Chapter 29 #2
We crept along the left side of the room while Griselda hammered away at her piano. The music was deafening, and I started to think we might make it all the way to the staircase, and maybe even up it, without the girl noticing a thing.
But then came a break in the music, and without turning around on her bench, she said quietly, “Have you come to save her?”
Her voice was small, thin. A pause, her fingers hovering above the keyboard, and then she resumed playing.
I gestured sharply at Gareth to stay where he was, then went to the girl. My body thrummed with restrained force; my skin was scorching hot. I’d knock her straight through her piano if I had to.
But then came three quick, triumphant chords, and the music stopped. The piece was over. And Griselda Lemaire turned to me with tears streaming down her face. Her face was thin, her lips chapped and raw, as if she’d been biting them all through her little recital.
“I’ve been hoping someone would come,” she whispered. “It’s gone on for far too long. He’s up there right now. I won’t call the guards. I’ll keep playing and hide the noise. Just please get her out.”
I watched Griselda closely. “Who are you talking about?”
Her face fell. She turned back to the piano, riffled through a pile of sheet music. “I have to start playing again,” she said quickly, “or else he’ll come yell at me.”
I grabbed her thin wrist with one hand and clamped my other over her mouth, holding her tightly enough to hurt.
“When I let go,” I said quietly, “you’ll tell me what’s happening here, and you’ll do it fast, or I’ll break your wrists so you can’t play at all. Do you understand?”
She nodded, and when I released her, she wasted no time.
“They keep Lily in the room at the top of the stairs,” she whispered frantically.
“I don’t know why. She’s just some farmer’s daughter.
Mama brought her to us months ago, right when the Knotwood started growing.
And Papa put her up in the room, and he left Eldric in charge of her.
He goes to her often, and when he does, I’m to play down here until he’s had his fill of her and leaves. ”
She drew in a shuddering breath. “I’m to play as loud as I can so no one will hear her.
Eldric doesn’t want to upset our staff. And he hates me,” she added, her eyes filling with fresh tears.
“He always has. He likes to terrify me. Mouse, he calls me. If I don’t do this, he’ll punish me, and he likes few things more than that.
” Her mouth trembled. “So you see, I have to do this.” She selected a piece of music with shaking fingers.
My mouth tasted sour with fury. “Is it just the two of them up there? Eldric and Lily?”
Griselda nodded.
“No guards?”
She shook her head.
“And the stairs are the only way in or out?”
She nodded again. Tears plopped onto her fingers.
I gritted my teeth and placed a gentle hand on Griselda’s shoulder. This single kindness was all I could offer her, and even my light touch made her flinch. A moment later, she was playing again, her fingers crashing onto the keys with such vigor that I could barely hear myself think.
I hurried back to Gareth. “Did you hear all of that?”
“I wish I hadn’t,” he said, his voice hard and angry. He glanced up the stairs. “Do you think this Lily is unaware of her true nature?”
“Yes, like Mother was, and Yvaine too.” I quickly looked around the room one more time, but no guards burst in, and Griselda was completely immersed in her own frenzied performance.
The ceiling’s canopy of vines suddenly seemed ominous.
“We’ll have to act fast, before Eldric can use his magic against us. ”
Gareth glanced up at the vines. “Yes, if we can avoid it, I’d prefer not to be strangled by greenery today.”
I hurried to the stairs and climbed them, Gareth on my heels. At the top, I turned back to scan the room, but we were still alone with Griselda.
I tried the door, but it was locked, and as I stepped back to kick it open, a woman’s scream rang out from inside the room.
The music cloaked it, but not well enough.
Gareth flinched and held the torch higher.
Griselda faltered at her piano, the music breaking off for an instant before resuming, louder and sharper than before.
My body lit up with rage. Whether that was Neave in there or truly just a farmer’s daughter named Lily, this demented arrangement had gone on long enough.
I kicked down the door and sent it flying across the room, where it crashed through a window and sailed out into the night.
A young man scrambled out of a canopy bed: Eldric Lemaire.
He had icy-blond hair that fell in waves to his shoulders, and he wore a loose white tunic and rumpled trousers of fine gold brocade.
He was sweaty, wild-eyed. His mad gaze darted to the shattered window, which was framed by quivering vines.
The whole room teemed with greenery; hundreds of vines, maybe even thousands, stretched across the ceiling.
The walls were thick with them. And in this house, vines might as well have been swords.
I tore across the room and rammed Eldric in the chest with my shoulder. The impact cracked his ribs and left him crumpled against the wall, gasping for breath.
I went to the bed at once, where a woman who looked to be about my age lay curled up in a mess of silk sheets.
She wore a white nightgown, and she stared at nothing, her eyes puffy and red.
Her pale skin was a tapestry of cuts and scars, and the blood glistening at each wound was both red and gold.
Red, the blood of her human host; gold, the blood of her true godly self.
For a brief moment, it felt like all the breath left my body.
Mother had been right.
Neave.
I knew it was her as surely as I felt the floor under my feet. All of my senses whirled in alarmed recognition. This was Neave, in the body of a farmer’s daughter named Lily, who might not even know what—who—she carried inside her.
“Mara,” Gareth said sharply, a warning in his voice. At the same moment, a bolt of magic shot through the room, raising all the hairs on my arms.
I whirled around. Eldric, huddled against the wall and cradling his ribs, had summoned the vines.
They moved fast, slithering like snakes.
Some of them came for me, others for Gareth.
And still others went straight for Eldric, wrapping him in a hissing green cocoon several layers thick.
Not even I would be able to get Neave and Gareth to safety and give this disgusting worm of a man the grisly fate he deserved. Not before the vines consumed us.
I scooped Neave into my arms and ran for the door, shouting Gareth’s name.
But when I glanced back to find him, he wasn’t running after me.
He’d found a candelabra on a side table with four lit candles, and as I watched, he tossed aside his burned jacket and thrust the darkened, oil-soaked torch into the flames.
As soon as the torch burst back to life, Gareth flung it toward Eldric and his shield of vines.
The spinning flames ignited the bed’s canopy and then crashed into the spot where Eldric hid.
The rest of the bed caught fire immediately, and the vines not long after, but Gareth was already racing toward the door.
We ran down the stairs to the sound of Eldric’s screams.
I’d never loved Gareth more fiercely than I did in that moment.
The ballroom was empty; Griselda had abandoned her piano, but the door to the passage stood open. A wave of gratitude tore through me. She could have easily locked us in here if she’d wanted to.
Back in the main house, the hallways were quiet and empty, just as we’d left them, but the party had erupted into chaos.
I heard it long before Gareth could—Aralinda Lemaire sobbing, her father calling for the doors to be locked, house guards shouting for everyone to present themselves for inspection.
Someone had set fire to the house; someone had murdered Eldric Lemaire.
Griselda. I bit back a curse. This was a big house; the only way anyone could already know about the fire was if she had reported it to her parents. I stopped a few paces from the now-empty gambling rooms to listen more closely.
“She could have told them exactly where to find us,” muttered Gareth, who had obviously come to the same conclusion I had. “But she didn’t. They could’ve come for us, and no one at the party would have been the wiser.”
I nodded. “This chaos will be a welcome distraction.”
“Thank you, Griselda,” he said lightly. “As long as we can still get out, that is.”
I glanced down at the girl in my arms. Lily.
Neave. I had to think of her as a god, not as a human girl, or else the horror of what had happened to her would fell me.
She felt weightless in my arms, so still and quiet that if my senses hadn’t told me she was indeed breathing, that her tired heart still beat, I would have thought she was dead.
Suddenly the sound of breaking glass exploded from inside the ballroom—one crash after another, and then another, followed by shrieks both human and beastly.
I smiled. My hearing was so sharp that I could see the scene unfurling as clearly as I would with my eyes.
“Ryder has wilded creatures from the Knotwood,” I told Gareth. “Birds, raptors, stags, wolves. Hundreds of them. They’ve broken the windows. They’ve burst in through the doors. It’s havoc. Even the guards are running.”
“What an excellent whiskered ruffian he is,” Gareth said. Then he looked at me and added gravely, “You know what this means.”
I did, and I hated it. “I’ve got to take Neave and run.”
“And the rest of us will regroup outside and head for Kirsa’s house. And…” He trailed off.
“And I’ll meet all of you in Fairhaven,” I finished firmly. “In two weeks or less, I hope. If only you all weren’t such slowpokes.”
Gareth looked as wretched as I felt. I shifted Neave into one arm, tugged him close with my free hand, and kissed him hard. Then I held him to me and pressed my forehead against his.
“If you let yourself get hurt,” I said, “I’ll kill you. Right there in the Citadel before hundreds of witnesses.”
He smiled faintly. “Stay safe, darling,” he whispered, and then he kissed my cheek, and I turned with my heart in my throat and started to run.