Enchanted (12 page)

“Grumble?”

Silence answered her. She called his name again, but suddenly she knew he would not answer. She could feel his absence like a tangible thing, knew it just as she knew her own name. She walked over to search the well, and when she saw the smashed remains of the tiny water bucket, despair clawed at her. She called his name a third time, in a desperate voice as broken as that bucket. There were no ripples in the water of the well, filled to the brim as it was from the storm two nights earlier. The rocks had been disturbed, either by tempest or wild beast in rage. She hoped Grumble had run away and hidden somewhere, found an underground spring far beneath the well and swum to safety.

Silly girl, making up stories,
her mind scolded.
He’s dead and gone and you just don’t want to admit it.

I hope he went quickly,
wept her heart.

She missed him with her whole body. And as that empty body turned to leave the well and the clearing and all their fond memories, she could almost hear him say,
Goodbye, my Sunday.

The walk back to the towerhouse lasted an eternity. She felt neither sadness nor pain, only a thick numbness that wrapped itself in a cloak around her. She was not happy to see her garden gate again, nor was she surprised or excited to see that Trix and the birds had finished their task. Baskets and bags overflowing with beans lay in a heap by the edge of the field. She didn’t care.

Sunday walked into the house through the kitchen, but she did not hear Trix’s cheery greeting or her mother’s mumbled complaints. She picked her journal up off the table and walked through the sitting room, past Papa with his pipe and Friday with her mending. Her melancholy march unaltered, she trudged slowly up the stairs. She did not stop until she had reached Wednesday’s aerie, the topmost room in the tower, and there she sat at the window and looked out. Sunday did not see Wednesday curled up on her bed scratching down her latest lament on scraps of parchment; she saw only the clouds as they sailed by and turned gray and then pink and then gray again as the world succumbed to shadow and the gods sprinkled stars across the velvet sky.

She opened her journal and stared at the blank pages. She should force herself to write, she knew, to purge these feelings so that she might grieve and move on. But she wanted neither of those things. Right now the pain was a comfort. Right now he was still alive in her heart, closer than he would ever be again. Right now she needed her best friend, the one friend in the world she could no longer speak to. He was gone, and she had not kept her promise. She hadn’t even said goodbye.

Perhaps she could say goodbye to him now.

Her pencil met the paper, but it would not write. Tears of frustration rolled down her face as she tried desperately to move the stubborn instrument. Her shoulders shook, her vision blurred. She closed her eyes to blink away the tears so that she might forget she had shed them at all. When she opened her eyes again she found that she had indeed written words on the page, but they were not the farewell she had been laboring toward. In a light, uneven, barely legible scrawl before her, the words she did not want to feel read:
I love you.

Sunday tore the offending page out of her book and threw it out the window.

Sometime in the night she fell asleep on the hard window seat. Sometime before dawn Wednesday covered her with a blanket so that the dew wouldn’t chill her as it beaded upon her skin and hair.

She awoke to the warm sun on her face and the soft cooing of a pair of white pigeons.

A
LWAYS.

The fire had gone out again. He tried to hide inside the warm cocoon of blankets, but the cold seeped into his bones. When the whispers came, they scraped like steel down the length of him.

Rumbold. Rumbold.

His body shook. Before he’d gone to bed that night, he’d made the decision that if the whispers came again, he would not succumb to fear. With eyes closed so his imagination could not draw more monsters out of the shadows, he counted out the steps from the end of the bed to the wall and then along it, until his shin collided with the neat pile of wood Rollins had replenished. He fell to his knees in the ash and felt for the tinderbox. Beside it, Rollins had left two long, oil-soaked rags.

Free me.

The rags caught so quickly that Rumbold had to snatch his hands away. A circle of golden light surrounded him as the flames burned into the kindling. He tucked his skinny legs up and wrapped his thin arms around them, resting his chin in the ash on his knees. Boldly he peered into the whispering darkness, at the foot of his bed where the mysterious shape had formed the night before. He needed to know if what haunted him was old or new, mundane or otherworldly. It might have been pulled out of Hell during his transformation and given form by his fears. The stories of Soul Riders were gruesome tales ending in madness and death. Considering the power of his curse, it was entirely possible that a demon had followed him up the Fairy Well. If so, he bore the responsibility of seeing it returned.

A more frightening prospect, he thought as shadow began to resolve itself into shape, would be if it was neither ghost nor Rider but something else entirely.

He squeezed his legs until he felt bone against bone through skin and muscle. He tasted the cinders on his already dry lips. The form stretched and grew until it was roughly the size and shape of a man. The chill in the air deepened. Rumbold could see his breath before him; the translucence of it was only slightly more substantial than the presence at the foot of the bed. And then slightly less. In four frigid breaths, the shape had some semblance of a face; in five, a mass of brown hair formed on its head. What if it was him? What if the thing haunting him was his former self, wanting to be remembered? At the seventh breath, the hair grew long and spilled down the shoulders of the lithe figure in fat dark curls. Chestnut curls.

His mother wrapped her arms around herself and looked down upon him, her face a mask of love and fear.

There was no ninth breath.

She was more beautiful than he remembered. The firelight turned her skin and blue eyes golden. A shimmer of ghostlight upon her cheeks and temples made tiny white feathers across her brow; her sheer gown was also white beneath her sable cloak of hair. Great white wings spread out behind her and lit the room, far brighter than Rumbold’s humble fire.

They stared at each other, not speaking, not touching, not daring to move and shift the impossible balance that had brought them together. Rumbold ached with shaking, silent sobs and shallow breaths. Tears soaked his nightshirt, but he let them fall, not wanting to turn his eyes from the sight before him. She cried, too, in her own way, her tears vanishing back into shadow before they hit the ground.

I will always be with you.

They stayed that way until the dawning sun’s rays dissolved her image into daylight, until she faded so completely that Rumbold wondered if he had really seen her at all.

***

Rumbold woke on the flagstones again. His rumpled hair was matted with ashes, and cinder dust coated his tongue. This time it was Erik who roused him from the hearth. The guard stepped over Rumbold and unloaded an armload of fresh wood. He did not offer the prince his aid.

“May I?” Erik gestured to a chair at the small breakfast table. Rumbold nodded and the guard sat, stretching out his legs and lacing his fingers behind his head. He gave the room the same courtesy glance that he’d given Rumbold. He picked up the golden ball in the middle of the table and tossed it from hand to hand. “Rollins said you needed more firewood. He’s fetching your breakfast.” He snorted a half-laugh. “I’ve seen finer meals served to the damned.”

Rumbold forced his sticky tongue to work. “I ahppreciate it.”

“Then I suggest you reward Cook for her efforts.” He said it without groveling or hesitation. It was a bold move. Rumbold nodded his agreement.

“Good. Just don’t send flowers or jewels or something equally useless.”

Rumbold shook his head this time, confused.

“What use has Cook for fancies? I hear she’s been asking the steward to allot the kitchens a bit of land for an herb garden. There’s an old walled-ln garden on the south side of the castle that would do. Give her the key and an orphan to tend it. That would set her up forever.”

“Yes,” Rumbold managed. “I would like ... to be useful.”

The guard grunted. “Is that so.” He put the bauble down, scratched his red beard, and folded his arms across his chest. “The soot suits you.”

Rumbold’s laughter quickly degraded into coughing. Erik handed him a small pitcher of water from the table. The prince gulped greedily, his lips barely moist enough afterward to spare a sincere “Thank you” as he handed it back.

Since Rumbold’s return, Erik had always looked him in the eye, never averting his gaze or avoiding him as many servants and members of court did. Whether it was because the prince had scared them before or because his presence scared them now, Rumbold wasn’t sure. He would never know if he couldn’t find someone to talk to. So he chose to offer Erik two of the highest and most dangerous compliments that royalty can bestow: honesty and confidence.

“I do not remember who I was,” Rumbold said carefully. He brushed the cinders off his knees; a cloud of ash rose before him, and he coughed again. “Velius said that he ... he was glad I chose life. What did he mean?”

“Who knows half the riddles Cauchemar spouts.” Erik uncrossed his legs, then recrossed them. He stared at the portrait on the wall in front of him, an elderly relation Rumbold didn’t remember. Finally Erik’s deep timbre filled the quiet room.

“Your mother died and Jack was cursed in the same season,” the guard said. “You were too young to know all the games different hands played around you, too young to see their intentions, and far too young to carry such a burden of sadness and loneliness. You hid inside yourself and spent a quiet childhood.

“Your godmother cast her own counterspell to put off the inevitable, but for how long? You had walked on eggshells for so long, a boy on his best behavior, living in terror of what was to come. As time went on, you began to embrace the curse’s deadline. You marked it as the time from which your life would start, when you would make your own choices and control your own destiny. You made every preparation there was to make as your eighteenth birthday came and went. The spell’s postponement only prolonged your waiting, and you’d had enough.”

Rumbold shifted uncomfortably on the flagstones. Erik tossed him a velvet cushion and the prince set it right in the ashes. “No harm could come to you until the curse had been fulfilled, but no one expected you to become ... selfdestructive.”

“Was I mad?” Rumbold asked.

“In every sense of the word, and—fo my mind—with every good reason.”

“Did I hurt anyone else?”

“I don’t think you gave a thought to anyone else. If anyone was hurt by your actions, you did not intend it.”

“Did I ... hurt myself?” Rumbold wondered, noting the guard’s tense position and tenser pauses, if he had ever concentrated on the body language of another person so intently before. Another person besides Sunday.

“You’re sitting there, so it couldn’t have been too bad, eh?” But Erik’s smile was gone; the lines on his forehead returned. “I will say, I would not trade places with you for the world. No man is meant to tempt Fate as you have. You were as much a victim of that fairy-feud as Jack was, and you deserved a happy ending for all they put you through. But your life from this moment will not be easy, my friend. You have only yourself to blame for that damnation.”

So. This difficult path was the life he had chosen. Rumbold wished he could be as glad as his cousin about that. He looked at his hands still clasped around his knees, his fingers gray with ash, the soot caked in black lines along his knuckles and under his nails. His hands were bony, but they were also strong. These hands would forge his destiny, clear the brush from the difficult path, and catch whatever Fate threw at him. He could not change the man he had been, but these hands would make him the man he could be.

If he’d had friends in his previous life, they had not made themselves known upon his return. Now he found himself with three: Sunday, Velius, and Erik. He wiggled three fingers. Counting himself and Rollins, they all made a hand, solid, the first and best part of a body slowly rebuilding itself.

A strange framed ancestor sneered at the Cinder Prince on his dusty hearth. Rumbold squinted back at him, at an elegant woman in a black dress, at a pudgy boy with an equally pudgy dog at his knee. “Who
are
these people?” Rumbold asked Erik.

The guard burst into a belly laugh. “No idea. Stern bunch, aren’t they?” Erik stood, extending a hand to the prince. “Come, Your Dirtyness. Let’s get you clean and then take you down to the field to mess you up again. The boys will be looking for you.”

Rumbold put his bony hand in Erik’s meaty one and let his friend help him stand. “Your father will see you now, sire.”

Rumbold nodded to another steward—had he ever known their names?—and summoned the courage to walk through the massive doors. The expectation of disappointment roiled in the pit of his stomach. His feet sank in the deep red carpet; more unfamiliar relations looked down on him from their gilded frames. The painted ceilings felt miles away, their moldings hidden in the shadows of late afternoon.

Anyone walking this hall to the king’s solarium was meant to feel small, to remember his place in the world, so very far below that of his wise and powerful monarch. To a man who’d spent half a year as a frog, size did not matter. Rumbold was nervous for some other reason buried in his mind along with his very quiet, very rebellious, and very cursed childhood.

The doors to the king’s solarium were closed. Rumbold squared his shoulders and knocked, the sound almost completely absorbed by the polished wood. Perhaps his father would not hear; perhaps he was gone and Rumbold could call again another day. Perhaps...