Gallant, page 17
Olivia lets out a slow, unsteady sigh, heart racing in her ears. And then she looks down.
She cannot help herself. She crouches and peers beneath the desk, hoping to find her mother’s journal where it fell. It is not there, but halfway to the door she glimpses a bit of paper in the corner, its left edge torn.
On it, her mother’s hand, already beginning to slant.
I am afraid it wasn’t my hand on her cheek wasn’t my voice in my mouth wasn’t my eyes watching her sleep
She shivers, letting the paper fall.
As it whispers to the floor, she hears footsteps overhead. The slow, easy stride of a man at home. Olivia holds her breath and listens until they fade.
Run, says her blood.
Stay, say her bones.
Olivia traces her way back down the maze of halls, not to the grand stairs, broad and bathed in silver light, but to the music room.
She circles the ruined piano, its black and white teeth piled in a heap, and goes to the corner. Her fingers trace the seams, just like Matthew showed her, until she finds the little latch. A gentle press, and the panel swings open onto steep, narrow steps. It is pitch black, and she climbs by feel, counts ten steps before reaching the top.
She turns in the dark and feels for the other door. For a second, it holds, unwilling to give. Fear twists through her, the simple, visceral fear of a body enclosed in a narrow stone space, and in her panic, she throws herself against the door too hard. It swings open, spilling her out into the room.
Olivia almost falls but catches herself on the wooden poster of the bed. She bites her tongue and feels the warm taste of copper in her mouth. Blood. She swallows it and steadies herself. She is in Matthew’s room, or at least, the room he lives in on the other side. Here, it is abandoned. The bed sits covered in a film of dust. The shutters are open, the window glass splintered, the tapestry that hung on his wall threadbare and leached of color.
She holds her breath and listens, but the footsteps she heard have stopped. She rounds the bed, goes to the door that leads to the upstairs hall, pressing her ear to the wood. Silence. Her hand goes to the knob, and she’s about to ease the door open when she feels as much as hears the sound of a body shifting, the sigh of limbs on a mattress.
Her eyes go back to the four-poster bed. It is still empty. She looks to the tapestry on the wall. And then she is there, guiding the heavy curtain aside, staring at the second door. It is ajar, the wood whispering open under her touch.
There in the dark of the other room, there is a bed. And on the bed, a boy lies curled beneath the sheets.
Olivia starts forward, then catches herself, hands on the doorway. It is too easy. Which is to say, it hasn’t been easy at all, but this, this part, feels like a trap. Here is the way in, and there is the bait, and she knows better than to reach for it. Instead she takes a step back.
The trouble is that when she does, the floorboards creak under her feet, and the figure in the bed stirs and sits up. Unfolds, and as it does, she realizes it is not the boy she saw in the fountain, but a shadow. A soldier. The short wolfish one with the feral grin. The gauntlet gleams on her hand as she pulls away the sheet.
Olivia lurches back into Matthew’s room, only to collide with another body, one that made no noise when it came in. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the edge of a tattered black coat.
“Hello, little mouse.”
That voice, like smoke in a narrow space. She can hear him smile, teeth clicking together in his open jaw. Her hand slides into the pocket of her dress and closes over Edgar’s knife.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Olivia spins, drawing the blade. She doesn’t wait, but twists and drives the knife into his chest. The master of the house looks down at the weapon protruding from his front and clucks his tongue.
“Now, now,” he says, “is that how we treat family?”
He curls his hand around her wrist, his touch like paper over stone. His fingers tighten, and pain lances through her bones, along with something else, the spark of heat, the sudden cold, the same strange dip and fall she felt when she brought the mouse and the flowers back to life. As if he’s stealing something from her. Sure enough, the faintest hint of color spreads across his skin, and a wave of dizziness crashes into her, making the room tip and her vision blur. She tears free, surging toward Matthew’s bedroom door, toward the hall beyond, only to find another soldier blocking her way. The one built like a brick, armor strapped to his shoulder.
He looks down at her, bored.
Behind her, the master sighs.
“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia,” he chides, and the sound of her name in his mouth sends a shiver through her. She scrambles back, turns toward the hidden door only to see the third soldier leaning against the wooden post of the bed, armored plate shining on their chest.
She is surrounded. Trapped.
But not alone.
Help, she thinks, and the man who is not a man must be able to hear her thoughts, because his mouth twitches, amused. But she is not speaking to him.
HELP ME! she calls again, the force of the words shuddering through her.
And they come.
Five ghouls rise up through the rotting floor. Among them, she sees the one who helped her escape. It glances at her now, a sadness sweeping across its half-there face. The ghouls form a circle around Olivia. They have no weapons, but they stand, backs straight, facing out. And for a moment, she feels safe. Protected.
Until the monster laughs.
“What a quaint little trick,” he says, taking a step toward her. “But I am the master of this house.” Another step. “And here, the dead belong to me.”
He sweeps his hand through the air, as if brushing away smoke, and the five ghouls twitch and waver. They dissolve, crumbling back into the floor, and she is alone again.
The three soldiers close around her.
Olivia fights.
She fights the way she did back at Merilance, when Anabelle’s friends held her down, fights with every ounce of strength and every dirty trick she knows, fights like a girl set loose on the world with nothing and everything to lose. But it’s not enough. A gauntlet closes over her wrist, flinging her into a plated chest, and the last thing she sees is the gleam of an armored shoulder as the third shadow looms.
“Mind the hands,” says the master, right before pain explodes on the side of her head, and the strength goes out of her limbs, and the world gives way to black.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It died.
The cat Olivia saw that summer on the tin roof, the grouchy old stray that reminded her of Matron Agatha. One day she escaped across the gravel moat to the garden shed and found the animal slumped on the ground nearby.
It was so rangy, so thin.
Olivia could feel its bones beneath its fur as she crouched over the body, ran her hand down its soft side, petting the creature as if it were simply asleep. As if she might be able to bring it back.
Wake up, she thought, tears sliding down her cheeks, even though she hadn’t liked the stupid cat.
She buried it in the garden shed, hoping it might haunt her. Hoping that one day she’d catch sight of it out of the corner of her eye, another body in the dark.
She forgot. Isn’t that strange? She forgot.
The world comes back in pieces.
The brittle crack of pages turning. The silver light against the crumbling walls. The moldy fabric against her cheek.
She is lying on a sofa. It takes her a moment to realize it is the one in the sitting room, where Hannah brought her that first night at Gallant. Where she sat, tired and confused, as Edgar and Hannah argued about what to do with her, and Matthew came charging in and tore the letter from Hannah’s hand and cast it into the fire.
There is no fire now, just a splintered stone hearth. A velvet chair. A low table with an object perched atop it: a helmet. The same polished metal as the pauldron and the chest plate and the gauntlet. She frowns at it, her thoughts too slow.
Her hands are bound together with a length of dark gray rope. She pushes herself up, even though the movement makes her head ache and her vision swim. When it steadies, she sees that she is not alone.
The soldiers stand around the darkened room.
The broad one waits by the door.
The thin one leans against the wall.
The short one rests her elbows on the back of the sofa.
And the master of the house sits in the velvet chair, a blue-black rose balanced on the arm and a book open in his lap.
“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia,” he says, and a shiver rolls over her skin as she glimpses the G curling across the front of the book.
“I have been whispering the name into your hair,” he goes on, and then she is on her feet, lunging toward him, toward her mother’s journal, only to feel a large arm catch her around the waist.
The broad soldier hauls her back, and a second later she lands on the sofa again. The short one brings her hands down on Olivia’s shoulders, gauntlet rattling as she holds her in place.
“They say there is love in letting go,” the master continues, his voice rolling through the room, “but I feel only loss.” He flicks ahead as if bored, skipping to the final page.
“Remember this,” he says. “The shadows are not real.”
His milky eyes float up.
“The dreams can never hurt you.”
His mouth curls into a smile.
“And you will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.”
He closes the journal.
“What would your mother think if she were here?”
He tosses the book onto the low table, where it lands beside the helmet, sending up a plume of dust. “Good thing she’s not.”
He takes up the rose, and it’s one of the blooms she brought back, its head massive, its petals velvet.
“Leave,” he says, and for a moment, Olivia thinks he’s talking to her, that he’s giving her permission to go. But then she realizes the order was given to his soldiers. The broad one retreats. The short one follows. The thin one hesitates, only a moment, before vanishing into the hall.
The door closes.
And they are alone.
She flexes her fingers. Edgar’s knife is gone, but she studies the broken stone hearth, searching the fragments on the floor. Would any be light and sharp enough to wield?
The voice drags her attention back.
“Quite a talent you have,” he says, studying the wild rose. “And quite a pair we’ll make.” He lifts the flower to his nose, inhales, and as he does, it wilts again. The petals wither, the head droops, the leaves curl like dry paper. As it dies, the faintest color floods back into his cheeks. Brief as a fish darting underwater.
The rose crumbles to ash, but the ash doesn’t fall. Instead it swirls in the air around his hand.
“It is one thing to give death form,” he says, and the ashes coalesce into a chalice. “Another to breathe life back into it.”
A twitch of his fingers, and the chalice dissolves.
He draws something from his pocket. It is curved and white, save for the point, which is black, as if dipped in ink. A sliver of bone. He holds it out to her, and as he does, the ropes crumble from her wrists.
“Show me,” he says, and Olivia stiffens. She should refuse, just to spite him, but an urge takes shape inside her. A longing. Her fingers hum with it. And something else forms there. A question. An idea.
He sets the bone in her hand, and the prickle of life rises through her. It hovers just beneath her skin, waiting to be unleashed.
Live, she thinks, and the feeling rushes forward, out of her hand and into the remains, and as it does, the sliver of bone becomes a beak, becomes a skull, becomes a crow, muscle and skin and feathers. In seconds it is whole again, yawning wide as if to caw, but the only sound she hears is the master’s soft chuckle.
The crow clicks its beak, one black eye finding hers, and for a moment, she marvels at the feat of it, the power in her hands. And then—
Attack, she thinks, and the crow bursts into the air and dives for the creature in the chair, and Olivia is on her feet, racing toward the door, even as she hears him pluck the bird from the air, the brittle snap of its neck, even when he says, “My dearest niece, I confess, I do not know exactly where you are.”
Her steps slow. Her uncle’s letter.
“You were not easy to find. Your mother hid you well.”
Go, she thinks, even as she finds herself turning back to face him.
“We must thank Hannah,” he says, and Olivia flinches at the sound of the woman’s name, wishes she could steal it back. “She made the list of all the places you might be.”
The notebook in the study drawer. But Olivia checked the desk in this study. There was no journal there.
“The two houses are bound. The walls are thin. And I have a way of reaching Prior minds when they are inside Gallant.”
Olivia’s heart sinks. Matthew.
“A body needs sleep. Without it, the heart gets weak. The mind gets tired. And tired minds are pliable things.”
As he speaks, the images float behind her eyes like waking dreams. Matthew, rising from his bed. Moving slowly through the house, his eyes half-open, no longer blue-gray but milky white.
“Speak to the tired and they listen.”
I don’t remember falling asleep, her mother wrote.
“Whisper to them and they move.”
But I woke up and I was standing over Olivia.
“A tired body doesn’t care. It’s like a seed, designed to carry.”
She sees Matthew moving down the darkened hall into the study, sees him draw the little black book from the top drawer, even though he cannot read, those borrowed eyes tracking over the list of homes that were not homes.
“I have sent these letters to every corner of the country,” recites the master of the house. “May this be the one that finds you. You are wanted. You are needed. You belong with us.”
Behind her eyes, Matthew’s face collapses in anger. He casts the letter into the fire. “I don’t know who sent you that letter. But it was not my father.”
The master rises from his chair.
“Come home, dear niece. We cannot wait to welcome you.”
He smiles, that eerie, rictus grin. But Olivia shakes her head. He said that Prior minds were his, so long as they were bound to Gallant. But her mother left. And still he followed her.
“Grace was different,” he says. “It didn’t matter how far she went. So long as she carried a piece of me with her.”
He turns his head, and she sees the rent in his cheek where the skin pulls back, exposing jaw and teeth. And that is when she sees the hole. The dark hollow in the back of his mouth.
When you came apart, I found the cursed bone. It was a molar, of all things, his mouth hiding inside yours.
She sees him standing in the ballroom, his skin, tattered with so many missing bones. The ash-born dancers, how they collapsed to dust, and how he called the slivers back, the borrowed fragments of himself. How the skin only healed when the bones returned home.
I ground the tooth to dust, her mother wrote. And threw the filings on the fire. He will never have the piece that was you. I hope he rots while worrying the hole.
The tooth is gone. The piece of him. Her mother made sure of that. How did he find her then? How—oh. Oh no.
At least I have Olivia.
She is the reason her mother could not escape the dreams. The reason he could get into her head, no matter how far they fled. Because half of her is his.
“And here you are. Where you belong.”
She backs away from the words, from him.
There is no one between her and the door and she throws herself against it, expecting him to lunge for her before she makes it, expecting to find it locked. But it gives, swinging open, and she plunges out into the darkened hall.
She rounds the corner only to find the narrow soldier waiting at the end. She staggers backward, turns down another hall, trying to orient herself in the dark.
She sprints through the maze of crumbling walls.
Too loud, too loud, she thinks, every step, every breath, every cracking board beneath her feet. Her bones tell her to hide. Her heart tells her to run. Every inch of her screams to get out, get away, get back to the wall, but she has to find Thomas. She scans the open doors, the rooms beyond.
Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? she pleads, skidding around the corner.
That horrible voice echoes through the silent house.
“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia.”
She catches her toe on a threadbare rug and goes down hard, pain shooting through her hands as she throws them out to break her fall.
Metal glints as the broad soldier rounds the corner. She scrambles to her feet.
“This is your home.”
Where is the nearest hidden tunnel?
“This is the only house that will ever welcome you.”
Where is Thomas Prior?
“Once you understand, you will not want to leave.”
She bursts through a set of doors and into the ballroom, sprawling and dark. She is halfway to the far wall and the wooden molding and the hidden door when she hears the skitter like pebbles thrown across the inlaid floor.
And the room surges to life.
One moment it is empty, and the next, the dancers rise up to every side, from ashes to flesh in a single breath. They twirl around her, skirts whispering and shoes hissing, a turning wall of bodies. They open their mouths and the voice that pours out is his, only his.
“You cannot run from me.”
The dancers part to let him through. Beneath his tattered coat, his skin is broken in a dozen places, one for every missing piece. The three soldiers follow in his wake, and the dancers close behind them and fall still.
“I know what they have told you. That this is a prison, and I am the prisoner. But they are wrong. I am not a monster to be caged.”
