Chapter 19
C H A P T E R
N I N E T E E N
the last master of ravensgate
When Cal had been about seven years old, he had broken one of the glass curio domes that had belonged to his great-grandfather.
The preserved bird inside had burst, unfurling yellowed stuffing and musty old feathers that had scattered amongst the dried moss and glass fragments, likely releasing lead-tainted dust.
The servants had wordlessly cleaned up the mess, as they cleaned up all messes in the Cullraven household, but Cal had sensed from the hardness in their faces and the tension in their shoulders that he had done something wrong.
And when his father came home, and Ben had immediately ratted him out, he had only to look at Cal to send a bolt of dread piercing through him like black lightning.
He felt that now, turning on his heel and veering towards the portrait hall. Caught in the crosshairs. But he was not a boy any longer and now he had something to protect.
“You’re going to run, boy?” Footsteps pounded down the stairs, loud and heavy. He’s still wearing his boots. “Are you a raven—or a coward?”
I’m hers, Cal thought.
He threw open the doors to the portrait hall, which stretched long and tortuously, the shadows flawed open to reveal bone-white strips of moonlight. Photos of ancestors long-departed lined both sides of the walls, their glass covers flashing in knife-like bursts of light as he hurtled past them.
“I won’t let him have you,” he said to Nadine, his voice loud and breathless.
She shivered against him, the way she had in the wood when he had taken her to his place between the trees while she was trembling with the fear of being sacrificed.
“I’ve wanted you ever since I learned the feel of you in my arms and got that first, lingering taste of your sweetness,” he confessed. “I’ve waited a year to have you come to me, my sparrow—and I am not letting him take you.”
His father crashed through the doors behind them, shaking the portraits in their frames with an osseous rattling sound.
His sparrow leaned over his arm with a pained hiss and grabbed one of the pictures off the wall, ripping the nail and with it, the wallpaper.
She threw it over his shoulder with surprisingly good aim—his father had to duck as it smashed into the wainscotting behind him, glass exploding in a way that reminded him of that broken dome from his childhood.
The mazelike halls loomed before them. His arms were beginning to shake with the strain of holding the woman in his arms. He let out a harsh breath. Just a little further . . .
“You, with your romantic notions,” his father snarled. “Do you think this heroic display is going to make the girl fall in love with you? With this life? No. Just look at your mother, Cal. She hates it here. Despises it. The only thing that keeps her with me now is fear.”
Hearing what he had long-suspected confirmed aloud—by the man determined to protect the myth—was jarring. He nearly stumbled, then caught himself. For so many years, his father had preached the necessity of finding the perfect woman and he hadn’t even believed it himself.
Had he ever?
“That’s the truth of it! Your mother thinks we’re all monsters.
Where do you think she is right now? Hiding in her room, like the craven little bird that she is.
Waiting for all this to be over, to be fucked and then put back on her shelf.
Until the next year, when it happens all over again.
I see blood on you, boy. Tell me, who did you kill? ”
Your precious heir.
His father laughed cruelly, obliviously. “Did the girl see you do it? That’s what it means to be a raven: to make the little sparrows cower beneath your circling shadow. To make them wonder if their flesh will satisfy what blood will not.”
Cal sucked in a harsh breath, hearing a perverted form of his earlier words thrown back at him. This was more than legacy; this was punishment. Dedalus, coming for Icarus, determined to rip out his wings before even the wax could melt, condemning him for daring to fly.
Nadine ripped a family portrait off the wall, struggling with its weight, and threw that, too.
There was a meaty thud followed by a loud clatter as the glass smashed in his father’s face and scattered to the floor, crunching beneath his booted feet as he stumbled, blinded.
Cal heard him smack the frame aside, heard it collide with the wall so that the glass crumbled further, just like their family’s fucking rotten legacy.
“Sparrow,” he said viciously. “When I rip you apart, I’ll be starting with your wings.”
Cal slammed open the solarium doors. The inset glass, so meticulously placed, flew from the frame as soon as the wood slammed against the wall.
With every breath, he inhaled the powdery loam of dead plants and rotting wicker furniture.
He kicked a few large planters out of his path, spilling soil, and fumbled for the latch on the back door.
Not daring to look behind him, but hearing his sparrow’s gasp and knowing his father was close.
And then, then, the tumbler slid into place and they were in the moonlit garden.
It was already cold. It usually was at night, at this elevation, but on this particular one it was as if a dark enchantment had settled over the grounds.
A mist had descended, ringing the trees in gossamer halos that glowed unnaturally in the moonlight.
Cal could smell the flowers, even while they were budded up against the encroaching dark, and when he set Nadine down in the soil, the petrichor scent of still-damp earth stung his nostrils with its sharpness.
His father staggered into the garden with a growl, bleeding from his nose and a gash on his cheek. He clawed the hellebore out of his path, and in the eerie light of the moon, his eyes seemed to glow the reflective yellow of a wolf’s.
“That quivering creature at your side might be coerced into breeding your children, but apart from that, there is no difference. A deer is a sparrow is a deer.”
Cal swept Nadine behind him. “So everything in the book is a lie.”
“No. It was the hunt that mattered to Caledon Cullraven. The glory of the family legacy, which fell to the subsequent generations to uphold. Sparrows and their ilk are nothing. A mere means to an end and nothing more, closer to concubinage than the sacred vows of man and wife.”
His smile turned sharp. Blood from his facial wounds ran over his lips in black rivulets, glistening like oil between his teeth.
“I didn’t realize how deeply you boys had internalized that part of the lore. That you thought you could pair-bond with a sparrow and—what?” he mocked. “Find love? They’re meant to be subjugated and bred, not cossetted and . . . loved.”
“So you gave Noelle the green book.”
He half-expected his father to deny it; rather, he seemed gleeful at the opportunity for malicious truths.
“I did. And the sparrow didn’t care much for her raven prince then, did she?
No, she came for him with her little talons right in the middle of the square.
It was a wake-up call for Ben, hearing the sweet songs of his little wife become the stark ravings of a madwoman. ”
“She wasn’t mad!” Nadine screamed from behind him. “You killed her!”
His father turned. “Caledon Cullraven killed his first wife for less. When he caught her with her lover in the woods that night, he realized just how evanescent such trifling feelings are. And her fate loomed over that of his second wife in perpetuity, keeping her and all others in check. That painting in your room, my deer—did you like it? They say all Cullraven brides bleed, you know. At first.”
Nadine shivered with loathing and his father smiled.
“But Evangeline didn’t love Caledon. It was fear that bonded her to him until the time of her death. That made her bear him children. Fear, and nothing else.”
“Same with grandfather?” Cal heard himself ask. “And our grand-uncle? Them as well?”
“More sparrow-brides who needed to be culled from the flock, yes.”
“And what about Mother?”
“Ah yes. Corrine. Well, she is—rather uniquely obedient. And she does like her pretty house. I used to leverage you children to ensure her continued obedience, but now I think she’s simply grown used to the fear. It’s the only reason I still come to her, you know—the fear.”
“My god.” Cal couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice. “It’s all just a twisted fucking fairytale.”
“But my, what a beautiful one. Yes, Caledon, I can see how you were blinded to it. What man doesn’t want a woman who will fall before him as one does a god?
” He gave Nadine a darkly knowing look, one that suggested that he knew exactly what the two of them had gotten up to all those nights spent in Ravengate.
“Even this one, with all her pretty cowering, will not bend as easily as that. And she will turn on you. All sparrows do.”
He lifted his gun, intent on aiming it. Cal’s grip on Nadine tightened. “If you discharge that, the whole town will hear it.”
“They know what day it is. What’s one more shot among many? All sparrows die when they refuse. And all sparrows refuse in the end. That’s why female Cullravens—they never inherit. Not unless they keep the family name. The blood is weak, until you raise it up. And Ravensgate needs its heirs.”
Ben: his useful idiot.
A cold fury welled up inside him like a leviathan rearing up from the deep. “What about your heirs then? It was Ben I shot in the woods tonight, Father. He died trying to kill my sparrow. Are you going to shoot me to get to her as well?”
“You killed Ben?”
He drew himself up. “I did.”
Cal could count on one hand the number of times he had seen his father properly shocked. This was one of them. “He’s been counseled his whole life on how to take over the estate. What have you done, you fool—you’ve ruined everything.”