun the colossal task of untangling the child’s obsidian nest of hair.

Since that day, the two had engaged in this ritual whether or not Fiona’s hair was in need of combing, and so the girl, now nearly a woman, undid her braid and sat at her stepmother’s feet. Picking up the comb that lay beside her, Lareina lifted her stepdaughter’s hair and ran the fine ivory teeth through it with care while Fiona rested her cheek on her stepmother’s knee.

“How was the square?” Lareina asked, and the girl sighed.

“Fine, I suppose. Not much of interest, and no one will talk to me. They stare at me, though.”

“That’s to be expected, my child. You are growing to be quite lovely. People are bound to appreciate it,” she said, but her heart was heavy at the prospect. She’d been noticing for a while that Fiona was no longer a child, that before her eyes she was transforming into a truly beautiful creature. Yet Lareina also knew that too much beauty could be a dangerous thing, and that often it was best to be just on the pretty side of plain. The pretty side of plain was no longer an option for Fiona, however, and now more than ever, Lareina wanted to keep the girl in her sights.

“I don’t think they like me,” Fiona said, staring into the fireplace, her eyes dancing along with the flames.

“They will once they get to know you.”

“I’m not so sure. They look at me like I’m an infection,” she said.

“You must be imagining things,” Lareina said, massaging her stepdaughter’s shoulders. “We will grow to like it here. I promise you. We just need to settle in.”

“I’m afraid,” Fiona said without really meaning to. Sometimes when she was with her stepmother, her heart opened up and unexpected things came spilling forth, things she herself did not know that she felt.

“Shhh, now,” Lareina whispered. “Everything will be okay. You’ll see.” And sitting there by the warmth of the fire, gazing out the window and through the veil of snow, both believed that it just might be true.

That afternoon, Tom and Rowan walked south through the woods to Seelie Lake.
Wolves be damned
, she’d declared, setting off through the trees. When they reached the edge of the frozen lake, he and Rowan lay on their backs atop the cold rocks that stretched along the icy banks, and stared up at the clouds. Crows were gathering up in the branches of a high-reaching pine, and Tom couldn’t help wondering if the birds were watching them as they seemed to watch all the forest creatures. If there really was a wolf about, the crows would know. Would the birds give them warning, he wondered? Or would they watch the humans be slaughtered on the shores of the lake?

“What did they look like? The men who died on the mountain?” Rowan asked, as if reading his thoughts.

“Oh, that,” he said, cringing at the memory. “It was awful, Rowan. You don’t need to hear it.”

“Sometimes you can be so tiresome,” she said, hitting him gently on the shoulder.

“I’m protective.”

“You don’t need to protect me,” she laughed. “I’m older than you.”

“By three months.”

“A lot happened in those three months, Tom,” she said, turning to face him, her clear blue eyes squinting at him through pale lashes. “I didn’t want to tell you this before, but a lot of secrets were divulged. I was inducted into some really high-ranking societies, stuff you’ll never
understand.” Her lips quivered as she suppressed her laughter.

“Is that so?” Tom laughed. “This explains why you so often need me to point out when you’ve failed to twin your stockings,” he said, pointing to her mismatched pair.

“Mine is a life of the mind,” she proclaimed, making a grand gesture with her arms. “Let others worry about my feet! Now, please, Tom. My curiosity is killing me. Tell me about Beggar’s Drift.”

Tom’s eyes grew dark. “Ro,” he said. “What I saw up there, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a bad place, everyone knows that, but if you could have seen that man … his eyes, his tongue—they were gone, torn from him. What could do a thing like that?”

Rowan cocked her head to the side. “But everyone’s been saying it was a wolf. That doesn’t sound like the work of a wolf.”

Tom nodded, relieved to hear her speak aloud what had been troubling him. “That’s what I thought. It seemed to me that it was something … beyond wild animals, but no one wanted to hear it.”

“Something beyond? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know exactly—something not born of the Goddess; something not of this realm.”

“Forest things, then?” Rowan asked, trying to keep an open mind. “Goblins and the like?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t get that impression.”

“Well, what impression did you get?”

He thought for a moment, and staring out at the icy
expanse, he chose his words carefully. “Evil,” he said. “All around me up there, I felt the presence of evil.”

Rowan’s features were knotted with concern. “Have you spoken with an elder about it?”

He sighed. “No one would listen. It’s as if everyone wants to blame it on a wolf because although we fear wolves, we understand their ways. But whatever happened up there is beyond comprehension. It was something wicked, Ro, and I think the elders know it. Paer Jorgen was with us, and I think that what we saw up there, it scared him—scared him so much that they’re lying to us about the danger.”

Rowan shivered at Tom’s words. She didn’t know what to make of his theories, but it was clear that his experience up on Beggar’s Drift had frightened him more than she’d ever seen him frightened. “But what do you think, Tom? What do you think killed them?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s a reason no one goes up to Beggar’s Drift. Whatever’s up there, it’s not the same as the forest things down here. It’s like the land—icy and foul.”

“You’re talking as if you saw something.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes distant. “No, it wasn’t what I saw; it was what I felt. It’s bad land up there.” He ran his hands through his hair and shut his eyes as if to close them against the memory. “Tell me something, Ro. Tell me something good.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, wanting to help him but not knowing how.

“I don’t want to think about that place anymore.” He sighed. “Tell me something silly and sweet and mundane.”

She bit her lip, searching, and then raised her eyebrows. “Well, I think our Emily’s going to marry Bill Holdren,” she said.

“That’s good news. Bill’s a nice fellow.”

“Yes, he’s nice. That’s not the point. I don’t want him to take my Emily away.”

“It’s time enough,” Tom said, starting to feel more like himself. “She’s getting on twenty.”

“But what will I ever do without her?” Rowan whined.

“More housework, I suppose.” He laughed. “Those little scholar hands of yours might actually get a callus or two.”

“I do housework,” she snapped, feigning outrage.

“Chatting to Emily while she does housework is not in itself housework.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, and he laughed. “Perhaps I’ll leave.”

“And go where?” he asked, surprised.

“The palace city,” she said, sitting up. “I’d love to see it, to meet all the different sorts of people who live there.”

“Aw, Ro,” he said, gazing at her with pride. “They’d be lucky to have you. Anyone would.”

“So let’s do it, then. Let’s run away.”

“You must be joking.” He snorted at the idea. “I’m never leaving Nag’s End.”

“You don’t even dream about it, about seeing far-off lands?” Rowan asked, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.

“Nag’s End is good enough for my father, and it’s good enough for me.” Pushing himself up to sit beside her, he stared at the sky a moment, as if pondering something wondrous. “Rowan,” he said, “do you think it possible to love someone upon first laying eyes on them?”

Rowan sighed and pulled her knees to her chest. The idea of love made her nervous, and she and Tom never discussed it. “Well, the poets certainly thought it so,” she said, drawing on her scholarship, as she always did when she felt unsure of herself. “If they’re to be believed, a woman’s eyes can know a future lover upon seeing him, and if the man sees the fire in those eyes, sees himself there, then he can fall in love before they’ve even spoken a word.”

“But what do
you
think?” he asked, a fervor in his voice. “Do you think it’s possible?”

She considered this, furrowing her brow. “I don’t know. I suppose I like the idea of some part of our bodies knowing and recognizing our futures even if our minds cannot. That appeals to me. But no,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think it possible.”

“You don’t?” he laughed. “Really? If your future husband came riding into the village one day, you don’t think you’d recognize him immediately?”

Rowan shook her head. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“How does it work, then?”

She was silent for a moment as she tried to untangle what she thought from what she felt. “I think in order to love someone, you must know their heart. You need to witness
their goodness, and you can’t know something like that unless you’ve known someone for a while. I think familiarity breeds love.”

“That’s not very romantic of you,” he laughed.

“Isn’t it?” she wondered. “I think there’s something charming about couples who grow to love each other as they get to know each other. Why, didn’t you tell me that your parents only married because their own parents wanted to merge families? Presumably they didn’t love each other at the beginning, but now I imagine they feel all the more proud of their love because it wasn’t easy to come by. It was something they worked at.”