14. THEY NEVER CAME BACK #4
‘Isobelle? Gweeen!’ Jane’s voice called, from really not very far away at all, a few pools down the path. Close enough to make them both seize and go still. ‘Gargery’s here!’
Gwen groaned, the protest welling up from somewhere deep, deep inside her: ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m going to murder that girl!’
Isobelle let out a somewhat hysterical laugh, bowing her head to press her face against Gwen’s shoulder. Gwen could feel the flush of her skin, and shivered again despite the interruption.
Isobelle moved away before Gwen could stop her. ‘Come on. We should hear what he has to say about the witch.’
Gwen clambered out of the pool, her knees threatening to bend in ways they really shouldn’t. Wrapping herself in one of the towels and shivering against the sudden cold, she followed Isobelle down the path, muttering.
The caretaker of the hot springs was waiting for them back down by the changing rooms. They took a few minutes to dry off and change – even Isobelle wasn’t about to try her hand at interrogation while dressed in sopping-wet shorts – and they gathered in a half-moon cut out in the stone that was being done up as an open-air cafe.
‘Elsie said you ladies wanted a word with me?’ Gargery said, once they’d seated themselves at one of the tables.
He was an older man of perhaps fifty or sixty years, with grey hair, deep brown skin, and mournful eyes set in a crisscrossing pattern of wrinkles.
‘Lord Bingleton’s really the showrunner,’ he added, glancing aside. ‘I just look after the waters.’
Gwen felt a sudden, unexpected moment of sympathy for the man, who obviously wanted to be left in peace to tend these pools and not have anything to do with the theatrical holiday spot his lord was concocting.
‘We actually wanted to ask about the true story,’ Gwen said gently. ‘What really happened fifteen years ago, not what Bingleton is saying now.’
‘What really happened with the sorceress?’ Isobelle added. ‘Was it truly a battle between good and evil, like the story says? Was she all that bad?’
‘Aye,’ said Gargery in a low voice. ‘It was bad. People died, my lady. Many of my friends. My cousin, his wife, their little one.’
The girls had gathered at a nearby table, listening.
‘What exactly did the sorceress do?’ Isobelle asked gently.
‘She could talk to creatures,’ Gargery said. ‘Bring ’em out of the woods, set ’em to attacking people. Monsters, too. Like that one.’ He lifted his chin, gesturing in the vague direction of the ocean and the sea monster Gwen had fought.
‘Do you know why?’ Gwen asked. ‘Why she’d turn on her town?’
‘She weren’t always that way.’ Gargery ran a hand over his shock of grey hair. ‘She was just another witch, you know. Some remedies when folks got sick, the occasional banishing when a spirit got stuck in someone’s house, that sort of thing. But something happened with the paladins, they say.’
‘The paladins came before she started attacking people?’ asked Sylvie, abandoning all pretence at not eavesdropping, and turning towards them. ‘Bingleton said they arrived to fight her.’
‘No, lass, they’d been here, oh … six, seven years already. The tower was a training ground of sorts for them. One of several across the land, I think. Something happened up at the tower, and that’s when the witch went mad.’
Sylvie went quiet, frowning, and Isobelle took over again. ‘Monsters I can understand, but what real harm could she do, summoning animals? Bears died out here centuries ago, and the wolves are all further north.’
Gargery shot her a sharp glance. ‘You think an animal has to be big to be dangerous? Imagine a swarm of rats, a hundred strong, all maddened, all running at you, clawing and biting at you, out for blood.’
Isobelle recoiled, shuddering.
Gwen had been watching Gargery, his darting, mournful eyes, the slant of his posture, the bobbing of his throat when he swallowed. Softly, she asked, ‘Is that what happened to you?’
Gargery’s shrewd eyes met hers. His eyes flicked down to the dragonsfire scar on Gwen’s arm, for she hadn’t buttoned her sleeves again after dressing. For a moment, a strange understanding passed between them, like an unseen current – one wounded warrior recognising another.
‘No,’ he answered quietly. ‘With me it was a deer.’
He shifted his weight, easing back and putting a hand under one leg, lifting it and setting it down again a little to one side so they could see it. With a jolt, Gwen realised the trouser leg was hiding a wooden limb.
‘Huge red stag came screaming out of the wood and trampled me. Broke my leg in so many places they had to take it off.’
Gwen swallowed. ‘Gargery, how is it that you’re willing–able – to talk to us about this? The others in the town, they all seem to clam up when we ask. Almost like magic.’
Gargery frowned, looking down at his lap, one hand idly rubbing the remainder of his leg. ‘Fear’s a mighty weapon,’ he replied. ‘I can’t tell you anything about magic, really. But I suppose they’re afraid.’
‘But not you?’ asked Isobelle, her eyes bright with sympathy. ‘I’d think you would have more to fear than most.’
Gargery smiled wryly at her. ‘Maybe. But I fought my fears fifteen years ago, lass, when my leg went. Sometimes you just decide the fear can’t have you.’
Isobelle met Gwen’s eye, her brow furrowed. Gwen knew what she was thinking – perhaps Gargery was right. Gwen still wasn’t convinced there was magic at play here, but Isobelle was, and she was almost certainly wondering if perhaps the magic only affected those with unresolved fear.
‘What of the other witches in the area?’ Isobelle asked doggedly, turning her gaze back to the old man. ‘Surely they would have helped talk her down?’
Gargery’s lips tightened. ‘The paladins of the Order said they couldn’t be sure who was causing the attacks, or which ones were her secret supporters. They rounded up every witch within ten miles of the town and brought them to the tower.’
‘And?’ whispered Isobelle.
Gargery’s thumb rubbed slowly at the wooden leg beneath the fabric of his trousers, as if rubbing away some long-ago ache in a muscle that no longer existed. ‘And they never came back.’
It was a quiet walk back to the main town. The girls bade Isobelle and Gwen goodnight at the entrance to the inn, and Gwen and Isobelle went upstairs, both quiet, both absorbed in their thoughts.
‘So the sorceress was real,’ Isobelle murmured, her eyes on the corridor floor. ‘And the paladins were real. And the sorceress did terrorise the town, and the paladins did stop her.’
‘But at what cost to the other witches?’ Gwen finished the thought for her, her own mind grim.
‘I imagine their fate is the same as what would’ve happened to those women who came to Darkhaven to report that a dragon had razed Aberfarthing to the ground.
’ Isobelle’s voice was thick and tight – Gwen did not have to know her as well as she did to feel the anger and helplessness radiating from her.
Gwen reached out and took her hand. ‘Perhaps the animal attacks were a coincidence and they simply used this idea of the sorceress to do what men have done since the dawn of time. Round up every independent, intelligent woman in the area and get rid of them all at once.’
‘I don’t believe that.’ Isobelle was chewing on her lip. She glanced at Gwen and saw her expression, and she offered a tired smile. ‘I mean, I certainly believe they’d take the excuse. But Gargery’s story … have you ever heard of a deer trampling a man half to death? Something happened here.’
They considered the possibilities in silence.
‘I suppose what we need to do is pay a visit to that tower,’ said Gwen finally. ‘See what we can learn from the ruins to fill in the gaps in the story.’
‘We’ll make a plan tomorrow,’ Isobelle said firmly, her fingers tightening around Gwen’s. ‘Come to my room – I don’t want to go to sleep just yet.’
Gwen had not forgotten the memory of Isobelle in her arms in the water, or the soft heat of her lips, or the sound Isobelle had made when they kissed. Gwen tightened her fingers through Isobelle’s and kept going past her own room towards the one at the end of the corridor.
Isobelle drew her in close, wrapping one arm around Gwen’s neck and seeking her mouth for a kiss, somewhat more tentative than their last, but no less absorbing.
With her other hand, Isobelle fumbled for the door latch.
They stumbled inside, laughing as Gwen gracefully tripped over something in the gloom, and Isobelle groped for a candle.
It took some time to get it lit, and eventually Isobelle had to forbid Gwen from touching her until she got the wick to flame, illuminating the room.
They both froze.
The room had been a mess when they’d left – dresses strewn around in Isobelle’s fruitless search for a bathing costume. Now, it was a disaster.
Boxes and cases had been overturned, and clothes thrown everywhere.
Books littered the floor, spines broken and pages torn, and Isobelle’s jewellery had been dumped in a glittering heap on the rug.
Her writing case had been torn apart, and ink puddled on the papers, letters and notes scattered across the desk.
Someone had ransacked her room.