33. WELCOME, SIR KNIGHT, LADY ISOBELLE, TO YOUR DOOM #2
Bingleton’s arms lowered a touch and he stared up at her, his eyes wide.
‘Sorry, I’m not as good on my feet as I’d thought …
see, I wrote the whole necromancy thing, but I wasn’t prepared for you to bring in this other storyline about a curse.
You’ve got to let the villain monologue, you know – you’ve got to hear the whole plan so it all makes sense. ’
‘Don’t listen to him!’ cried Tabitha in poignant, frantic tones. ‘Strike him down now – this is how he gets inside your head …’
Bingleton looked from one of them to the other, mouth open, confusion wreathing his features. ‘Hang on, what’s going on? You didn’t come together? Wait, is this still part of the role-play?’
‘Role-play?’ Gwen repeated weakly.
‘It’s the crowning touch on the Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea Experience,’ Bingleton said proudly.
‘On the final night, we all play roles – visitors get to play the hero and come to the tower to face down the evil necromancer, played by yours truly, and there’s a whole …
’ His voice trailed off, eyes moving between Gwen’s face and Isobelle’s.
‘I thought you’d got my invitation to try out the game, no? ’
Gwen shifted her gaze from the cowering nobleman to the girl at the edge of the firelight, leaning against one of the pillars as though it was all that was holding her up.
Tabitha’s eyes were bright, brilliant, her hair afire in the light, her gaze intent – brows raised, lips quivering with fear and anguish.
It was a brilliant performance.
She met Gwen’s gaze for one heartbeat, and then two.
Then her lips stopped quivering, she straightened and gave a whimsical little smile. ‘Well, I suppose that’s done it. All that quivering and wailing was giving me a headache anyway.’
A wave of dizziness swept through Gwen as full realisation came crashing down upon her with all the force and inevitability of the ocean itself. ‘It was you,’ she whispered. ‘All along … it was you.’ At her side, Isobelle bit back a cry of dismay and distress.
Bingleton looked between the three women, looking baffled. ‘Hang on, I’m lost. What do you mean, it was her? What’s been going on? I’ve been up here for days, working around the clock to get the tower ready … Is something going on in the town?’
Tabitha glanced dismissively at him. ‘Run along, little man. This doesn’t concern you.’
Bingleton drew himself up. ‘Hang on now, young lady, I’m not as bloody formal as my dad, but I am still lord of this town, and—’
Tabitha stepped into the light, her eyes bright and piercing. Her plain grey skirts seemed transformed by the light into wisps of living shadow, and her hair seemed to crackle with the firelight. She fixed her stare on Bingleton and advanced slowly, step by step.
‘You can either go, now, out the front door … or I can visit upon you a terror so profound, so unendingly torturous, that you’ll run screaming off the cliff rather than face another second of torment. It’s your choice.’
Gwen could feel it, the force of her power – her own heart quailed and shrivelled, a dark terror welling up inside her from that deep place that held all she could not face. Even without targeting her, Tabitha’s power was undeniable.
All the fear in this town, the terror that had slowly crept over all of them – now she knew its source.
Bingleton went white – good god, the man had actually darkened his eyelids and lashes with cosmetics – and scrambled to his feet. Without another word, he went sprinting for the exit.
Tabitha watched him go, huffing a soft, wry laugh. Then she turned back to Gwen and Isobelle, heaving a sigh. ‘And then there were three.’
She crossed the ring of firelight and prodded the chair with her foot, turning it with a screech of clawed feet on stone.
She dropped into it, heavily, her eyes grave and intent.
Taking advantage of their stunned silence, she regarded them thoughtfully.
‘Did you really think Bingleton, that ridiculous man, was behind this? That he had the power to control a monster, like my mother did?’
Isobelle managed to find her voice, her hand still curled around Gwen’s arm – though who was supporting who now, Gwen wasn’t sure. ‘But we were your friends,’ she whispered. ‘We wanted to help you – we saved you from those brigands on the road—’
Tabitha gave little sign that Isobelle’s words had moved her at all. ‘The surest way of deflecting suspicion is to need rescuing.’
‘Everything was a lie, from the very start? Why?’
Tabitha’s gaze sharpened. ‘Don’t ask foolish questions,’ she retorted. ‘You know why. You know what happened to my mother.’
Isobelle swallowed hard. She looked sick. Gwen’s sword hand had fallen to her side, and she found she could not move it; when she tried, a wave of terror wrapped around her like none she’d experienced yet.
‘So it was revenge,’ Isobelle breathed. ‘But not of a man for his beloved – it was that of a daughter for her mother.’
Tabitha’s lips twisted, but the expression could hardly be called a smile.
‘I was four when they came for her. I was shipped off to live with my aunts, who told me she died of an illness, but I remember the night they came for her. The things she summoned to fight them, the screams of beast and men, the way the house shook when they burst through the door. The people of this town … they let those monsters take her.’
‘And so you visited upon them the same fear they made her feel,’ Isobelle whispered. Her tone was a wrenching mix of sympathy and horror. ‘But … why not just tell us what was happening? It was wrong, what happened to the witches here. We would have … Why lie, why … why this whole deception?’
Tabitha raised her eyebrows. ‘Tell a monster-slaying knight that I was the daughter of a monster-summoning witch? I thought, at first, that if I let you think you’d killed the sea monster, you’d leave. The last thing I needed was anyone with sense poking their nose into my business.’
Isobelle’s face hardened. ‘All this, torturing Gwen … just so you could make a town suffer for being powerless to help your mother?’
‘The town wasn’t the point,’ Tabitha replied. ‘But what would happen if those who built this tower heard tell of a dark power rising here? One that threatened to resurrect that horrible evil they slew all those years ago?’ Her voice was bitter, angry.
Gwen managed to speak, though her voice was tense and seemed to come from far away. ‘The Order of the Evening Star. That was your real target. Why you summoned the monster in the first place.’
Isobelle gasped. ‘You were the one who searched my room … you were the one who broke my owl talisman!’
‘I thought then that one or both of you must be members of the Order, or one of their spies. So if I could convince you there was some unspeakable evil here, you would summon reinforcements. Or, at the very least, tell me where to find them.’
‘Your spell,’ Gwen said through gritted teeth. ‘The ritual we did in the woods, where we had to spill all our secrets for it to work … you were hoping we’d confess that we were members of the Order.’
‘It seemed worth a shot. But when you went off and started shouting about all your relationship woes, I realised you knew nothing and couldn’t help me. So I did the one thing I knew would send Sir Gwen here screaming for safety, anywhere other than here.’
‘I told you about my nightmares.’ Gwen felt the slow, serpentine slide of a tear slithering down her cheek. ‘I told you I dreamed that the dragon came back, again and again, that I could never kill it …’
‘I admit, it didn’t occur to me that you would stick around when you realised you were facing an unkillable sea monster.
’ Tabitha’s eyes were on Gwen, her expression thoughtful, even admiring.
And somewhere, deep within those hazel eyes, flashed the tiniest hint of regret.
‘You’re quite the catch, aren’t you? What a lucky girl our Lady Isobelle is.
’ Her eyes slid back to Isobelle, who was shaking with rage at Gwen’s side.
When neither of them spoke, Tabitha straightened, both feet on the ground once more, and leaned her elbows on her knees.
‘Who was the woman who arrived the other night?’ she demanded, glancing between them. ‘I had to watch from quite a distance, but it wasn’t one of your friends – it was someone new who fished Gwen out of the sea.’
A wave of fear swept through Gwen. If Tabitha was after the Order, then they couldn’t tell her about Olivia.
Olivia, who had no magic of her own, no way to defend herself against a power like this – Tabitha would use her, torture her with terror, until she got the information she wanted about how to find the people Olivia worked for.
Unable to stifle the fearful groan that escaped her lips, Gwen tried to lift her sword. Her arm still wouldn’t move.
Isobelle’s hand came up to cup Gwen’s cheek, turning her head, her blue eyes searching, alarmed. ‘Gwen? What’s wrong?’
Gwen tried to speak, tried to shout, but it was as though she’d been banishing every little thread of shadowy fear to that dark pit within her for so long that they’d all grown teeth. And now someone had burst the gate holding them back, and every one of them was coming straight for her throat.
Isobelle’s gaze snapped back to meet Tabitha’s. ‘Let her go.’ Gwen had never heard her voice sound like that before – each word like an iron blade, hard and cold and biting.
Tabitha eyed the floor between them, which glittered with broken glass and water. ‘Agrimony,’ she murmured, inspecting the ruins of their spell jar. ‘Clever. You know, if what I taught you that night of the ritual had been a real spell, it might have worked.’
Isobelle wrenched off the gauntlet and glove on Gwen’s free hand and thrust her fingers through Gwen’s, squeezing tightly as she angled her body, putting herself between Gwen and Tabitha. ‘Do what you want to the Order,’ she snapped, ‘but let Gwen go. She never did anything but try to help.’
Gwen could feel the warmth of Isobelle’s hand creeping through her, thawing her like the heated stones that brought her back from the icy grip of the sea. She tightened her fingers around Isobelle’s. ‘And let this town go, too. These people didn’t kill your mother.’
Tabitha glanced between them, her easy manner dissipating.
She rose to her feet, eyes snapping. ‘I am the last of the witches of Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea.’ As she spoke, the shadows seemed to gather and swell, rushing in around her like the wings of a thousand black birds.
‘And I will not rest until I have delivered death to the man who killed my sisters, my mother, my very heart. He will pay with his soul.’
‘He?’ echoed Isobelle.
Tabitha met her gaze without blinking. ‘My father.’
Isobelle clutched more tightly at Gwen’s hand. ‘Your …’
Tabitha’s eyebrows rose. ‘Why did you think there was a secret tunnel between my mother’s house and this tower of paladins?
Narrative convenience for you?’ She barked a quick, sharp laugh.
‘I remember he was kind, and very tall, and he would bring me presents when he visited my mother. That was, until he started a real family. His real wife, his real child. The ones he didn’t have to hide from his precious Order.
’ Her eyes shone with bitter tears of conviction and many, many years of heartache.
Gwen drew a long, quaking breath – Isobelle’s warmth had reached her lungs. ‘Gargery said something happened one day to drive the sorceress mad … make her start attacking with her summoned animals …’
‘Love makes us do strange things.’ Tabitha’s eyes held as much anguish as fury.
Gwen could almost see Tabitha as she had once been, a little girl abandoned by both parents – one through indifference, the other through heartbreak and rage.
A little girl who, in order to make her way in the world, learned to use the very thing that haunted the recesses of her spirit: fear.
For a long moment, the only sound was the cheerful crackle of the fire and, very faintly in the distance, the whispering waves against the rocks far below.
Then Tabitha clapped her hands briskly. ‘Now, you two can stay here and cower for as long as you like – I don’t actually want to hurt either of you, despite what you might think.
I am going to go have a conversation with that operative of the Order who arrived in such dramatic fashion the other night. ’
Gwen found, all of a sudden, that she could move again. She took a step forward, still holding Isobelle’s hand, and raised her sword. ‘I’m not going to let you leave,’ she said, firming her voice.
Tabitha glanced at her over her shoulder.
‘You’re going to stop me?’ Her smile was, strangely, a little sad.
‘Oh, Gwen. Don’t you know you’re my creature?
’ Her eyes locked on Gwen’s, and a shock of horror ran through Gwen’s body; Isobelle’s hand suddenly felt like glowing iron, burning her. Gwen flung it away with a gasp.
Tabitha whispered, ‘You stand upon the stones where my mother died. This is my spell, and you’ve walked straight into it.’
She snapped her fingers, and the world tilted sideways.
Gwen never felt herself hit the ground.