The Master of Heathcrest Hall (83 page)

As important as these objects were, there had been something of greater value in the box. Then she pushed aside a heap of broken sticks, and there it was: her father’s journal, bound in black leather. She picked it up, clasping it to her breast as she stood.

“It was something precious, then,” Lady Shayde said. She stood at the end of the long room, half-revealed in the dying light of the fire.

“Yes,” Ivy said before she even thought to, then winced. Stories told of the White Lady’s fabled power to compel others to speak, and Ivy had suffered it herself when Shayde came to interview her. She had to be careful what she said.

Only why? What use was there resisting anymore? They were under Shayde’s power now; Ivy could not win a struggle against her—at least not unless they were within a grove of Wyrdwood.

“It’s my father’s journal,” she said, still clutching the book. “It was in the box he gave me.”

Shayde’s dark lips moved a fraction, forming what almost
seemed the shadow of a smile—if she was really capable of such an expression. “Ah, the Wyrdwood box. That was clever of you, to identify the base desires of your attackers and play upon them. I was impressed by that, Lady Quent. You would have made a fine agent of the Gray Conclave.”

Ivy stared in astonishment—not from this last statement, as shocking as it was, but from the ones preceding it. “It was you!” she gasped. “You were the shadow I saw from the attic. But you weren’t just outside, were you? You were here in the manor.” Ivy staggered, holding a hand to her brow. “How long were you in this room, watching?”

Shayde stepped into the firelight. “Do not fear. I would not have allowed those men to harm you or your sister. Yet you hardly needed my assistance. I can see why Sir Quent admired you so deeply as he did. You are a very capable woman, Lady Quent. You would have been able to dispatch all of the soldiers on your own, had not one of them been a … well, I still do not know what such things are called. But you saw what he was. Even then, you would have been successful had you but aimed for his head. It is the only way to dispatch their kind, to remove their heads from their bodies. But you could not possibly have known this.”

Couldn’t she have? Ivy thought of her dream, of the men struggling on the beach. But none of that mattered; she faced a different peril now.

“How did you know to find me here?” she said carefully.

“I was there at your house on Durrow Street,” Lady Shayde said. “The day the soldiers came for you. I heard you say to Lord Rafferdy and his friend, the illusionist, that you would go to Heathcrest Hall.”

Some of Ivy’s horror was replaced by wonder. “So you were there as well. It was you the soldiers glimpsed out the window, in the garden. You lured them from the house so that Rose and I were able to escape.”

“Yes, I did. Once the soldiers left the house, I told them you had fled in a carriage and ordered them to pursue you. Then I
entered the house again, and I saw you step through the door, the one carved with leaves. That it was magickal in nature was apparent.”

She took another step deeper into the pool of firelight. “I thought to follow you at that moment, but Lord Rafferdy had locked the door with some manner of key and gave it to the illusionist.” She made a little shrug. “I could easily have taken it from him, of course, but I would not have known how to pursue you in the place where you had gone, and I might easily have become lost in the world beyond the door. So I decided I should travel overland instead. This was somewhat difficult, given the state of affairs in the country, but there was nothing that could prevent my passage. I arrived here over a half month ago, and have been watching the manor ever since.”

Amid all the feelings that twisted and tangled in Ivy’s breast, fascination rose up among them. “But why? Why have you followed me here?”

“I wanted to help you,” Lady Shayde said.

Ivy sprang back a step; it felt as if sparks had leaped out of the fireplace and had alighted all over her. “To help me!” she cried. “How can you possibly claim to want such a thing after what you have done to me—after what you did to my husband with your own hands?”

For a moment, a discernible change altered the white mask of Lady Shayde’s face. It was a tightening of flesh, a sharpening of lines, and a deepening of hollows. Ivy might almost have thought it an expression of pain. Except that was not possible, for surely
she
could not feel.

Then the moment passed, and Lady Shayde’s face became utterly smooth once more. “I did what I was required to do.”

“That is a lie,” Ivy said, clenching her hands at her sides. “You wanted to destroy the Inquiry, to stop them from doing their work of safeguarding the Wyrdwood and the women who were drawn to it. And with my husband imprisoned, you had done so. There was no further gain to be achieved with his death. You did not
have to murder him. But you did anyway—you did it because you hated him.”

“Hated him?” The other woman shook her head. “No, I did not hate Sir Quent. As I have told you, hate is not a thing which I can suffer.”

“Nor compassion!” Ivy exclaimed, her throat aching.

“That is true. I cannot feel compassion. Or happiness, desire, sorrow, or love—not any of these. I remember that I did feel such things once, but I cannot recall the feelings themselves. Such things were taken from me when I was made into … this.” She lifted a white hand.

This answer in no way satisfied Ivy. “Then it was your master who ordered you to do it.”

“I was indeed ordered to take Sir Quent’s life. But it was not Lord Valhaine who gave me the command that I was bound to obey.”

“Then who was it?” Ivy cried, the words hoarse and ragged from rage, from grief. “Who commanded you to do murder upon my husband?”

Lady Shayde lowered her hand. “It was Sir Quent himself who did.”

How it was that Ivy did not collapse to the floor was a thing she did not understand. One moment Lady Shayde seemed to vanish from the far side of the hall. Then, in the space between two heartbeats, she was there beside Ivy, supporting her with cold, hard hands, and helping her into a chair.

For a dreadful span of seconds, she feared she could no longer breathe, that she had forgotten how to accomplish such a basic act. She wanted to cry out, to accuse Lady Shayde of lying. But it wasn’t a lie, was it? She had seen it herself within the gem: how some exchange had passed between them, some agreement, and how he had knelt before her willingly.

At last a breath shuddered into her, burning her lungs as if she had taken in fire not air. More breaths passed in and out of her in jolting spasms; a flood of hot tears ran down her cheeks. She was weeping.

“Why?” she managed to say at last. There was so much more she wanted to ask, but all she could do was utter the word again. “Why?”

Lady Shayde was a black silhouette, standing before the fireplace. “Why did he ask me to end his life—is that what you mean? But you must know the reason for that, Lady Quent. There was never any hope that he would live. From the moment he chose to make a treaty with the witch in Torland, his doom was sealed, and he knew it.

“When I came to him in his cell, it was to tell him that he was to be tried, convicted, and hung that very day. With the grave defeat in the West Country, Lord Valhaine felt a great need to make some public demonstration of his strength and authority. But by asking me to end him, Sir Quent stole that victory from Lord Valhaine. What was more, he was assured that you, Lady Quent, would never be branded as the wife of a convicted traitor, and so deprived of all of his wealth and property, which should naturally have passed to you upon his death, having no other heir.”

Ivy could only shake her head, unable to speak. It was too horrible to bear, the knowledge that he had done it for
her
sake.

“Is that what you meant, Lady Quent?” The other woman gave a shrug. “Or perhaps you meant, why did I do as Sir Quent asked of me there in his cell beneath Barrowgate? The reason is simple enough—it is because I made a promise to him long ago. In fact, it was here in this very room that the oath was made, more than twenty years ago. It was the very last day that I ever looked so.”

She gestured to the staircase in the center of the hall, and to the portrait that hung above the landing. Earl Rylend, his wife, and their son, Lord Wilden, dominated the middle of the painting, while off to the side, nearly merging with the shadows, was a girl with dark hair and almond skin.

“Sir Quent was waiting for me that day when I came down the stairs. Of course, he was only Alasdare to me then. Or Dare, as I called him. He tried to stop me from going to the elf circle, where Mr. Bennick was waiting for me. I told Dare that if he would let me go, then one day he could ask anything of me, and I would do it
without hesitation. I swore this to him, and he knew me well enough to know that I meant it. And so he let me go.

“Nor did anyone else in the household try to prevent me. Lord Wilden was dead; he had perished attempting a spell that was beyond him—which, despite all his tutoring by Mr. Bennick, all but the simplest of incantations were. Preoccupied with his grief, Earl Rylend had paid me no attention since his son’s death, and Lady Rylend never did. And so, once Dare let me pass, there was no one to stop me from going to Mr. Bennick.” She turned away from the painting. “And I did.”

Ivy wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, and she struggled to understand. Mr. Quent had only ever spoken of Ashaydea’s transformation at the hands of Mr. Bennick with regret and sorrow. She could not imagine why he would willingly allow her to go to the elf circle, even if he had not fully understood at the time what Mr. Bennick planned. After all, with Lord Wilden dead, he had to know Mr. Bennick was perilous, and the two had been close since childhood. His father had served the earl, and she had been the earl’s ward. From an early age, Alasdare Quent and Ashaydea Rylend had been playmates, and then they had grown up together. Given his character, it was inconceivable to her that, as a young man, Mr. Quent would simply abandon his childhood companion to an awful fate, unless—

Ivy’s eyes went wide, and she sat up straight in the chair.

“You loved him,” she whispered. “You loved Alasdare, only he did not return it. Not in that way, at least. For he did love you, as he fondly would a sister. But not in the way which you dreamed.”

“You have keen powers of deduction, Lady Quent. Were I capable of a more usual sensibility, I suppose I would be mortified or weep with regret. But I am not. I know that I was infatuated with him as a girl, and that as a young woman I loved him—though I cannot recall what it was like to feel that love. Yet I can remember with clarity how, when I finally professed my affections to him on the same day Lord Wilden perished, he seemed puzzled by the idea.

“Nor, over those days that followed, did Dare seek me out or approach me. Thus, having been abandoned by the man whom I wanted, I resolved instead to go to the man who had a want for
me
. For Mr. Bennick had made it clear to me more than once that I was a proper candidate for an enchantment he wished to work. Dare did come to me then. But I think he knew he could not stop me from going to Mr. Bennick, not when he had refused me himself—not unless he had changed his mind on the matter. But he had not. A heart, as I know through observation—if no longer through experience—is not a thing to be easily altered; it beats in what direction it will. And so I went to the elf circle, and gave myself up to Mr. Bennick and his spells, and became what you see before you today.”

That a tale of such sorrow, such pain, and such dreadful consequence should be told so flatly, and without any expression of real feeling or emotion, made it seem all the more terrible. Nor did Ivy doubt any of it. More than once she had seen the regret written upon Mr. Quent’s face when he spoke of Lady Shayde—of Ashaydea. He could only have been all too aware that, had he but professed a love for her that day, her fate would have been entirely different than it was.

Only he had not loved her, at least not in that manner. Nor did Lady Shayde seem to lay blame upon him for that fact. A heart, as she had said, beats in what direction it will.

Yet what of Ashaydea’s heart now? Did it not continue to function within her, however cold the blood that passed through it? Given the relentless and singular determination she had applied to her work with the Gray Conclave, in direct opposition to the labors of the Inquiry, it seemed difficult to believe she had not possessed some desire for vengeance against Mr. Quent.

Or had she?

Ivy found herself thinking of
The Towers of Ardaunto
, the book penned by Mr. Fintaur, who had surely met Ashaydea and must have known of Mr. Bennick’s intention to create a White Thorn of his own.

A thorn can only pierce when it is grasped
, the maiden in the story had said at the end, after plunging a knife into her lover.
Nothing can unmake me what I am
.

A thing that cannot feel cannot know what to do on its own, just as a saw or chisel cannot shape wood or stone of its own volition; they required a hand to wield them. So the maiden had traveled to Ardaunto, to be a tool in the hand of the prince. Just as Shayde had gone to Invarel, to serve Lord Valhaine—to be a knife that he might use in any way he would. It was Valhaine’s will that had directed her against the Inquiry all these years, not feelings of regret or a wish for vengeance, for she could not be affected by these things.

Upon realizing all of this, a peculiar calm came upon Ivy. Her husband was dead; here before her stood his murderer. Yet Shayde could be faulted for his death no more than a pistol could be faulted for the demise of a man who was shot by it. Neither thing had the desire for murder—only the mechanical and merciless capability for it.

Yet this new understanding only begged a new question. If Lady Shayde was the Black Dog’s weapon, then why was that weapon here?

“Have you come here to kill me as well?” Ivy said. And it was strange, as she said this, that she felt almost more curiosity than dread.

Lady Shadye walked slowly to the stuffed wolf on its pedestal, the stiff fabric of her dress crackling like the now-dying fire. “You are not employing your talent for reason, Lady Quent.”