Bloodfeud (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 3) (14 page)

There was a guard between him and the house; a grey-haired captain strutting about and hovering around the marble fountain, now greenish with moss and pining for attention. The sweeping steps were no better tended. Merion squinted through the rhododendron leaves, looking for the dark stain of blood. He saw only a hole. It was as if the marble had been hacked away. As he looked harder, he saw it was a doorway. Merion felt a brief flush of excitement before it was quashed by a twinge of anger and concern. What unknown trove had they pilfered? What relic had they stolen? He ground his teeth. He had underestimated how hard this would be; he hadn’t expected secret hideouts in his father’s garden.

So began the process of creeping and listening. Rhin couldn’t have done better. Merion edged his way around to the other side of the steps and lingered in the shrubbery a stone’s throw from the lordsguard. He had brought a stone for the occasion; a small rock, balanced in his hand. With the other hand, he reached into his bag and produced the small vial of tuna blood He held it close, thumb tucked under the cork and ready to push.

He put all he had into the throw, sending the rock flying over the captain’s head and into the bushes on the far side of the vast patio. The lordsguard was good; he flew like a cat after a sparrow, sword drawn.

Merion moved quickly, darting across the patio and down into the darkness of the hole. He’d simply come to look at the state of his home, nothing more. Yet here he was, delving into yet another of his father’s secrets. He was shaking so much he almost popped the cork right there.

His feet made quick work of the stairs, and a short walk led him down a dark corridor; one that stretched like the drumroll before the reveal of a trick. A domed room greeted him; a cavern lined with shelves and bookcases, draped in shadows. A single lantern sat on the desk at the far end, but even in its dim light, Merion could see that all the shelves were empty. Barer than a dead man’s table.

He moved to the nearest shelf and wiped a finger through the dust, tracing the hollows where items had once sat. He could see the scrapes where they had been snatched away; they weren’t books, that was for sure, not by the shape of them. These were the footprints of vials, bottles, and decanters. Merion noticed a discarded label on the stone floor and snatched it up.
Bloodglyphs
. His finger followed the sharp edges of the lettering trying to remember Lilain’s lessons.
Cat
.

As he bent down to replace the label, a glimmer from under a bookcase caught his eye. It was a forgotten vial, barely bigger than his thumb. He had to lie on the floor to reach it, coating himself in dust. He eyed its label in the candlelight. No bloodglyphs this time, just straight common tongue.
Kelpie.
It looked brown in the light.

There was a rustle from outside, echoing through the corridor. Merion flicked the cork of the tuna blood and drank it down, tensing to force it into his veins.

Boots on the stairs now. He leapt up and tucked himself to the right of the doorway. The magick pounced fast; shades of the fish vein always did. Something about the salt, or so Shan Dolmer had once told him. It was already pounding in his skull by the time the grey-haired captain came rushing through the door, gun whirling from side to side.

He was fast, but Merion was faster. The tuna blood jolted him with energy, flinging him forward, quick as a blink. A swift kick was all it took to sweep the legs from under the captain. His face collided with the floor with an awful thud. Merion was quick to follow up; he had learnt that lesson many times over in the Endless Land. He dropped to the lordsguard’s side and rammed his forehead into the marble one more time for good measure. The shade’s speed and strength saw the job done. The captain was out cold.

‘And you never even saw my face,’ Merion whispered, as he clapped the dust from his hands.

He spared a fleeting moment to take one last look up at the ceiling and the countless yards of shelves, before ducking back into the corridor and sprinting out into the daylight. He was back in the woods in a flash.

Just like the mole shade, the tuna blood burned up quickly, petering out by the time he had scurried back along the tree branch and out of the estate. It was high time he found himself a professional.

*

Breaking west and south, Merion headed for where the mighty stone press of the city gave way to grass and bushes. Jekyll Park was a vast patch of greenery embedded deep in the heart of London’s white and grey landscape. It was so enormous you could stand at its centre, on the shore of the Long Water, and barely see the spires of Knightsbridge, or Bucking Tower and the Palace of Ravens. Only the Bellspire was visible, on the banks of the river. The city—mankind’s grandest and greatest—could be forgotten for just a moment.

Merion couldn’t remember the exact way, but he managed to find a path through the meandering streets that led him to the park’s northeast corner. From there it was at least an hour’s walk across the rolling hillocks and through the twisting gardens to the distant southwest corner. As he walked, the evening’s darkness slowly fell, and the first stars began to pierce the greying sky. Lamplighters bore their wicks from gaslight to gaslight and, soon enough, the city began to sparkle, even though the sun was still clinging to the horizon.

Just as his legs were growing sore, Merion found himself in the long shadow of the buildings on Jekyll’s edge. He took a moment to stand atop a small mound and stare about, eyes wandering between the benches and saplings.

‘A copse. Oak and elm. Oak and elm…’

Merion muttered to himself, wishing he knew more about trees; although it was impressive enough that he remembered their names, and Rhin’s old rhymes.

He spotted a copse nestled in a hollow just short of the park’s boundary. The trees were packed so tightly that half of them were nearly fused together. Merion aimed himself at the hollow, walking slow and careful, as if the presence of his footsteps could betray him.

Just outside the copse he found a small plaque set into a rock. Merion scanned its weathered surface, shining grey where it had been rubbed of its brass. It told the story of a young child, lost to the well inside these trees. But Merion was not in the mood for stories, and he knew better than to listen to its warnings. He walked on, eyes narrow.

It took several minutes to find a gap where he could sneak through into the deeper darkness between the trees. It was silent there; the rattle and clatter of carriage wheels and footsteps muffled by the density. He found himself a little short of breath. Perhaps it was a sort of magick; Fae spells to keep intruders at bay.

Merion found the well almost immediately. It was the only thing standing amid the loam and gnarled roots; impossibly old, made of bone-grey brick, the mortar long chipped away. A warped wooden structure stood over it, dangling a thin, silvery rope into the mouth of the well. The boy forced himself forward to look down, even though his heart hammered in his chest. All he wanted to do was run, yet he knew he had to look, to push himself on. It was inspiration in its darkest form.

His thoughts turned to the night of the Bloodmoon, of Rhin snarling in the lightning flashes, of the sight of the empty dock receding into the night as the
Black Rosa
dragged him and Calidae away.

Merion shook his head. Rhin was done running. He would have fought the banshees tooth and claw until they took him. He was here, in London, there was no doubt. Merion shuddered as he thought of what his friend might endure while his plan unfolded. What scored him deeply was that he was no use to the faerie yet; that Rhin had to wait to be saved.

Merion put his hands to the cold brick and stared down into the hole. It was as if the light—what little there was of it—was not welcome in the well. It shied away from the darkness, barely penetrating a yard or two at the most. From there on, it was velvet blackness. Impenetrable. Merion shuddered and let his legs lead him away, squeezing back through the trees, and out into the evening. He had never felt magick quite like it.

He let the fear vacate him, embodied in several giant sighs of relief. A passer-by walking a herd of small tufted dogs threw him a concerned look. Merion mumbled an apology—more to Rhin than to the stranger—and began to walk away, catching his breath on the move.

By the time he was back in London’s core, his feet didn’t want to see another mile of the city. That’s what you got, pretending to be a waif and stray in the biggest city in the world. He had the coin for carriages and horse-traps, but carriage-jockeys and whip-crackers like to swap tales, or so his father had once told him.
And they remember faces like you would not believe
. Better to put his feet to work instead of ruining Dizali’s surprise.

Finding himself back on the Kingsroad, Merion followed it south until the pungent smell of the docks tickled his nostrils. His eyes roved every nook, every cranny, gutter, shadow, and wall; as they had all day. He was on the hunt for two things. First, a Scarlet Star, then a place he could stow himself away for a night or two. The latter was taking precedence at this moment in time. A chill was already settling into the cloudless evening.

He stuck to the older streets, where the dock-houses had sat before the sway of industry and commerce moved further down the river. The stench of grimy wood and overused gutters drifted on the air. To most high-born, it would have been intolerable to walk these streets, never mind sleep on them, but Merion’s spectrum of tribulations was too broad for a boy his age. He thought of the day spent handling the dead in Fell Falls, after the Shohari attacked. He had seen the world’s true face and it was an ugly one. But there was no time for naivety, nor regretting missed chances for change. As that traitorous Big Jud had said, far back in Nebraskar:

‘If you’re content in this moment, then don’t regret those that have led you to it,’ Merion muttered. Big Jud hadn’t put it nearly as eloquently, but the meaning was clear. The Endless Land may have chewed him up and spat him out, but at least he was back here, in London. He had returned home.

Merion allowed himself a grim smile beneath his hood.

No regrets, just revenge.

By the time the city’s bells were proclaiming midnight, Merion was settling into his new abode; a forgotten alcove under a higgledy thatched roof. It was warm for the most part, thanks to a roaring fire somewhere beneath him and a dry roof above. Spiders and mice he would have to come to some sort of agreement with.

The stress of the day smothered him as he put his head to the crumpled bag; a rudimentary pillow. His eyelids were lead shutters, clamped tightly; his limbs made of stone. He felt sleep curling around him and slipped into its embrace.

PROMISES

30th July, 1867

A
ll Rhin knew was cold, and that he wasn’t able to move. Not even a hair. He was just a pair of eyes, trapped in a kaleidoscope of green, white, and the darkest black. It was so cold even the shadows had frozen. He couldn’t see his breath before his face. Every now and again, he would feel icy water climb his neck, or linger at his lips, unseen, making him want to thrash and panic. All he could do was blink. The uninterrupted fear seemed to last for days, until the phantom water was finally dragged away, leaving his eyes to shiver uncontrollably, rattling in their dead sockets.

Was this death? Or just the journey?

When Rhin finally managed to focus his addled mind, he had the suspicion that if this was death, then it was only just the beginning. For
bean sidhe
do not kill what they have been commanded to fetch. If there was to be a light at the end of this tunnel—as the humans enjoyed to pretend—it would be Sift’s grinning face, sharp like a blade of granite.

The shadows grew with every warped mile that passed; every mile closer to Shanarh they drew. By the time he felt the hard press of the earth choking him—clutching his throat and forcing dirt into his mouth—blackness enveloped his eyes. He screamed in his head, wanting for all the world to feel just one twitch, one shiver, in his paralysed body.

With a thundercrack, it was over. The dirt, fear, and the cold all vanished. Rhin floated like a lost seed on the tunnel breezes; curled like a foetus, forgotten and discarded.

Then came the stillness; hours of it, as the world slowly found its feet again. Up became up, down became down. Then a pressure, as if gravity were falling over him for the first time; building up from his knees and ankles to his wings and his head, laying heavy on his chest. Then the cold returned, its spikes digging into his wilted muscles. He wanted to snarl and curse but his face was still frozen, his eyes still blind.

Inch by inch the feeling returned, flooding glorious warmth back into his icy veins. But then came a new terror: the pain of realisation. It had not been a dream. In the void, he had harboured a hope, prayed to the Roots even, that he had simply knocked his head, or he was fighting through a fever. Praying was something he had not done in decades; not since he had realised the evil of Sift’s mind and stolen her Hoard.