The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil (15 page)

He was watching the ghost out of the corner of his eye, enjoying her outrage as he not only ignored her but also defied her, which was why when the witch took not the button but his whole hand, he startled in surprise. She was running her finger over the tattoos and scars on the inside of his arm, but there was comprehension on her face, not just curiosity.

“You were a concubine of the court,” she said with surprise, then stilled as her finger traced the royal mark. “The
Cariff
court.” She looked up at him as if
he
were a ghost. “You should be dead.”

Timothy considered yanking his arm back, but he made himself leave it there. “You can see that I am not. But yes, I was a court concubine.”

She was shaking her head. “The Cloister monks tortured all of you to death. You were the first captured. It was your deaths the witches saw and caused them to rouse the army. I watched this when I was but a novice.”

“You saw
me
?” Timothy asked, impressed despite himself. “In your visions?”

She nodded. “I saw the concubines. The men and the women, down in the pits—” She traced the brand above the royal mark. “I saw them give you this. Then I saw—” She shut her eyes and said no more.

If she truly did see, Timothy had pity for her. He closed his free hand over hers on his wrist. “I was a prisoner of the Cloister, yes. But I escaped. They tortured me…differently. I don’t know why I was kept alive.” He nodded to the bed. “It was he who rescued me. And now it is he who needs rescuing. Please. Help me help him.”

He hadn’t meant to accept her so completely just yet, but he found her pain at the memory of her vision or whatever it was she had seen all those years ago was testament enough for him. He pushed the now furious ghost from the corner of his focus and opened the rest to the witch, telling her the full, strange story, all that he knew and could understand.

“He cannot die—or, at least, it is very, very difficult for him to.” Timothy gestured to various scars across Jonathan’s body. “Each of these should have been fatal; this punctured his liver. This, a lung. A bullet once went directly into his heart; he was in a coma, and the doctor tried to tell me there was no hope, but I made him operate. The surgeon made the incision, but I had to remove the pellet myself, as the physicians were so undone by the sight of a man’s heart beating even with three aortas severed that they had to be admitted into their own hospital.” He gestured to Jonathan’s neck. “This was the last. We were ambushed, and the bandit who grabbed Jonathan tried to cut his throat. I couldn’t reach him, and I had to watch as the knife cut a wide swath. It bled like nothing I have ever seen. He should have died there in my arms. He did not. The army hospital discharged him and put him on a boat home, thinking he was nearly gone—hoping, I suspect. They couldn’t look at him. The thick tubing of his vessels, his windpipe—all were severed, visible through the gaping hole in his neck from the butchery,
and yet he lived
. I watched his insides knit slowly back together day by day. But he has been weaker each time, and since we have come back to his homeland, he has been nearly rabid with paranoia. He says he is possessed of a demon. He says he will turn into an agent of death and destruction if he is not cured of it. He says the longer he is here on this soil, the more power it claims and the more lost he becomes.”

The witch let go of Timothy as she moved to the head of the bed and began moving her hands over Jonathan’s body, shaping the air above him as if she were touching a ghost body that hovered above his flesh and bone. Timothy dared a look at the ghost at the foot of the bed, but to his relief, he saw that she had vanished again.

When the witch came to Jonathan’s bandaged groin and thigh, she stopped.

“How did he come by this one?” she asked.

“He brought it with him to the Continent. It’s from a fight with his father, he said.” Timothy glared at the wound. “It has never fully healed. It reopens almost daily, and it has grown over the years.” He pursed his lips, then rubbed the gesture away before he spoke. “He says this is where the demon lives.”

Again Timothy watched for her reaction, but this time she gave none at all. She only stared down at Jonathan, unmoving, her face so wooden it could have been carved from a plank. Her hands, however, gave her away. They were clenched into fists at her sides, fingers tucked in so tightly her knuckles were white.

“She has some sense left, then, if she still knows fear,”
the ghost said, reappearing beside Timothy.
“Perhaps there is hope after all.”

“Can you help him?” Timothy asked the witch, ignoring the ghost. “Can you cure him? Can you save him?”

Madeline Elliott nodded, but slowly. When she spoke, her voice was thin. “There will be a cost.”

“I will do anything,” Timothy said with no hesitation. “I will give my life, witch, if this is necessary.”

But she only shook her head. “There is nothing you can do. There—” She swayed on her feet, then reached out to steady herself on the bedpost. The veneer of her expression cracked, and Timothy could see she was terrified. Though she gathered herself again, she could no longer fully recover. “I must pay the cost.”

“Noble fool.”
The ghost began to pace back and forth beside the bed.
“She will only feed it! She is of a House! She will only set it free!”

Timothy frowned at the ghost. “House? She is noble like Lord Whitby? She is a lady?”

He realized too late he had spoken aloud; Madeline Elliott tore herself from her trance of terror and looked at him through a sort of fog.

“Not political houses. Magical Houses,” Madeline said. “Whitby is one of the political houses too, but the magical Houses are older.
Caryltin, pari, ellyuit
, and
whitbi
are the names of the four elements in the Old Tongue. Lord Carlton, Lord Perry, Lord Elliott, and Lord Whitby ruled them in the world. But the lords are dead, all but one, and he is two in one: the Houses of Perry and Whitby merged long ago. The rest are spent, with only traces of the House blood remaining. Once we were the guardians of the elements. Now—” She looked down at her hands, flipping them over and back again as she watched. “Now we are little more than the ghosts we serve.”

Timothy cast a glance at the woman of blue mist and light beside him. “What does it matter that you are of a House? An Elliott, you said. The House of Water.” He paused, wondering how he had known that. Then he shook his head, swearing in Catalian under his breath. “This is madness. This is not happening. I am still enchanted or drugged by that mathdu ghora at the inn. Houses! Ghosts!
Madness
!”

“Jonathan is under a curse,” Madeline said. “He spilled the blood of his own House, which means his family’s daemon has changed from pure spirit of the Element and has come as a demon to claim him. It will eventually consume him or be passed on to another of his House. And if it consumes him, it will use him like a puppet to destroy the remaining members of the other Houses.” She pursed her lips. “And that is me. I am of the House of Elliott, the only one left. Carlton is dead, and Whitby has been claimed long ago. I am all that remains. But I am a witch. I am my own power. I am more than my blood.”

“She is vain! She is a fool! She will kill the beloved!”
The ghost was wailing now.

“Can you save him?” Timothy leaned forward over the bed toward Madeline, bracing his palms against the rotting mattress. “Can you make him whole again?
Will
you save him?”

“I—” Madeline Elliott pressed her hands to her abdomen and stared at Jonathan’s face. Her own was full of agony and fear. “I would, and I will, but…” She raised a hand to her mouth and covered it, shaking her head. “If I still had guides…but without them? How?”

“Guides?” Timothy asked.

“Magical aids,”
the ghost said.
“Anchors for a witch. Hers have abandoned her because she dared to disobey them and come to this man’s side.”

“Let me be your anchor, then,” Timothy said before Madeline could form an answer.

The ghost shook her head. So did Madeline. “If you
were
an alchemist—” She cut herself off and shook her head. Then she covered her face. “I cannot see the way! I am not afraid to die, but I cannot see how to do this! He said only I had the power to save Jonathan, but
I cannot see!”

Timothy turned to the ghost and glared. “Help her!” Madeline Elliott looked up at this, but he ignored her and addressed the ghost again. “If this is so vital,
help her
!”

“Who are you talking to?” the witch asked.

“We cannot help those of the House.”
The ghost crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head at Madeline.
“This one in particular. She does not believe.”

“
I
don’t believe,” Timothy shot back. He waved a hand at Madeline, then at the anachi. “
She
believes! Help her!”

“You see the ghosts,” Madeline whispered. She was looking at Timothy with shocked awe. “You—
you
see the ghosts?”

“Just one,” Timothy snapped. “And it’s one too many. Do you know who she is?”

But Madeline Elliott was backing away. “Androghenie,” she whispered. “You see the androghenie.”

“No,”
the ghost said, calmer now.
“I am not androghenie. But I have an aspect among them.”

“What are androghenie?” Timothy’s head was spinning, the strange word rolling around inside the storm. Images collided with it, images of beautiful children, tall and slight and soft, their skin a strange mixture of dark and light, their eyes wide, their mouths upturned in laughter.

They are mine
. He didn’t know if it was his voice or the ghost’s.
The androghenie are mine.

“Who are you?” Madeline Elliott was backing away slowly, staring now at Timothy. “Who are you to stop my spells? Who are you to speak to the Old Ones? Who are you who speaks their tongue, who knows their words?”

Timothy shook the images out of his head and faced her. “I’m no one! No one!”

On the bed, Jonathan began to moan. His body started to twitch, and Timothy’s heart sank as he recognized the sign of a convulsion coming on. It would be a bad one, and the wound would open. How much blood could one man lose in a day?

Timothy cried out and buried his hands in his hair. “Mathdu, you stupid people, you stupid country! What do you do to him? What is this hell you put into him? Why will you not take it out?” He turned back and forth between the two women. “Witch! Ghost! Demon! Houses of Elements! Where is your worthless Goddess in this cast of idiots? Where is your great whore, your ice queen, your High Hypocrite—”

He stopped. Madeline Elliott looked frozen—she
was
frozen, he realized with a sick comprehension. So was Jonathan. He and the ghost alone were still animate.

“I am no whore, court concubine.”

Her words did not echo as they had before. Timothy looked down at his hands. He was made of light, as she was. He laughed, feeling more than a little mad.

The ghost reached out and touched his hand. She was gold again but blue as well, the two colors swirling together within her. She squeezed his palm.
“Call the beloved,”
she whispered.
“Call him, please.”

“You are the Goddess,” he said, not believing the words even as they passed his lips. “You, a ghost only I—a gutter boy of Catal—can see, are the Goddess of Etsey. And you want me to call Jonathan’s bastard half brother because
he
is your beloved.”

She shook her head.
“I am only a shade, and I can do nothing. I cannot speak. I am nothing but a memory. I have waited so long, so cold in the darkness—and you, you claim your will, but you will not listen, and you will not see!”

Timothy opened his mouth to argue with her, then stopped, arrested. He turned back to Madeline, still frozen in a way that made his insides squirm, but he stayed there, letting the ghost’s words echo in his head.

“I cannot see.”

“He told me I had the power to save Jonathan.”

“He told me…”

“He…”

“I cannot see, I cannot see…”

Timothy stepped forward, ignoring the fact that he stepped through the bed, through Jonathan’s legs. He shivered when he bumped against Jonathan’s wounded thigh—he could pass through flesh and bone and wood and cloth, but he could not pass through that. He reached out to take Madeline’s hand.

“Who told you?” Timothy felt as if he were in a dream, and his mind assured him this was one because nothing else was logical. “Who told you that you had the power to save Jonathan?” But she did not speak, did not move, did not even breathe.

Timothy let go of her hand and turned to the anachi at the foot of the bed. He stared at it for several seconds, focusing on the eerie blackness of the skull’s empty sockets.

“I cannot see.”

He walked back through the bed again, across the room to his satchel. He dug through it until he found a small linen bag with glass beads sewn in intricate patterns across it a pattern that matched his first tattoo. He withdrew a knife from his pocket, ignored the way both it and his hand were not flesh and metal but clustered points of light, and he pried two blue stones the size of flat acorns from the center. Clutching them tightly in his hand, he crossed back to the bed.

“Who are you? What is this you do? Who are you?”
The witch’s questions echoed in his ears, but though they troubled him, he did not let them slow him down. The ghost did not speak, only watched as Timothy went back to the bed, crouched down to the skull, and placed the stones carefully into the two sockets.

“See,” he said to the skull. “Show her the way to save him. Show me the way to understand.” He shut his eyes as the images returned to him again, the children running and laughing, dancing. But this time a tall white figure came along behind them, and Timothy felt his heart catch, tightening as he added,
“Show me the beloved.”

A wind blew through the room; it put out the candle on the bedside and the witch’s hearth fire. It brought back time: on the bed, Jonathan was convulsing and gasping, and beside it, the witch was bending toward him, looking lost and afraid. Timothy barely saw them; he saw only the ghost, soft and quiet as she stared with him at the skull at the foot of the bed as it gathered the twigs and garlands and buttons and jars of earth, and the sole burning candle, collecting the elements into a body as it began to rise.