Hilde #3
She and Thorgoode had been a comfortable pair for a long time. It had not been the sort of starry-eyed romance that people wrote ballads about, but it was hers, and her entire life was built upon it. The truth was, sometimes she was fine, and sometimes missing him left her hollow with loneliness.
“I think it must be my turn to ask a question,” she said. She was not going to cry, she decided, no matter how much she might want to.
Then there was a movement, and he was offering her a handkerchief, as if he could read her thoughts and doubted her resolve.
How was it that he had a handkerchief when he had no breeches?
She took it gingerly from his outstretched fingers to be polite, though she still had no intention of indulging in tears.
When she glanced at him, she saw that his hair was already escaping the knot she’d tied, brushing against his collar, and his eyes were shockingly sympathetic.
She wouldn’t have thought that a man who was so frivolous could have such an understanding countenance.
“You must think me cold,” she said. “I assure you, my motivation for wanting Thorgoode back is not selfish. If it were only my fate at stake, I would go back to being plain Hilde and happily leave Lady Croft in my past, but people depend upon me. Han, Ed, Francie, and Cook—not to mention every person who lives in the village. I had a plan to ensure that their lives, and their children’s lives, would be better.
A plan so that they could provide for each other, as they provided for me when I was in need.
All that plan requires to become a reality is for Thorgoode to have a little more time.
Why…” She trailed off, the words caught in her throat.
“Ask me,” he said, and he had a strange, almost defiant expression on his face.
“Why won’t you use your Charm to help me?”
Elmwood searched her face, clearly wrestling with what to say. It seemed to be difficult for him.
“I think I can best explain by telling you a story. When I first attended the university in Neck, it was my habit to sometimes go out carousing with my classmates in the Teeth. That’s what they call the area along the river, where the docks jut out into the water.
It’s not a nice place, but we were young idiots, so off to the Teeth we went when we wanted a bit of trouble.
“On most of these nights, we found a tavern just seedy enough to be entertaining and then proceeded to drink ourselves silly. If we were especially wild, we’d visit a brothel or theater meant for folk who actually worked for a living and pretend each and every one of us couldn’t afford to buy the place cellar to rafters.
I had led a very insular life up to that point, so sometimes I was shocked by the poverty and suffering I glimpsed, but it seemed pointless to let it spoil our good time. ”
Hilde had been to Neck only the once and had seen very little of it—certainly not the shocking bits where they kept their brothels and theaters.
Somehow, though, she could imagine Elmwood so clearly, younger and utterly carefree, carousing about the streets in a pack like the village boys, only with much worse trouble at their disposal.
It didn’t surprise her that he’d been able to turn his eyes away from seeing the hard truths of a big, ruthless place like Neck.
All wealthy people must learn to do it, she imagined, or else why would such suffering be allowed to endure?
“Now, by this point,” he continued, “I had used my Charm a number of times, but only on animals. The outcomes had been macabre at best and had left me with the sense that being deviant and using my Charm might provide a bit of a hedonistic thrill, but it was generally not worth either the risk or the mess. I had been sheltered enough that I’d never had occasion to consider using it on a person. ”
That surprised her. She didn’t know anyone in the village who had made it to adulthood without facing death at some point.
“It was late, and I was on the tipsy side of drunk.
We were walking between stops on our tour, and I heard a noise down some alleyway that caught my attention.
My friends went on without me, heedless that I had stopped to peer into the darkness.
I thought that perhaps there was someone in need of help, and in my sodden optimism, I figured I was just the man for the job. So I made my way down the alley.
“At the far end, I found a woman. More of a girl, really. Her clothes were tattered and threadbare and her head was uncovered. She was propped up, sitting against a stone wall, hands laid palm up in her lap, and as I drew closer, I covered my nose with a handkerchief, for she stank of shit.
“I saw at once that she was stone-dead.
“It shocked me, and I might have fled then and there, but I realized that the sound that had drawn me over was coming from a bundle lying beside her.
I drew closer, as if in a trance, and discovered that it was a babe.
My mother died before I was a year old, and I have no memories of her.
That was what I thought of, as I looked at that babe.
If it survived, it would have no memories of its mother.
“Compelled by my own longings and regrets and muddled by ale, I knelt beside the girl and pressed my hands into hers. I Charmed her.
“She woke with a rattling gasp that I heard in my dreams for years afterward. She had huge eyes the pale blue of river ice in wintertime, and she begged me for water.
“ ‘Water, water, water’ was all she could say, imploring me over and over, as if her need was the only thing that existed in the world.
She grabbed at my clothes and tried to suck at them, as if doing so might quench her terrible thirst. She was oblivious to her babe, to everything except the thought that had consumed her as she died.
“I later realized that it must have been the bloody flux that got her. I’d heard that people who suffered from it often died of thirst, in the end. That didn’t occur to me at the time, though.
“I ripped myself out of her grasp and I fled. I ran to the nearest house and got help, telling them I had stumbled upon a sick girl and her babe, but even when I returned with a doctor, she raved and wailed for water, insensible to anything besides her terrible thirst. I called on the doctor several days later to inquire how she was doing. But by then, she had died again. I hadn’t cured the underlying disease, you see.
All I had bought her was a few more hours of suffering before it inevitably took her again. ”
Hilde had found herself quite caught up in his tale.
Now she realized that Elmwood had gone pale, and his hands were shaking again, though he tried to hide it by clasping them in his lap.
It was cruel to force him to speak of his Charm when it clearly upset him.
It was crueler still to continue harrying him about using it, and yet, that was her intention. It had to be.
“So you see,” he said, “using my Charm is not a gift, to either the living or the dead. It is a curse. It has caused me nothing but suffering.”
Her sympathy for him dampened. He was so focused on his own suffering that it mattered more to him than the fate of the girl or her baby. But Hilde would not lose focus.
“They come back insensible, then?” she said at last.
Elmwood shook his head. “They come back intent to the point of mindlessness. Whatever they were doing when they died becomes a sort of obsession. It’s as though their reawakened mind can only remember the last thing that crossed it.
That’s the catch. That, and they generally die again from whatever took them in the first place, so there is really and truly no point to any of it. ”
Hilde got up abruptly and bent over the hearth to see if the skillet had cooled enough to clean.
She certainly wouldn’t wish that poor girl’s suffering upon Thorgoode, but Thorgoode hadn’t died miserably in some alley. He’d been headed home. Home to her and to Croftholde.
It was true that she didn’t know what exactly had killed him.
Perhaps it had been some secret, lurking illness that gave no sign before it struck.
Maybe, if he came back, it would eventually strike again.
But more likely, she thought, it had been his heart, which was what had killed his father and brother.
Bringing him back might buy him a fair amount of time.
And think of the good he could do with it.
He could protect Croftholde. He could say his goodbyes.
She needed to convince Elmwood that this time, it would be different.
His power could be used to set something right in the world.
She was weary to her very bones of the belief that using a power that came as naturally to her as breathing was a wicked thing.
Elmwood’s Charm was a gift, whether or not he could see it.
The skillet was still hot.
“I am sorry,” said Elmwood. “Using my Charm would only bring you more grief.”
More grief? The thing that would bring her grief was seeing Croftholde and all its people subject to the Harrier’s whims. She had to do whatever it took to prevent that from happening.
Perhaps…if she could somehow show him what was at stake and make him care for it even a little, he could be moved to face his fear of his own power and save Croftholde.
Letting him come around to her way of thinking gradually would surely be the most effective means by which to convince him.
“You can stay here. Until your renters go home,” she said.
Elmwood’s eyebrows shot up. She had surprised him again.
“That’s far more kindness than I deserve,” he said.
“You need time to practice.”
“To practice?”
“If you’re going to learn to fry your own eggs.”
He laughed then, and it was strangely pleasing to see humor chase the bleakness away from his expression. Not that she cared about his mood, she told herself, aside from how it pertained to his willingness to help her.
“Are you going to teach me, Lady Croft?”
“Is that your next question, Lord Elmwood?”
“Hand me that skillet.”