Castle & Key, page 29
“That’s not fair!”
Susan took the turning toward the right side of the manor without hesitation. “No, it’s just not enjoyable,” she said.
“I’m coming,” the master said. “I’ll help.”
“Bother you, too!” Janet said, in the most exasperated tones that Susan had yet heard from her. “Where is he, do you think?”
“This way,” said Susan, her heart in her throat. There was an intensely tight pulling of threads around where she was, along with the master and the bride, but the rest of the manor, halfway open and sprawling with magic, seemed to be loosening around the edges like a knot that had been teased apart at the edges to get at the tight core. Despite that, Susan knew where she was going. She was not the expert in following twisty threads that Emmett was, but the thread she was currently following through the manor was one that she would have been able to follow to the ends of the earth.
This thread twisted, wandered, and grew taut as they approached a door toward what Susan suspected to be the front of the manor—if a front existed in this odd, shifting part of the manor. The door itself was solid wood and banded with leather and magic, and it had a keyhole that was at once ridiculously large and entirely impossible to see inside of. It had been painted all over with a dark, light-swallowing red paint.
“Oh!” said Janet, staring at the door. “This is the first door! The first one we have to go through in order to escape, I mean. How is it the first door?”
“I don’t suppose it’s pure chance,” said Susan, who was beginning to develop an amusing idea of how their escape was meant to be accomplished.
Janet might have suggested that the key was a right set of circumstances, rather than an actual key, in an attempt to distract Susan’s attention from the fact that she had been given the key; but Susan had an idea that it wasn’t completely wrong. Not when it came to finding the doors they needed, at least.
She wasn’t surprised, therefore, when upon unlocking the door with the key that Janet silently handed back to her, she found Emmett sprawled on the floor halfway across the room with his back to the door.
Someone had hit him on the head, and although there was no blood on the carpet, there was enough clotting in his short hair to considerably worry Susan. It wasn’t the only thing that worried her.
Dropping to her knees beside him, she said sharply to Janet and the master, “Get out—I’ll bring him along as soon as he comes around.”
“We can’t go out, we have to go through!” protested Janet, while the master said at the same time, “Why? We have to keep passing through doors to get out.”
“Stop there,” said Mr. Oswald’s voice, from the doorway. The hound growled as they all looked up to see the butler there with a short-barrelled shotgun pointing at them, her face taut. “This has gone far enough. Mrs. Carmichael wants you back in the outside manor so we can decide what to do with this cycle.”
“That’s why,” said Susan, in exasperation, too late to be any good. It likely wouldn’t matter where in the manor the doors were: if they kept doing the right things, the manor itself would bring the doors to them. Mr. Oswald with a gun, on the other hand, was quite another thing.
“Move back,” said Mr. Oswald, her eyes wary.
“Mr. Oswald.”
Both Susan and the bride said the butler’s name, but it was Janet that Mr. Oswald looked at reproachfully.
“You shouldn’t have done it, miss!”
Janet flushed. “I didn’t do anything!”
That, thought Susan, her eyes flicking up from her ministrations to Emmett to look at the bride, was probably not entirely true. It hadn’t stopped the manor from opening up, however, so whatever Janet had done, it wasn’t an irretrievable step of betrayal.
Either that, she thought, her gaze dropping to Janet’s bodice with the sudden realisation that the bride no longer wore her necklace, or it was the exact truth and had passed muster that way. She managed at last to turn Emmett’s massive body over, and found that he was blinking at her dazedly.
“Oh good,” she said. “You’re not dead.”
Emmett groaned, lifting a hand to his head, and tried to get up.
“Slowly, lummox,” Susan said, helping him to sit. She pointed with her chin at Mr. Oswald and added, “You’re making Mr. Oswald nervous.”
Emmett’s upper lip drew back briefly, causing Mr. Oswald to step back slightly. He said, “Going to kill us, are you?”
Mr. Oswald flinched, a brief tremor of movement across her transparent face. She licked her lips and said, “You brought it on yourselves. All you had to do was do the right thing, and everything would have been all right.”
“I don’t particularly like your way of doing the right thing,” Janet said. “If it’s the same as Mrs. Carmichael’s way.”
“You just had to resist temptation,” Mr. Oswald protested. “Then everything might have been all right. But you always choose to save yourselves.”
“I don’t think you can really say that when Janet is there with the master,” pointed out Susan. “It’s not like she’s betrayed him; she’s trying to save him along with herself.”
Was she mistaken, or did the gun barrel drop just a little?
“It would have been the same in the end,” Mr. Oswald said, as if arguing with herself. “It always looks like it’s going well, and then someone betrays someone else.”
Susan looked meaningfully at Janet from across the room, tilting her head at the interior door that was just behind them, and saw Janet pinch the master’s fingers. Then she ignited the protection spell that always clung to herself and Emmett in a single flicker of blue fire that flared and doused the both of them in an instant, and said very clearly to Janet, “Run!”
She wasn’t sure whether the master dragged Janet through the door, or if she was the one pulling him away, but while Mr. Oswald jerked her shotgun back and forth in a flurry of paralysing hesitation and the hound darted behind Susan and Emmett, both bride and master appeared again, followed swiftly by Regan.
The housemaid bore a gun much larger than the one Mr. Oswald held, and the shiny determination in her purple eyes was unsettling. She said to Susan, “You can do what you want, but how well do you think a spell is going to stop a silver bullet?” She tilted her chin toward Janet and the master and added, “And if it doesn’t work on you, I’ll just shoot them.”
Susan met Janet’s apologetic look with a philosophic one.
Regan nodded at the blue fire. “Get rid of it.”
Susan exchanged a glance with Emmett and then shrugged, releasing the enchantment. Blue fire flickered and vanished, and the manor around them became real and magic once again.
“I don’t see how the manor is going to let you get away with this,” she said. “I understand that it’s malicious, but it does seem to be pretty caught up with rules, and I’m pretty sure you’re breaking them.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Regan. “We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again—and if the master tries to stop us, well, we’ve dealt with that before, too. You’re not the only ones who have to live here, you know. You make it dangerous for the rest of us when you do stupid things.”
Mr. Oswald’s shoulders seemed to straighten, making Susan’s heart sink. “Get out of the room,” the butler said. “We’re going back out into the main part of the manor.”
There was nothing else for it but to do as they were told; it was no good trying to escape without half the people they had meant to take with them, and Janet and the master were obviously unable to protect themselves via magic. Susan and Emmett walked ahead of Mr. Oswald and her small blunderbuss while Janet and the master followed behind with the hound, Regan a few steps behind them.
“Where does she want them?” asked Regan after they had been walking for a few minutes. To Susan, it sounded as if the maid was worried—a suspicion that was borne out when the girl asked a moment later, “Where’s the rest of it gone? It’s never been this hard to get back out before! And where is Mrs. Carmichael?”
“I don’t know where she is,” said Mr. Oswald. The muffled quality to her voice suggested that she was biting her lip. “I haven’t seen her since this morning. We were just supposed to find anyone who went missing and bring them back to the morning room.”
“If we can find the morning room,” Regan muttered.
Susan reckoned a further fifteen minutes passed before the girl stopped them all again.
“You and I both know we’re not going to get anywhere with this lot right now,” she said. “Let’s just take the key and go. Mrs. Carmichael is the one who knows her way around the inside of the manor. Let’s throw them in one of the rooms and leave them there.”
“We can’t just leave them free in the manor!”
“We’re not leaving them free; we’re locking them in a room with only one door,” said Regan. “And you know as well as I do that it’s far more dangerous wandering the halls than it is staying in the room.”
“You should be coming with us to escape, not stopping us,” said the master. “How long have we worked together?”
“That’s what I’d like to ask you!” Regan said promptly. “We’ve been together longer than I like to say, and I never thought I’d see the day when the master would put his trust in one of the flighty little pieces that get sent up here!”
“Maybe that’s why we’ve been here so long,” the master said.
“This room will do,” Regan said, ignoring the reply. She called ahead to Susan and Emmett, “Stop there! Turn around carefully and don’t get too close to Mr. Oswald, or I might just get nervous enough to pull the trigger.”
Susan turned, Emmett doing the same beside her, and saw the paleness to Janet’s cheeks—the sudden glitter to her eyes. That made her look more carefully at the door they had just passed. Having done so, she tried not to grin, because it must be the second door. Just like the first it was leather-ornamented and carved in sections, the dull paint green instead of red.
“In you get,” said Mr. Oswald.
“All right,” Susan said. “But I think it’s locked.”
“You’ve got the key, I should think,” said Regan, her eyes sharp and malicious. “Go on. Open it.”
Susan flicked her gaze up and sideways to meet Emmett’s curious eyes, and felt comforted. So Emmett was thinking the same as she was! How delightful!
Janet silently passed her the key, and Susan unlocked the door. No sooner was it open than Regan plucked the key from her hand and tossed it to Mr. Oswald. “We’ll take that. It looks like there’s only a few windows in there, but I wouldn’t try to climb out of those: it’s only mist outside when you’re this far in the manor. Some of the mist isn’t empty, either.”
Mr. Oswald caught the key and clasped it against the barrel of her gun, as though unsure of where to put it now that she had it, and motioned for Janet and the master to enter the room. They did so, hand in hand, with Emmett behind them, and Regan’s eyes caught the hand-clasp.
“Last chance, master,” she said, with a friendly sort of grin. “You might as well come with us; you’re not going to get out of here with this lot. The master doesn’t, you know; you’ll only stop them in the end.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” the master said, his chin lifting. “I’d rather meet the end of the story with my bride by my side.”
“Suit yourself,” Regan said, with a scornful laugh. She said to Mr. Oswald maliciously, “Looks like you’ll have to move up again, Mr. Oswald!”
Susan saw Emmett’s furrowed brow as he tried to parse out the meaning behind the words—or perhaps the meaning behind Mr. Oswald’s stricken look—and asked the flushed, miserable butler, “Is that really what you want? Do you really want to be trapped forever as someone you know you’re not?”
“Nobody cares what he does when he’s not around us,” Regan said. “Shut your mouth, Miss Susan! So long as he toes the line when he’s in public, he can be as odd as he likes in the bathrooms. Come along, Mr. Oswald.”
“Inside,” said Mr. Oswald, physically pushing Susan into the room.
The gun barrel pressed coldly against her ribs, chilling her skin, and was then gone. The door shut behind them a moment later, and they all heard the brief silence before a key scraped in the lock, loud and laborious. It was drawn out in just as clumsy a fashion, and Regan’s voice muttered indistinctly as two sets of footsteps faded away.
Susan turned back from the door and said matter-of-factly, “I wish you’d sit down, lummox. You look like you could use a rest.”
“Why did you come back for me?” he said, dropping down into one of the chairs. “You had the key; why didn’t you leave while you could?”
“Because you’re the key to me,” said Susan, feeling remarkably happy about the situation. She sat down on the arm of Emmett’s chair with one foot propped on the seat as he gazed up at her with narrowed eyes, and looked around the room in some satisfaction. This, she knew, was a lull in the story, and in her experience, lulls were very useful for working things out and getting things done. At the very least, no one had a shotgun pointed at their faces any longer.
The hound, as if it agreed, coiled itself in a semi-circle, laid its chin on its paws, and huffed a sigh.
“I’m starting to think that you might have had a better chance of getting out without me,” the master said ruefully, squeezing Janet’s hand and then releasing it.
He turned in a circle that took in the entire room, small as it was, and then removed the glass stopper from a blood-red decanter and poured a couple of measures of brandy into two glasses. Janet took one of them in her left hand and looked down at it with glazed eyes, then back up at the master.
Susan, her eyes fixed on the two of them, saw the dawning comprehension on Janet’s face, and the curiously slow shift of emotions. The master lifted the glass to his lips as Janet’s fingers seemed to reach for her pendant and failed to find it; the barest breath of a moment later, that same hand swiftly slapped the glass out of the master’s hand.
“Don’t drink that!” she said, in a choked voice.
“Good heavens!” said Susan, at last understanding Mrs. Carmichael’s dire utterances and the exact reason for the lack of Janet’s necklace both at once. “You came here to kill him, didn’t you? That’s what you meant about making sure that no one else ever had to come here! You came to the manor with the knowledge that there was something here that could kill him and the exact know-how to use it to kill him.”
“You can’t bring weapons into the manor,” Janet said tiredly as the master dropped down into the nearest couch, very nearly frozen, and stared up at her. She sat down on the other side of the couch, avoiding his eyes. “Whoever or whatever enters the field of the story curse is changed into a form that fits the story. If it’s a weapon, it gets changed into something else altogether.”
Susan swivelled a little on the arm of Emmett’s chair, and he made room for her other foot to rest on the seat of the chair, meeting her eyes with one of his brows raised.
“So you thought that it was a good idea to use a weapon that was already here,” she guessed.
“I’ve studied poisons since I was a little girl,” said Janet, turning her head just slightly to meet Susan’s eyes briefly. “Ever since they took my oldest sister by force when I was eight. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to take a weapon in if I went—and I had a very long time to figure out the best way to do what I needed to do once it was my turn. I managed to get my pendant in, and I even managed to get some information out.”
“About the poisons room?”
Janet nodded.
The master looked dazed. “What are you talking about? There’s no poisons room! You really came here to kill me?”
“How could I do anything else when you’d already killed my sister and hundreds of others?” demanded Janet hotly, leaning toward him in the fierceness of her anger.
“Me?” He stared at her, astounded. “I didn’t kill all of them! I didn’t kill any of them!”
“Not directly,” said Janet, and she seemed even more exhausted than before. “But you’re the master, and just because of who you are, they die! They’re bred to die, allowed to die—they’re meant to die. Because you’re the master, and you have to have a bride.”
“He’s not actually the cursed master,” Susan said, willing to be helpful in a love affair that looked as though it might last longer than the death of the manor and its story curse. “He was the footman originally. How long ago did the previous master die?”
The master swayed in his seat and said with difficulty, “I’m…the master. I have to be the master.”
“He’s not—he’s not the original cursed master?”
Susan wasn’t sure if Emmett or Janet was watching her with more attention—Emmett with a kindling understanding, and Janet with horror and hope both vying for precedence on her face.
Janet spoke again, her voice trembling, “He has to be the master.”
The master said, “I…have to be the master. There’s no choice.”
“Think about it,” Susan said to the master, very gently and slowly. “Think about what you just said. What do you mean when you say that you didn’t kill all of them? What do you mean, you have to be the master? Who told you that you had to be something you aren’t?”
The master stared at her, and it was evident to Susan that he was thinking about it directly for the first time, without any substance or interference clouding his thoughts.
“The curse has been stopping you thinking about things,” she said. “You should probably try to answer the question. If you think it’ll help, I’ll ask in another way. Either that, or the lummox can ask.”
“No, it isn’t—” He stopped, and wet his lips. “That is—I don’t—I’m not the master. I mean, I haven’t always been the master. I came here—I don’t remember when I came here. It was a long time ago, and at that time, I was a wandering musician, I think. Then I was a gardener until someone died during the story. I was a footman after that until the master died.”
