The Master of Heathcrest Hall (69 page)

They were blue, those eyes. And gazing into them, she realized that she recognized the spirit beyond them. So it was that she
knew the horrible truth, and understood at last how she had been betrayed by the tall man with the wolf pelt on his shoulders. How she had been betrayed by …

“M
YRRGON,” cried a voice.

Ivy sat up in the horsehair chair, pressing a hand against her midriff as she did. The windows of the long front room of Heathcrest Hall were all black, and they shook as a rain lashed against them.

A light approached, and Ivy suffered a momentary terror as she recalled the dream she had been caught in. Only the light was gold, not crimson, and as it came near she saw its source.

“Rose,” she said in relief.

Rose drew closer. She held a brass candleholder, and a flame flickered atop the stump of wax. “Are you all right, Ivy? I heard you call out something.”

“I’m sorry if I frightened you, Rose. I was having a bad dream, that’s all.”

Ivy thought back to the dream she had been caught in when Rose woke her. It was the same, strangely vivid interlude that always began with her collecting shells along the shore of a sea. She had had the dream a number of times back in Invarel. Then, oddly, it had ceased after the night her body rejected the tiny life—the son—that had been growing within her.

For a while she did not have the dream at all, or at least not that she recalled. But then, after the soldiers took Mr. Quent away, the dream had come to her again. And ever since their arrival at Heathcrest Hall, she had had the dream with increasing frequency, until now it came to her nearly every time she shut her eyes and managed to fall sleep.

And each time, she remembered more of it upon waking.

Now, as she stared into the light of Rose’s candle, Ivy began to recollect the final moments of the dream. Leaving the cave with the tall man. The moon waxing and waning in the sky as they traveled
the shadowed land. His large hand resting upon her belly as it swelled. And then he smiled as he said their son’s name would be the same as his. That it would be—

“Myrrgon,” she whispered.

“Yes, that’s it,” Rose said. “That’s the word I heard you call out. What does it mean?”

That was a good question. Why was Ivy having a dream about a young woman who lived by the sea, and a man with the name of an ancient magician? And why was it coming more and more often? Again, she thought back to the dream. She could remember nearly all of it now—the people’s flight from the sea, the cave, the man with blue eyes and the white-faced woman, the trees, and the shadows. It was only the very end of the dream that remained murky and indistinct. Her belly had swelled as a life grew within her. She had held a child in her arms. Only then something had happened.

Something awful.

Ivy’s gaze went to an old stuffed wolf that was mounted upon a wooden stand nearby. Its glass eyes glinted, and in the flickering candlelight its gray fur rippled as if it was moving.

“I’m not sure what it means,” Ivy murmured, more to herself than to Rose.

All the same, Rose seemed to accept this answer. “I found a box with some tea in the kitchen,” she said, taking up the candleholder as she stood. “It was in the corner of a cupboard. It’s very old and dry. I could try to brew us a cup from it. I’m sure it’s not any good, but I think at least it should remind us of tea.”

Like the shadows before Rose’s candle, the dream flitted away. Outside, the rain still beat at the windows, and a spasm passed through Ivy. Only it wasn’t pain this time, it was simply a shiver, for she was cold.

“Yes,” Ivy said, “I would like that.”

And she went with Rose to the kitchen.

T
HE TEA was not so poor as they feared, for the leaves had been well-wrapped in a waxed cloth inside the box. Ivy wondered if it was Mrs. Darendal who had last used this tea. Had the housekeeper closed the box carefully, expecting to open it again soon? Or perhaps it had been the housemaid, Lanna, who had done so.

But neither of them had ever opened the box again. Mrs. Darendal’s son, the highwayman Westen, had come to Heathcrest Hall intending to take Ivy away and so lure Mr. Quent into a fatal trap. Only Mr. Quent had arrived with soldiers, and they had shot Westen’s compatriots while the highwayman fled. After that, Lanna had returned to her family in the village of Low Sorrell. And Mrs. Darendal had perished.

Ivy filled a kettle with water, then made a little fire in the stove. For this, she used some of the wood stacked beside the fireplace that dominated one end of the kitchen. That the cavernous fireplace had once been used to roast whole boars brought back by the earl’s hunting parties, Ivy had no doubt.

Theirs was a decidedly smaller party; and once the tea was hot they took it to the parlor off the front hall. They had been spending much of their time in the little room, for it was easy to keep warm. The last several lumenals had all been swift and fleeting, while the umbrals in between had each been longer than the last, and a perpetual chill had settled over the house.

As they sat by the fire and sipped tea, Ivy could only think of all the time she had spent in this room when she was a governess, tutoring Clarette and Chambley. Several volumes of the
Lex Altania
still resided on the bookshelf in the corner. How many hours had they spent being entertained by those battered old books! She would observe as the children took turns reading passages from them, all the while keeping an eye on the parlor window, waiting for the gruff and forbidding master of the house to return.

Only he would never return again. Heathcrest Hall had no master now.

That the house remained itself was a wonder, she supposed. It had been raining and dark the night Ivy and Rose emerged from
the little grove of shabby trees and stumbled across the moor. Ivy was still astonished at Rose’s bravery throughout the entire ordeal. She had gone willingly through the door Arantus, and had followed Ivy across the dusty gray-green plain toward the stone arches that stood in the distance.

Ivy had searched among the gates—those that still stood—looking for ones that opened onto scenes of crooked trunks and straggling branches. And of these, there was one in particular she was searching for, one she was certain she would recognize. All the while, Rose had demonstrated no trepidation, and instead had been fascinated with the stars above them, and the great purple crescent of the planet Dalatair. It was as if she had already known such things lay beyond the door. Ivy could only wonder what else Rose had discussed with the spirit of their father.

At last Ivy had found the gate she recalled seeing on her previous visit to the way station. Though it was dark through the gate, and thus difficult to make out the scene, still there was a familiarity to the silhouettes of the trees beyond. That she was glimpsing the very grove that stood on the ridge just east of Heathcrest, she was certain.

When Ivy told Rose they must go through, and not to be afraid of the trees or of anything they might do, Rose had merely nodded. Hand in hand, the two had approached the gate. One moment they trod on gray dust, and the next old leaves crackled beneath their feet.

At once Ivy had felt the presence of the ancient trees. For a terrible few heartbeats there was a menace to the creaking and groaning of their branches as they shook under the force of a gale. Only then Ivy called out to the trees with her thoughts, and they listened and were soothed.

A path opened before them, and Ivy and Rose followed it to the high stone wall that surrounded the grove. Ivy had wondered how they might scale it; she did not want to alarm Rose by having the trees pluck them up off the ground. But there was no need, for a great crack had opened in the wall—a gap Ivy was certain had not been there when she dwelled at Heathcrest.

Whether the crack had been made from the outside, or from
within, Ivy did not know but it was just wide enough for Ivy and Rose to slip through. It was with some reluctance that Ivy left the grove, and she brushed her fingers over the rough trunks as she did, feeling the life, the power, flowing like sap within them.

I will come to you again
, she thought.

Then the sisters left the wall behind and made their way down the slope, through the heather and gorse. The night was so dark that Ivy half-feared she would not know which way to go. But memory served where sight could not. Soon they left the one ridge behind and ascended up the side of another. Just as they reached the summit, a gust of wind tore through the clouds, and the moon sailed free of its shroud. In the silvery light, a familiar, blocky outline hove before them.

It was Heathcrest Hall. She had returned at last.

A joy had filled her, and seizing Rose’s hand she had raced the last distance toward the house. Only as they approached, her joy was replaced by a sudden dread. On one side of the house, moonlight shone through empty windows, for the roof had fallen in, and the stones were stained black with soot. There had been a fire.

A fear came over Ivy that she had lost Heathcrest as well, but this fear was lessened as they drew closer to the house. The windows were all intact on the main part of the manor, and the walls unstained. It was evident the fire had been confined to the southern wing. Then the clouds closed over the moon, and rain began to fall again. Hurriedly, the sisters approached the house, eager for shelter.

It was only when they reached the house and found the front door locked that Ivy realized she should have expected this. Mr. Quent had closed up the house when they left for the city more than a year ago, and no one would have been in it since then.

Ivy had stared dumbly for a moment, but soon an idea occurred to her. She took the Wyrdwood box, which she had carried all this while, and held it near the door. As she concentrated, several tendrils of wood uncoiled themselves from the box. They probed the lock like tiny fingers, then slipped inside the keyhole.

Turn it
, Ivy thought.

There was a click as the tumblers moved within the door. Ivy coaxed the little twigs out of the lock and back into place upon the Wyrdwood box. Then she pushed upon the door. It opened with a low sigh.

And that was how the lady of the house had returned.

That had been well over a half month ago. Or at least, Ivy guessed it had been that long, for it was hard to know precisely how much time had passed. Though she searched room after room, there did not seem to be a working clock anywhere in the house. She had found an almanac in the parlor, but it was from years ago, its pages cracked and yellowed. Besides, even a new almanac would have been no use. The lumenals and umbrals alternated in the most fragmented and jumbled fashion. Sometimes a day appeared hardly to be half done when the world suddenly seemed to tilt and the sun lurched toward the horizon. At other times it was as if the sun stood still in the sky, withering all beneath its brutal glare.

Despite the unpredictable series of lumenals and umbrals, one pattern had begun to emerge. While the days varied in length, in general they were becoming shorter, while it was the opposite case for the nights. Though Ivy had no way to measure it, she was certain the umbrals were, in the average, increasing in duration. Often, by the time a sluggish dawn crept over the world, there would be frost on the windowpanes. And of late the moorlands around the manor had turned from gray-green to gray-brown.

Sometimes, when it was dark, Ivy would dare to step out the door of the house and look up at the sky. Reading a few books upon the topic had in no way made her into an astrographer, but all it took was a keen eye to notice the changes in the arrangement of the heavens. The red planet, Cerephus, had continued to grow in size, so that it was now easily perceived as a disk by the naked eye. While not so large as the moon, it was nearly as bright, and cast a lurid crimson glow over the world.

Even as Cerephus brightened, the rest of the heavens seemed
to feel its growing influence. Other steady points of colored light, which had heretofore been sprinkled widely across the heavens, were now on the move. Each time Ivy observed them, they had traveled in closer proximity to Cerephus: purple Dalatair, pale yellow Loerus, silvery twins Acreon and Urioth, burnt-umber Regulus, and brilliant blue Anares. There were other planets too small to observe without the aid of the lens—Vaelus, Cyrenth, Naius, Eides, and far-off Memnymion. All the same, Ivy did not need to work the knobs and gears of her father’s celestial globe to know that these bodies were all moving in the heavens as well. Their orbits and epicycles were gradually and inexorably altering, so that soon all of them would be arranged like shimmering beads on a single strand pulled taut. And then …

When twelve who wander stand as one, through the door the dark will come
.

Those were the first lines of the riddle her father had left for her long ago, hidden beneath the endpapers of a book. It was the riddle that had helped her discover the key to the house on Durrow Street. The key had been revealed when she arranged the celestial globe so that all the orbs representing the planets stood in a line. As she gazed at the sky above the dark moorlands, Ivy often wondered what other doors would open when it was not just the celestial globe arranged in such a manner, but the heavens themselves.