Untold (36 page)

He went to the same door, slipped up the same stairs, but this time when he reached the second floor he kept going. The next flight of stairs was dark and familiar to him: when he touched the banister, he felt the carving in the wood that formed flowers in running water, twined in a drowning woman’s hair.

Jared had to open a few doors before he found the stairs that led to the attic: he had not gone up there often. The door that led up to the attic was painted white. It had a round doorknob.

The ordinary door actually gave Jared pause, but he did not pause for long. He walked up the fragile wooden stairs, and when his foot hit a step he called on the air to muffle the creak. He called the darkness to wrap around him.

Shadow and silence, silence and shadow, every step. Nobody would see or hear him coming.

When he reached the attic, he looked around and saw oriel windows that the moonlight was shining directly through. They looked like huge pearls, softly glowing in the dark walls.

For a moment everything seemed to be shadows and silence, and Jared thought he had been wrong. Then he heard the low murmur of Rob’s voice and knew that his mother had betrayed him after all.

He walked through the dark, toward the sound of Rob Lynburn speaking. He opened one door, begging the hinges to stay quiet, and crossed a dark room. There was light seeping in from the cracks of the closed door across the room. Electric light, slipping easy and yellow as butter under the door, and the murmur of Rob’s low pleasant voice. Jared would have liked to fight him, but there was Ten to think of. He had to wait Rob out.

“I thought you would be pleased,” his mother’s voice said.

Jared concentrated on the door, pleading for quiet, begging with the air not to carry sound, and it swung silently open, just a few crucial inches. There was furniture in the room beyond, swathed in white sheets. It looked like an entire sofa set had died and been wrapped in shrouds.

He looked around the door and saw Rob standing over his mother, so much taller than her that he appeared to be looming. Neither of them was looking at the door.

Jared took a chance. He pulled the shadows close, so close that the darkness faded and moonlight spread into the corners of the empty room where he stood, and he could hardly see. He went down low and crossed, in two swift steps, to behind the shrouded couch.

Once crouched down there, he told himself he was an idiot. His mother had told Rob where he was headed. She had not given a second thought to betraying him. He should not dream of trying to help her.

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Rosalind,” Rob said. He put a hand against her throat, gently turning her face up to his. “When exactly did you see Jared?”

The lightbulbs in this room were not shaded but set in clear glass casements, and the naked electric light sheened his mother’s lashes with gold. It seemed like a gold shutter obliterated the color of her eyes for a moment as she blinked. “I—I don’t understand.”

“Before he took Lillian?” Rob inquired. “Or after he took her? She’s my wife. She’s valuable. You should have known that the thing to do was instantly raise an alarm.”

“He would have fought,” Jared’s mother said with commendable speed. “He’s unstable. I’ve told you that. I thought you wouldn’t want to risk your sorcerers, I thought it would be better to catch him by surprise.”

“You thought it would be better to lose Lillian than risk sorcerers who aren’t even Lynburns?” Rob asked. He was caressing his mother’s tumbled hair, hands and voice steady, kind. “Oh, Rosalind,” he said. “Try again.”

She retreated back into the safe territory of incomprehension. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t believe you,” Rob told her. The tone of his voice was so reassuring. “Rosalind. Fool me once . . . and you did, didn’t you? Now you’ve let me down again. The others, they’re mistaken, they’re being stupid, but at least when they see the light I’ll know I can trust them. How can I fight with you at my back when you might change your mind at any time, Rosalind? How can I trust you? I simply can’t.”

His voice was like a lullaby. It was hard to make out the actual words and not respond to the tone: Jared saw his mother straining in toward Rob, face open and eager to make it up to him. “You can,” she assured him. “Rob, I’m sorry. I love you. You have to believe me. I love you. I love you.”

“Shhh,” said Rob. He laid his cheek against her shining hair. “Hush now. I believe you. I do.” Jared hardly saw him move, in the shadowed space between their two bodies. He was aware of Rob’s hand going to his belt, but it seemed like a meaningless gesture until he saw Rob’s arm go back, saw the clean purposeful thrust. “I have only ever loved one woman,” Rob told her gently. “And it wasn’t you.”

His mother drew in a startled, shuddering breath.

“You’re no use to me, Rosalind,” Rob explained, still kind and reasonable. He drew out one of the Lynburn daggers, its gold blade drowned in slick blood, and stepped back, letting Jared’s mother slide to the ground.

It had all happened so fast that Jared had not quite believed it was happening. Now it was done, and he had not done a thing.

There was blood spreading across his mother’s torso, turning the pale material of her dress dark. His mother’s cheek was resting against the floorboards, and their gazes met. The light was dying in her eyes, a candle guttering under one last too-violent breath.

Her outflung hand was lying under the sofa. Jared reached out to touch it, he hardly knew why, to save her when it was too late to save her or to comfort her when he’d never been able to comfort her.

They had never been able to save each other.

He could not quite reach: their fingers did not quite meet.

She breathed once more, the sound halting and sticky. She did not breathe again. Her eyes were still open, staring at Jared, but they were dull as glass with the light gone out behind it.

Jared crouched on the floor looking into his dead mother’s eyes, until the sofa crashed into the farthest wall.

“Hello, son,” said Rob.

Jared didn’t get to his feet: he just hurled a handful of air at Rob, like a storm thrown from his palms.

Rob did not even raise a hand. He just glanced at the air and it obeyed him instead. He had Lynburn blood on one of the Lynburn daggers. His mouth shaped a faint sneer. “Really, Jared,” he said. “Be more intelligent.”

But Jared had something else. He had a strand of Rob’s hair, found in his hairbrush at Aurimere, saved for this occasion.
“Noli me tangere,”
said Jared, and his spell knocked Rob across the room.

It gave him enough time to run, and he ran. He ran for the attic door and blasted it open with a spell. Ten Glass sprang up, pieces of door scattering at his feet. He looked so small, wide-eyed and terrified, and Jared was so scared he would fail him.

“Ten,” he said, “get out of the house, get to my Aunt Lillian. Go fast. Go now!”

Ten stared at him for another instant and then obeyed, charging past Jared and Rob, making for the stairs.

Rob was already on his feet. He lunged for Ten, and Jared launched himself at him, feeling the strand of hair go up in smoke in his hand.

Rob sneered. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Jared said between his teeth, and lunged for Rob’s dagger.

He grabbed the blade, slicing open his palm and knowing his blood was mingling with his mother’s, still warm on the cold gold. He gripped the dagger and threw himself at Rob again, knocking him back, not caring about keeping his own balance. They hit the floor. Rob used his weight to pin Jared to the ground. Rob was bigger and stronger. He grabbed Jared’s free wrist and Jared could feel the power behind his grip, trying to wrench his arm out of its socket.

Jared bared his teeth at him in a grimace and sank the dagger into Rob’s shoulder. It was all he could reach. His stomach turned at the sound and sensation of the blade cutting through a body, through gristle and meat.

Rob had put this knife through his mother. Jared sank it in up to the hilt, and twisted.

Rob let a pained hiss leak out between his locked teeth, his big heavy body suddenly heavier on Jared’s. Then he got in Jared’s face and pressed a kiss on his cheek. “My boy,” he breathed into his ear. “Who knew Rosalind would be the one who had my real heir? Nothing stops you, does it? And you already have the taste for blood.”

“Whose boy I am seems to be up for debate,” Jared remarked breathlessly, tugging at the blade. There was so much blood on his hands, it was difficult.

“Oh, look at you,” Rob murmured. “A real Lynburn. You breathe and the house listens. If I’d had the raising of you instead of Ash, I know what you’d be. I don’t have any doubts.”

Jared did not have any wish to hear about Ash’s inherent goodness, or think about how much better he would be for Kami. He felt dizzy with rage and the desire to shut Rob up. The world was going black, splattered with scarlet.

This wasn’t rage, he realized, his thoughts surfacing from drowning darkness. Rob was sucking the air out of his lungs. He was suffocating. “What do you want?” he gasped out.

“You on my side,” Rob said. “You by my side.”

Every breath cut Jared’s throat, as if he was swallowing razors. “Oh yeah. Sign me up for evil.” He grinned wildly up at Rob, even though his sight was going dark: Rob’s face dissolving away from him, everything turning formless and strange. “Give me a weapon and put me at your back. You can totally trust me. I swear.”

He laughed, the sound almost a whine, and Rob laughed with him, full and hearty. Jared tried to get hold of the dagger, of his magic, of anything, but the world kept up its slow terrible slide away.

“You don’t understand what I’m really doing yet. You don’t understand anything yet. But you will. All you need is a little training,” Rob said soothingly. “Like a horse. You simply need to be broken.”

Jared twisted underneath Rob in one last desperate burst of strength, not fighting anymore, just trying to get away. He couldn’t. He was losing the fight; he was losing the world.

Distantly, as if it was happening to someone else, he felt the dagger slip out of his hand. He felt Rob’s hand, still horribly gentle, stroking his hair.

He heard Rob’s voice, low in his ear.

“I know just the place for you.”

* * *

Jared woke up with his legs jammed between a wall and his chest. His head was pounding, and his cheek was pressed against another cold wall. He felt himself gasping as he surfaced into consciousness, remembering suffocation even though his lungs were expanded again, air coursing through them as it should.

The air smelled stale. It smelled of something else as well.

He couldn’t focus on it. He couldn’t focus on anything, fire or earth, wood or water. He was trapped, in an enclosed space he didn’t know where, in a little pocket locked away from magic.

Jared dragged in another breath of air and tried to force himself to be calm. His legs were trapped. He couldn’t move them, so he tried to move his arms.

One of his elbows met stone. His other elbow met something else, something that felt like a coatrack: cloth and a frail structure behind it.

Jared looked to his side, and felt the breath dry up in his throat.

There was scarcely any light in the confined space. What light there was was faint but not dim enough that Jared couldn’t make out the shadowy form that sat beside him, back against the other wall, knee to knee with him, head bowed.

There was so little light that everything looked gray, but Jared knew the fragile remains of the boy’s skin really were gray. His chin rested against his chest, but Jared could see the withered side of his cheek, the shadowed hollows of his eyes, or the sockets that might once have been his eyes.

His clothes were worn and old, rotten in places but mostly preserved in that dry air. It was clothing from decades ago.

The hair hanging in that drawn gray face was dry and pale, curling the way dead leaves curled, so pale it looked bone white in this light.

It made Jared think of Holly’s blond curls. It made him think of Aunt Lillian.

Edmund Prescott, the boy Lillian would have married. Except that he had run away when he was seventeen.

He had disappeared, and left Rob to marry the heir of Aurimere.

Jared wanted to scream, but he found himself just gasping dry air and staring down at his hands. There was so much blood on them, dark in the gray light. His own, his mother’s, Rob’s: there was no way to tell, and it didn’t seem to matter.

Rob had left a boy here to die, alone in the dark, once before.

Jared closed his eyes and pressed his face against the cold wall. A terrible sound rose helplessly, low in his throat: he clenched his hands against his knees and would not look at all that remained of Edmund Prescott.

He found, after a long dark moment, that there was something he could focus on after all. There was Kami: not in his head, not in any way he could reach. But he could hold on to the images of her, all the memories he had. He could string instants of remembered light up against the enveloping dark.

His breaths were the only sound in that tiny space, walled up alive with the dead.

The swift impatient movement of her hands when she talked and wanted to be writing. The curve of her mouth, the vivid flash of her eyes, and the smile that could leap across a room at you. The steely grip of her hand, in lake water colder than death, the promise in that grasp that she would not let him go.

Another dry desperate sound broke from Jared’s throat. He leaned his forehead against his bloody hands, and waited in the dark.

* * *

It was a couple of hours before Kami noticed. The conversation kept starting and fading away, every plan petering out but none of them willing to give up. There had to be some way forward that was not a dead end.

Eventually, though, she went out to the front of the pub. Martha was closing up, wiping down the bar. People were standing by the door in a loose cluster, aware that they should go but terrified to leave.

And Jared was nowhere in sight.

“I thought Jared might be helping you,” Kami said. Dread was already rising inside her, building slowly.