Castle & Key, page 31
“We’ve been gone a month without contact,” she said. “The papers are all still here, so we’d probably better think about moving on as soon as we can. The horses seem to have been kept in some sort of stasis, by the looks of it. They’re all well.”
“Shall we go to the town first?” asked Emmett. There was a speculative sort of tone to his voice, and Susan doubted as much as he seemed to that anyone would want to do so.
“I’m not going,” said Janet. She coloured a little as everyone’s eyes fell on her, but put her chin up. “I know it’s not up to me, but if you’re all going there, I’ll move on with Jasper to the next town. There’s nothing there for me except excommunication or a trial, anyway.”
The master, at the sound of his own name, lifted a head of what was now very ginger hair, and said somewhat hoarsely, “I’ll go where you go.”
“Of course you will,” she said, and the fierce tone was back to her voice. The master smiled a little blindly, and she added, “They wouldn’t let you in, anyway.”
That, thought Susan, was painting it rather mildly. She was quite certain that the master would be dead within a few minutes of entering the town below the hill. Even if the town didn’t collapse at the loss of the magic that had fed down from the manor, there were probably enough women who would share Janet’s previous desire to do away with the man they thought had killed so many other women over the years. From their vantage point, Susan was quite sure that she could already see smoke in various places around the town—a decent amount of manor-connected furniture was probably burning right about now. That was another mess better avoided.
She asked the butler, “What are you going to do, Mr. Oswald?”
The woman turned her eyes away from the mound of ruins, her eyes bright with that fire that still burned somewhere within her, and said, “My name is Florence. That’s what it was before I came here, and now that I’m going, I’d like it again. I’ll come as far as the next town with you; after that, I don’t know.”
Susan would have liked to have asked if the others had different names—had the manor hid away the names of Helfer and Regan, and even Mrs. Carmichael, and simply slotted them into the parts of Helfer, Regan, and Carmichael as they fit?—but the horselords were already on the move to prepare their horses. There would be time to go over what had happened and find out where everything now fitted in the slightly different world they had emerged into.
“I don’t fancy being run out of town,” Emmett said. “Or killed. I’m for the next town and finding somewhere out of the way to bunk down.”
“Next town,” said Curran and Katrina in concert, and glanced at each other somewhat ruefully.
“Not going anywhere that I’ll have to be in danger of my life again,” said Brennan. “Had enough of danger while you two long-legged bottle-bobbers were carting me around the manor. Might as well make for the next town and call m’mother to let her and the girls know I’m safe.”
“Don’t worry, Brenners,” Susan said. “I won’t let anyone else turn you into a hall stand, and I’ll make sure Emmett approves of any and all towns we enter.”
“That’ll be the day,” he said gloomily, and Susan couldn’t help laughing.
Some things might now be subtly out of place and not quite right, but Brennan’s gloominess was as familiar as it was comforting.
* * *
Freedom from the manor gave Susan a clearer mind to think. The journey on to the next-closest town, where they might have a chance to contact Glause and family again without worrying about being caught by any possible pursuers, also gave her the time to think, sheltered as she was from Emmett’s attention by his broad back.
Given such time, it occurred to Susan—at some stage between swinging herself into the saddle behind Emmett and dismounting after a good five hours’ slow riding to keep pace with the walkers—that rather than obliterating her heart-squeezing feelings, the destruction of the manor had had absolutely no effect on them at all. If anything, they seemed to have become more solid and difficult to avoid—though perhaps the difficulty lay in the fact that she spent the entirety of that time with the solid warmth of Emmett in front of her.
She was perturbed enough with her discovery to help the horselords unsaddle and brush down the horses in complete silence, and when they sat down to eat and drink that night, she carefully avoided her usual place next to Emmett. She hadn’t considered that this would put her under his thoughtful, considering gaze from across the table, and while the others ate and drank and laughed with Janet and Jasper—rejoicing, no doubt, in the return of their human bodies and abilities—Susan found herself mumchance and worried. At some stage, she would have to excuse herself to Emmett for the ways in which she’d shamelessly used him during their time in the manor. Feeling as she did, she doubted her ability to be able to do so without giving away her true feelings.
At some stage in that far-too-long and far-too-hot night, Susan found Janet sliding into the seat next to her, which Brennan had vacated not more than a few moments ago. She was thankful for it—Emmett had risen just as soon as Brennan left his chair, and she had been suddenly, dreadfully afraid that he was going to sit there instead.
“I’m sorry that things got so…confusing in there,” Janet said, with a shy kind of honesty that Susan was beginning to suspect was her chief weapon. “I think I must have figured out that it was the manor that was cursed instead of the master himself just a little while after you did, and I couldn’t think how to tell you without saying too much. All I could do was play games and try to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding you.”
“Oh well, I fancy I’ll have to say the same back,” Susan said, just as frankly. “I knew I had to play the part of the Jealous Maid, but when you started to play back to me with the Jealous Mistress, I was never quite sure whether it was real or not. By the by: the night before Brennan disappeared, you were talking things out with him, weren’t you?”
Janet looked down into her cup. “Yes. I always had the dilution syrup in the suite, but I’d been looking for the poisons room, and I finally figured out how I was going to get it that night.”
“Yes, he told me not to drink anything without letting the hound at it first,” said Susan, a bubble of laughter rising in her chest in spite of her heaviness. “I found your dilution syrup, but I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me that it was a medium for dispensing poison to anyone but yourself—or to connect it with your pomander!—until you stopped Jasper from drinking whatever it was that Mrs. Carmichael left.”
Janet drew in a deep breath that shook a little. “I thought for too long before I did it, even then. Sometimes I think that the manor was right to expect the worst of me.”
“I find that you often get what you expect,” Susan said. “I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself—you did think he’d killed your sister, and you didn’t kill him, after all!”
“I’m glad I didn’t,” she said, her eyes on Jasper, who gazed back at his bride with an adoration that made Susan’s mouth twist a little in rue.
The master and the bride had got their happy ending, whether within the confines of real life or the story. They had given up enough to appease the story and had got it back tenfold. Susan was inclined to think that she had given up something that she would never have a chance to get back.
“Then you must have been the one who dosed the master—Jasper—with lilly-pilly,” she said, looking away. “I thought it was Mrs. Carmichael, but that was the night you got what you needed.”
Janet laughed as if she couldn’t help it. “I was so angry! He’d given me the key and told me that I should get out as quickly as I could without even trying to save himself. That night, even after he’d already given me the key, he trustingly drank whatever I gave him!”
“I can see how that would be irritating,” Susan said, and this time, her smile was genuine.
“Mrs. Carmichael came to me this morning—or whatever time it was before you found me in the breakfast room. She seemed to know exactly what I had planned, and she said that if I wouldn’t do it, she would. She said I’d gotten soft, and asked me whether or not I really cared about being free and freeing everyone. I already had the poison by then, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, either. Now that I know that Jasper wasn’t the master—”
Janet stopped and shivered, and Susan felt a certain coldness creep over her own skin.
“It was a setup from start to finish,” she said. “Even if you’d killed him, it would have just picked someone else to be master and started all over again, and of course you would have died for betraying him. The whole thing was terrifyingly clever—although, I think the most frightening thing was how mindless it was! All those rules and regulations, and all the possibilities that were accounted for, and there wasn’t more than a mess of ghosts and maliciousness and far too much magic!”
“That’s why I can’t be sorry that Mrs. Carmichael is dead,” said Janet. She said it defiantly, but looked down again despite that. “They all—we all had the same choice. And I know that the manor was pushing us the way it was, but we all chose to do what we chose to do.”
“Yes,” said Susan, rather hollowly. “We all chose to do what we chose to do.”
She waited until Janet and Jasper began to talk of retiring for the night, then slipped away during the good-natured ribbing that ensued, feeling slightly flushed from wine and the warmth of the night. Her room was hot and sticky, however, and Susan felt scarcely less hot and sticky. She climbed out her window while the others were still talking and drinking in the next room, and dangled herself over the edge of the roof to drop into the garden below, through which she had already seen a pleasant creek.
Emmett was waiting for her when she climbed softly back onto the roof, cool and refreshed and still a little bit damp, to sneak back into her window. She saw his huge form by moonlight, propped up against the outer wall of her room with his arms resting on his knees.
Susan regretfully gave up her first idea, which was to bid him a breezy good night and climb swiftly back into the safety of her stuffy room, and instead sat down beside him, resolved to have the thing over and done with. Emmett must certainly have noticed that she had been withdrawn and uncommunicative throughout the day.
“Ah,” he said, as she sat down. “So you are going to talk to me again. I wondered if you’d just go back in.”
“There’s no fun in that,” Susan said, with the faintest of rueful laughs. “What do you want of me?”
“I don’t like being ignored,” he said. “And I’m uncomfortable.”
“Don’t worry, lummox,” she said, with a pinch of sickness at her heart. “You’re free again. I’m not going to claim your hand in marriage to restore your reputation in the eyes of the world.”
Emmett coughed, or laughed, she wasn’t sure which. “Aren’t you? What if I run into danger with a runaway bride again?”
“Then you’ll be free to either accept or decline her advances as you choose, without a story curse muddying the waters for you, I suppose,” said Susan.
Emmett’s hand closed reflexively and relaxed again, and Susan would have liked to have thought that it was frustration in his voice when he asked, “Are you saying that everything that happened in the manor was the curse? The feelings, the kisses?”
Susan took in a breath and let it out rather more quickly than intended. Emmett was being far blunter than she had expected of him, and she couldn’t be anything other than honest in return.
“No,” she said. “Well, not for me, at any rate. The manor must have picked up something from me that made it spin the story in that way when everything began, and I’m afraid you got caught up in it because of me. There’s no need for you to worry about it. They’re my own feelings, and I’ll sort them out.”
There was a silence that went on for a little bit too long to allow Susan to avoid looking at Emmett. When she did look at him—a quick glance sideways when she couldn’t bear it another moment—his head was down, and he was looking at his hands.
She knew that look: he was considering what he was going to say, trying to find the best way to put the words in order.
It hurt to breathe, but it would hurt more to talk. Susan said anyway, “We’re outside now, after all. You don’t have to—you don’t need to worry about my feelings. I’ll get rid of them somewhere.”
A quick breath escaped Emmett; he turned his head and said, “Horselords don’t share their horses.”
“You—what?” Susan said, bewildered. “Yes, you do! We’ve been burdening poor Juniper for the last few years!”
Emmett straightened and turned until he was facing her properly, then said with deliberation, “Horselords don’t share their horses with anyone but a life partner. At the time, I would have throttled Brennan for trying to say it, but—”
“So that’s what he was trying to say,” Susan said, dazed and almost at random. Her chest no longer hurt, but it was just as hard to breathe as it had been before.
“I’ve been in love with you for years,” he added, with a brief, private sort of smile. “It looked like there was nothing I could do about it without frightening you off, and I thought I’d rather keep going on as we were than risk losing you.”
“As though I could have left you!” said Susan indignantly. “I don’t think I’ve ever considered life without you from the moment I met you. I’ll have you know, lummox, I’ve been desperately trying to stifle my feelings in that dreadful place for the last week because I didn’t want to take advantage of you!”
“I told you,” said Emmett, lifting her far hand and passing it between his own as if he was seeing it for the first time, “that I wouldn’t be so easily nose-led around the manor. You said that the manor picked up on feelings—why do you think I had such trouble with dreams before you did? I was following dreams that I thought were you down the hallway like a fool from the first night we were there.”
“If they were anything like my dreams of you, I’m surprised they got you out of bed at all,” said Susan frankly.
She would have continued, but as she spoke, Emmett took the hand he already held and cupped it against his cheek, drawing her closer in the movement. In fact, with the palm of her hand against his roughened cheek, her water-cooled fingers soaking in the warmth of his skin and the breath caught in her throat, Susan found she couldn’t speak at all.
She wasn’t required to do so: Emmett leaned toward her, wrapping his free arm around her waist as she shifted forward to meet him, and kissed her. Susan let go of thoughts and dreams and returned the kiss with all of the enthusiasm that had been squashed by guilt when she was still within the manor.
When they had settled back against the sun-warmed wall, Emmett’s arm unfamiliarly yet comfortably around her shoulder, there was time for companionable silence and a slow but growing grasp of delightful reality.
Susan smiled out into the darkening night; Emmett played with her fingers.
He said, as if to himself, “As soon as I knew you were having dreams of me, I was certain you’d come into the manor with feelings of your own—I just didn’t know if you’d realised it.”
“I suppose,” said Susan, with a very slight stiffness to her voice, “that’s why you allowed Janet to cling to you and kiss your cheek.”
Emmett’s cheeks had reddened slightly when she threw a look up at him. He said, “Ah. That’s something I’m not proud of.”
“Good heavens!” said Susan, pulling away very slightly in amazement. “You were doing it to make me jealous!”
“The bride—Janet—already seemed to have a good grasp on what needed to be done to keep the manor happy, without saying too much aloud,” said Emmett, his arm tightening around her. “It might have been the manor making me do it, but at least part of the reason I did it was because I wanted to know for sure that it meant something to you.”
“Two birds with one stone, in fact,” said Susan, nodding. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done the same thing herself when she kissed Emmett in the breakfast room. “Lummox, you’ll remember that I told you how I rebuffed a very sleepy master from using my shoulder as a pillow for your sake.”
Emmett, who had laid his head on that shoulder a moment before, silently tilted his head and kissed her on the neck.
“Oh well,” she said, catching her breath. “Just as long as you know it. Lummox, I don’t think we can reasonably sit here all night and swap kisses; there’s rather a lot to be done tomorrow, and I don’t think any of us have slept properly in the entire week or month we were in the manor.”
“I don’t care much about tomorrow’s work,” said Emmett, nudging another kiss into her neck, this time closer to her jaw.
“Perfectly understandable,” allowed Susan, “but Curran and Katrina are grinning at us from the window one over, and I’m pretty sure that Brenners is staring disapprovingly from above, so—Emmett! I won’t be kissed in mixed company! You’ll corrupt Brennan’s pure young mind!”
Acknowledgments
With many thanks to Dory Hulburt, Sue Snow, Peirce Baehr, Tiny Ladybug, Midnight_Moonlight, and Sarah Taleweaver, who each provided names for our players!
W.R. Gingell, Castle & Key
