The Shadow at the Gate (34 page)

“If you don’t mind, mistress,” he said diffidently. “Might I look in at her? Old Bord—I mean, the officer of the watch will ask if I’ve seen her, and if I say no, he’ll probably send me back straightaway.”

She nodded. “Come. I’ll not have you shunted back and forth between the castle and our home.”

The end of the hall opened up into a large chamber lit by an oil lamp hanging high from the ceiling. Arodilac drew a quick breath. He had never been in this part of the house before. For a moment, the ball was forgotten.

“Mistress Gawinn—are these, are these. . .?”

“These worthies spur on my poor husband each and every day.”

Sibb smiled slightly as she spoke. The walls were hung with painting after painting. They were portraits of men, and in their clothing and in the cracked oil and faded colors, there was evidence of a progression of time spanning hundreds of years. Weapons hung below each of the paintings: a battle-axe with scarred handle but brightly burnished head under a portrait of a stern old man, and, further along, a sword in its leather-wrapped sheath. There were spears with blades as thin and as delicate as paper, braces of daggers, and an ugly-looking morning star with a brutal spiked ball.

“This is all the same family,” said Arodilac, looking from face to face.

“All of them Gawinns and all of them Lord Captains of Hearne. All of them dead and buried, from near to distant past. Mostly distant now. Some fell in battle and some were felled by old age itself, cursing, no doubt, the fact that they didn’t die on the battlefield. They’ve left their weapons behind. Their weapons and their shadows and their whispers to urge on the next son of their house to his duties.”

She did not speak bitterly, but turned her eyes about the chamber fondly, as if looking upon the members of a beloved family.

“It is comforting to know we are watched with such good will,” she said.

A staircase mounted up from the chamber. The steps creaked under them. Mistress Gawinn took a lamp from a wall bracket and it flared within her hands. Shadows stretched down a hall lined by doors on either side. At the far end, moonlight shone through a window. A door creaked open and the tall figure of Loy stood there.

“Milady.” He scowled at Arodilac.

“Is she sleeping still?”

“Aye. Not stirred a finger.”

“We’ll just peep in then,” said Sibb. “The Guard must be assured that all of Hearne is sleeping safe in their beds.”

Arodilac blushed but said nothing.

Loy ushered them into a sitting chamber. A second door opened past that to a bedchamber. Arodilac could discern the form of the girl under the blankets. Her hair spilled about the pillow and gleamed whiter in the lamplight than the cotton sheets themselves.

“I hope she doesn’t dream tonight,” said Sibb.

Loy shut the door.

“Satisfied?” he said, scowling at Arodilac.

Somewhere nearby, a horse whinnied. The sound was faint, for the walls of the house were of thick stone. The noise came again, and there was a strange, shuddering note of desperation in the sound. It seemed as if it was no longer a horse whinnying but rather a child screaming, thin-voiced and out of breath.

“What in shadow’s name is that?” said Loy.

“My horse,” said Arodilac.

He turned and sprinted down the hall. Loy ran after him. For some reason, Arodilac stopped at the top of the stairs and crouched down, staring into the chamber below. The light was dim in the space beneath, for there was only the single lamp hanging from the ceiling.

“Why are you—?” said Loy.

“Hush,” he said, and in that moment they heard clearly, from somewhere in the house, the sound of glass shattering.

“See after the girl,” said Arodilac, his face white. “And bid Mistress Gawinn go to her children.”

Arodilac looked frantically around, but there was nothing at hand except for a vase at the top of the stairs. It was filled with dried flowers. He plucked them out and laid them down, rustling, on the floor. The vase itself was scarcely as heavy as the flowers and he grimaced, hefting the thing in his hand. Still, anything was better than nothing. He crept down the stairs. The steps creaked beneath his feet and, with every groaning plank, his heart faltered within his chest.

For some strange reason, the lamp hanging from the chamber ceiling was flickering as if blown by a gentle exhalation, even though the air around Arodilac was as still as if the house itself was holding its breath. Shadows gained form so that ghostly figures glided to and fro on the floor below the stairs. On the opposite wall, light glinted on a spear tip. It seemed as if the portrait above the spear winked—an old man with a scarred face. Arodilac blinked.

And then he heard it.

It was a quiet sound. A mere rearrangement of weight, as if someone had shifted their balance from one foot to the other. There, the sound came again. Arodilac looked through the railings. His breath caught in his throat. For there, staring up at him, were two red eyes. Two red spots gleaming in the gloom. At least he thought they were eyes. And then he knew beyond any doubt that they were eyes, for to his horror, the two red spots blinked and then blinked again, still staring up at him.

The neck of the vase shattered in his hands. The noise seemed as loud as a thunderclap in the silence of the house. Blood dripped from his fingers where the pottery shards had cut him. He gasped. Below him, claws scrabbled on the floor. The steps creaked and up the stairs hurtled a form made out of shadows and teeth and glaring red eyes. The thing slammed against him and he was thrown against the banister. Wood splintered and he yelled, terrified, for there was nothing beneath his feet. He flailed out and caught hold of a railing, only to have it break, and then he was falling. His fingers grabbed onto something—a smooth horizontal piece of wood—that held, slowed him for a second. The frame of one of the paintings. Then it too snapped, and he heard the sound of canvas ripping.

Arodilac slammed down hard on his back. For a moment he could not breathe and the lamp above him seemed to spin around in circles that left a trail of dull, flaring gold in the dark. He gulped and gulped again until the air came flooding painfully back into his lungs. He stumbled to his feet. Without even thinking, he grabbed hold of the nearest weapon—one of the spears—and wrenched it away from the wall. Then he ran for the staircase.

He was halfway up the stairs when someone screamed. A figure lurched across the hall in front of him, a bundle clutched in its arms. Loy. Hair as white as corn silk flew up against his face and the bundle clutched back at him with desperate hands. The girl. She screamed again. It was a high, ugly sound. The scream of an animal without wits and without hope.

Loy collided with the opposite wall and then stumbled down the hall, away from Arodilac and toward the window at the far end. Lamplight painted a wet red sheen on one of his legs. A shape drifted out of the door after him, a mass of shadow roughly formed in the shape of an immense dog. The dog seemed strangely insubstantial, for one moment part of a leg was there, and then it no longer was—Arodilac could see through it to the oak floorboards beyond—the next moment the head dissolved into shadows and then back. It was as if the beast took on the appearance of whatever was around it—shadows, wood, stone, the weave of a rug. It blended into its surroundings like a sand lizard fading into near invisibility against the backdrop of its desert dune home.

But even though the beast faded in and out of sight, it was easily heard in the creaking steps it took—the floorboards groaned under its tremendous weight—and the sound of its rumbling growl. A stench of decay filled the hall. The thing stalked forward, head lowered and fixed on Loy. It moved slowly, and Loy, even though he staggered along, kept up a quick pace. But the hallway was only so long and Loy was soon at the window at the far end. He untangled the girl’s arms from his own to set her down—she fought and clawed to stay in his arms, but she was small—and then, alone, turned toward the approaching creature. He saw Arodilac, but his face was dull with shock and he said nothing.

The dog leapt.

Arodilac shouted and ran forward. But it felt as if he ran through deep water. Surely this was only a nightmare that he was struggling to wake from with the sheets tangled about his legs. The spear felt as heavy as an oak log in his hands. The light in the hallway had been faint enough to begin with, shed by only the flame of one lamp on the wall near the top of the stairs, and now it seemed to be dimming even more so that darkness flooded in around the edge of his sight. All he could see was Loy’s face and the white band of his arms clamped around the dog’s neck. But the white was slowly blurring into red and the darkness was dissolving the man’s face into itself until there was only his eyes blinking tiredly.

“Arodilac.”

It was only a whisper. That was all Loy could manage. The moon shone through the window behind Loy and the blot of darkness swallowing him up. Moonlight gilded the spearhead falling through the air so that it looked like a falling leaf. A leaf gone gold with autumn and falling to the earth to die. Then the leaf plunged into the darkness and the darkness seemed to shrink in on itself slightly—it looked much more like a dog now. Its teeth snapped together in front of Arodilac’s face.

The window behind Loy shattered around him. He fell out into the night with the darkness still clasped in his arms. It seemed as if he smiled as he fell, his eyes drifting from Arodilac’s white face to the even whiter hair of the girl crouched shivering and sobbing below the sill. Desperately, Arodilac tried to hang onto the shaft of the spear but it slipped through his fingers, slick with his own blood.

Light sprang up behind him in the hall and he heard the terrified voices of the servants on the stairs. Footsteps ran by him and Sibb Gawinn was on her knees with the little girl in her arms and there came a thin, faltering voice that fluttered and sobbed and whispered the word
mama
over and over again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

DANCING AND OTHER ENJOYABLE THINGS

Ronan turned the ward ring around his finger. He had never been inside the castle. At least, except for the time when he had come to meet Arodilac Bridd, but even that time could hardly count as having been inside the castle. He had been whisked through an unobtrusive door all the way around the back. The servants’ quarters, probably. Arodilac Bridd. That was one person he did not wish to meet tonight.

He glanced sideways at Liss and marveled. Surely she was only a girl. A slender form capped with a sheaf of shining hair, lips parted, eyes wide and looking everywhere. Just a girl overwhelmed with excitement at her first ball. In the regent’s castle, no less. Her hand rested on his arm, lighter than a sparrow’s weight.

As light as the foam on a wave.

And Ronan marveled even more. For he knew that if Liss looked at him, he would see in her eyes, past the excitement and the eagerness, something ancient and serene and terrible. He bent his head over her hair and smelled the sea.

“Isn’t this marvelous?”

“What?” he said stupidly.

“This. All of this.”

“Yes.” But he saw none of it, only her.

Her fingers pressed down on his arm, propelling him forward. They drifted across an immense hall, through a throng of people eddying and swirling around them. A thousand lamps dangled high overhead from a thousand gold chains, shedding soft light down and in and over and around everything. The light nestled in white diamonds resting on even whiter throats. Sapphires and emeralds and rubies caught the light and then threw it back into the air, shot through with their blues and greens and scarlets. The light lapped against silks and satins and the impossibly perfect skin of the most beautiful women in all of Tormay. But amidst all of this, the light pooled around Liss until she glowed brighter than the finest diamonds, brighter than the most gorgeous sweep of silk, brighter than the most beautiful duchess. Ronan looked down at her and despaired of his charge. Surely there was no chance to keep her hidden. Surely there were so many eyes on her, covert and calculating and biding their time. He realized he didn’t even know what he was supposed to be guarding her from.

Her fingers tightened on his arm.

“We only see what we want to see,” she said.

He said nothing, but sweat beaded on his forehead. A servant curveted past bearing a platter of crystal glasses and Ronan claimed two before the man disappeared into the crowd. Liss wrinkled her nose when he offered her one, so he drank them both, thankful for the wine’s chill. It swept the bemusement from his mind.

“Who is your enemy here, milady?”

“Do not call me that, thank you.”

He steered her past a cluster of courtiers grouped around a young man dressed in what looked like every imaginable color there was to be had, and then some. He was talking loudly and every face in the group around him leaned in avidly. Gems flashed on his fingers as he waved his hands about. A servant with a studiously blank face stood on the outskirts of the group, holding a tray of wine at the ready.

Liss craned her neck, fascinated.

“What is the name of the bird with the enormous tail? It fans out like so—” And she spread her fingers in front of her.

“It’s called a peacock. Liss, how can I watch over you if I don’t know who I’m watching for?”