Scarlet in the Snow (8 page)

I’d been right about the watching eyes yesterday, I thought.

‘My lord did not know of your presence,’ she went on. ‘He did not know till you were in the garden. That bush, you see, has never given a flower before. I couldn’t make it, for though all the others bloomed, it stayed dry and bare. Then, two weeks ago, he noticed a tiny bud on it. He’s been watching that bud ever since – watering the plant, caring for it. When it finally opened, it gave him real joy for the first time in so long.’

I swallowed. ‘I am truly sorry. I only wish that I could –’

‘Listen,’ Luel said impatiently, brushing aside my apology, ‘the very day – no – the very moment such a beautiful flower blooms on a bush that has always been barren,
you come
.’ Her eyes grew bright. ‘I knew you were here for a reason. Now I know why. There is something powerful in you, something very special. I can feel it.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I have no magic powers, nothing special.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Though my words
were rash and unthinking, I haven’t changed my mind. I really do want to help. And if I am to do so, then you must allow me to ask questions.’

The old woman looked at me. ‘Very well, as you wish. I can tell you about the past and about this place.’

‘But?’ I prompted.

‘Let us come to that when we do,’ she said, evasively. ‘Now, you must be hungry. Shall we have some lunch? While we eat, you may question me and I will answer as best I can. Agreed?’

‘Fine,’ I said, trying to speak lightly.

I wasn’t surprised to see the table in the dining-room already set for two, and laden with all kinds of good things selected from the delicious bounty of the waters, from succulent prawns to crayfish served in their shells with golden mayonnaise, pike-perch whose whiteness of flesh contrasted with the coral blush of river trout, and a sturgeon soup so fragrant that it made my knees knock together from pure pleasure. Add to that fried potatoes and onions, sour-sweet red cabbage, and a large salad stuffed with olives and tomatoes and different kinds of greens, and you had a feast which made my mouth water immediately.

‘How do you do it?’ I asked, as we sat down. ‘There are no servants here to do the work.’

Luel smiled. ‘That’s so. There is no-one here but us. But, really, this is the easiest magic of all.’

I waved a hand at the food. ‘You conjure all this up from nothing?’

‘Of course not. Does it taste like food made of air?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s not enchanted,’ she went on, ‘except in the manner of its arrival. It’s come from the very best tables, you see.’

I stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I go to the mirror and I ask it to show me who’s having a feast that day – not just in this region but all over the country – and I devise the day’s menus from it, choosing only the best. Naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ I echoed, helping myself to some lobster. ‘But how do you get it here?’

‘I call it to this table,’ she said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. ‘And it answers the call.’

‘Oh,’ I said, dazed by the strange picture this conjured up of Luel snapping her fingers and dishes flying through the air like obedient dogs to their master, ‘but they – the people whose tables you’ve lightened – do they not notice?’

‘I daresay they do,’ she said with a shrug. ‘But I never take more than one dish from any one table. They probably put it down to a mistake of some sort. Or possibly a light-fingered servant, naughty child or cheeky dog.’

‘Whose tables have you . . . sampled in this way?’ I asked, tackling some prawns.

‘Many different ones. And only those who can afford it.’

‘And the clothes in my room – did they come here in a similar way?’

Luel shot me a wry look. ‘Yes. I must say, you must be feeling better, asking me questions like these.’

I coloured a little. ‘I suppose I am.’ And I did feel lighter, as if the hope Luel had said I’d given had entered
my own heart and mind. I took a first sip of sturgeon soup. ‘Why do you never call your lord by his name?’

There was surprise in Luel’s face again as she gave me a long, searching look. ‘To protect him. He is still being sought. If I should ever say my lord’s name out loud, then . . .’

‘Then what?’

‘It might reach the wrong ears.’

The way she spoke these words made me shiver. ‘But he calls you by your name. Wouldn’t that also –’

‘No, I am using my inner name here, not the name I was known by in the world. This one carries no echoes. And neither, at the moment, does yours, for different reasons.’

‘What are those reasons?’

‘They don’t know of your existence,’ she said simply. ‘And they won’t, unless . . .’

‘Unless what? Please, tell me. I have a right to know.’

‘Unless you make it so,’ she said quietly. ‘And I think you know what that means.’

I swallowed. She meant if I tried to run away. But even though only a few hours ago that would have been uppermost in my mind, I was now more curious than frightened. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Three years in clock-reckoning. Much longer if you count it in the relentless hours of my lord’s agony.’

‘And where are you from?’

‘I cannot tell you that for the same reason I cannot speak my lord’s name. If I were to speak the name of our home . . .’ Luel paused and I saw a flicker of sadness cross
her face, ‘the feeling in it would alert them. We are not from this country. That is all I can say.’

I was silent a moment, then I said, carefully, ‘What happened to your lord? Was it a curse?’

‘Yes. He crossed a powerful and very dangerous man.’ Her lips peeled back into a snarl. ‘Quite how dangerous, we did not know until it was too late and the spell was cast. I managed to halt the full workings of it and to whisk my lord away. But that is all I could do.’

Suddenly, I didn’t feel hungry at all and pushed my plate away. ‘You said that your lord is still being – sought. Does that mean –’

‘Our enemy does not consider his revenge complete yet. It will not be complete until my lord is utterly destroyed.’ She spoke calmly, but her words chilled me to the bone.

I whispered, ‘The crow this morning . . .’

‘It may be from him. It may not. I checked our defences again, and they have not been breached. But I still cannot take the chance.’

I shivered. ‘Forgive me, Luel, for asking this, but you are a
feya
, are you not?’ She nodded in reply. ‘And you are connected to your lord by no ordinary bond.’

‘That is so. I’ve served the family for a long, long time. And I have known my lord for all of his twenty-one years, since the very day he was born.’

Twenty-one, I thought, shocked. Why, the
abartyen
was only a few years older than me. To think that that terrible thing had happened to him when he was eighteen. A sharp pang went through me, a mixture of pity and
horror. ‘One of your kind is surely stronger than a mere human sorcerer,’ I said. ‘So why –’

‘There is no
mere
about it,’ Luel snapped. ‘Our enemy is most certainly no ordinary sorcerer. And yes, I’m what you people call a
feya
, but there are many grades and ranks of powers amongst us. Mine is only a small one.’

My eyes widened. I waved a hand around. ‘But this place . . . it is your doing.’

‘Yes. So what? I have tried to keep my lord safe and make him comfortable. I have even tried to give him moments of respite, of beauty, like the rose. But every day it grows harder.’

‘The . . . the empty frames – are they part of it?’

Luel nodded.

‘Why don’t you wish them away, or whatever it is you do?’

‘It is not so simple,’ she said sadly.

I was tempted to say that someone who could control a magic mirror and make dishes and dresses fly from places all over the land should have no difficulty with getting rid of empty spaces.

‘Child, you must understand. There are so many things I cannot do, much as I long to. I cannot reverse the spell. I cannot restore what was taken from my lord – everything he once loved, the life he once lived. I cannot protect him from the darkness that eats away at him. I cannot save him from a cruel injustice that day by merciless day devours more and more of his memory and with it his humanity.’

‘Oh, Luel,’ I cried, shaken to the core by the horror of it, ‘the man who did this must surely be no man but a demon
from the deepest pit of hell. For how could a human being do such a terrible thing to another and still not consider that his revenge was complete?’

There was a great sadness in the old woman’s eyes as she looked at me. ‘My dear sweet Natasha,’ she said, ‘he is no demon but indeed a man.’

‘Well, if he is no demon, it is simple.’

Luel’s eyebrows shot up, questioning me.

‘What one human can do, another can undo,’ I went on. ‘There
must
be a way to break this spell. And I want to do it. Come what may. With your help, of course,’ I added.

Luel’s face filled with light. She grasped my hand, and I felt the strange coolness of her
feya
skin. ‘Oh, Natasha, my dear child, you have made me so happy,’ she whispered. ‘You cannot know how happy. Before, you gave me hope. Now, you have given so much more. For yes, there may be a way to break the spell, but I could not say so before this very moment.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Listen to me,’ Luel said. ‘I took a risk letting you in, for I knew it might weaken the spell that has protected this place from unfriendly eyes. But I took that risk because I knew you were different, and I hoped so much that maybe you were the right one. Yet I had to be sure. Because it is only to the right one that I may say it.’ She smiled radiantly. ‘And you have just proven you are the one.’

What Luel told me then stilled my tongue and made my heart hang heavy as lead. I listened to her speak of the one way that would break the spell, and tried to school my own expression to conceal the horror I felt at what was being asked of me. She looked at me when she’d finished. ‘Well?’

‘I . . .’ The simple word snagged in my throat. ‘I . . .’

‘It is a shock, I know. But in time . . .’

I held up a trembling hand. ‘Is there . . .’ I swallowed. ‘Is there no possibility of . . . Are you sure this is the only way?’

‘It is the only way I know.’ She laid a hand on mine. ‘Natasha, don’t look so terrified. My lord – what you see now is not what he really is. If you knew him as I do . . .’

‘But I don’t,’ I said shakily. ‘That is just it.’

‘If you turn your back on my lord now, his fate is sealed. There is nothing surer.’

‘I will not turn my back, but I . . . I will do anything to save him but that,’ I said, rising and pushing back my chair so hurriedly that it fell with a crash. ‘You cannot demand such a thing of me! I cannot be forced to think of him as my . . .’ The words caught in my throat.

‘You are right. You cannot be forced to love him. You cannot be forced to marry him. And nobody can demand it of you,’ Luel said sadly. ‘My dear child, I’d hoped you understood that. All I can do is suggest it. It must be done of your own free will or it is worthless.’

With a cry, I fled the room and ran down the corridor, expecting at any moment to hear her coming in pursuit of me. But I reached the glass doors that led to the garden without her voice hailing me. Blindly, feeling as though I were about to suffocate, I pulled open the doors and stumbled out into the empty garden, the crisp cold air making me gasp, half in relief, half in pain.

I reached a stone bench and sat down. Doubling over, I rocked from side to side, murmuring desperate prayers. I tried to still the panic that burned within me, the fear that Luel was lying and that I was already trapped by my own thoughtless words into a terrifying marriage with a beast.

My eye was caught at that moment by a splash of scarlet on white – the withered petals of the fateful flower, lying in the snow. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I got up groggily and staggered to where a single petal lay. All the others had vanished as though they’d never existed and the bush was completely bare.

I picked up the petal. Withered as it was, it still exuded a faint fragrance, and its ragged shape and deep colour
reminded me eerily of a heart. A bloody, dying heart, broken beyond repair. And that image undid the last of my precarious self-control, so that I put my face in my hands and wept, the petal slipping unregarded through my fingers.

‘She has told you.’ The voice was quiet, but it made me start violently. I turned to see the
abartyen
standing on the path. He stood absolutely still and his yellow eyes held no expression at all but glowed like lanterns in his monstrous face. He made a terrifying sight.

‘Yes,’ I whispered, quailing before him.

‘She has no right,’ he said, so quietly that I strained to hear him. ‘No right. I did not ask it. I
will
not ask it.’ His voice rose a little with each word, so that by the time he got to the end, it was a deep, menacing growl.

I took a step back. ‘It is all right, sir, I am not –’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ he said harshly. ‘I know every fibre in you rebels at the thought, every sense shrinks. Is that not so? Answer me.’