Chapter 14 Penny #2
“Your Eminence, I must disagree,” Merrick replied. “Vaughn Koesters was our leader, our guide to Eeus’s favor. Who can know what wisdom may be imparted on these pages? We should study them. Take what knowledge we can.”
Levitt glanced at Kit at the same time I did, but Kit remained staunchly silent. He stared straight ahead, so focused he might have bored a hole through the far wall.
“Temporarily, I’ll allow it,” Levitt said after a pause. “I’ll assign them to Fletcher to catalog. But they’re to be returned to Kit as soon as possible.”
“Of course, Your Eminence.” Merrick smirked.
Still holding the journal, Levitt peered into the shambles of the kitchen and shook his head. “It appears there’s nothing to be found.” Genuine sorrow creased his brow as he turned toward Kit and spoke in a low voice. “My apologies for the intrusion—”
“Nonsense!” Merrick chimed in. “We have yet to search the entire property.”
“Dig a hole in the yard, why don’t you?” I snapped. “Perhaps your evidence is buried in the snow.”
Merrick rounded on me, flashing teeth that seemed suddenly sharp. “Perhaps,” he retorted.
Rather than venture out of doors, he headed toward the bedrooms, taking the door at the end of the hall into the area that had been practically forbidden since we’d arrived here.
Levitt and Kit remained in close proximity.
Levitt’s sympathetic expression persisted while Kit remained painfully impassive.
He was so strained, so tense, that I wanted to assure him, to slide my fingers between his and offer what comfort I could.
But we weren’t alone, and that wasn’t allowed around the present company.
Sounds continued from other parts of the house.
Both bedrooms and even the bathroom were being rifled out of our line of sight.
The longer I stood, the more tension bound me up.
Levitt was whispering to Kit, and the sight of his lips so near Kit’s face made my blood boil.
That, and the knowledge that my brother was pawing through things Kit wanted to keep private, wreaking havoc in my life like he’d always done, drove me to move.
I bolted out of the living area. Kit shouted my name as I passed, but I didn’t slow until I rounded the corner into the far bedroom where Merrick had gone.
Entering the room, I found it as sparse and barren as the rest of the home.
I’d expected Merrick to be halfway through destroying the place, ripping the sheets off the bed or turning the mattress in his sanctioned search.
Instead, he stood to one side, surveying the area as though in study, looking for what, I couldn’t possibly guess.
When he spotted me crossing the threshold, he turned with a scowl. “What is it, Penwell?”
“Why do you hate him?” I aimed a finger back the way I’d come. “What has he done to you? Or is all this only because he’s important to me?”
Merrick crossed his arms and snorted a breath. “Very little of my decisions have anything to do with you. Though, still more than I would like. And I told you already, this doesn’t involve you.”
I came closer to him, strung tight with indignation. “I live here too. If Kit was hiding something, don’t you think I would know?”
“I cannot understate how little you would know, Penwell.” He swept his hands down his ceremonial robes in grand reference to himself. “I carried on with this deception for years without your notice. Not to mention Father’s and your mother’s.”
He never failed to distinguish that he was only half my blood, and that was the half he liked least. No one would have guessed we weren’t fully siblings.
We even looked alike with the same sandy blonde hair, green eyes, and suntanned skin, though he had paled in recent years with more time spent here than on the farm.
But he insisted on holding himself apart—and above—the rest of us.
I wondered, not for the first time, how I’d overlooked it all my life.
I’d accepted him as different than me, but in only the best ways.
He was a hard worker, successful and ever-striving.
People in Eastcliff always said he had a head for business and would do great things.
Even Mother said I should be more like Merrick.
Knowing what I did now, I was glad to have never managed that feat.
He was still posturing, still glaring at me as he concluded, “Maybe if you pulled your nose out of your damned drawing book long enough to notice the real world, you’d see what was right in front of you.”
He’d said the same things when we were young. I was thirteen, and he was twenty-three, a head and shoulders taller than I was and nearly twice as broad as he barged into the living room of our farmhouse where I laid on the rug.
It was cold, and I was as close as I dared get to the fireplace.
Just near enough my fingers weren’t numbing as I smoothed my pencil across a drawing I’d made in the field earlier in the day.
I laid down a patch of lead, then smudged it with my pinkie finger, adding shading beneath the tree where our newest calf had laid.
Merrick stomped over, tracking mud across the rug in his haste. I must have heard him coming, but I carried on, fussing a bit of gray I couldn’t quite get to blend.
“The pigs were out,” he said from above me.
Setting down my pencil, I rolled to one side and looked up at him. “Huh?”
Looking him over, there was dirt streaked all the way up his trousers. Through the window on the wall behind him, the sky had clouded over. I hadn’t noticed the distant patter of rain, but I couldn’t ignore the water dripping from Merrick’s clothes and puddling on the floor beside me.
My gaze traveled up from his soggy slacks and shirt to his scowling face. He looked as stormy as the weather outside. Dark and foreboding.
“Weren’t you meant to be tending them?” he asked.
My lips bent in a frown, and I started toward standing. “Sorry, I forgot. I’ll get them.”
No sooner had I made it to my feet than did Merrick’s palm thrust into my chest and drive me back down. I hit the floor on my tailbone and looked up at him again as he towered overhead.
He turned his thumb toward his chest. “I got them. From the fields. But not before they wreaked havoc on our new crop.”
Dread dropped on me like a weight that seemed as determined as my brother was to hold me down.
I’d been watching the pigs, then got hungry, so I came inside for some boiled eggs and water.
When I went back out, I saw the calf, so I drew her for a bit…
I wasn’t sure how long. With the storm rolling in, it might have been earlier than it looked, but the growl of my stomach suggested it was near dinnertime. Hours had slipped away from me.
Merrick stomped his foot, and I jumped.
“The seedlings only broke ground last week!” he shouted, then flung his hand toward the fields far beyond us.
“Now they’re everywhere, and with pig tracks through every bit of it.
We’ll have to replant, which means a late crop this year.
We can only hope they get established before they burn up in the summer heat… ”
When he drew a breath to rage on, I cut in quietly.
“Was it really that bad?”
His expression fell flat, as if that was a stupid question. “They’re pigs, Penwell. Destructive, ignorant animals who root and dig and trample wherever they go. And you were meant to be tending them.”
My face scrunched as I swiveled toward the kitchen, imagining the disaster he described. With Mother and Sayla in town for the day, and Father busy working in the new barn, it had been a quiet afternoon. I didn’t want to ruin it with an evening full of scolding and shame.
“Don’t tell Father,” I said at last. “I’ll fix it. I can—”
“Replant the field yourself?” Merrick scoffed. “I think not. This rain should have been a boon, but instead it’s created a muddy mess. And it shows no sign of stopping. We’ll be plowing through the muck for days because of you.”
I shrunk beneath his scorn, and because I knew he was right.
I’d been given a single task that day and managed to put it out of mind entirely.
I’d heard our parents talk enough to know the farm was still struggling to recover from the barn burning four years ago.
Add to that the bills owed to the folk who had helped us get back on our feet that year.
To lose another batch of crops on my account was a damning failure.
“What were you doing, anyway?” Merrick glanced past me at the sketchbook still open on the floor. He huffed a loud breath, then rolled his eyes. “Need I ask?”
Bending, he scooped up the book and held it open, squinting at the drawing.
After a brief inspection, he snapped it shut.
“Father may allow these… distractions, but I will not.
I've no mind to indulge what has become dangerous whimsy. By the gods, you're practically a man. It’s past time for you to be done with childish things and start pulling your weight. I expect you to do your share of the work when I take over. This”—he waved my sketchbook—“is an unacceptable use of your time.”
I should have guessed what he would do next, but I didn’t think of it until I saw the wicked glint in his eye. He turned partway toward the fireplace, then gave the sketchbook another meaningful flap.
“Merrick, don't!” I sprung forward as he sent the book sailing. It landed atop the logs, sending up a spray of sparks.
On hands and knees, I scrambled toward it, but stopped the moment the heat from the flames kissed my cheeks. I found myself scurrying away instead, on my back and scrambling until I’d returned to where I’d begun.
“There.” Merrick dusted his hands together. “Perhaps now you'll be of some use.”
I sat, welling up with tears while I watched the fire fan and curl the pages of the book. The parchment caught on the corners, which blackened and flooded the hearth with smoke.
I watched, and Merrick walked away, muttering about lessons that needed to be taught and how I was too stupid to learn any of them.
Now, I stood across from him, less alone than I’d been in our farmhouse that day.
Less afraid, too. My time in Ashpoint had made me bolder, as had the constant assurance of the man in the next room.
I knew if I called, Kit would come running, house search be damned.
He’d saved me in the graveyard, and even before that.
And I’d saved him from this. He just didn’t know it yet.
I didn’t have to call, though, before Kit entered the bedroom, wide eyed and wary. He looked from me to Merrick and back again. “Everything all right, Pen?”
A crooked smile pulled at my mouth. “It’s fine, Kit.”
“Quite fine,” Merrick echoed. “And I think you’ve enough trouble of your own without borrowing from Penwell.”
Rather than retreat, Kit lingered in the doorway.
Despite the strain still pulling on his features and the coating of road dust and grime from our long journey home, I found him as handsome as ever.
I wanted to go to him that moment and kiss him fiercely.
To put his worries at ease. To spite Merrick.
To show everyone that I was taken and treasured by this man.
He may not have said it—neither had I—but I was growing more confident by the day that Kit and I were in love.
So, Levitt could whisper, and the Sentinels could make a mess of things, and Merrick could loathe me as much as ever. It was all quite fine.
I stared at Kit and smiled until Merrick broke the moment of reverie.
“You heard me,” he snarled at Kit. “My half-brother doesn’t need a guard dog. You be a good boy and go sit in the living room till we’re done.”
The insult brought rage so blistering hot that it seemed to set me ablaze.
I lunged toward Merrick. One hand caught hold of his robes and his bone necklace, using that grip to pull him toward me while I swung around with my other fist. It connected with his cheek in a cracking blow that rocked his head backward.
Pain exploded in my knuckles, but the surge of excitement that swelled in me immediately overpowered it.
Merrick reeled and sank, falling away and leaving me holding his necklace as the cord snapped, sending bones and tiny beads scattering across the floor.