Gallant, page 14
There must always be a Prior at the gate.
With my blood, I seal this door.
Father calls it a prison.
And we the keepers.
I was born to die in this house.
What have you done?
Olivia’s head spins.
She looks down at her bare feet, caked with mud and dust, the shallow red scrape of thorns that wrap around her calves, too tired, too shaken, to feel any of it. She passes the suitcase and the bed, walks straight into the tiled bathroom, and runs a bath, as hot as it will go.
As it fills, she stands before the bathroom mirror, studying her face, her eyes, her dress, all of her coated in ash and blood and things she cannot see but feel, the ghoul’s hand on her mouth, the mouse twitching in her palm, the dead-white eyes hanging on her in the dark, and suddenly she wants to climb out of her clothes, out of her skin.
She strips away the stained blue dress and climbs down into the too-hot water, watching as it clouds. She works one-handed, scouring her skin, trying to scrub away the eerie chill, the dancers’ ashes, the boy in the fountain she couldn’t reach, the door that wouldn’t open, and the fear of what would have happened if the soldiers had caught up with her. She tries to scrub away the other side of the wall, the terror she felt with every step, but also the eerie sense of coming home. As if some part of her belonged in that dead, decaying house.
And of course, it did.
She is her father’s daughter, after all.
The tallest shadow.
She tries to imagine him as one of the dancers, turning like a puppet across the ballroom floor, but she knows in her bones he wasn’t one of them.
Death, with his four shadows and his dozen shades.
Four shadows, and she counted only three, ranged around the throne.
The water clouds, and in the swirling surface she conjures another soldier, not broad or thin or short but tall, standing dark eyed and armor clad upon the platform. She sees him hunting her mother through the ruined house. Catching her. And setting her free.
Olivia studies her hands below the water, the heat causing pink to bloom across her skin. The gray film she washed away still hangs in the bath, wrapping like tendrils around her fingers. A mother made of flesh and blood. A father made of ash and bone.
What does that make her?
The water has gone cold and fogged with all the things she’s washed away, and she climbs out and pulls the plug, watching it drain. Her mother’s blue dress lies ruined on the tile, and she leaves it there, opens the suitcase she never unpacked and pulls on the second gray shift she brought, the fabric stiff and scratchy and ill-fitting. Only a matter of days, but she can hardly stand the feel of it now against her skin. She strips it off and pulls on a pale green dress instead.
And then, she packs.
Not because Matthew told her to, but because she longs to find a place where she is wanted. And she is not wanted here. She stares down at the pile of pale fabric in her suitcase, then flings open the wardrobe and pulls out her mother’s clothes.
The case is too small, they’ll never fit, but she doesn’t care, she has lost enough and she is taking this. One by one the garments come free of their hangers, one by one they drop like flowers cut, until the wardrobe is empty, the floor strewn with cloth, and Olivia collapses, chest heaving, among the garden of her mother’s dresses, the bright yellows and bold reds and hazy blues, like summer blooms.
Something cracks inside her, a soft, hitching breath.
The tears come then, bitter and hot.
She hates them even as they fall.
She has only cried twice, once when she was old enough to read the book and realize that for all her games and all the lies she told herself, her parents were never coming back. And once after Anabelle tore the pages out. Not when she heard the horrible rip, but later, after she’d risen up to fill the jar with bugs, after she’d dumped them in Anabelle’s bed and crawled back into her own, she’d curled up in the dark and sobbed, the torn pages of the journal clutched against her chest.
Her mother’s journal. She keeps flexing her fingers, desperate to feel the familiar weight of the book. But it’s gone. Lost beyond the wall, and the grief hits her in a wave.
It is not the words she mourns—she has memorized them all—it is her father’s drawings, the ones she’d only just begun to understand. It is the object itself, the indentation of the pen on the paper, the grooves in the cover, the letter in the back, Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, her name written over and over in her mother’s hand.
The mother who fled this place.
Who warned her never to return.
The mother she misses, despite the fact she never knew her.
A slight draft slips through the room, though the window is shuttered and the door is closed.
And then the ghoul is there. There is less of it than the ones beyond the wall—half a shoulder is missing, part of a hip, an arm—but it is there, ankles crossed, leaning forward elbow balanced on one knee, chin resting on its palm.
Her vision blurred with tears, Olivia can almost imagine the woman on the bed is real. Perhaps she is. Real, she is learning, is a slippery thing, not a solid black line but a shape with soft edges, a great deal of gray.
She doesn’t look up, afraid that the ghoul will disappear. She sits there, head bowed among her mother’s dresses, even as she senses movement, even as she feels the ghoul rising from the bed and stepping forward into the pool of cotton and wool and silk, sinking to its knees in front of her. They would be nearly eye to eye if she looked up.
And she cannot help herself. She does.
When Olivia lifts her gaze, the ghoul flickers slightly, like a candle in the breeze, but then steadies. Perhaps it has never been the looking that banished ghouls. Perhaps it is the thinking, the pointed go away she’s always lobbed at them as she glared.
Now Olivia stares at what’s left of her mother.
What happened to you? she thinks.
It is not like Uncle Arthur, with his face half gone. There is no gunshot wound, no blade, no culprit, but the ghoul is painfully thin, and there are hollows beneath its eyes, and Olivia remembers the entries in the journal, the sleep her mother could not find, her fear of drowning in her dreams.
Tired can be a kind of sick, Edgar said, if it lasts long enough.
Whatever illness took her mother, it is taking Matthew too. And she doesn’t know how to stop it, doesn’t know how to keep it from coming for her next.
Why did you leave Gallant? she wants to ask.
Why did you leave me?
The ghoul’s hand drifts up, and Olivia holds her breath, hoping it means to speak, to sign, but its fingers simply brush the air beside her face, as if to cup her cheek or tuck a strand behind her ear, and Olivia cannot help herself, she throws her arms around her mother’s neck, desperate to be held.
But here, the ghouls aren’t real enough to touch. Here, they are only fragile shadows of the dead, and her hands go straight through. She tumbles forward, landing among her mother’s dresses. Pain lances through her wounded palm. And when she scrambles up again, she is alone.
Olivia sags, wishing, for the briefest moment, that she were back beyond the wall.
Gallant has gone quiet.
Not the eerie quiet of the other house, or the restful quiet of a place asleep, but the tense quiet of bodies retreating to their corners. Somewhere, Hannah is leaning into Edgar. Somewhere, Matthew lies awake and waits for dawn.
The windows are shut fast, and she knows that day won’t break for another hour, at least. Matron Jessamine used to say this was the darkest part of the night, after the moon and before the sun.
Olivia hauls her small suitcase to the bottom of the stairs and leaves it there.
She pads barefoot through the empty halls, the way she did her first night here. Already, she has learned the layout of the sprawling house, and she finds her way without a candle past the row of portraits to the music room, her mother’s red journal tucked beneath her arm.
The piano sits abandoned in the dark.
No Matthew. No moonlight. The garden nothing but a wall of textured black.
Olivia climbs into the bay window with the red journal. It is far too dark to read, but she doesn’t plan to read. Instead she peels back the cover, turning past curling text until she finds the final entry. And then, turning once more, to the blank pages beyond.
There, she begins to write.
If you read this, I am safe.
Her father’s drawings are lost, but her mother’s words are safe, read a thousand times and pressed into the pages of her memory. And there, in the dark, her pencil hisses over the page as she resurrects each and every one.
I dreamed of you last night.
If I gave you my hand, would you take it?
What will we call her?
And with every reconstructed line, she understands, Grace Prior wasn’t mad. She was lonely and lost, wild and free, desperate and haunted.
And she did everything she could.
Even if it meant leaving her daughter.
Even if it meant letting her go.
There is so much she still doesn’t understand, but that, at last, she knows.
Olivia writes until she reaches the last entry, scrawls the letter to herself in the back of the red book.
Olivia, Olivia, Olivia
Remember this—
the shadows are not real
the dreams can never hurt you
and you will be safe, as long as you stay away from Gallant.
She stares at her mother’s words in her own hand for a very long time and then closes the journal and presses it to her front.
Exhaustion curls over her like smoke, but she does not sleep.
Instead, she keeps her eyes on the window, on the garden, the thinnest trails of daylight winding through.
She will not go back to Merilance. The car may come to take her there, but it is a long road, and it will have to stop at least once, and when it does, she will leave. She will run away, as her mother did, as she always meant to do herself. Perhaps she will flee into a city, become a vagabond, a thief.
Perhaps she will go to the ocean, sneak aboard a ship, and sail away.
Perhaps she will slip into that quiet little town and work in the pasty shop, and be a mystery to everyone who comes and goes, and she will grow up and grow old, and no one will ever know she was an orphan who saw ghouls and once met Death and lived in a house beside a wall.
The master of the house is angry.
He makes his way to the garden wall, a pair of yellow boots hanging from one hand like just-plucked fruit.
The shadows stand there, waiting.
“You let her get away,” he says in a voice like frost.
Their heads droop as one, eyes on the barren ground, and he wonders what excuses they would give if they could speak. He studies the door, where two small palms have struck again and again, knocking away the crust of long-dead leaves, exposing the iron beneath.
He runs a hand thoughtfully over the stain, then turns and makes his way back up the garden path. The dead roses lean away, but a single, bursting bloom hangs across his path, the petals full and heavy.
The master of the house traces the life back down its leaves, its stem, its roots.
“Very good,” he says, plucking the flower.
And then he smiles, a small, wicked smile, a smile the moonlight doesn’t land on, a smile just between the garden and his teeth.
Very good indeed.
Part Five
Blood and Iron
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rain drums its fingers on the garden shed.
The ghoul stares out from the corner.
Olivia shifts her weight, feels something crack under her shoe. She looks down, expecting to find one of the many clay pot shards littering the ground, but the piece is porcelain, roses and thorns curling over a white ground, and she knows it belongs to a vase, though she isn’t sure how. The ghoul holds a half-formed finger to the empty space where its lips should be. The rain has stopped, and Olivia knows she better be getting back, if she’s going to go, but when she steps outside, there is no gray gravel moat, no grim stone building, no Merilance.
Instead, she’s in the garden at Gallant. A riot of color blooms to every side, and of course she is here—how could she forget?
She turns toward the garden wall and sees her mother standing there by the gate, in a yellow sundress, in the shadow of the stone, one hand lifting to the iron door. Olivia opens her mouth, wishing she could call out, but she can’t, of course, so she runs.
Flings herself down the garden path, hoping to catch her mother before she opens the gate, but just as the woman at the wall turns to look over her shoulder, Olivia stumbles and falls. Lands hard on the ground, which isn’t grassy and soft but a tangle of brittle ivy over dead earth. She scrambles up again, but it’s dark, and she’s on the wrong side of the wall.
The house that isn’t Gallant rises like a broken tooth, and she twists back to the gate and sees her mother standing in the open door, a tall shadow at her side. Olivia stumbles toward her parents but as she gets closer, she realizes the shadow isn’t her father. It’s the man who isn’t a man, the master of the other house, bone jaw shining through his torn cheek as he smiles and slams the door shut, and Olivia wakes up.
She gasps, the red journal falling to the floor. She blinks, one hand raised against the sunlight spilling in through the bay window, cloud-white and bright. It is far past dawn, hardly still morning. Her head is thick, her hand throbbing dully. Someone has laid a blanket over her, and when she looks up, she finds she is not alone.
Matthew sits on the edge of the piano bench, head bowed, picking at the bandage on his own palm. They make strange mirrors, each with a hand wrapped in linen, his clean and hers stained.
When she straightens, so does he. Their gazes meet, and she braces for an assault. But he just looks at her with those tired, haunted eyes, and says, “You’re awake.”
Again, not a question. Never a question. Matthew’s sentences always seem to end in periods. She nods once, curtly, expects that the car is waiting, and he has come to rouse her and send her on her way. She pictures Hannah and Edgar in the foyer, her suitcase already loaded in the car. But Matthew doesn’t stand. He lets out a long, low breath and says, “I was angry.”
Olivia waits, wondering if that is meant to be an apology. He swallows hard.
“I do not want you here,” he mutters, and she lifts a brow, as if to say, I couldn’t tell. But he is no longer looking at her; his gaze has drifted past her to the window and the garden and the wall. “But you deserve to know why.”
He stands then, already turning toward the door. “Follow me.”
And Olivia does. She takes up the fallen journal and trails him out of the music room.
“I should have told you about the wall,” he says, “but I was afraid, if I did, you would go looking. I guess I hoped, if you left soon enough, it might not know that you were here. It might not find you.” He glances back over his shoulder. “But then you went and found it anyway.”
They walk down the hall of portraits, Matthew’s gaze flicking for just a second to the patch of bare wall where one has been removed. His steps are slow, his breath audible, as if his body is working too hard just to carry itself along. She can hear Hannah and Edgar chatting in the kitchen—surely they don’t mean to let her go without so much as a goodbye?
Matthew leads her past the ballroom, and she understands then where they are going.
The study door swings open, and Olivia follows him inside. For the briefest moment, she is back beyond the wall, in the other study, shoving the chair under the door as the wolf-like soldier barrels toward her.
But then she blinks, and the chair is in its place, and the shelves are lined with books, the wallpaper smooth, the sculpture waiting on the old wood desk. Her eyes flick to the far wall, wondering about the secret door as Matthew sinks into the chair behind the desk, as if the short trek across the house has stolen all his strength.
“It’s not your fault you are a Prior,” he says, “and Hannah is right, I cannot make you leave.” Olivia’s heart thrums, spirits rising, until he says, “But once you know the truth, you’ll understand why you should.”
He runs his hands through the thicket of his light brown hair and rests his chin on his folded arms and stares at the metal sculpture on the desk, his cheeks hollow and his eyes fever bright.
“So I’ll tell you the story, as it was told to me.”
He reaches out and rests one finger on the metal sculpture, giving it the slightest push. The whole thing tips into motion.
“Everything casts a shadow,” he begins. “Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source.”
Olivia’s heart quickens.
The wall.
“The wall,” echoes Matthew. “The world you saw beyond the wall is a shadow of this one. But unlike most shadows, it isn’t empty.”
His gaze flicks up.
“Did you see it?”
She knows, without asking, that he means the gruesome figure in the other house, the master made of rot and ruin. Milk-white eyes and coal-black coat and jawbone shining through its tattered cheek.
Olivia nods, and Matthew swallows and goes on.
“Perhaps it began as nothing. A weed poking up through barren soil. Or perhaps it was always what it is—a destructive force—it doesn’t matter. At some point, the thing in the dark grew hungry. It realized that it was living in the shadow of the world. And it wanted out.”
Matthew keeps his gaze on the sculpture as he speaks, and Olivia too finds herself drawn to the revolving houses, the rhythm of them as they turn away and come together.
