Chapter 18 Non #2
Which meant Jazz had taken the stairs to our next destination two at a time. Not wanting to be left behind on a floor of the castle I had never been on, I had kept pace. But now I was embarrassingly out of breath compared to Jazz, who looked like they’d just taken a leisurely stroll.
Another arched door stood in front of us, but Jazz hadn’t given me any clue as to how we were going to acquire the jewellery.
“Press your palm to the centre.” Jazz nodded to a circular knot carved into the middle of the door.
I quirked a brow.
“Well, I certainly can’t open her bedroom door while it’s locked with a blood spell. She isn’t my family.”
“Sorry, she being…”
Jazz gave me a confused look. “Your grandmother, Ledr Bronwen, Big Bad Bron.”
My eyes practically bulged out of my head. “You want us to steal jewellery from my grandmother’s bedroom?!”
Jazz pressed their finger to their lips as their eyes darted around the empty corridor.
“Bron won’t have an issue with us lending a necklace or two, but the sentries who guard her private chambers might. Stop making us look so guilty.”
“No way am I opening that door. She probably did something that singles me out of a blood spell or whatever you call it.
Jazz rolled their eyes. “You give her too much credit. She never expected you to be able to wield anything at all. Why would she spell wards to keep out someone she never thought would make it here?”
Jazz’s jab made me flinch, and my eyes welled. I tucked my chin to my chest, trying to avoid Jazz noticing just how easily comments like that hurt me.
But Jazz had already noticed my tears. They reached for my face, but I drew back. “Non, I’m sorry. That came out—”
I slammed my palm into the centre of the door, a silver light outlined the knot, and my hand felt like I had pins and needles for a moment. The door opened with a creak, and I shoved past Jazz, knocking their shoulder, and stepped into the room.
Bedroom was a very accurate term for where my grandmother slept, because the room literally only consisted of a large four-poster bed and virtually nothing else. It was a bed in a room, that was it.
There was nothing decorating the walls, no soft furnishings, no curtains above the single window, or even a rug on the floor. Just an expanse of cold sandstone.
She was consistent with the cold bitch act; I’ll give her that.
Jazz stepped beside me, and I turned back towards the corridor. Clearly, we weren’t going to find anything in here, and I needed a drink.
“Hey, where are you going?”
I pulled my arm free of Jazz’s grasp. “Anywhere but here. She doesn’t even have a dresser! You really think we’re going to find any jewellery in here?”
Jazz grabbed my other arm and spun me around, my nose coming within inches of another door that seemed to lead to a different room.
This door had a regular handle, and Jazz opened it, stepping to one side and bowing low to let me through.
I stomped past with my nose in the air, intentionally swaying my hips and causing the swaths of tulle to swish from side to side.
The sensual laugh from Jazz that sent shivers up my spine almost made me forgive them for their shitty comment earlier.
We stepped into a sitting room that was just as lacklustre as Granny’s bedroom. The far wall had an opening in the middle that led to another room.
Jazz nodded towards the opening. “Her closet is through there.”
The closet, which was the same size as my bedroom back home, was brimming with hundreds of variations of her signature black two-piece.
A small section held a few garments in the Northern Coven’s purple and some larger black clothing that looked like it might have belonged to a male, based on the size.
Who that male could have been was a mystery; it certainly wasn’t Ail Llew, as the blazers alone were big enough to cover him from head to toe.
Considering I’d seen Granny wearing the same exact black suit every day since I was seven, she had a lot of clothes.
Jazz sauntered in behind me and headed straight for a stack of black boxes that held the jewellery they were looking for. They hummed to themselves as they picked through countless pieces, throwing them back in when they didn’t meet the criteria.
“You seem pretty familiar with this place,” I said as I continued to pace around the room, running my fingers over the luxurious fabrics.
Jazz didn’t look up from the pearl earrings they were assessing in their hand. “Very. I used to spend almost every summer here growing up, and Bron would let me raid her jewellery collection to play dress up.”
A lump formed in my throat at the image of a young Jazz shuffling around this closet in high heels too big for them, layers of beads around their neck. I couldn’t bring myself to reply to Jazz after that; I likely would have ended up saying something I regretted out of jealousy.
A carving on one of the sandstone bricks, identical to the one on Granny’s bedroom door that I’d placed my hand on, caught my attention.
My fingers brushed against the knot unintentionally as I reached for it, and a light of pure silver illuminated the interlocking rings.
The wall began to rumble and slide away, revealing another room.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw Jazz was still engrossed in the boxes of jewellery and hadn’t noticed the wall vanishing, so I continued alone to investigate the hidden room, leaving them behind.
The room Granny clearly wanted to keep hidden was the opposite of the rest of her bedroom. A plump velvet sofa sat in the middle of the room, covered in patchwork throws. A fire sparked to life in the ornate fireplace in front of the sofa, and the floor was covered in haphazardly placed rugs.
On the small table to one side of the sofa sat her teacup, golden spoon, and saucer that I had seen her summon frequently. The inside was stained with tea, suggesting she had been in this room recently.
Turning in a full circle in the centre of the room, I realised the walls were covered in hundreds of pictures, all in mismatched frames. The only one not hanging on the wall was a small black frame that sat on the side table next to the teacup and saucer.
Picking it up, I examined the black and white image closely.
Although it was faded with age, I could just make out a woman and a man with what looked like rope wrapped around their joined hands.
Both were dressed in black and staring at each other intensely.
Honestly, they looked like they wanted to murder each other.
Maybe these were some relation to Granny—her parents, even?
Their features were relatively generic, and with the picture being in black and white, I had no idea of what colour their hair was.
But I could make out a large scar on the face of the male that ran from his hairline to his cheekbone, straight through the space where his left eye should have been.
Carefully, I put the picture back and continued perusing the hundreds of pictures that lined the walls. Most of them were of the same four people: a mother, father, and two sons. I assumed the taller of the two was the older one.
When Jazz finally burst into the room, declaring they’d found the necklace they had been looking for, my face was wet with tears.
“Non, what’s…” But their voice trailed off as they stepped beside me and realised what I was staring at.
My voice was shaky and almost inaudible, but thankfully, Jazz understood. “They’re my family, aren’t they?”
I saw Jazz nod solemnly in my periphery.
The pictures appeared to be arranged by date, showing the two boys growing taller with each frame, their lives unfolding across the walls. I pointed to an image where the boys, or young men in this picture, stood laughing with their arms thrown around each other.
Nodding towards the taller and older looking of the two, I asked, “Is that my father?”
Jazz gave me a confused look.
“I’ve never met my father or even seen a picture of him.”
They grabbed my outstretched hand that had started shaking and gave me a sympathetic smile, placing a kiss on the back of my palm.
“What’s his name?” I croaked.
Jazz’s eyes went wide. “You don’t even know his name?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know anything about this side of my family. Only that Bronwen is my grandmother and Seren is some distant cousin.”
Jazz let out a long sigh, running their hands through their silken hair before turning back to look at the picture of my father. The other young man he stood with was his younger brother, I assumed.
“Your father’s name is Gwaun, and that’s his younger brother, Emrys.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off my father’s face.
It was almost identical to my own, save for his build being leaner.
His eyes were glowing silver pools, and it seemed his younger brother, Emrys, shared the same eye colour.
Looking at Gwaun so happy and carefree, I couldn’t fathom what must have happened for him to end up the monster he had become.
The faces of those poor girls flashed in my mind’s eye. Gods, how could he be so cruel?
“Are any of my family at Llwyn Onn?” I asked, swiping at a stray tear with my knuckle.
Jazz’s eyes were lined with their own tears now as they leaned over and wiped away another that had escaped down my face.
“You might want to sit down for this,” they said gently, guiding me to the sofa.
We sat talking for a while, and Jazz told me as much as they knew about my relatives.
It felt odd that someone who, only days ago, had been a complete stranger to me knew more about my family than I did.
But from the stories Jazz told me, it seemed our families were close and had been for some time.
The one major piece of information that I had been desperate to know was how my parents had met and whether they were ever in a relationship or even married.
Mum would always change the subject when my younger, inquisitive self would ask these questions.
But Jazz relayed that after a certain point in time, my father became completely estranged from his family and friends, so his whereabouts during the time he would have met my mother were unknown.
“My grandmother was married?” I asked when Jazz told me the tall, scarred male in most of the pictures was my grandfather, Gwilym.
They pointed to a portrait of him that hung near the fireplace, his arm slung around the shoulders of another male who was similar in age to him.
It seemed I didn’t share many features with my grandfather; I shuddered at the thought that I likely took after my grandmother more.
Jazz let out a soft laugh. “Not just married, absolutely besotted. Your grandparents’ marriage was the kind they write about in books. Bron has never been the same since Gwil passed away.”
“He died? When? How?”
“It will be five years since he passed in December.”
Five years? I would have been twenty. That meant he’d been alive the whole time Granny had been visiting to train me. She’d hidden my existence from my own grandfather? But come to think of it, maybe he’d known all about me and had chosen to not meet me.
“He had a terminal cancer, pancreatic. It was very sudden, less than a year from diagnosis to his funeral.”
My mouth opened and closed multiple times, but nothing came out. How could I even begin to explain to Jazz how similar my experience with Catrin was and what she meant to me? Granny and I had been going through such similar experiences at the same time, but she’d not mentioned it once.
“And there wasn’t a Wielder or Witch that could use their powers and save him? I thought we weren’t entirely human.”
“Technically, we aren’t. As we have some blood from one of the Crewrs, we benefit from things like a longer lifespan and faster healing.
But certain illnesses, terminal ones like cancer, nothing can stop that.
We have our ways of prolonging things just like modern medicine, but in the end, we all lose the battle the same way. ”
I would be lying if I said the thought that Granny might have been able to help Catrin hadn’t crossed my mind in my moments of desperation when Cat was dying. Despite my vow to never speak to Granny again after my Cychwyniad, I would have grovelled at her feet if it meant she’d save Cat.
“What about Emrys, is he still—”
But Jazz shook their head and squeezed my hand tighter. “Emrys was killed when I was a baby. I don’t remember him. My mother has spoken about him from time to time, but his passing is a sore subject for everyone, especially Bronwen.”
“How did he die?”
Jazz stood and made their way to the door. The look of sympathy they gave me over their shoulder only confirmed what I had suspected as soon as Jazz said my uncle had been killed.
He’d died at the hands of my father.