15 #2
Gwen said, “He has always done so.” She started back down the hall. Braithe followed, telling herself she needed to know how this house was arranged, where the windows were, any doors, any possible exits.
Gwen led her into a spacious chamber that boasted a bed, a nightstand, a washstand, and several chairs. There was no window. Braithe stopped just inside the doorway. “He expects me to sleep here?”
“His chamber is next door.”
“Why does that matter?” Braithe had no wish to guess. She remembered the casual cruelty of the changeling queen, and it gave her an overwhelming, pointless urge to run to the front door, to try to open it by force, with her fingernails if necessary.
“He will want you near,” Gwen whispered. “When he wants to—to do what he does.”
“Which is?” Braithe asked bluntly.
Gwen’s eyes remained cast down. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“His mood.”
Braithe welcomed the sudden warmth of her rising temper, and she let it burn. It was better to feel angry than terrified. “Has he done these things to you, Gwen? Has he hurt you?”
“When I was younger. He doesn’t hurt me now.” When Gwen turned to go back into the hall, Braithe saw the scars on her neck. They were old wounds, untreated, badly healed. They matched the foul images she had seen in Faolin’s mind.
She followed Gwen out. “Does no one come looking for you?”
Gwen’s head came up, and she shot Braithe the green-eyed glance that was so familiar and yet so strange, lacking the spirit of Gwenvere that had made it sparkle. “No one knows I’m missing.”
This, Braithe understood, with a lurch of sickness in her stomach, was the thing about changelings.
They took the place of the stolen child, and no one knew for certain that the real one was gone.
It was one of her mam’s warning tales come true.
It was ghastly in real life. She said with unintended sharpness, “Show me the rest of this house, please. The other rooms.”
Gwen led the way without demur, a woman accustomed to following orders.
There were other bedchambers, each furnished much like the one she had already seen. There was a kitchen with a square table, two stone sinks, a mostly empty pantry. There were no doors leading outside the house except the front one, a weird circumstance for such a large house.
Braithe paused outside a room that had no door, only a simple arched entryway.
It gave onto a workroom, with mortars and pestles on a worktable, and ancient herbs hanging from racks.
A large glazed window, dimmed with grime, admitted an uncertain shaft of light that illuminated dust motes spinning in the air.
Braithe was about to go inside, but Gwen seized her arm to hold her back. Her hand was small and cold, nothing like the hot, hard fingers of the changeling. “Don’t go in there. It’s not allowed.”
“Why?”
“It’s where he used to make his potions and things. One of the girls went in there once, though he had ordered her not to. He was so mad, he beat her nearly to death. Then he put a block on the room. It’s still there, though he doesn’t go in anymore.”
Braithe leaned forward to peer around the workroom.
It had a distinctive air of disuse, the herbs dry and gray, ready to crumble to dust. The worktable and the tools were blanketed with the sort of grime that takes years to build up.
She couldn’t think why Faolin would care if anyone went in.
It had obviously not been used in a very long time.
She straightened and turned back to Gwen. “Where is that girl now? And you said there were others?”
“They’re gone. He gets tired of them, and they disappear.”
“To where?”
Gwen’s eyes filled with sudden, weary tears. She whispered, “I don’t know. He never says.”
“Have you asked?”
“Once. Never again.” Gwen led the way back toward the chamber Braithe was meant to stay in. As she shuffled along the hallway, she said, “Sometimes it’s not too bad if you don’t make him angry, but if you do…”
“What, Gwen?” Braithe followed her. “If you anger him, what happens?”
Gwen gazed along the corridor, her eyes unfocused, her voice a monotone. “He has ways to hurt you. Some of them are magic, and those are the worst.” She paused, then added, as if to be helpful, “He likes hearing you scream.”
Braithe felt the flood of shame that poured from the older woman.
It was a difficult moment for her, because she couldn’t help seeing Gwenvere when she looked at Gwen, which made the old loathing burn in her breast. But that wasn’t fair to this poor creature.
“It’s not your fault,” she managed to say.
“And I’m sorry about the things that have happened to you. ”
Gwen started into the bedchamber, but Braithe said, “No. I’m not going in. I’m not staying.”
Gwen stopped, looking back at her in real alarm, then, warily, at the closed door to Faolin’s room. She whispered, “I told you he won’t let you leave.”
Braithe said, “Very well. Let’s go back to the kitchen.”
Gwen nodded and started in that direction, clearly glad to move out of Faolin’s hearing.
Braithe, her arms folded and her jaw set, gazed out through the small window above the kitchen sink.
The afternoon was nearly gone, the red sun sinking toward the west. Idhri and Morgana would know she was missing by now.
They would want to look for her but would have no idea where to start.
She said, “Thank you, Gwen. You can leave me here.”