Gallant, page 16
Three hours until dusk. Matthew is resting, but Olivia’s skin hums with nerves, and she goes out into the garden to get some air. The day is warm, and she walks between the flowers, eyes trailing over pink and gold and green before she sees it at the garden’s edge.
One of the roses has died in the night, as if a sudden frost stole in. The stem looks brittle, the leaves have curled, the head droops. A sharp slice of winter in the summer yard. As she nears it, she sees the gray weed wrapped like a hand around the rose’s throat.
Olivia’s fingers twitch, the memory of the other garden, the way dead flowers surged to life against her palm. She reaches out with her good hand, questing, careful, as if the rose is made of glass and just as sharp. Slowly, she cups a withered bloom, paper dry against her skin, and waits to feel the prickle, the chill, as she breathes life back into the flower.
But nothing happens.
Olivia frowns, tightening her grip, trying to force energy into the rose. But the flower only cracks and crumbles as the petals tumble free, scattering across the lawn. She looks down at her fingers, the dust of the dead rose a shadow on her hand.
Whatever power she might have beyond the wall, she does not have it here.
Two hours until dusk.
Her suitcase has vanished from the foyer, returned to the foot of her bed. Olivia changes out of her mother’s pink dress, climbing into her own gray shift, knowing it will blend into the world beyond the wall. She holds her breath as she does up the buttons, as if the clothes are a kind of spell, as if she might fade back into the girl she was at Merilance.
But she doesn’t. She can’t. She has never been a Merilance girl.
In the bathroom, she studies her reflection, her charcoal hair, her slate-gray eyes, her sallow skin. She looks like something from beyond the wall. Pictures herself silver lit inside the other house, twirling across the ballroom floor. A snap of thin fingers, and she is ash.
But then she sees her mother’s comb on the counter, the flowers summer blue. Imagines Grace Prior at her back, touching her shoulders, leaning in to whisper that it will be all right, that home is a choice, that she belongs here as much as there.
She takes up the flower comb, tucks it in her hair.
Beyond the window, the light is going thin. She looks down at the stone fountain, the woman with the outstretched hand, and she knows now it is a warning. Stay back, it says. But it is a message meant for strangers. She is a Prior, and Gallant is her house.
One hour until dusk, and every minute seems to drag. Olivia cannot stand the wait, wants to plunge back into that other world, to fling herself across the wall, but as long as the sun is up, the wall is nothing more than what it seems. All she can do is wait.
Wait and hope that she finds Thomas.
Wait and hope that Death does not find her.
Wait and hope that this will work.
And then what?
The question tangles through her like a weed.
Matthew said the thing beyond the wall is hungry, that it will never stop. But he also said that it is dying, that he meant to starve it out. Could they outlast its final, desperate throes, or will it only end when they do? If she stays, could they be a kind of family? Or will she have to watch her cousin waste away and wait for the dreams to turn on her as well?
A shadow crosses the doorway. Matthew stands there, waiting. He looks past her to the window, where day has turned to dusk, and says what she already knows.
“It’s time.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Downstairs, Hannah is latching the shutters.
Edgar is locking the doors.
And Matthew is lecturing them all. Perhaps it is only hope, but his back is straight and his gaze is focused, and Olivia can imagine the boy he might have been once, the man he could become, if the thing beyond the wall had not stolen his family, if the darkness had not frayed his nerves, and the nightmares had not whittled him so thin.
It is a simple enough plan, but he goes over it again.
Olivia will find Thomas and return to the wall. Matthew will be waiting on the Gallant side to let them out. She will knock three times, and he will open the door and seal it again in their wake before anything else can get through.
She imagines Matthew standing at the gate, palms pressed against the iron to feel the knocks, imagines the darkness whispering through his head, trying to coax him to unlock the door, to step through and see for himself. She wonders if he will hear his brother’s voice. At least he will not hear hers.
“You have to get back to the door,” he says, and the set of his jaw, the steel in his gaze, tells her if she fails, if she is caught, he will not come. He will leave her there beyond the wall.
As for Edgar and Hannah—
“You must not leave the house,” he warns them.
“And if something gets past you?” asks Hannah. “What then?”
“Go down into the cellar.”
Edgar snorts, a shotgun resting on his shoulder. “I think not.”
“You have to hide.”
“We may be old, but we have fight left in us.”
“Who are you calling old?” snipes Hannah, taking up a fire poker.
“You are not Priors,” says Matthew grimly. “You have nothing it wants. Nothing to give, and everything to lose.”
“This is our house as much as yours, Matthew Prior,” says Hannah. “And we will defend it.”
“You will die.”
Edgar stands his ground. “Death comes for everything.”
Olivia stares at them, these people she is just beginning to know, this makeshift family, but all she sees are the dancers in the ballroom, the way they turned to ash.
It will not come to that, she tells herself as she flexes her fingers, the bandage tight over her palm. Her hands are empty, the sketchpad and the red journal left on her bed. She wishes she had something to hold. A hand. Or a knife. She sighs, fingers dropping to her side.
But as she takes in Hannah’s curls, threaded gray, Edgar’s stooping shoulders, Matthew, already winded—she bites back a silent laugh. Not the laugh you make when you’re amused, but the one that escapes when you know you’re in trouble.
Hannah pulls her into a tight hug, one that seems to wrap all the way around her like a coat. Olivia wishes they could stay like that forever.
“Just a child,” the woman murmurs, half to herself, and Olivia can feel a teardrop hitting her hair and knows Hannah is thinking of Thomas as much as her, and maybe even of her mother, and her uncle, of every Prior she’s met and known and lost beyond the wall.
Hannah cups Olivia’s cheek, tipping her chin so their eyes meet. “You come back,” she says. “Thomas or no, you come back.”
Olivia nods.
And then Matthew is leading her out into the garden. Away from one house and toward another. She looks back at Gallant, one last time—at Hannah and Edgar watching from the music room, little more than outlines in the failing light. At the ghouls that gather, the old one at the edge of the orchard, her uncle at the back door, a woman beneath a trellis, her mother sitting on a low stone bench. None of them tries to stop her as she and Matthew make their way to the wall.
But as they near it, she slows.
There is a new shadow on the ground. It fans out, the way lamplight does when it falls through an open door, though the one in the wall is closed.
Olivia kneels to study the mark.
It fed on every living thing, every blade of grass, every flower and tree and bird, leaving only dust and bones in its wake.
How do you fight something like that? she wonders and hopes she does not have to.
She runs her fingers over the grass. It’s dry and brittle and black.
The door was only open a second, maybe two, and in that time, the other side burned its way into this one. What would it have done in an hour? A day?
It would have eaten everything.
She looks down at her own hand where it rests on the barren earth.
The thing beyond the wall can strip life from this world, but in that world she can give it back. Is that a weapon, or a weakness? She doesn’t know.
Olivia straightens and finds Matthew staring at the door.
“Are you certain?” he asks. And she knows he must look at her and see a foolish, headstrong girl, a strange intruder on his stranger world, or worse, someone else to lose. He does not know what she can do. Then again, neither does she.
He looks at her and asks again, “Are you certain?” and she nods, not because she is, but because it is the only answer she can give. The only one that will keep Matthew alive, and bring his brother home.
Night is sweeping in now, and she turns to make her way to the edge of the wall, only to feel Matthew catch her wrist and pull her back. She tenses on instinct, unsure whether he means to quarrel or drag her into a hug.
He does neither. He simply rests his hands on her shoulders and looks her in the eyes.
“I will be right here,” he says. “When you come back.”
All her life, Olivia has wondered what it would feel like to have a family.
And now she knows.
It feels like this.
Olivia nods and squeezes her cousin’s hand.
And then she takes a deep breath and steps around the wall.
For a moment, nothing happens.
She is back in the empty field, the sea of tallgrass rippling in the breeze, a few weedy thistles jutting here and there between the stems. The mountains rise, craggy old stone peaks so far away they look painted on the sky, and she can feel the wall behind her, and the world beyond it, the warmth of the garden at her back.
There is still time to turn around.
Perhaps seconds, perhaps heartbeats, but there is still time. Olivia closes her eyes and holds her ground. Between one breath and the next, the world settles. She feels it the way you feel a cloud as it passes overhead, blotting out the sun. When she opens her eyes, the field is gone, and she is back in the wasted garden, staring up at the ruined old house.
No figure stands on the balcony. No milk-white eyes shine in the dark. Still, her hand drifts to the pocket of her dress, to the hunting knife hidden there, a short, heavy blade in a leather sheath. Edgar pressed it into her hands just before she left.
“Pointy end out,” he said, patting her shoulder, and she wanted to tell him she knew how to use a knife, even if the only thing she’s ever cut are carrots and potatoes.
She doesn’t draw the blade, isn’t sure what good it will do against the monster in the dark, but it is enough to know that it is there.
Go, hisses a voice in her head, and she forces her legs forward, up the slope into the garden, moving like a thief.
Once, back at Merilance, she nearly got caught.
She was in Matron Agatha’s room, kneeling in front of the bedside drawer, searching the contents more out of boredom than need, when the doorknob turned and the old woman came in, her shuffling steps and stale perfume filling the narrow space.
There was no room to hide beneath the bed, cluttered as it was, and if the matron had turned on the light, she would have seen Olivia there, but she didn’t. She stumbled, sighing, through the darkened room and sank onto the bed, eyes glassy with Matron Sarah’s sherry. She just sat there, staring at nothing, and Olivia knew she could either kneel there all night, waiting for the old woman to drift off, or make her escape, and in the end she decided she’d rather be caught fleeing than stay trapped, so she went.
Only she didn’t break for the door, didn’t run.
Instead, she held her breath and moved through the dark, slow as a shadow sliding over the wooden floor. And Agatha never even noticed.
That is how she moves through the garden now.
She passes the roses she touched the night before. Surrounded by dead limbs, that single plant blooms, petals blue-black beneath a blanket of silver light. Something sings beneath her skin at the sight of it, the urge to reach out again, to run her hands over the other wilted things. How many could she revive? It hurt, a little, that prickle, that chill, but it was wondrous, too. How let down she’d been in the other garden, when nothing rose to meet her touch.
Go on, says a voice in her head, but there is something strange about it, as if the thought is not quite hers. She forces her hands into fists and keeps walking.
Ahead, the house draws her eye like a candle in the dark, like a ghoul in the corner of a garden shed, and she has to stifle the urge to look, keeping her attention instead on the tangled stretch that curls around the side of the estate.
In the dark, the dead limbs and twisted husks make shadows everywhere. Nothing moves, and everything seems to move at once. The ground is uneven, old roots pushing up, thorny weeds sprawling, as if they’d had one last, riotous bloom, spilling over their banks before losing their hold on life. It would be so easy to snag on a sharp branch or fall, and she is sure that if she cuts herself, the ground will know. The thing in the house will know. If it does not already.
So Olivia steps carefully, trying to summon a patience she has never had as she moves in the shadow of the house that is not Gallant, to the front drive.
And the fountain.
No moon, but silver light still falls on the statue rising at its center.
The woman looms, dress chipped and arm broken, the basin hidden from view.
Olivia draws Edgar’s knife and scans the drive, so exposed compared to the garden. No cover, nothing but the bare stretch of gravel. Her eyes flick to the front steps. Empty. The front doors. Closed. No sign of the three soldiers in their glinting armor.
No sense in waiting. She darts forward, the gravel shouting under her shoes, too loud, too loud, as she races to the fountain, hoping to reach the stone lip and see Thomas curled in the bottom, and—
The fountain is empty.
Nothing but cracked stone and several threads of ivy, the same ivy that was wrapped around his wrists, now broken and cast off on the basin floor.
Olivia hisses through her teeth. She knew it wouldn’t be that easy.
She turns, expecting an ambush.
But all around her, the grounds are still.
The shadows do not move.
She puts away the knife, takes a step toward the house beyond the wall. Then stops.
There’s a difference, after all, between walking into a trap and slipping between its teeth, storming through and skirting the edges. She creeps to the door on the side of the house, the one that leads in to the kitchen. Hovers, breath held, listening for sounds of life or motion.
The door whispers open, but in the heavy silence of this place, the whisper might as well be a whistle.
Olivia jumps back, pressing herself into the cool stone side of the house. She waits for the sound of boots, waits for the soldiers, for the master of the house. She waits until the silence settles like a sheet, until the world falls still around her. And then she steels herself and steps inside.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Olivia tells herself it is a game.
Like hide and seek. Like tag. The kinds of games the girls played back at Merilance, after the lights went out. Games Olivia always watched, but was never called to join, because she was too good at hiding, because she was no fun to find, since she never yelped or laughed or screamed.
It is just a game, she thinks as she creeps through the kitchen. The floor tiles are cracked and broken, but she does her best to move with quick and silent steps, past the empty cabinets and the barren shelves, the apple still sitting, shrunken, on the counter. She peers into the darkened hall.
Where are you? she wonders, trying to keep her thoughts as quiet as her feet.
Something moves behind her, and she spins, heart lunging up into her throat. But it’s just a ghoul. The ruined echo of a young man, details drawing together and crumbling apart. She sees the slope of its shoulders, and the shape of its eyes, deep-set and dark in that familiar way.
The Priors all fought . . . they forced the creature back beyond the wall. . . .
And they never came home. The door was sealed. Their lives, a forfeit in the fight. The ghouls here, all Priors who died to keep the darkness in its cage.
Olivia begins to sign, then stops, remembering there is no need.
The ghouls can hear her.
Where is the boy? she asks, waiting for the ghoul to gesture to a room, a door, to show her which way to go. But it only shakes its head, and there is something in the rapid side to side, not a refusal so much as a plea.
Do not look, it seems to say.
But Olivia has no choice.
Answer me, she thinks, trying to make the thought an order. Where is Thomas Prior?
But the ghoul will not say. It shakes its head again, hand drawing through the air.
You must go.
But she can’t. She can’t go back without the boy. She can’t see the look on Matthew’s face. Can’t let her family down.
She leaves the kitchen and the ghoul behind, stepping through into the hall. The floorboards warp and sag and splinter. The air tastes like dust. The hall branches, some doors open, and others closed. The house is too large. He could be anywhere.
For a moment she has a mad idea.
She closes her eyes, imagines herself a part of this place, and tries to reach out and feel him, as if he were a patch of sun, a pulse. They are connected after all, two Priors, two living bodies in a house full of ash. So she reaches, and hopes, and feels . . .
Nothing. Just foolish.
Wherever Thomas is, she will have to find him the old-fashioned way. By looking. So she moves through the house, torn between keeping to the shadows, which might not be empty, and walking through the moonlit halls, alone, exposed.
She passes the ballroom, but tonight there are no dancers spinning silently across the floor, no soldiers ranged about, no white-eyed figure on his makeshift throne.
The study door hangs open, listing on its broken hinges, the chair turned away behind the desk. She holds her breath as she creeps forward, waiting to hear that eerie voice from the other side, waiting for the chair to turn and reveal those dead-white eyes, that paper skin, bone jaw shining through its face. But she reaches the chair, and it is empty.
