The Rose Bargain

Chapter Twenty-Three

Emmett approaches the door confidently, like we’ve been invited for tea. I trail behind him, his willing shadow.

With one large hand he reaches up and knocks on the ancient door. The sound reverberates through the silent forest. No answer. He knocks again.

The shadow in the window stills, watching us. From behind the door comes the sound of five locks being undone, agonizingly slow.

Click

Click

Click

Click

Click.

The door creaks open wide enough to reveal a single eye. “Who are you?”

a male voice asks.

“We’ve come to call,”

Emmett says pleasantly. “I believe you know my brother.”

The single visible eye narrows.

Emmett holds the basket up with a hopeful grin. “We’ve brought jam.”

He slams the door in our faces, the sound reverberating through the forest.

Then, one final lock slides, and the door swings open.

“Might as well come in,”

the man says.

He’s not what I expected. I’d pictured some sort of grizzled, ancient creature from a children’s story. What stands in front of me is just a man. He looks to be in his late thirties, with a close crop of dark blond hair. He has a forgettable face, nice enough, but unremarkable in every way.

The house is musty and dark, every curtain drawn or window so covered with filth it lets in little light. There are stacks and stacks of books piled on every available surface, some covered in dust, some brand-new. Over every doorway hangs an upside-down horseshoe.

I follow Emmett through the door, but as soon as I step onto the flagstone floor, I’m hit with a stomach-curdling revulsion. A disgust so strong I suddenly feel the need to run out the door and go anywhere that isn’t here.

I look to our host, who is standing still in the hallway, watching us like he expected this. His face is neutral, pleasant even, but when I look at him, I feel nothing but bone-deep disgust. It crawls up my throat until I’m choking on it. I hate this man. I hate him urgently, without reason.

Emmett’s fist tightens around the basket of jam, and there’s no longer anything funny about our gift.

“Come in, come in,”

the man says. “The sooner you get your answers, the sooner you can leave.”

He’s got an odd, stilted sort of accent.

We follow him into the sitting room, as gray and overcrowded as the rest of the house. He gestures for us to sit on a pair of wooden chairs by the fire, and Emmett and I acquiesce, despite every bone in my body resisting.

He blows dust off of two teacups. “I don’t receive many guests.”

He pulls a black kettle from the cavernous fireplace in the middle of the room and fills our cups.

I slip the book out from where it was tucked under my arm beneath my cloak. “Do you know anything of the original owner of this book?”

The man gives it only a cursory glance. “I am the original owner of that book.”

“That’s not possible?” Unless—

“I’m sure you’ve put it together by now,”

the man says casually.

Emmett just holds his tea, and I do the same, terrified to take a sip. “Put what together?”

“The cost.”

It hits me all at once, this sensation of loathing I’m feeling is the queen’s doing. “You bargained for eternal life, but no one can stand to be near you,” I guess.

He winces, clutching an invisible wound. “That’s a tad harsh. I believe the exact conditions were eternal life, but a life without love.”

“You agreed to that?”

“I was young, what did I know?”

the man replies. “I was fresh out of the war. My parents and siblings were long gone. I took a girl every now and then but considered myself a bachelor. What did I need love for? I was a fool. I paid her price.”

Emmett shifts in his seat uncomfortably. “What is your name?”

He takes a sip of his tea, then lets out a slow breath. “It’s been a long time since anyone has asked me that. I was called Eduart Burnhamme.”

Emmett leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Will you tell us your story?”

Eduart considers us, and even though I know this sick feeling congealing in my chest is the queen’s magic, I still feel nothing but revulsion.

“I fought for the Yorks.”

His gaze lands on the fire. “I was there that day on the battlefield when she first appeared. We thought she was an angel. We saw what she did for old Edward, how she cut down the Lancaster army like they were wheat ready for the harvest. She placed the crown on his head like it was nothing. But we all know how that particular story ends. When she took the throne at Eltham, she made an announcement—anyone who wished to make a bargain with her should come and kneel before her throne. I was certain no one would; you’d have to be an absolute fool to trust the old witch after what she’d done. But people lined up by the thousands. Day and night, she made bargain after bargain. I saw paupers become lords, farmers pull gold straight out of the ground like turnips, daft fools marry the most beautiful girls in the village. Fingers and toes and memories went missing, but everyone agreed the price was fair.

“There came a time I could no longer resist. I waited three years to make my bargain. I thought I was very clever back then. I didn’t want land or a wife, I wanted adventure.

“I was greedy for the world, but I was afraid of it too. I’d seen the way the Black Death had taken my mother, father, and sisters, snuffed them out like candles. When I kneeled before her, I asked for eternal life, and she laughed in my face.”

Emmett stares at Eduart, completely enraptured, but I can’t look at him. I dig the sharp corner of my thumbnail into the cuticles of my other fingers until my nails are rimmed with blood.

Eduart continues. “‘What is so great about living forever?’ she asked, but I knew she was mocking me. I said, ‘You tell me.’ She smiled that awful smile of hers and said, ‘It’s knowing that nothing truly matters. You’ll outlive the consequences; you’ll outlive meaning itself. All that’s left is entertainment.’ I didn’t know then what I know now. After an eternity, there is only boredom or the lack of it. She asked what I would do with an everlasting life. I said I’d travel the world, see all there was to see, and then see it all again. But I was lying, to her and to myself. I’d seen so much death on the battlefields and at the cruel hand of disease. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my friends’ guts strewn out over the grass, heard their screams anew. I told the queen I wanted adventure, but the truth is, I was afraid of death. I wanted to live without being afraid.

“She told me she would grant me eternal life, but it would be a life without love. I was a young man, what did I need love for? At the time, I thought it meant I would never take a wife. That sounded all right to me, a wife would only slow me down. I didn’t know the depth of it then, what it would feel like to live so long alone.”

“What did you do?”

I whisper, horrified, disgusted.

“At first I did exactly what I told her I’d do. I sailed around the world. France first, then the rest of Europe. I sailed down the coast of Africa, spent a few years in China, then to the Americas. But everywhere I went, it was the same. Inns shut their doors to me, barmaids refused to pour me ale. I would walk into a room and everyone else would walk out. Eventually I came back here, to this house I grew up in, the same house where the last people on earth who ever loved me died.”

“What do you do now?”

Emmett asks.

“I sit and I read and I wait for the end of the world,”

Eduart answers gravely.

“We can help you. We have a plan,”

Emmett says.

At this, Eduart laughs, an upsetting, full-body chuckle that sends tea spilling over his pants. He gestures behind him to a plaster wall caked in decades of dust and dirt. “Sign the wall before you leave,”

he says, and though it’s difficult to make out in the low light, I see now that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of names scrawled on it.

“What?”

Emmett looks properly angry now.

“That’s the problem with living forever. You have to witness each new generation act like they invented everything. It gets so tedious.”

He sighs heavily, like the weight of our cluelessness is pressing on his lungs. “Visitors just like you call once every fifteen years or so, like you’re the very first people who ever thought about unseating her.”

“What do you mean?”

I ask uneasily.

“The first group came about a decade into her rule. I was abroad then, but she made examples of them, hung their bodies at the Tower in low tide and invited the town to watch them drown as the river rose. The next ones came about fifty years later. One of the stupider attempts to blow up Apethorpe Palace. They too died at Traitors’ Gate. I actually joined the one in the 1660s for a bit, just to have something to do. There was an attempt to locate the door from which she came. The idea was, if she could not be killed, perhaps she could be returned to her own land. It was a fool’s errand. Every member of the search party died of old age before any evidence was found. Then there was the uprising of 1724. That one got ugly. A bargainer from Penzance locked himself in the throne room with her and meant to starve them both out, his compatriots guarding the door. If a hand could not be raised against her, he would let natural causes take her. The queen just laughed, strolled out of the throne room completely unharmed, and left him to starve to death within.”

“There is no record of any of this,”

Emmett says, his whole body tense.

“Of course not. Why would a despot provide a record of her people’s hatred toward her? It’s the same reason there are no books on the Others in any library across this great, wide country. She rules in fear and shadows.”

I glance around at his stacks of books. “How did Bram end up with this book?”

Eduart takes a sip of his tea. “Now that is an interesting story. I met the Prince of Wales last fall. It takes a lot to shock me in this never-ending life of mine, but it was a great surprise to find him at my threshold. Bram has a bit of a morbid fascination with those his mother has made immortal.”

“There’s more of you?”

I ask, horrified.

“Oh, of course. Where do you think her footmen came from?”

A chill crawls down my spine. I recognize it now, the same sallow look in Eduart that permeates the skin of the queen’s strange, silent, ever-loyal footmen.

“She learned her lesson after me. Everyone else who wishes to live forever must give up their freedom to serve her. She is clever, you’ve got to give her credit.”

“And Bram knows this?”

Emmett asks.

“He found out about a year ago. It’s when he came to see me. I didn’t have much information to give the poor boy, but it’s never easy to acknowledge that your only parent is a monster. I hadn’t heard from him since, until I received his letter asking if I had a particular book in my collection. The book, it seems, was for you.”

He gestures to me. “There’s nothing in there that would lead to her demise—trust me, I’ve looked. Their only weakness is iron, and she had all our weapons melted down after the war.”

Iron. “Bram told me that’s how his father defeated her,”

says Emmett. “Can we find more?”

Eduart shakes his head. “I gave up in 1789, but you’re welcome to keep trying.”

“We don’t need iron or tricks or anything else. We’re not like the others,”

Emmett interjects. “We plan to undo the bargains themselves.”

“I’m sure you believe that,”

Eduart says, not insulting, but world-weary.

“Do you know anything about the bargains?”

Emmett presses, undeterred.

Eduart sighs, like he’s humoring him. “Only that they’ve gotten more creative over the years. She likes to play with her food, but I think she’s getting bored with the whole spectacle. To my knowledge, no bargains have ever been undone, though many have regretted theirs and tried. Your own father darkened my door a decade or so ago, begging for information.”

Emmett’s brows knit together in an expression of shock. “My father?”

“I know exactly who you are, Emmett Alexander De Vere. Your father is a good man, and he is sorry.”

It’s as if I can hear Emmett’s heart crack right down the middle. He blinks away his welling tears. “He regrets his bargain?”

Eduart nods. “He does, says he should have run away with you in the night rather than subject you both to a life without each other.”

“Then why’d he do it?”

Emmett asks, his voice thick with tears he’s too stubborn to let fall.

Eduart shrugs casually. “The queen ruined your grandfather’s life. He bargained for an exceptional mind for numbers in exchange for never finding anything funny again. It made him hardened and cruel, to the point where he abandoned his family when your father was just a boy. Your father joined a group of like-minded rebels in his adolescence and dedicated his life to the queen’s downfall.”

Emmett stares at his teacup, his grip so tight around it, I’m afraid it might shatter. “Why did he marry her?”

“He thought his best bet was taking her down from the inside. He made himself the perfect suitor, but once they wed, the queen grew suspicious of him. He spent too long in the library, asked too many questions, cavorted with people she didn’t trust. He believes that’s why she separated the two of you. The queen is afraid of her husband and didn’t want to give him the opportunity to raise you as his protégé. Your father overestimated himself, thinking it would only take him a year or two to solve the problem of the bargains and everything would be right in the world. But he was wrong.”

“His abandonment was hubris? I was left alone with nothing but a governess for company because of his misplaced confidence?”

Emmett sounds furious now.

“He loved you, and he thought that legitimacy as a prince would protect you in the meantime. His ego was his downfall, as it is for so many.”

“Well, he must have figured it out. He left me clues that spell out Moryen’s original bargain. If we break that, everything else falls to pieces.”

“It works only if you’re right.”

“We’re right,”

Emmett says through gritted teeth.

“It is a fool’s errand, and you will die in the pursual of it.”

“I refuse to accept that,”

Emmett says.

“That’s another thing I’ve learned in this exceptionally long life of mine. It doesn’t matter if you accept things or not. They happen anyway.”

“I didn’t come here to be lectured,”

Emmett snaps.

Eduart takes another slow sip of his tea. “Of course you did.”

Emmett stands to leave. “If you will not help us, we have no more business with you.”

Eduart turns his attention on me. “You’re one of Bram’s girls, aren’t you? I read about you in the paper. Does he know about the two of you?”

“No,”

I spit venomously. “Bram doesn’t know about the plans to unseat his mother. Do you take us for idiots?”

Eduart shakes his head. “No, I meant does poor, sweet Prince Bram know you’re in love with his brother?”

“I’m not—”

I stand to leave, my face scarlet red. It takes all the self-control I have not to dump my full teacup directly onto his horrible head.

“Let’s go, Ivy.”

Emmett stomps through the hallway but pauses at the door. “Thank you for your hospitality, sir. I hope you enjoy the jam.”

Eduart calls after us as we stomp out the door. “You didn’t sign the wall!”

We step out of the house into the tangled garden where the air feels thinner, and we both sigh in relief. The tension between my shoulders and the nausea pooled in my throat dissipates.

“Horrible man,”

Emmett says.

“The absolute worst,” I agree.

“You, in love with me? You barely tolerate me.”

He laughs but it comes out strained.

“Exactly,”

I reply thinly.

We walk from the house into the forest. Birdsong starts up again, and I am relieved for one blissful minute, until it all comes crashing down. Where the horse and cart used to be is now only a kicked-up patch of dirt and wheel tracks.

“Dammit,”

Emmett hisses.

On foot, getting back to camp will take hours. We’ll be lucky to return before the hunting party, and we have no reasonable way to explain our absence, let alone why we’re together.

“I’m ruined.”

I panic, pacing. I’m tempted to pick up my skirts and start running, but we’re so far from camp, it wouldn’t be of any use.

Emmett looks at me, a steely set to his jaw. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

We follow the path out of the forest to a larger dirt road that leads back to Alton. “We’ll pay for a hackney in the village.”

Emmett is walking so quickly it’s nearly a jog. He must know as well as I do, the timing will still be tight. We’ll have to get extraordinarily lucky.

Storm clouds gather on the horizon as the sun sinks dangerously low. Emmett and I both refuse to acknowledge it, as if ignoring time will make it pass more slowly.

We walk onto the Alton high street right as the storm breaks wide open. Lightning cracks across the sky and we are drenched in seconds.

We sprint down the road to a thatched roof coaching inn. The sign hanging above the door sways in the howling wind. It’s got a faded crest under the words The Swan.

Emmett and I burst through the doors to a ground floor pub teeming with people desperate to get away from the weather.

The proprietor, a steely-eyed old woman, marches over to us. “You’re dripping on the floor.”

Emmett looks like a drowned puppy, his hair plastered to his forehead, his coat hanging heavy off his shoulders. I’m sure I don’t look much better.

“We’ll be on our way soon, ma’am,”

Emmett apologizes. “We need a hackney.”

The old woman tuts her tongue. “In this weather? Not a chance.”

As if to prove her point, another crack of thunder echoes outside.

“We’re part of the prince’s hunting party. Please, we need to get back to the celebration,”

Emmett insists.

“I don’t care if you’re the prince himself. No driver is going out in this weather. Half of them are drunk in the pub and the other half are in for the night. Weather like this spooks the horses.”

“Please—”

Emmett tries once more, but she cuts him off.

“You’re in luck, though.”

The foundation of the inn creaks as it sways in the force of the storm. “I have one room left. It’s all yours if you want it, milord.”

I choke back a laugh, though exactly none of this is funny.

Emmett turns for the door. “No thank you. We’ll walk.”

He wrenches the door open, and we walk back into the storm. Immediately I’m thrown back with the gale force of the wind. The rain pierces my face, and my already sodden hem becomes so heavy it’s hard to move.

I take two steps before the toe of my boot catches against a pit in the road and I trip directly into a puddle. I land on my knees with a splat, and Emmett rushes to my side.

“You may walk home,”

I shout over the thunder as I push myself to my feet, ignoring his outstretched hand, “but I am taking that room.”

Better ruined than frozen to death.

I march back into the inn, muddier than before, with an exasperated Emmett at my heels.

I slap my wet hands down on the counter. “We’ll take the room.”

The innkeeper looks at me smugly. “I assume you’re married?”

she asks, like she knows we’re not.

Emmett makes an unintelligible noise of protest behind me, but I just smile sweetly and say, “Blissful newlyweds.”

The innkeeper’s quill is poised over her register. “Names?”

Emmett shoots me a glare, then says, “Fern and Edward Bennett. From Nottingham.”

“Eight shillings.”

Emmett fishes out some money. Eight little portraits of Queen Moryen on the coins stare up at us judgmentally from the counter.

The innkeeper turns and pulls the last remaining key off of a pegboard behind the desk. “Come with me.”

The inn is overly warm with so many bodies packed inside. We pass through the raucous pub and follow the owner up a rickety flight of threadbare stairs.

My wet dress must weigh at least ten pounds, and even with the heat of the inn, I’m shivering against its cold weight.

We’re led up to the third floor, and though I don’t look, I can feel Emmett glowering behind me.

The woman unlocks the door with a click and waves us inside.

The door shuts behind her with a thunk, and we are alone.