Chapter Twelve
Rhys did not wish to linger, though it was evident that absolutely everyone else did.
As soon as Merlin vanished into the priory, they swarmed the table of food, a wave of chatter rising up amongst them.
“A true legacy,” the priest was saying, plucking a wedge of cheese off the spread. “A blessing, in fact.”
“I have seen your act thrice, dear woman,” Yuri was saying to Mrs. Winterstone. “I don’t suppose there is a Mr. Winterstone?”
“There isn’t, actually,” she answered, tilting her head in amusement. “But there is a husband, if that’s what you mean. My second. Though I’m not opposed to the idea of a third.”
Seph wasn’t saying anything at all, still frowning and clutching either elbow with the palms of her hands. She was the one who bent down to gather their lantern up, peering inside to see how much more flame they had left.
“We should go,” he said to her, his hand reaching out instinctively and then pausing, still in the night air. “I want to go.”
“Good,” she replied, her eyes flicking from the dancing lantern light up to his. “So do I.”
“You are walking?!” Madame Ivanova demanded, appearing so suddenly at their side that both startled. “In the dark?”
“Yes,” said Seph. “It isn’t far.”
She looked disturbed by this, her brow wrinkled and her plump, bejeweled fingers wringing together. “Perhaps share one of our coaches,” she suggested, turning to peer at Rhys. “Walking is hazardous, even in the light.”
“I assure you, we are perfectly safe,” Seph said impatiently. “And we cannot wait for charity.”
The medium nodded, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
“Good night,” Seph added, giving an apologetic grimace. “Thank you for your concern.”
They turned, Rhys following her lead, and got two steps toward the path before he felt those heavily-ringed fingers wrap around his wrist, tugging his attention back over his shoulder. The woman was still frowning at him, purple fur tickling her jowls in the wind.
“Madam, if you please,” he said, tugging his hand free. “We really must be going.”
“It wasn’t your uncle,” she said suddenly, her accent dropping away entirely in favor of a South London clip. “You didn’t see your uncle.”
“All right,” Rhys said, blinking at her. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Watch the path,” she said again as they turned to leave, her voice raising to call after their retreating backs. “Watch for sharp stones!”
He froze, his blood going thick in his neck.
But when he turned back, she was gone, just one of many shadows around the distant campfire.
“Rhys?” Seph said, impatience tinging her voice. “Come along.”
“Right,” he said, turning and trotting after her. “Sorry.”
He did not put much stock into mediums, truth be told, but he kept his eyes low on the dirt path all the way back to the end regardless.
The only stones he saw were the cobbled ones.
In fact, he was so fixated on watching their steps that he’d forgotten the snoring entirely until they had crossed the threshold back into the inn, where it could be heard like a soft, purring kitten, fluttering through the floorboards.
He sighed, casting his eyes heavenward, and climbed the staircase with the full knowledge of the futility of attempting sleep in the auditory nightmare happening behind his rented room.
That was why, about a quarter hour after parting ways, Seph found him plastered against her room’s door, blankets and pillows smashed tightly in his arms, pleading to let him in.
She pulled the door open so suddenly that he stumbled into the room fully enough for her to immediately close it behind him. She was wearing men’s pajamas, he saw as he regained his footing. Small ones that fit her frame, so perhaps a boy’s, not a man’s.
They had blue and red stripes. Always two colors.
He gave her a weak smile and dropped his pillows and blankets on her rug.
Her eyes followed the pile of linens and she blinked twice, looking back up at him with her mouth in a flat line. “Really?”
“I won’t do anything untoward,” he promised, fully aware of how pathetic he sounded. His eyes were already rimmed in red from trying to stuff the snoring out of his ears by suffocating in the pillow, and he blinked at her blearily, realizing his vision had gone a little murky.
“I know you won’t,” she said with a sigh, stepping over the pile of blankets and planting her bare feet at the side of her very comfortable-looking inn bed. “You don’t fancy blondes. I recall.”
He squinted at her. “What?”
“The floor,” she said, pointing at his things. “I’m dousing the lantern in ten seconds, Rhys.”
“Oh, but—”
“Nine,” she said. “Eight …”
He harrumphed and started kicking out his makeshift bed, flopping down onto it just in time for her to douse the light.
“If you snore,” she told him, “you’re going right back out into the hall.”
For a moment, they were silent, with only the rustling of blankets and the creak of the wooden floor between them.
Rhys rolled onto his back, staring up into the dark at where the ceiling probably was. “I like your pajamas,” he said. “Malcolm has the same ones.”
She made a noise like the tap of a cymbal. “Probably got them at the same shop in the Lanes,” she said. “Now I want to turn the light back on so I can see yours.”
“See them in the morning,” he said, stifling a little yawn. “They’re nothing special. But I also bought them in the Lanes. Perhaps we just missed each other, pajama shopping.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed, and he could hear the reluctant smile in her voice.
It made him smile too.
She sighed and shifted her weight. In the dark, he could see her shadow tilting toward him, propping her head up on her hand with her elbow buried in the mattress. “Did you ever share a room as a child? With your foster brothers, perhaps?”
“Not often,” he answered, turning his head to look at her outline. “Sometimes, when we traveled.”
“We’d do it all the time in the caravan,” she said.
“I’d sleep in a cousin’s tent and then she’d come and sleep in mine, sometimes groups of three or four, especially if there was a celebration or special occasion.
In the dark, children always talk. It’s safer to think hard and find the hidden corners of your mind and easier to speak them aloud.
It’s something I think we lose when we’re grown. ”
He considered that, remembering the boys huddled together on the floor of a large castle bedroom in Edinburgh. “We often tried to spook each other in those situations,” he confessed. “And half the time ended up spooking ourselves in the process.”
“Yes, that too,” she said with a wistful, little sigh. “I miss the meandering conversations more than the spooks.”
“Do you want to have one now?” he asked, lifting his arm to drape behind his head, propping it at an angle so he could look at her, so he could make out her features little by little as his pupils expanded in the dark.
“I was reminded a bit ago that the word for ‘beaver’ in French is ‘castor,’ and I’ve been meaning to ask Hattie if she doesn’t think the little fellows are more like Pollux than his brother, in the end. ”
Seph hesitated. Just for a moment. And then she laughed, dropping herself back on the pillows with a little thump. “You’ll have to ask Hattie,” she said. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Shame,” he returned, chuckling to himself. “I’ll have to save it for a dinner party that finds a lull. Do you want to talk about what happened tonight?”
She was quiet, like she wasn’t certain. “Maybe,” she said. “But not yet.”
“All right.” He could see her better now, the shape of her hair sharpening to individual strands sticking out of her braid.
“I thought Errol was an expert on plants and animals,” she said softly into the night. “Does he really mix up mushrooms?”
“Aye, well,” said Rhys seriously, “mushrooms aren’t plants. Or animals. Are they?”
She exhaled softly. “I suppose not,” she said. “So what are they?”
“Something else,” he told her. “There’s an illustration in that book of fairy circles, showing what they look like under the dirt.”
“Oh? What do they look like?”
“Like a big hand,” he said, holding his own up in a cup shape and spreading his fingers. “The circle of sprouts we see are just the fingertips poking out, ready to snatch you if you step inside.”
She giggled. “Does the book say that?”
“Of course not,” he answered, dropping his hand back onto his chest. “The mycologists are in on it.”
“Never trust a scientist,” she replied, still breathy with amusement.
“I shan’t,” he promised. “Believing everything has an explanation and you can find it is perhaps the most superstitious thing you can do, but they’ll never see it.”
“Ruby’s a scientist,” she pointed out. “And Errol too, I think? Botany is a science.”
“Ruby’s more a witch than anyone around that campfire tonight,” he answered. “And Errol could’ve been a druid high priest. You’re only proving my point.”
“Perhaps we should have them perform for Merlin too, then,” she said, stifling a little yawn, which jumped across the room and into Rhys’s throat.
He indulged it, his lungs expanding as he pulled the yawn inward and let it out and then puffed his cheeks out, giving his head a shake.
“There’s probably more magic and wonder in what they do than in the lot of us,” he agreed.
“I should just take him to the Rest and have us all re-perform our summer showcase.”
“The baroness’s funeral, you mean,” Seph echoed. “This last one was that, wasn’t it?”
“It was. That’s what he’s after, though, isn’t it? A funeral before he dies. That’s what this is.”
“Hm.”
He could feel her face screwing up in thought from across the room, her fingers tapping on her stomach where they were interlaced across her middle. “I think it might be a little unethical,” he added. “Fooling a dying man. Giving him false hope.”
“I thought you said people want to be tricked,” she reminded him, flashes of their walk across the grassy dune toward Starling’s Rest playing rising in the dark. Had that really only been a week ago? “I thought you said we love it. That it makes us feel wonder. That we seek it out.”
“I did say that,” Rhys acknowledged, a frown in his voice. “And I do believe it. It’s just the dying part that makes me pause. It feels like a vicar’s lie, not an illusionist’s, and that’s why I think it might be … I dunno. Murky.”
“Even if that’s what he asked for?” she said, turning to meet his eye across the void of darkness. “Even if that’s what he wants?”
Rhys sighed. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t, either,” she admitted. “But my mam always insisted that sleep helps untangle these knots. Maybe we’ll be clearer in the morning.”
“Seph,” he said fondly. “It’s morning right now. Already.”
“You know what I meant.”
He laughed. “I did,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night, Rhys,” she replied, rolling away from him and curling up under her covers. “Sweet dreams.”
He waited until he heard her breathing steady. Until he knew she had fallen across the abyss and into Nod.
And then he followed her there, letting the darkness swallow him too.