Her sunken, cloudy eyes gazed back at her grandniece. Did she see her? Emma wondered. Or only a dream?
She breathed something, a half word, the beginning of a comment, the beginning of a name. Her eyelids fell again, closed.
“H’m,” was all Miranda Beryl said before she turned and walked out of the room. She went downstairs again, the amazed Emma following, and out the front door. To all the silent figures turning to her, including Mrs. Haw still sitting on the steps, she announced,
“She’s alive. We’re staying.”
Thirteen
All sound ceased in the great house when Ridley Dow closed the door behind him. It was as though the ocean itself had stopped dead in the middle of its thunder. So Ysabo felt, as the strange abrupt silence buffeted her ears. The young man, still looking at her, opened his mouth to speak again. Then he simply dissolved into nothing, and the world started speaking around her again.
It sounded familiar enough: no vast rumblings of astonishment and rage, no raucous rattle and clamor of crows pouring like black wind among the stones. The house had ridded itself of the stranger that easily. It had swallowed him. It had blinked him out of sight. No need for disturbance, except in Ysabo, whose trembling would stop eventually, whose terror would recede. Who would compose herself, for the sake of her days, and continue on her way.
Which she did, when she could finally bring herself to move, to step through the place where the man had vanished. Her eyes still burned dryly; her heart still pounded at the memory. He had looked at her; he had given her his name and hers. And for that, he had ceased to exist.
It might have been Emma, she realized dazedly. Stepping so easily, in curiosity, across the threshold, the first time she had seen Ysabo’s world. But they had always been wary, both of them, of the random, capricious threshold across which they met. So it had not been Emma, blinked out of existence in front of Ysabo.
It had been a stranger who knew her name.
Who had he said? Crossing paths . . . an ancestor . . . Something urgent had brought him to that door. But what?
She drew breath, loosed it wearily. Another question without an answer.
She had no more courage for exploring, for wondering, for asking. The incident had stopped her heart; she wanted no more surprises. She went upstairs to where it was safe, to Maeve’s chambers, where her mother and her grandmother spent their mornings. It was not yet noon; she didn’t have to be elsewhere. Maeve and Aveline gazed at her absently as she entered, their eyes full of some interrupted discussion. Ysabo sank into her chair near the windows, took up the needlework she had left on the small table beside her.
“Where have you been?” Aveline asked. It was more a greeting, an acknowledgment of Ysabo’s presence than a question demanding an answer. She went on without waiting for her daughter to cobble a half-truth. “We’ve been planning your wedding.”
“Oh.” She straightened in her chair, remembering it herself then, and tried to assume an interest. “I don’t know what happens. What must I do?”
“Just say yes to anything you are asked,” Maeve said. She glanced dubiously at Ysabo. “You will, won’t you? You won’t argue, you won’t ask why—”
“No,” Ysabo answered softly. “I promise. They frighten me, the knights.”
“Well, that won’t last. And, of course, he may begin to love you. That has been known to happen. Usually, they forget who you are within the year. I mean,” Maeve amended, at Aveline’s indignant stare, “you become as necessary as all women here: you have your place, you are seen, you become part of the ritual of their lives. It is not an encumbrance as long as you ask nothing unreasonable of him.”
“May I ask his name?”
Maeve and Aveline consulted one another silently.
“Nieve?” Aveline guessed.
“I thought it was Zondros.”
“You don’t know?” Aveline said a little fretfully to Ysabo. “It seems the kind of thing one should, at such a time.”
“He only said it once. And then he asked the question. I was so surprised that his name flew out of my head.”
“Well,” Aveline said, pushing a needle trailing black thread into her frame, “somebody should know. I’ll ask among the ladies. Now. As for your wedding. You will be married in the great hall with all the knights and lords and ladies attending. You’ll wear my wedding dress. Rose-colored satin with webs of pearls all over it. The ceremony is ancient and simple. You pledge yourselves to one another, drink from the same cup, and kiss. You’ll marry in midmorning, after you feed the crows, who, of course, will be watching, too. That way the rituals will not be disrupted. That evening there will be a sumptuous wedding feast. You will wear the dress to that, and you and your knight will sit in places of honor at the table. Then, for that night and until you conceive, you will sleep together in the marriage chamber. After that, you will both be free to return to your own chambers; your husband will come to you or not, as you both decide.”
“I don’t go to him?” Ysabo said faintly.
“It’s as you decide,” Aveline repeated. “But your chambers are more private than the knight’s. You see?” She smiled at her daughter. “Nothing difficult, nothing confusing, nothing to fear. And sooner than you can imagine, you’ll have a child of your own to love.” She paused; her perfunctory smile grew deeper, more genuine. “For us all to love. Can you do all that? Without causing trouble?”
Ysabo sank deeper into her chair, tried to vanish into the tapestry. She gave the only possible answer. “Yes, Aveline.”
She worked her needle silently a while, two faces appearing, one after another, in her head: one with black brows and a bold, proudly planed face, the other with dark eyes behind flashing spectacles. One had seen her when he looked at her; the other never saw her. She heard Maeve’s and Aveline’s voices again as they reminisced about their own weddings, then wandered off into more distant, improbable times.
“Do you remember,” Aveline said, “those long, long summer days, just before the leaves began to turn? I ran barefoot across the meadow grass while you dallied in the pavilion among the courtiers with Queen Hydria and the wizard Blagdon, watching knights ride in all their colors through the distant wood . . .”
They were tales, Ysabo had decided long ago. Stories Maeve and Aveline put themselves into in order to pass the time, worlds full of trees, seasons, sky, castles, worlds where hearts were pierced by a glance or a sword, where magic wove like bindweed through past and present, where people fought and loved and died without regard to ritual. Places they could visit whenever they wanted, for they had found the only door out of Aislinn House: the door into tales and dreams.
“And one turned aside from his company,” Maeve murmured, “rode across the meadow to me.”
“Did you know him before I did?” Aveline asked.
“Who?”
“Nemos. Before I was born.”
“I always knew him. Always, all my life...”
Ysabo threaded a needle with the color of foam and began to fill in the wing of a swan gliding across a pool full of flowers like cups of light. She had only seen such a pool in someone else’s tapestry. I borrow worlds, too, she thought. I pretend I have been in them.
“When we rode with him down that long road in the rain? Do you remember? Dark it was, so dark, even at noon that day. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Where were we going?”
“We rode in Queen Hydria’s entourage, home from visiting some enchanted place that Blagdon wanted her to see, to honor.”
“Old ruins. I remember now.”
“They were, yes. They were ancient stones, trees so twisted and tangled by age they crawled along the ground as white as old bones. But the place was still alive. I could feel it, the memories it held. The compelling magic of it.”
The sun had shifted its light beyond the stone frame of the window, too high overhead to be seen. Ysabo put her needlework down and rose quietly, to change into her white gown for the midday ritual. Aveline gave her an approving smile. She put her own work aside, but lingered for one more memory, one more sweetmeat. Ysabo, crossing to the door, heard it.
“When we walked into the wood in the soft spring rain? Just the three of us? I was very small. All the white violets at the stream’s edge seemed like lovely, astonishing bits of treasure. And everything around us a mist of new green. Nemos picked a violet, put it in your hair. But it refused to stay, kept falling down again, and disappearing in the weeds...”
Ysabo’s hand, closing on the door latch, jerked away from it as though it had pricked her. Aveline glanced around at the rattle. A servant came forward swiftly to open the door, bowed Ysabo through. She kept her shoulders back, her pace even, until she turned a corner.
Then she slumped against the wall, blinking, her eyes gritty, swollen with memory.
Nemos, the stranger had said as he came into her world. Nemos Moore.
And then Ridley Dow was gone. Aislinn House had closed over him like water, and he had drowned in nothing.
Again she found the strength to move: nothing else to do. She followed the ritual path of her day as mindlessly as the sun, holding the goblets with Aveline and Maeve in the great hall for the knights, watching the doors close behind them. Opening this window, lighting that candle, locking the door at this end of the house, unlocking the door at that. Lighting the lantern, carrying it into the dark, leaving it on the boat to cast its frail light across the black water.
Someone spoke then, and she nearly reeled into the water with shock.
“Princess Ysabo.”
Ridley Dow was sitting on a ledge of stone, an outgrowth along the cavern wall. She could barely see his face, but she recognized the flash of his lenses.
“I thought—” Her voice had gone somewhere; she could only whisper. “I thought you were dead.”
“No.” He rose, came closer to her, but only as close as the edge of shadow around the light. He spoke very softly. “I’m sorry I startled you. I made myself disappear. I take after my ancestor in that I can learn to do such things. I thought it would be safer for both of us. I’ve been following you.”
“You should not—” Her voice, gaining strength, shook with urgency. “You should not be here, Ridley Dow. This house is no place for you.”
“I know.”
“If anyone sees you—If even the crows see you—You are not part of the ritual. The knights don’t understand anything that is not ritual. They punish it.”
“I understand.” He touched his spectacles with a forefinger, studying her. “I’ll be very careful.”
“But what is it you want?” she asked him desperately. “Why have you come at all? There is nothing for you here but trouble.”
“I know,” he said. “Exactly what I’ve come to find. How much trouble my ancestor caused through the centuries he’s been alive. How much I can cause him.”
She stared at him, wordless again. He shifted shape in front of her eyes, then, from the reckless innocent as unarmed as a maiden come to tweak the eyelid of the ancient sleeping monster, to a man with hidden powers who might possibly understand more about her life than she did.
“Nemos,” she whispered. “Maeve and Aveline talk about him. They make up tales with him in them. They ride with him to impossible places, to meadows and ancient ruins, to the court of a Queen Hydria, who seems to hold her court here in Aislinn House as well, because everyone says her name at supper. But no one ever sees her there. So how could Maeve and Aveline know her? How could they know Nemos Moore? They’ve been in Aislinn House all their lives.”
“And Nemos Moore,” Ridley said grimly, “has been in and out of this house at will. I don’t understand everything he did here, but he is very powerful and seems capable of any mischief, including riding into someone else’s tale.” He was silent a little, as though contemplating his wicked relation in the dark water. Then he seemed to see the water again. “I don’t suppose,” he added, “you know if there is any meaning whatsoever to this boat. The lantern.”
“Don’t ask.” The words came out with unexpected fierceness. “That is all I understand. All anyone has ever told me.”
“I see,” he breathed.
“I must go. The ritual doesn’t like to wait.” She turned her back to him, told him as she moved away, “If you follow me, don’t let me know.”
When she looked back before she left the underground chamber, he was nowhere to be seen.
He appeared again sometime later, when she unlocked the door to the east tower and went up the winding stairs to the top to turn the page in the book on its stand in the empty room. He was there suddenly, at her elbow, peering at the empty page.
“How very strange ... Is it simply cruelty, or some extreme subtlety of magic?”
“Ridley!” she exclaimed, her hands closing tightly onto the edges of the stand.
“Sorry,” he said penitently. “It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.” He reached out, to her horror, riffled through the blank pages. “I’ll have to study it more closely later.”
She stared at him again, this creature from some world beyond her comprehension. He bore her scrutiny with composure. No knight would ever have allowed her to study him like this, she thought. Their eyes would grow angry, warning her, as though her gaze had challenged them.