32. Goldenscythe
Chapter 32
Goldenscythe
What have you done?
Victor’s words echoed in my mind, sending a cold shiver to slide down my spine.
I became aware that I was lying on my bed, my hair undone, no more than my thin nightdress to conceal me from the vast black form that towered over my bedside, the eclipsed glow of the hearth behind his midnight cloak all that separated him from the darkness itself.
I must have fainted.
How long had he been here, watching me?
What had I done?
Strange memories returned to me, more foreign than familiar, and I dared not let my mind grasp too firmly any one of them. Not with him so near, his focus so fixed upon me, my wits still foggy from my faint: I feared, now more than ever, that he would see into my mind.
And of all my returning memories, still dim though they were, that feeling of fear was the most familiar of all. I had a sinking sense that I must not allow him to know what I knew. A subtle shudder of trepidation, my constitution yet too weak to still its tremor. Before even I remembered what it was, I sensed that I was hiding something from him—something I had done—something I possessed.
Then I felt the light of the hearth-fire return.
“Victor—”
Lifting my head at the sudden absence of his looming darkness, I found him at the foot of my bed. I looked to him just in time to watch his scarred hands draw the skirt of my nightdress up to my knees—my breath hitched in a soft, expectant gasp—but his hands moved back down, his fingers trailing over the new bindings on my legs as he grunted quietly in dissatisfaction.
The fear that haunted me did nothing to quell the way my body warmed beneath his hands, responsive to even so transient a touch; I broke into a light sweat that made the thin cotton of my nightdress cling to my skin.
I wondered if the terrible thrill of it only made the heat sink deeper.
“Victor,” I repeated, holding my voice steady. “You came back to me.”
“Not an hour too soon,” his deep voice rumbled as he drew himself back to his full height, his few footfalls swift and decisive as he strode to the makeshift chemist’s bench of my dressing table. There was a sound of shuffling clothes; I saw him drape over the back of a chair what looked like some kind of belt, a sheathed sword, a holstered pistol, and my mind drifted for respite to the highwaymen of the old-fashioned stories I had relished as a girl. “You have followed my instructions faithfully,” he intoned, “and without error? The dressings changed and poultice applied dawn and dusk; the elixir taken at midnight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Without error.”
“I was late to the elixir last night, and I have not yet taken it tonight, because—before I fainted—I knew the hour had not yet struck.”
“Overexertion?” I heard the clink of glass vials, the soft hollow pop of an unstoppered jar. “Effort expended in sorcery?”
“A little, sir, I’m afraid.”
And as I spoke those quiet words, it all flooded back to me: Hargrave’s library, Absolon’s trap, the theater, the spiritualist shop, the book, the escape, the catacombs, the grave—Reinhardt and Greycliff, steady and unmoored—the locked box—the Talisman—the terrible truth?—
My vow to kill him.
My desperation.
“More than a little ,” he grunted. I said nothing.
I thought of the book and the box under my bed: not a place I expected him to look, but not at all concealed if he should. I thought of the Talisman, stuffed hastily into the far side of my mattress.
What have you done? he had asked me first. How much did he know? How much did he guess?
I had a few minutes more, perhaps, to extend the excuse of my recovery from a swoon while I decided what to say to him—what to do. My withholding of my secrets could still be forgiven for a while: an accidental oversight in the confusion of my weakened state. But this would not last.
At least I could change the direction of the conversation, and in doing so buy myself time. “Did you find the goldenscythe, sir?”
“Enough to restore both you and my reserve twice over,” he replied, some measure of satisfied pride easing the harshness of his voice. “Potent plants, lusty and abundant, growing a mere day’s ride from here—on some landed gentleman’s self-consolation that the wild beyond his walls is a mere shooting grounds . While he sleeps, the land that endures his name grows feral by the shadow of the moon.”
Potent plants . I felt my body tense on the mattress, wondering what potent should mean for the new concoction I would surely be commanded to drink. I had longed for this—for the cure to what Gremio had done to me—but now I could think only of Greycliff’s madness, his tormented mind no longer his own.
Could I trust still in Victor’s herbal chemistry? Surely he would not allow my mind nor my will to be broken; he needed me, he needed my art in its finest condition for the spell to banish Gremio, and though I trusted nearly nothing now, I found that I still trusted this. And yet, were my mind to slip just a little, just for a moment, in the course of the new elixir’s administration—were my loosened tongue to tell him of the Talisman, or worse?—
“No one… resisted you, when you found it?”
I could see only the broad back of his vast, black form as he stood engrossed in his mixing work at my dressing table, though I heard him chuckle darkly: always a menacing, almost evil sound. Whether some memory of driving a groundskeeper away in terror amused him, or whether he had done far worse, or whether he was simply entertained that I had asked—I did not know.
“No one dared.”
“Thank you, Victor.”
He raised his head, looking slowly back to me over his shoulder. Beneath the shadows of his hood I saw the reflection of the firelight flash from his dark eyes, his steel mask.
“All that you did to get it for me, Victor—thank you.”
I said it in part to gain his trust, it is true, while I measured how many falsehoods it would take to conceal the truth of what I had done—and yet those words and their meaning were no less sincere. How could I not be grateful, even now, for this man who had ridden like a demon through the midnight rain to save me, at who knows what danger to himself? Who stood now mixing and measuring his occult herbs for my benefit, immersed again in his chemistry, the same white shirt he wore when he left me clinging to the sweat of his broad chest, his boots and cloak still splashed with the mud of the ride?
And in my gratitude, the same thought crossed my mind that had so many times: that this grim, fearsome man, for all his foreboding darkness—for all the secrecy of his bleak, unspeakable past and his half-hidden face—had never done me wrong, never proven false.
But that was true no longer.
The hour for that fond fantasy had passed. He was different now, more distant—or else I sensed only my own distance from him—but the measure of the gulf was either way the same.
My heart sank with a sigh.
And I, who had never been false to him, and never before told him a lie?—
Then I was broken from my reverie.
“The precise ratio of goldenscythe to mistletoe must be correct,” his deep voice rumbled beneath the crackle of the hearth. I felt as much as I saw him turn fully toward me—the shifting of his cloak in the warm air of the small bedroom, the weight and intensity of his gaze—and the last of my audacity to defy him sank like a stone: in a moment he was standing over me at my bedside again, the darkness and closeness of his looming form blotting out the light as the shadow of his sorcery spread. His first two fingers touched my throat again as I lay in my nightdress before him, suddenly aware that the skirt was still where he had left it at my knees.
Another memory crept softly into my mind, at once disquieting and too pleasurable—not a vision, but a feeling— and I wondered if this was how my dream of the past night had begun.
“My art within you fades,” he murmured, between a growl and a solemn sigh, his touch pressing deeper against the sensitive flesh under my jaw.
I forced myself to breathe slowly, evenly, trying to settle my quickening pulse.
“Elizabeth. What have you done?”
A deep tremor betrayed me before I could fight to hold it back. I felt speared by him—by his words, by the pressure of his fingers on the side of my throat, by the sense of his possession rising within me—utterly trapped, fixed and impaled against my mattress with no hope of escape.
Kill him, had I thought? Had I dreamt I had so much as the fraction of a chance to even flash the blade, much less to drive it home?
I could feel my chest begin to heave with every breath, the quivering pulse of my blood beating against his firm touch.
“Something has changed.” There was no accusation in his tone, only the statement of a self-evident fact, and the taut, forced evenness in his voice assuaged nothing. I would have liked hot wrath better than his strained, unnatural calm. “Do not think I cannot tell. But relax, for now. Relax. The amount of goldenscythe I measure must be nearly exact.”
I closed my eyes, allowing myself to release my tension and my last, instinctive defenses into the inviting darkness of his shadow, feeling my body and pulse relent beneath his hand. He had me—he meant to heal me—there was nothing I could do.
“Better,” he grunted. “But not by much.”
I thought I felt his fingers drift slowly down my neck as he drew away, so subtle as to leave me wondering whether I had only dreamt his touch—if I had slipped for a passing moment into imagining the spectral sensation of his hand a half-moment too long on my skin.
And I wondered how he dared touch me so tenderly, after what I now knew he had done to me, how he ravaged the life I had known; and I wondered whether I dared to presume I would have resisted that ghostly caress, had I been sure it was more than my own fantasy.
There was a feeling on my scalp of my hair being gently gripped—of this much I was certain—and I knew that he was taking a cutting of my hair for another elixir. The vast shadow cast by the hearth darkened my bed another second before it vanished again into firelight.
I knew that I ought to tell him something, anything, before suspicion drew him to ask again. The passing moments were allied to me no longer—not when he so clearly sensed that all was not well. Time and silence suggested only guilt.
“It’s a strange story, sir,” I began. And I would tell him a part of it. I had to. With Greycliff awaiting him in his dungeon, there was no other way: better he hear it first from me than encounter so damning a surprise and know that I was false.
But I would not tell him all.
I kept my eyes closed, unwilling yet to watch his response.
“I do not doubt.”
“I should begin it with Greycliff.” I allowed a pause. Even with my eyes still closed, I could feel the gravity of his gaze weigh on me. “When you return to your hall, you will find him in your dungeon. The last I knew of him, he was injured somewhat—and entirely, violently mad, driven beyond his mind by visions he did not will.”
The quiet sounds of his pouring and stirring stilled entirely. My chamber was silent but for the fire in the hearth.
I knew he was waiting.
“Greycliff stole your goldenscythe, sir—or so he claimed in his madness. He pursued Reinhardt and me with a knife, but after a fight we overcame him, and dragged him to Absolon.”
I felt the sharp, sudden intake of Victor’s breath, and the entire chamber drew into itself like a gathering storm.
“ Greycliff threatened your life? ” His deep voice lashed into the room, his rage at once primal and terribly, frighteningly controlled, as cruel and precise as his iron daggers.
The voice of a man who could kill , I thought to myself, and as I thought of my husband’s murder again I opened my eyes and sat up on the mattress.
Victor’s scorpion cane was still on the floor beside my bed. I do not know why in that moment my eyes found it—perhaps it was the thought of knives. But it occurred to me that if he were to bend or stoop to retrieve it, he would be too close to the poor hiding place of my husband’s book and box. If an unexpected shape in the dusty shadows were to catch the corner of his eye…
And yet, of all that he could have replied to my revelation, it was the threat to my life that first enraged him.
“Not mine, I don’t think, but Reinhardt’s—a narrow escape. And I do not think Greycliff would have swung his knife at Reinhardt, had his mind been his own. Had he not been—intoxicated, somehow. A lunatic, driven by the influence of the goldenscythe he stole.”
“Greycliff will curse the day he crossed me,” Victor intoned, his ominous words equally a threat and a promise.
“What will you do to him?”
“That is mine to decide when the time comes.”
“I don’t think he meant?—”
“You wish to defend him before me?” Victor interrupted, his voice immediately hard as stone. “Seek a singular moment of my mercy on his behalf?”
“No, sir. He stole from you, necessitating your ride into danger and delaying my cure, and I leave him to your judgment.”
He grunted, and I thought he was satisfied—until he spoke again. “Why were you with Reinhardt?”
“I went to see him perform as the Marvelous Manfredini. I saw an advertisement in the newspaper, and it struck my fancy. I thought it seemed a mild enough excursion.”
“It struck your fancy,” he repeated. I knew that edge of suspicion in his voice. I remembered it from when he kept me after class, questioning me about Forsythe.
“No, sir—not in that way. I don’t mean it that way at all.”
Despite even the distance between us I knew that I felt him exhale, and the tension in my own body eased. I questioned for a moment whether this was reaction or sympathy—and remembered that, partial though the spell had always been and faded though it had become, I was possessed by him yet.
Some part of myself was still his.
I drew a long, deep breath and released it gently, letting myself relax, wondering if this should have any effect on the man whose shadow I shared.
Victor turned back to his work.
I wondered if I ought to account it mere coincidence.
“I should like to speak for a little, and tell you the next part of the story before you adjudge me, sir. Be assured that nowhere in the tale does a gentleman strike my fancy,” I continued, my inward smile bitterly wistful: this was true enough, as it was only my remembrance of Victor which stirred me so—Victor alone who drew out mild memories into that long, lonely ache I was forbidden by my chaste vow to feel, much less to quench—but I knew now that he had withheld from me, betrayed me, brought upon me all my misfortune, and I could not grace such a brute with the name of gentleman . “Even had I not my vow to restrict me, I would feel no such temptation. It is true that after our harrowing escape from Greycliff, I should not hesitate to count Reinhardt a friend. But that is all.”
“Speak, then,” he said simply, and I heard no overt malice in his voice. The now-familiar taps and clinks and liquid sounds of his chemistry resumed.
“I wished to read a particular book. I could not find it in Hargrave’s library here, and in your absence Absolon would not allow me into yours. I thought that I remembered seeing it at the corner spiritualist shop—the one where first we met, sir—but I did not remember the way, and thought it unwise to go alone.” Unwise to go at all , I suspected he would say if I paused too long, and so after a breath I quickly began again. “I saw the advertisement for the Manfredini show, and thought it would make for a pleasant diversion—something to prevent stagnation of the blood in the coming and going from the theater, but nothing too strenuous—and that afterward Reinhardt might tell me the way.
“It was indeed entertaining, and Reinhardt preferred to go with me through the underground rather than see me go alone. I had an ill feeling about taking a cab, and thought the tunnels for the best. The way to Witch’s Corner was without event, and I perused the volume that interested me,” I tried so earnestly not to rush these words, not to appear to evade his attention and thereby draw suspicion, that I wondered if I had drawn them out too long, “but along the way of our return Greycliff delayed us with his mad pursuit, and we were forced to flee and to fight for our lives.
“At last we overcame him together: Reinhardt first with some manner of illusion, but then with his fists—he broke Greycliff’s collarbone, I think, though Greycliff was too savage in his madness for that to stop him—and I with, well, my art, sir. Our art; yours and mine woven together. I never meant to expend it so: all of the running, and then this. But it was a case of life and death. As it is, Reinhardt is battered, bruised, and sore, but I think no worse than that, and my legs troubled me terribly until the elixir last night—yet I believe that I saved both Reinhardt’s life and my own, and likely Greycliff’s as well.
“Reinhardt dragged him to—I cannot say I recall the door; my memory of the end of the journey is dim and confused—Reinhardt said he dragged Greycliff to Absolon to be cast into your dungeon, and somehow I made it back to my chamber. After midnight, I’m afraid, and despite my haste—but I do not think it was long after. Immediately I took a drink of the elixir, and slept.”
I stopped there, waiting for him to speak, wondering how many interminably long seconds would pass until he realized I meant to say no more.
I did not know whether I should allow myself to feel some manner of relief, or whether I should continue to hold my breath: I had finished; I had finished the tale, and thought that I had avoided any dire blunders; I had accounted for my condition, and told him no secrets nor outright lies?—
“And if Reinhardt broke Greycliff’s collarbone,” Victor began as he turned to me slowly, “and dragged him—unconscious, I wonder, or yammering gibberish all the way?—some distance down the tunnel…” I sensed a faint warmth of amusement and curiosity growing in his voice. “Then what, precisely, did you do to Greycliff?”
“I think I mesmerized him, sir.”
“You think you mesmerized him,” he repeated with a grave, cocked bow of his head, his mask flashing in the firelight. I saw that he held a glass flask in his hand: a different shape than the one he had used two nights ago, and its contents a thinner, sicklier green.
“Now you’re making fun of me, sir; I can tell by the demeanor of your nod.”
He paused, straightening a little, and I had the terrible thought that behind his mask he might have smiled.
A cruel, cruel thing to imagine—I banished the impression from my mind’s eye—that so sardonic and solitary a man might tease me fondly now, as he had invented his bitter jokes for me in the carriage to distract me from my pain.
How now could I allow myself to think that something in me, something I had done or said, should have warmed so hard a heart?
After his own grim manner, and despite all he had done to me, I felt that in that moment he meant only to be kindly toward me, the elixir of the rare herb that would cure me still fresh in his hand—in the same moment, unbeknownst to him, that I watched him in my quiet duplicity, speaking to him in incomplete truths as I contemplated his doom.
Never in my life had I been such a villain.
I wished in that moment that I had Reinhardt’s command of illusion, that if I felt myself begin to weep I could make myself disappear.
I wished that Victor would be cruel to me, or savage me for disobeying his command, or force me against my will—or simply be cold, or unthinking, or indifferent. Anything to absolve me of my sorrow, whet the knife of my vengeance, silence the whisper of my soul.
“Why,” Victor began to ask me, and that same faint warmth in his voice cut me to the bone, “do you think you mesmerized him?”
“Because I think I had nearly mesmerized myself.” I looked again to the flask in his hand as I spoke—anywhere but to his eyes. “When I looked into the mirror the morning after you left—after you possessed me—I saw that my eyes had changed. They were altered in color, and in character more like yours, sir: dark, fiery and wild. I stared, fascinated by my reflection— too fascinated—I felt a kind of fog begin to draw over my mind, and I tore myself away from the image in the mirror before I could discover what might come next. I could not mistake the feeling that I was falling under some manner of spell, and that at the same time I had discovered in myself—in you—some young, feral art I had not known. I felt restless, sir, all day, until the feeling faded with my later exhaustion. Burning, somehow. And all the while I could not tell where I ended, and where you began.”
“Show me,” was his only reply.
“Show you what?”
I heard the thump of full glassware on wood as he set the new elixir down rather heavily on my nightstand beside the other flask, and the low huff of what sounded like a gently exasperated sigh.
He knelt before me on the fine old rug, my heart quickening for the strangeness of the gesture—and for the awful thought that he was closer now to the dust beneath the bed, disturbed as it was by my repeated stowing and retrieval of my husband’s book and box. Were there streaks through the dust that extended beyond the shadow of the mattress? Would they draw his eye? Or did he know or sense already what I had done, where I had hurriedly stashed away the surreptitious prizes of my quest, and he knelt with all intention to begin the search that would prove me untrue?
“The goldenscythe elixir must steep for a while. Open your eyes,” he intoned—I had not realized I had closed them, but I did as he bid me—“and look into mine. Show me what you did.”
We were almost eye to eye. He had adjusted his kneeling height to roughly match the level of my gaze as I sat before him on the edge of the bed, and though he allowed some space between us, it was not nearly enough to calm the sudden, quivering sensation that raced through my nerves at the sight of him on his knees before me.
I knew only that I shifted subtly on the mattress—whether away from him or toward, whether my first instinct was for my legs to close or part beneath the thin fabric of my nightdress, I cannot say.
“You wish for me to—attempt to mesmerize you, sir?”
“Whatever it is that you did to yourself in the mirror, and then to Greycliff—do that to me. Do not hold back; do not think I cannot tell if you do. Make me feel your power.”
It would be my fourth time doing so, of course, not my third as he had thought: I had omitted the incident with the artist in the neighboring theater seat from my tale as I told it, thinking the detail unnecessary, and that I needed not perturb Victor with the presence of yet another man?—
The absurdity of my consideration then struck me. Why, after all, should I care to spare from his own jealousy this man whom I meant to kill?
And if I meant truly to uphold that deadly promise I made to myself, had he now unknowingly granted me my chance? He awaited my gaze; he invited my attempt to overpower him.
What if I could?
His scorpion cane, and the long dagger it concealed, lay just to the side of his muscular knees and my little feet, halfway beneath the pooling blackness of his cloak across the floor. Were I to see those burning eyes let go of their dark fire—the massive shoulders begin to relax and slump?—
My heartbeat quickened. My palms grew damp where they rested on my thighs.
“You hesitate,” his low voice rumbled in the warm, still air.
His shadow was stifling me, lightening my head, invading me with a slipping vertigo that bordered on nausea—not since first I met him had the sense of him unsettled me so—or if this was not his shadow (how could it be, when I had come to find pleasure in the feeling of his art?) then it was my own nerves in the heat of the room, in the dire grip of my secrets, in the horror and triumph and anticipation of the moment that had come?—
“Did you pause thus before enforcing your will upon Greycliff?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why, Elizabeth, do you hesitate now?”
“Because—” I forced my voice to settle. “Because it’s you, sir.”
“You fear harming me?”
“I could not begin to presume that I?—”
He silenced me suddenly with a guttural snarl, his eyes burning into mine. “Have you forgotten what I taught you about presumption ?”
I showed as little fear as I felt: in that moment, the rising of his ire held less horror for me than did my own heart. “I meant only to respect your art.”
With a slow, subtle shake of his head, I watched his wrath fade. “But you did not respect Greycliff’s. You did not allow such deference to impede the vital power of a sorcerer’s presumption.”
I nodded, saying nothing.
“Do not allow it now.”
Whether I wished to be his student, his apprentice, his lover or his murderer, I had nothing to gain by demure restraint.
Drawing my spine up straight, I drew a breath—and I drove my gaze like a dagger into his own.
His eyes locked on mine, widening almost imperceptibly with surprise for the first fleeting moment; I forced my will deeper, desperate for the early advantage, wondering only then what should become of me if I lost to him, if I were to lose myself in the power of his gaze?—
No! I could not allow such a thought—I felt myself falter as it touched my mind, the inexorable force of Victor’s will gaining like a gathering wave. He felt nothing like the nameless artist, nothing like Greycliff, and I felt as if I strove with something terrible and vast and inhuman—as if I raged in headlong madness against a roiling black sea and its churning moonlit froth—yet I would strive.
I would presume.
But he was impossible, unyielding, endless. He withstood me through the last of my strength, letting me drain myself into him, until with a last, audible gasp I forced my gaze deeper into the blackness of his eyes with all that remained of my fading stamina.
Something relented—a sudden shift—a vague release. For a moment I could not tell whether I had been overcome or was (unthinkably) victorious, but in my confusion I heard a deep, soft grunt behind his mask, and in the remaining state of my possession I felt the quiet thrill that brushed down his spine.
I thought again of the dagger hidden in his cane. If this were to be the moment—if I could reach it in time—but it had taken all of me to affect him so, all my art and strength and will, and the sensation of my small triumph was too intimate—I felt too close to him—I remembered when first I pressed my mind into his, lying in his arms in his throne, and felt that same fleeting tremor of tension course through his strong body.
And in my reverie I hesitated, and the moment was lost.
Exhaustion flooded me as I watched him stretch his powerful shoulders and rise to his feet, breaking the spell, and I thought that the deep, foreboding sound of his laughter was tinged with a certain pride.
“Well done, Sorceress,” he said. He had never called me Sorceress before, and I wondered at the change. Was he mocking me now? Was all of this, all of his request for me to mesmerize him, no more than a means for him to maneuver me into exhausting myself, draining me of my power and my threat? Had he perceived or suspected my intent, and rendered me helpless to act upon it?
But no—no, the sound and nature of his voice was wrong.
“Rest, if you wish,” I heard him half-whisper as I allowed myself to lie back down on the bed; my breathing was still fast and heavy, my heartbeat was still in my head as I fought to recover my strength. “The elixir is nearly ready. I will restore you soon enough. Well done, Elizabeth.”
The pride in his voice seemed only to grow as he looked down at me, his broad chest swelling with a deep breath as he watched. I thought almost that he meant to approach me again—his eyes were changed somehow—and then I sensed that something held him back, and he turned to my nightstand to consider the elixir flasks with the cooling frustration of restraint.
“Little wonder,” he chuckled, and I wondered if he had found within himself some compromise between the grim control he had resolved to affect and whatever secret elation (it must have been this) lay locked and dreaming in his dark heart, “that Greycliff did not stand a chance. From which book did you learn this, Elizabeth?”
“From no book, sir.”
“As I suspected and hoped.”
“I thought it was from you. Some effect of your shadow inside me. My eyes halfway resembled yours—perhaps they still do?—”
“But what you did with them was entirely your own. I do not doubt the misconception spurred your confidence, freed your fantasy and your instinct from the manacles of the inhibited mind, and you may attribute that to me, if you so desire. The rest was yours alone.”
What was I to say, spent from my effort, praised and celebrated for my sorcery by the man whom a moment ago I had contemplated how to kill?
“How would you have managed to overcome Greycliff, after all,” he continued, “at the end of your excursion after some manner of book, having spent so much of my art in the chase and the unforeseen escape that your legs pained you again? By the time you conquered Greycliff, there was all too little of me left.”
For all that he said, some manner of book was all I heard. He had not forgotten my mention of a book.
Had I been such a fool as to expect that he would?
My body tensed. I felt myself sink into the mattress.
There was no menace in the deep rumble of his voice. The words themselves were enough: “I wonder what manner of book was worth it all.”
It was a duel, a dance of death—it had been from the start—it could be nothing else—and every time his manner reassured me, and I let down my guard, he rushed in again with the flash of steel. I felt as if I were Forsythe, armed only with a poor stage rapier and the recitation of some mannered, labored notion of how to perform a fight, set against an invincible foe so assured of his own victory that he measured himself on style.
“I do not blame you,” he went on. “You were restless and alive. And every hindrance was a dare, and every challenge tasted of latent triumph. You became driven. The book became an end for your indulgence in the means, an exercise for your will and your growing power. Do you think I was not your age once: a fierce young man in the first arousal of his sorcery, my new art hot with desire and fury and faerie fire? And did you presume,” his voice lowered as he looked down at me with a strange gaze, at once imperious and intimate, his dark eyes burning, “when you felt my shadow rise within you, that I could not feel you in turn? Dimly, distantly—a warmth, a scent, a silver shade beneath the moon—but I am not insensible.”
I froze again, not daring yet to breathe.
He grew quiet, and turned from me slowly, as if allowing me the mercy of release from the gravity of his gaze. I thought I saw his scarred hand lightly tense as he watched the fire.
How much had he felt? I grew terrified that I had said as much aloud—but he made no response, and so, sitting up once more, I comforted myself by watching his stillness.
The glow of the hearth flickered on his mask.
His breathing was steady, the massive shoulders gently rising and falling.
Across the miles between us, had he sensed my unquiet fire? My pain and exhaustion? My fear, my unmoored fury, my pride?
Was indeed my touch his own, as I had felt and known so well, when I spread the poultice on my legs; and dimly, distantly , did he feel my slick skin tremble and warm for his touch?
Could he feel me clench and quiver in the secret pleasure of my morning dream?
My eyes closed. The sound of my breath was unsteady as I exhaled.
I wished Reinhardt had never found the locked box beneath my husband’s grave.
I wished I had never known the truth.
Perhaps Victor has measured the goldenscythe poorly , I thought, my strained mind falling into fantasy, and I will go mad when I drink it, and forget all that I have come to know, and love him again.
It was a small, bitter relief to find that I had no tears to cry. I could not allow him to see me so.
“No, I do not blame you,” he breathed, almost a sigh, and as I opened my eyes I saw that still he gazed into the hearth, “but you will tell me the title of this book nonetheless.”
“ A Discovery of Minor Artifacts of the Egyptians. ” I did not hesitate this time. If his plan had been to sap my strength, he was victorious: I had no energy to dissemble anymore.
“Your husband’s book.”
“Don’t call him that.” The words came swiftly, unchecked, and I belatedly added: “Please.”
“And what did you learn,” the low rumble of his voice was no longer in my ears but in the back of my mind, inescapable, and I felt as if my body and my bedchamber filled with his shadow, “from S.R. Buckingham?”
“About the Talisman.”
A log in the hearth cracked in a brief burst of embers as I felt my words pierce him, the aim of my poor rapier true. A duel, had I thought? If only it were so simple, this hellish dance between us, these secrets that cut both ways—if only I did not recoil every time I drew blood.
When his shadow rose in me, I felt every taut muscle and every wound as if it were my own.
“Immortality, sir.” I would tell him only this—soothe and satisfy his mind, though after his crime he deserved no such solace. I did not know whether I should lament first my weakness or the chill that clutched and petrified my heart. A reverse Galatea of Cyprus, I thought to myself, transforming from soft flesh into stone. “I desired to know the purpose and properties of the Talisman of Thoth. Why Hargrave allowed me to name any price I wished and yet still came out to the advantage in the bargain. Why it would be a waste for Gremio to have it on his shelf.”
“Good!” he grunted behind his steel mask. “As well you must desire to know. I expect of you no less.”
He maintained control so well: the darkness, the gruff coarseness, the faraway air of fallen nobility that dignified the bearing of his brutal body and lent to his gaze a defiant pride. An invincible duelist. Effortless virtuosity. Sprezzatura until the end. In some way I could not help but admire him for that.
If I knew no better, if he had never possessed me, I should never have sensed the wildness that edged his anticipation.
“And,” Victor continued, “this knowledge gained—the quest won—are you satisfied, for now?”
“No, sir.”
“Good,” he repeated—but I knew that his voice was not entirely the same.
I had him—I had him then—but I had pushed to the crisis too soon, rushed in with my little rapier still sheathed and waiting for my hand.
The gleam of firelight on glass caught my eye. The flasks of green elixir were still on my nightstand. I was still weak. If I were to ask him now what he had done to my husband, and why he had never told me, would he leave me?
Would I die without him, uncured, his warm shadow within me fading into Gremio’s cold miasma?
Would he let me go?
Or must I live half a lie?
“If the Talisman is for immortality, sir—eternal life—why did you tell Gremio it was likely of little use to you? If you want to live forever—that’s why you entered the contract with Gremio, isn’t it? to extend your life?—if you want to live forever, why have you not simply taken the Talisman for yourself? Why bring me to Hargrave for me to sell it away? Why?—”
Why let Karvonen keep it for his alchemical tests , I nearly said, but caught myself in time: better to say nothing that could lead him to Karvonen’s laboratory, and there find the Talisman missing.
“Why any of it,” I continued, “if the Talisman is everything you want? I don’t understand, sir.” I felt my brain begin to turn, my head begin to ache: the complications and vicissitudes of the matter of the Talisman and Victor’s contract with Gremio were disorienting enough on my best days, and now at the ebb of my strength I could untangle the knot no further. “I don’t understand.”
“Because,” he replied, “as S.R. Buckingham theorized, that is not the Talisman’s only supposed property. Do you recall the rest?”
“I did not have time to read it all,” I said, and it was true, “but he thought it to be of use in curse-breaking, I think, and the repelling of ghouls?—”
“Correct. Ghouls, and other unnatural creatures of darkness, the debased life and animation of which are not in the exalted manner of a mortal man. ”
Those were my husband’s words, surely: pompous and overwrought, and I disliked to hear Victor recite them so, and disliked all the more to know that Victor had committed any part of that book to memory.
But why that phrase, of all?
“I still don’t understand, sir. Do you mean to say that you are…”
“A ghoul? An afreet?” He chuckled bitterly, shaking his head, and seeing his black form looming in my chamber, rimmed in the light of the fire, reminded me of the night when first I had summoned him—his phantom, his spectral apparition—when I set my hand in his, and the flames seemed to rise around us from my circle of ash, and looking to the face of the vision before me I saw only the ghastly, empty whiteness of a moon-pale skull.
What was Victor D’Arco?
I scarcely suppressed a shiver, my eyes desperately searching him for signs of mortal life. His scarred hands were flesh and blood—had I not seen him bleed, when he cut his thumb and mine? He breathed; his eyes were alive; his white shirt was streaked with the sweat and mud of the road and a mild spatter of dark red; I had felt his heartbeat, the warmth and strength of his body; I had memorized the scent of his skin?—
Was he not a man?
“The vagaries of language are not my particular study. Let them call me what they will—there is no name for what I am, save my name alone. As I told you: this is not my first time making, nor breaking, such a contract as I made and will break with Gremio. Nature made me a mortal man, I made myself a sorcerer; and yet, does a life extended by art and infernal contract remain—” I could not mistake the sardonic, defiant tone in his voice—“ in the exalted manner of a mortal man ? Or do I rather exist, as I suspect, as what S.R. Buckingham deemed an unnatural creature ?”
“I can’t say I know, sir.”
“Nor can I. And I while I do not trust Gremio as far as I could throw him, I cannot think that that mule-face would send me to hunt an artifact which would negate his power over me should I succeed in seizing it. He makes mistakes—he is, especially, a serial underestimator of human potential—but he would not survive so long in the chair of the Duke of Tartarus if he were an utter fool. No, I do not imagine he would assign me a quest likely to end to my benefit. Yet I expect he would be all too pleased to send me into a trap.”
“You suspect the Talisman would be useless to you at best, and detrimental at worst?”
“Possibly,” he replied. “I have interrogated the literature of every age and nation of every language I read—a simpler task than it sounds, so little of it both survives and remains worthwhile. I have found no precedent by which to judge. S.R. Buckingham, for all his flaws, knew more than most.”
Do you mean to say, sir, that S.R. Buckingham knew too much? I fantasized that I would reply to him—here it was, here it must have been it, the motive for Victor’s involvement in my husband’s demise; the motive now for me to suspect Victor to have stabbed into him himself with his dark dagger—but I said nothing.
Nothing at all.
Victor held the sickly-green elixir before the firelight, swirling the thick liquid in its flask. I do not know whether it merely caught the hue of the glow of the hearth, or whether its own color had taken on a more golden cast, but he seemed somehow satisfied.
Setting the flask back on my nightstand, he sat down beside me on the bed; I was not prepared, and his weight sinking into the mattress at my side pulled me almost too near to him before I rebalanced myself.
“Seat yourself before me,” he intoned. “As if we were in my throne again.”
He spoke as if it were a mere matter of course—as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I nodded and stood; he spread his muscular thighs to make room for me before him on the edge of the bed. How I fought against the quickening of my own pulse as I lowered myself slowly back down onto the mattress as he instructed me: between the legs of my husband’s murderer, the man I had been such a fool to trust, no defense but the frail cotton of my nightdress. Had my hair still been in its accustomed bun, I thought to myself, I should have felt the warmth of his breath on the bare skin of my nape.
As it was, beneath my unbound locks, I felt the fine hairs on the back of my neck rise with the faint tingling of my warming skin: the heat of his body so close against my spine was enough.
Any moment, I imagined, the iron grip of those arms would entrap me beyond hope of escape, the inexorable hands closing over my breasts—or perhaps, if he knew what I had hidden from him, around my throat.
How I willed in vain my heart to slow as I waited, and waited, and the few moments grew long.
I did not know whether I was relieved or disappointed that he did not touch me.
He did not touch me at all.
“Relax,” he whispered. I shifted a little, stopping my breath as I felt my ear accidentally brush against the cold steel of his mask. A sudden chill stiffened my spine, pressing my shoulders back against him—and that was worse still.
“Relax,” he repeated, his voice close to my ear. “If you feel faint, lean back against me. I will not let you fall.”
“The elixirs?”
Close behind me, I felt him nod. “The goldenscythe mixture first, then the original again. My shadow within you must be restored.”
“I thought the possession was only temporary.”
“Correct. A few weeks will likely suffice: your injury was more severe than Greycliff’s, but you are stronger, and this remedy is more potent. And during such time you will remain at my side, as I told you I required. Persistent exposure to my art will banish the remainder of Gremio’s influence. You may sleep in your bed, and take your meals where you wish, but you will otherwise remain close to me until you are entirely cured.”
He paused. I felt my fingers curl against my own thigh—and relaxed my hand immediately, wondering if I was already too late to hide my tension from his eyes.
Where, then, was I to hide the Talisman?
In my mattress where I had left it, far away from me as I spent my waking hours with him in his underground hall, the very key to eternal life unguarded but for the poor protection of a locked door? Could even I trust—I had imagined every terrible chance—that the very weight and movement of us on the bed right now would not dislodge it from its precarious hiding-place in the side of the mattress, causing it to fall onto the floor or (worse still) the metal box below with a devastating tell-tale plunk ? Even now, was I more than a breath away from disaster?
Or should I rather keep it on my person tomorrow, in his immediate presence, concealed from him only by the layers of my clothes? If I wore it on its chain around my neck, as I had before, and let it rest between my breasts—surely, there it would be safe. Unseen, untouched. Unless…
I needed not complete the thought—I could not, with him so close that I could feel again the rise and fall of his chest against my back. Yes, the Talisman would be safe there from the Victor I had known: the Victor I had come to trust so well, who despite every opportunity and chance had never done me wrong, never proven false.
But I did not know if I knew him anymore.
“Do I make myself clear,” he replied to my silence, his deep voice grave yet neither hard nor cold, “Elizabeth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any further concerns, before we begin?”
Surely, he felt my tension: how could he not? Despite all that I knew, all that I concealed, I was obliged now to trust him once again, to let my mind and my body fall into the clutches of Doctor D’Arco. What if I go mad from the goldenscythe? I thought to say—both as an excuse for my manner and a genuine concern in itself—but its puling cowardice offended me, and I could think of nothing more dignified to offer by way of explanation. “No, sir.”
“Then we begin.” Behind the mask, his voice was low already beside my ear, and I listened to it grow lower still as the words became strange: some manner of spell, I knew, spoken nearly under his breath, repeated three times in a language I did not understand. I felt the vestiges of his possessing shadow stir within me, his deep darkness closing in around me; I allowed the rise and fall of my chest to come into rhythm with his as I felt myself sink into him—had I leaned back so soon into his arms?—my eyes watching the cobwebs on the ceiling sway from the heat of the hearth, my head resting comfortably on the warm, solid support of his shoulder.
I had not meant for this. I would surrender to him, I knew—I must, for him to cure me—but this was so soon, so complete, so natural.
I was exhausted, I told myself. My defenses were weak. It could not be helped. Had he tried me another day, another time—I assured myself, I convinced myself—I would have endured a little longer.
Even now, as his shadow swept through the last of my resistance, I indulged in the fragile belief that this was so.
“You were correct to call Greycliff a lunatic ,” he said as he rolled his shoulder to set me closer to upright and pressed the rim of the first flask to my lips. His tone was not unlike the way he spoke in class, and as I felt the low rumble of his voice against my back it reminded me, vividly, that I rested against the chest of my professor. “Goldenscythe retains some shadow of the moon—but Greycliff’s fate will not be yours. Drink slowly. All of it.”
I reached up to take hold of the flask, drink it myself, allow myself at least this paltry point of pride—but he would not let go. We held it together, my fingers carelessly touching his as if it meant nothing at all. The taste was no worse than I expected by now, and as I felt my grip falter and my hand drift slowly down to my side—he was right, I regretted to concede to myself, he was right to keep his hand on the flask—all I could think was where to hide the Talisman tomorrow, my mind returning to fix upon this single thought. I imagined the feeling of it hanging against my chest again, the look of his scarred hands by candlelight as he reached for it, knowing somehow (to my horror) that it was there, his fingers curling around its shape as his warm palm hefted my breast—he would seize the Talisman from me, as he had seized it from the black velvet cloth of the fortuneteller’s table?—
No.
I blinked, attempting to clear my mind.
Victor pressed the next elixir to me, and I paused before I began to drink.
No—I returned to my abstraction—my memory was false. Victor had never taken the Talisman, not even when I dropped it onto the table before him. I had taken it. I had held it as we ran.
He had never touched it at all. The memories swarmed into my head, blocking out all other possibility of thought: the Talisman falling from my hand onto the wax-spattered velvet of the fortuneteller’s table; Victor surging to his feet, his scarred hands grasping the back of the chair so hard I waited for the wood to break apart; his voice as he commanded me to take the Talisman and come with him; my desperate grip imprinting its textures into the flesh of my palm as we ran, the sound of Gremio’s hooves behind us; the Talisman by the midnight candlelight of the library as I held it out to Hargrave, releasing it into his control.
The experiments to try its veracity and power were left to Karvonen.
My husband never placed Victor and that artifact together in his hieroglyphic manuscript; Victor summoned Gremio to the house, rather than seek the prize for himself.
Victor never touched the Talisman.
In the art and artifice of his uncanny existence, did he mistrust the Talisman and the legend of its dominion over unnatural creatures of darkness ?
Did he suspect it might destroy him?
Then I was powerless against him no longer.
I could kill him, perhaps, if I so chose. If I could temper and hone my heart of stone.
The Talisman would be my weapon.
“One mouthful, slowly,” Victor’s voice rumbled beside my ear, drawing me back from my morbid reverie. He was no innocent, not with my husband’s blood on his hands, not with the ruins of my life crushed heedlessly last year under the tireless stride of his black Hessian boots—but I fought the pang in my breast, the hairline crack in my new stone heart, to hear him go on knowing nothing of my dark designs, restoring me to life as I calculated his death.
For all his potent art, he did not know my mind. He did not know my heart.
“Slowly,” he repeated. “Then rest.”
I felt him tip the flask, the thick, bitter liquid sliding into my lips; I swallowed slowly as behind his mask I heard him whisper another spell, but the words grew distant as I felt myself falling, falling into his dark warmth, all my decisive machinations suddenly foolish, futile, far away. At my sides, my hands grasped instinctively for something to hold—the sheets, I expected, or my own knees—but I felt the hard muscles of his thighs flex beneath my touch, the slow swell of his broad, sweat-damp chest against my spine as he drew in a breath. I should have drawn back, I should have drawn away my hands the instant that I knew what I had done, but I did not—I could not—I held onto his powerful thighs with what little strength remained in my hands, my head resting back against his shoulder again, and as I closed my eyes, I felt his warm hands cover mine.
He was going to pull my touch away, I knew—quietly forgive me my mistake, occasioned by my exhausted state and my being halfway overcome by his art, and move my hands to grip at fistfuls of the uncomplaining bedclothes—but he did no such thing.
I cannot say if I felt his breathing deepen and quicken against my back, or whether it was my own, or ours together—his shadow had nearly drowned me again, and I can no longer be certain of all that I sensed, or thought, or felt—but I knew that his fingers slipped into the spaces between mine, and that with a gentle, unyielding grip, he pressed my hands closer against the heat of his thighs, holding me in silence as his darkness spread through me.
I do not know how long I watched the cobwebs on the ceiling though half-closed eyes, my hands still with his, my head still resting on the mild rise and fall of his shoulder as we breathed in the same slow rhythm. In some sense I already felt stronger, though a part of me wished it were not yet so: I should have liked to forget, and sink into another swoon, and sleep in his arms again as if the truth had never turned my heart.
I was too strong, I supposed. My consciousness never quite found the mercy to slip away.
“How do you feel?” I felt him whisper at last, his voice pressing into my mind.
He would never truly know.
“Stronger, sir,” was all I brought myself to say.
His right hand relented, drawing slowly away from mine, and I felt the familiar pressure of his two fingers against my throat.
I suppose I should have let my right hand fall away from the comforting, sensual warmth of his thigh. I ought not to have wanted to touch him anymore.
“Good,” he breathed. His hand lingered so gently on my neck—with such a strange, subtle abandon, when he had been so careful before.
I wanted to sigh; to melt into his touch.
“You should sleep,” he intoned quietly as his fingers drifted away, and for a breathless moment I wondered if he meant now , like this, so close against him, with his left hand still holding mine—but no. No, the rest of his words dashed aside the thought. “We will meet in class tomorrow, at the accustomed time.”
“Very well, sir.”
“You may rise.” I listened carefully to his words, searching for regret in his low voice.
“I’ll try.”
He did not let my hand go until I stood—until I became the one to pull away.
“Steady on your feet, Elizabeth?”
I nodded. “Just tired now, is all.” I do not know what compelled me to lie to him more than the moment required. “Should I apply the poultice again at dawn?”
“For another day, perhaps two.” I needed not hear the shifting of the bed as he stood to feel his looming presence rise behind me.
My breath caught. I listened for the faint, fatal knell of the Talisman falling from the tear in the side of the mattress, but the sound never came.
“Thank you, Victor.” He had stepped to my side and away—gathering some of his herbs into a cloth bag, fastening around his waist the well-worn belt that held his pistol and sword—but he turned as I spoke, and my eyes rose to seek his. “You saved me.”
“How could I not?” I thought that I heard him say as his broad back straightened, and he looked down to meet my gaze with the flicker of the hearth in his dark eyes; I wondered whether he had spoken aloud, or only in my mind, or whether I had only imagined he said such a thing at all. “Rest,” he told me then: of this much I was certain. “Tomorrow you will feel more yourself.”
I nodded once more.
He departed, locked the door, and I was alone again, my only company the terrible knowledge that he knew—how could he not?—that I was no longer the same. I listened to the sound of his fading footfalls.
For no reason that I wished to understand, I sat down and picked up his scorpion cane from the floor, leaning it against the bed beside me.
This was a triumph, I tried to tell myself: I was cured, I would recover; he had discovered neither the Talisman nor the box and book; I had now a night’s reprieve—and yet none of it brought me relief.
One night ago I had lost myself to pleasure in my sleep, dreaming of his touch.
Tonight, I did not know if I could bear to dream again.
I did not know what to feel anymore.