Authors: Mccormick Templeman
“It’s true, isn’t it? Fiona Eira was my sister.” The words came out strange and shaky, and even though she knew them to be true, she wanted him to tell her they weren’t. She wanted him to tell her it was all some terrible misunderstanding.
But he didn’t. “Yes,” he said, his voice like a gust of wind.
“I had a sister, and you sent her away?”
He nodded. “I did what was best for our family, Rowan. I did what was best for you.”
“Don’t blame your choices on me. You sent her away because of a prophecy?” she asked, her voice choked with sorrow. “You don’t even believe in divination.”
He looked out the window into the heavy black night beyond. “Of course I don’t.”
“But you sent her away because of what the witch told you,” she said, and standing before him, her fists clenched at her side, she resisted the urge to beat them upon his chest. “You can’t believe and not believe at the same time. You have to decide.”
“Rowan,” he said, looking up at her with pleading eyes. “How can I explain this to you? I am a man of reason. I never believed in witches or goblins—in the things we can’t explain. But your mother did believe, and when she invited that witch here, I have to admit, I was swayed. I liked her. She was so taken with you. She said you were destined for greatness. What father wouldn’t want to believe that? But when she came back, when your mother was pregnant with Fiona, her tune was quite different. She spoke of illness, of death—of that vile prophecy. Hateful, that’s what it was. What woman needs to hear she is going to die before her labor has even begun? Sometimes I sit up at night wondering what would have happened if that witch hadn’t said those things to her. Would she have found the strength … would she have made it through alive? Do you see now why I hate them? Do you see why I’ve kept you from their lies?”
Rowan shook her head, trying to understand. Taking a step away from her father, she leaned against the window seat and ran a finger along the rose stripe of its cushion. “But,” she said, “but she did die.”
He nodded. “She did die. She left me alone with an infant
and a child of no more than a year. What was I supposed to do? I sent Fiona Eira to your uncle Pimm and your aunt Malia. I knew he was a good man—that he would raise her as his own. It’s not as if I abandoned her.”
Rowan felt a pressure growing in her chest. She thought of Fiona Eira, an infant, her mother dead, forced from her home by a father who didn’t want her. Rowan’s heart ached for her, and it ached for herself, for the sister she’d never known. All those times when she’d instinctively reached out for someone, she was reaching for someone who was very much alive, someone who was supposed to be there beside her.
“And when she came back?” Rowan said, meeting his eyes. “You wouldn’t see her. How could you refuse to see your own child?”
He looked away, but not before Rowan could see the tears filling his eyes. “I was … I was frightened.”
“Frightened?” Rowan laughed, bitterness pinching at her throat. “Frightened of what? Of the prophecy? But you said you didn’t believe in the prophecy.”
“I didn’t,” he said, his chin quivering. “I don’t. But Rowan, life is unkind, and sometimes we tell ourselves we believe things because we need to believe them. An infant dies in its sleep, and the mother tells herself that the goblins took him. That is what she needs to believe, and so she does. Don’t you understand, I don’t know if any of these things are real. I don’t know if the prophecy is real, but I need to believe that it isn’t. For my own sanity, I need to believe that it isn’t.”
“You … you took my sister away,” she whispered. “My mother was dead, and you took my sister away.”
“I did what I thought was best for you. Best for the two of us.” He held out his hands to her, but she didn’t take them. “Please, Rowan, you have to forgive me. You have to understand that not a day has gone by that I haven’t questioned my decision. I know that if I hadn’t done what I did, that Fiona Eira would probably be alive today. I know that in my heart, and it kills me. It eats away at me night and day.”
Rowan looked into her father’s pleading eyes, and she saw that she had the chance to know his mind—that the secrecy that had kept him from her in recent times was slowly abating.
“I need to ask you something,” she said. “And I need you to tell me the truth.”
He looked her straight in the eyes and nodded. “Anything.”
She inhaled, as if preparing herself for the worst. “I want to know who the duke is—who he really is. I want to know why he’s here.”
He stared at her a moment, and then exhaling, he dropped his face into his hands.
“Rowan,” he said. “He’s a dangerous man. A very dangerous man.”
“Why is he here?”
“I suppose it’s best if I tell you from the beginning,” he said, his voice so soothing that Rowan sank into a nearby chair like a child settling in for a bedtime tale. “I’ve known him for a while now—since before he took over the job of
conservateur. I knew of his interest in Midway texts, and I knew he’d recently unearthed a new cache of them, which, I heard, he was guarding quite closely. When those soldiers came through Nag’s End, I wondered what they were after. There is little to interest the king up here, but the mountains behind us were once home to a sect of the ancient Midway peoples. I thought immediately of the duke. When the soldiers died, I sorted through their things over at the inn, and I discovered their captain’s logbook, and when I saw mention of the duke, when I read that he had commanded the mission, I decided to take the book for myself, to read it through.” Suddenly he let out an embittered laugh.
“What?” Rowan asked, taken aback. “What is it?”
He shook his head. “Perhaps I should have listened to the villagers. Perhaps I have incurred the luck of the dead after all.”
“May I see it?” she asked, her mind racing. “May I see the logbook?”
“You’ve already seen it,” he said. “When I yelled at you over the papers you held. Those were loose sheets from the logbook—schematics. But I’m afraid I no longer have it. It disappeared from my locked drawer. I am assuming the duke figured out some way to reclaim it.”
“What did it say? What did you find between its pages?”
“I don’t know exactly what I expected to find in there,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “But I was unprepared for what I did find. I thought perhaps it was an archaeological expedition for which the duke hadn’t secured
approval. I thought at most it might be a bit of a scandal, but what I found between those pages stank of treason.”
“Treason?”
“According to what the captain knew, the men were on that mountain to find a weapon—an ancient weapon of great power that the duke believed was buried in the vicinity of Beggar’s Drift.”
“My Goddess,” Rowan sighed, trying to piece it all together.
Her father nodded. “From what I could glean, one of the duke’s precious Midway texts had been translated to reveal the location of this weapon. Now, I knew the duke. I knew the hatred he harbored in his soul—the revenge he’s longed to seek against the throne. A secret trip to find a weapon of mass devastation did not look good for him—it was not something he would want the king to know about. So I wrote to him and explained that I had read the logbook, and asked if he’d like to discuss its contents with me. I also sent him your translation work. I knew he would be impressed, and I suppose I hoped that my knowledge of the contents of the logbook, coupled with your skills with the Midway dialects, might be enough to secure me a position in the palace city. I thought at the very least it might yield a profit of some kind.”
Rowan recoiled. “Blackmail?”
He grimaced. “Oh, I know it was base of me, but man
is
base, Rowan, and I pretend to be nothing more than a man.”
“Tell me about the weapon,” she said quietly. “Did he tell you what it was?”
“You won’t believe it,” he said, his eyes wide. “Once he got
here, he told me this weapon he claimed to have found was no weapon at all. It was a creature, he said—a great slumbering god that he said he could awaken through some magical nonsense. He intended to transport it in a massive wooden cart—that was the other sheet of paper you saw among my things—schematics for his ridiculous mobile prison. Of course, as soon as he told me this, I knew that he’d gone mad—dangerously mad, but it was too late by then. I went along with what he said because how could I not, but monsters and magic? It’s insanity. He arrived babbling about how his monster had been lost, and how he needed some coin—how if only he could find the coin, then he’d be able to set it all right again.”
Rowan cleared her throat, not yet ready to show her hand. “So he has no idea where the coin is? Has he … has he found the monster?”
“Rowan,” he laughed. “Use your head, my girl. There is no monster. Madness is the monster—the madness is driving the duke to kill.”
Rowan shook her head. “I think you might be wrong about that, Father.”
“Rowan, the blood fairly drips from his bejeweled fingers. I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out a way to stop him, but I come up with nothing. He is the queen’s brother. I cannot accuse him of murder. You know how this royal lot is. What is a handful of slaughtered villagers to them? So I have been trying to obtain proof. When he goes out at night, I follow him, but each time, I come up empty. I’ve even started looking for this coin myself, thinking that
if I could find it, that I could send him on his way, but the task is impossible. It’s utter lunacy.”
“There is a coin,” Rowan said gravely.
“What did you say?” He looked up at her with a raised eyebrow.
“There is a monster as well.”
He stared at her a moment before laughing and shaking his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
She held his gaze. “I’ve seen it, Father. I’ve seen it in the woods. I’ve seen it as plainly as I’m seeing you.”
Her father stared at her, the blood slowly draining from his face. “You’re serious.”
“What the duke told you is true, and he’s far more dangerous than you know. He did summon a monster. It stalks these woods. It’s killed and killed again, and it will keep on killing.”
Her father laughed and shook his head. “No. You can’t be serious, child.”
“Father, when will you trust me? When will you listen to me? Maybe there
are
goblins and fairies. Maybe there
are
monsters. Maybe these simple village folk from whom you’ve always sought to separate yourself know more about the world than you do. Maybe their beliefs aren’t as backward as you think.”
Her father paused a moment, his face a muddle of emotions, and then he leaned in. “You say … you say you’ve seen it,” he said.
“I have. I swear to you that I have. It’s an ancient thing, a horrible thing—summoned from the bowels of the earth
by a terrible magic. You say the duke is dangerous, but you don’t know the half of it. He’s a Greywitch, Father.”
Henry Rose sat there, stunned, and Rowan could see the enormity of it wash over his face, and color slowly began to trickle back into his cheeks, as if what he was hearing was on some level a relief.
“I can’t … I can’t believe it,” he said slowly.
“Then believe me. We are in danger. We are all in danger. The duke is a wicked man. He committed heinous acts to summon that monster. If he is able to get it under his control, the rivers will run with blood.”
Her father scratched his beard, his quick eyes focused, thinking. “You say you’ve seen the coin as well.”
She nodded.
“And the duke believes that the coin controls the beast. So it would seem we have only one option.” He met her eyes. “We need to get that coin.”
Rowan’s mind flashed to Fiona Eira’s pale chest, to the red ribbon around her neck, to her glittering incisors. “Listen, Father, I know who has it, but it’s not going to be easy to get, or for that matter, to explain.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is no simple way to say this.” He waited patiently for her to continue, and there in his eyes, she saw trust, and she knew she had to tell him. “Fiona … Fiona Eira has it.”
He looked at her with a mixture of surprise and fear. “Excuse me?”
She nodded. “Fiona Eira. She walks among us. She wears the coin around her neck like a bauble.”
He looked at her with a blank expression, as if trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, and then he shook his head. “My child … Fiona Eira is dead.”
“I know. But I’ve seen her. Out in the woods, I’ve seen her.”
“But that can’t be,” he said, astonished. “No,” he whispered. “That’s not possible. She was dead. We saw her in the casket.”
“Father, she wears the coin around her neck.”
A relentless knocking sounded at the door, jolting Rowan to her feet before her father could answer. She started from the room, her father at her heels, but was surprised to find Merrilee just outside the door, her face swollen from crying, her little body pressed against the opposite wall.
“Merrilee,” Rowan said, rushing to her. “Are you all right?”
The girl shook—clearly she wasn’t. “I’m afraid,” she said, trembling. “I think something bad is going to happen.”
Rowan reached out and stroked the child’s cheek. “Shhh, now. Don’t worry. I’m going to answer the door. You go sit with my father in his study, and I’ll be back in a moment.”
Rowan looked to her father, who nodded. “Careful now, Ro,” he said.
Rowan hurried to the front hall. Through the eyehole she saw Jude’s flushed face, and when she opened the door, something inside her surged with happiness. Without thinking, she threw herself into his arms, and hesitant at first, he seemed to freeze, but then he pulled her close. She pressed her face into the warmth of his chest, inhaling his
scent, flooded with relief. She looked up at his shocked face, and laughing, she stepped away from him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said, his eyes still wide with surprise.
“Jude,” she said, grabbing his hands. “It’s the duke. The duke is the Greywitch. I should have seen it. I should have known. He’s the one who summoned the creature. He wants to use it as a weapon to depose the king. If he gets control over it, who knows how many will die. But the coin is the key. If we get the coin, we can take control. We can stop the bloodshed. We can get Tom back.”