Kissed by Starlight (11 page)

“I can change my size and my shape.”

“Oh, that’s all right then.” The girl-woman yawned. “I’m frightfully hungry, Felicia. Let’s go home.”

“Very well, dear.”

“You can come too, Mr. Pixie,” Clarice said.

“I shall accompany you for a few steps,” Blaic said, falling into step beside Felicia. She looked up at him with the shadow of doubt on her brow. In a voice too low to carry to Clarice, who was running on ahead while singing the catch “In Mag Mell,” he said, “Bring her tonight to the cave of the ornamental hermit. Together we will seek to break the spell that binds her.”

“What is that?”

“You don’t know?” She saw his mouth quiver with a smile. “Well, it was a long time ago. Your grandfather’s time, I believe. He had a grotto built at the edge of the garden, rather handsome.”

“Yes, there’s a grotto, but no hermit! How could a hermit be ‘ornamental’?”

“His name was Ol’ Calm, or at least that’s how he spoke of himself. He lived in the cave at your grandfather’s expense, dressed with great picturesqueness in ragged clothing. He wore a straggling beard. When visitors would come, he would make prophetic speeches to them, having been carefully primed in advance with the details of their lives by your grandfather.”

“How do you know all this? You couldn’t have seen it!” She realized she’d accepted his story that he had been stone. If that were true, might not the rest of his tale—of dark thrones and other domains—also be true?

“Because I was a statue? Ol’ Calm was a strange man, no more than half-sane. He’d been well educated but had filled his head with thoughts of alchemy and the search for the Philosopher’s Stone. It turned his brain. His family was glad to have him dwell in the bottom of a rich man’s garden.”

“How do you know?” Felicia asked again.

“He would come and talk to me.”

“Then he knew?”

“No, he hadn’t the remotest knowledge of my peculiar circumstance. He talked to all the statues. He was especially fond of a certain Venus. He would write long sonnets to her and leave them at her feet. They usually blew into the trees and hung there like narrow flags, flapping poetry to the breezes.”

“What did he talk to you about?”

“History, mostly. He spoke as though he had a personal acquaintance with Socrates and Aristotle. It formed a bond between us, for I had known them both.”

“What?”

“Oh, not well. More a passing acquaintance. Greece was very beautiful then.”

They’d reached the crest of the hill. The wind came and beat against them. Felicia turned away, hiding her face in her cloak while a swirling devil of dust and dry grass went by. Remembering how near they were to the sinkhole, she called out, “Clarice! Stay with us!”

Then Blaic raised his hand, just an inch or so, and the wind died away. “She’s run ahead but you needn’t worry. No harm will come to her.” He reached out as though he would brush her cheek with his fingers. Though they did not touch, Felicia was left feeling as though they had.

Her emotions resembled the dust devil, a swirling mass spinning too fast to catalog its diversity. Through it, she heard him say, “She will come to no harm. Not from the moor; not from me. Meet me tonight, at the darkest hour, by the grotto.”

The wind drove in again. Instinctively, Felicia closed her eyes against the airborne grit. When she opened them, a question on her lips, Blaic had gone.

The flower-bedecked Dresden clock on her mantel sent a spray of silvery notes into the darkened bedroom. In the distance, Felicia heard the answering peal of the great clock in the main hall reverberating through the walls. Usually at this hour, she’d been asleep for some time and the clocks chimed unheard. Tonight, however, she had been too keyed up to sleep. Each nerve seemed stretched as she waited with her entire body for the quarter-hours to sound.

She had not undressed. It only took a moment to draw on her simple leather shoes and then she was across the room to open her door. All was as silent as the night before, though so far as she knew Blaic had cast no enchantment around the house. She stepped foot into the corridor, then drew it back.

“What am I doing?” she demanded in the lowest whisper. Was she going to trust someone who, if he were telling the whole truth, was not even a human being? Blaic himself claimed that his People hated humans. If that were the case, perhaps all his talk of a cure was no more than a ploy to eliminate two mortals at the same time.

Yet there was a light in Blaic’s eyes that made Felicia want to trust him. Then again, this also might be a trap; he had to know that when he smiled with his eyes in that way, she yearned to trust him. “If only Papa were here ...”

This made her utter a short chuckle of amusement. Her papa had been absolutely the last person to believe in the “little people.” Oh, he’d enjoyed folklore and knew how to tell a tale so his daughters’ eyes grew big as they breathlessly demanded to know if the tale was “honest and for true.” Felicia could almost hear his chuckle as he reassured them that dragons, giants, and fairies were equally mythical.

Felicia drew her dark green shawl a bit more closely about her shoulders. If dragons and giants started appearing, she would give in to the family curse and go quietly insane.

She thought, “If there’s even one chance...”

Stepping into the corridor, she walked swiftly but silently down the long carpet runner to her sister’s room. Clarice had promised to stay awake and by some miracle, she had.

Her eyes looked heavy as Felicia entered but she swore she hadn’t closed them.

“It’s most strange, Felicia. For as long as I can remember, Nurse has always snored so horribly! She’s kept me awake again and again, yet tonight, when I want to stay awake, she doesn’t let out a peep! It’s not fair....”

The silence was a trifle unnerving, as well as dangerous. “Shush, dearest. Let me fasten your skirt and we’ll be off.”

Felicia wrapped a scarf about her sister’s head and made certain her new blue velvet cloak was drawn close. “Put the hood over the scarf to make it doubly warm.”

Like two cloaked ghosts, the girls made their way downstairs, carefully avoiding the creaking board in front of Lady Stavely’s room. “What was that?” Clarice hissed.

“I heard nothing. Come along, do.”

Clarice cast a look back. “I saw a door close. Didn’t you hear the lock click?”

“No one’s there. They’d be sure to ask what we are doing out so late. I don’t think anyone was there.”

“Yes they were.” Clarice let out her charming giggle, like water tumbling over rocks. “They must have thought we were Wicked Roderick.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Felicia said automatically, then wished she hadn’t. If fairies could be true, why not other things she’d always dismissed as fantasy? Hamdry Manor was more than a hundred years old and storied; who knew what might walk on such a night as this? Suddenly she found herself half-expecting to have her ankles jerked from under her by some phantom. From all she’d ever heard about Wicked Roderick, he’d appreciated young women.

She’d taken Blaic’s “the darkest hour” to mean midnight. This, of all nights, was the one Lady Stavely decided to remain in the drawing room for several hours after dinner was served. It was nearly eleven before she’d gathered up her cards from the patience table and granted Felicia a gracious nod by way of dismissal.

Outside, with no moon to light their way, the night was so dark it was as though they had become muffled in curtains of black velvet. Felicia had not expected it to be quite so inky. She paused in dismay on the step and Clarice came close. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m letting my eyes adjust,” Felicia said. “I don’t want to run into anything in the dark.”

“Oh. Where are we going to?”

“The grotto.”

“I’ll lead,” Clarice said merrily. “It’ll be like blind-man’s bluff!”

“No, wait!...”

Clarice had taken Felicia’s hand and tugged her into a walk. Felicia stumbled along, but Clarice seemed to have the placement of every stick and stone memorized. The gravel crunched under their slippered feet while the wind sang in the trees. At first, Felicia looked only at the ground.

Then, for no particular reason, she looked up and at once caught her breath. The black velvet had become spangled with the dust of a million diamond stars. There were so many thousands that no familiar constellations could be distinguished against the blazing river that poured from one bank of the sky to the other. “Darkest hour, indeed?” she said, marveling.

She’d been outside until dark often in the summer, when the sun set so late that she had no familiarity with the night. Even when she had seen the stars, they’d seemed faint and faraway. Tonight, in the biting-sharp air of an early spring night, they were as near as the heath fires of a conquering army, vast and terrifyingly close to a watcher standing on the shore of Earth.

Even as she watched, half a dozen or more came raining downward. Felicia almost expected to hear them hiss as they sizzled through space. Were they fireworks or armament?

“Shooting stars!” Clarice said, and clapped her hands for joy. “Quick! Make a wish! I wish for a—

“Don’t tell,” Felicia said, wanting to cower to the ground and surrender. “It won’t come true.”

“Did you wish?”

“No. I have only one wish.”

“It’s about me, isn’t it?” Clarice turned her eyes toward the house. The starlight was so brilliant that she cast a shadow, and Felicia could clearly see the puffs of frozen breath coming from her lips as she spoke. “Mama says you think I’m ill. I’m not ill, am I, Felicia?”

“No, dearest. You know you are never ill.”

“That’s right,” she answered with a proud nod. “I told her that but she said she was afraid you’d make me ill and that’s why you have to go away. But you’re not going, are you?”

Felicia returned Clarice’s anxious squeeze of her hand, but reassuringly. “Not until... not until you can take care of yourself.”

“You mean, when I don’t need Nurse any more? Oh, I can do without her any time. She fusses almost as much as Mama does.”

“Shh, dearest. Not so loud.” Felicia looked back at the house too, but saw no candle moving behind the windows. “We’d better go on.”

“Right. Mmmm, where are we going?”

“To the grotto, Clarice,” Felicia said patiently.

“Oh! It’s an adventure, isn’t it? Mama doesn’t know I’m out of bed!” Pressing her finger to her lips, she crept in imitation, she fondly believed, of the American Indians’ method of crossing open country.

Felicia followed, feeling lonely and yet exposed under that glowing sky. There was nowhere, she felt, to hide. Anyone looking out a window could see them, two shadowy figures in the strange, strong starlight. No one would ever understand why she’d brought Clarice out into the frosty night. There was no one who could know that only by saving Clarice could Felicia escape her own guilt for wanting to leave Hamdry.

The mouth of the grotto looked flat and shallow. It seemed to have no more depth than an irregularly shaped half-circle, painted a flat black to represent a cave on some theatrical stage. Then a lighter shadow moved within the depths and Blaic stepped out.

Felicia said, “I hope this isn’t another trick.”

“No trick. I have spent some time today searching the ancient records for information. The spell on your sister can be removed, if she is carried in the arms of one of the People and together we enter the Shrouded Spring.”

Felicia glanced at Clarice, whose attention was distracted by a vine which had grown out of a satyr’s nose. The young woman’s delayed maturity led her to think this riotously funny. “Shh, Clarice. Mustn’t make noise.”

Obligingly, Clarice clapped her hand over her mouth. Though her eyes still danced and wettish snorts and gurgles came from behind her fingers, she did manage to quiet down.

“How far away is this spring?” Felicia asked. “We only have a very little while before Nurse finds Clarice gone.”

“It’s no distance. It’s within.”

“There’s no spring inside the grotto.” Felicia took one slow step back, then two more. “What are you about?”

“There is a spring tonight. Felicia—trust me.”

She could feel his will commanding her, bidding her to stop being so doubtful. Felicia wanted to give in to that silent domination. For a moment, she felt her head swim as though she were being pulled out of herself—too far, too fast. She broke the power of his eyes with a shuddering shake of her head.

Blaic’s mouth tightened. “Clarice...” The girl turned, her ready smile breaking free. “Clarice, do you trust me?”

“Of course, silly. Anyone would.”

“Then you will come with me.”

With a laugh, Clarice skipped across the frost-coated grass. Blaic bent his knee and swept her up into his arms. His cloak, black and oddly full, shaded into her blue-black one so that for an instant they seemed some two-headed, two-hearted creature from an ancient tale. Under the blaze of stars, even their hair seemed identical shades of blond. It had to be a trick of the light that for a moment they even seemed to share an expression. Excitement? Triumph? Fearlessness? Whatever it was, it seemed to blend them into one mind.

Blaic swung about with his burden and carried her into the grotto. At once struck into action, Felicia ran after him, unclear even now whether she meant to stop him or urge him to hurry.

The grotto was man-made, of rocks cunningly mounded to look like a natural formation. It was shallow, no more than eight feet deep. Felicia knew there was no spring within; it would have given the poor ornamental hermit permanent rheumatism to live in a damp place.

Come to think of it, she did not know how Ol’ Calm had come to die. Were his bones still in the grotto? Felicia shook off this morbid fantasy as she would have shaken a spider from her skirt. She had thoroughly explored the grotto as a child; so had Clarice. If there’d been a corpse, they would have found it, and would have boasted of it for months.

Inside the grotto, robbed of starlight, the night seemed deeper and blacker than it had since she was a child afraid of the dark under her bed. She stumbled over unseen obstacles, bruised her shoulder against a wall, and grazed her cheek on a roughly finished stone when the tunnel suddenly curved sharply to the right without warning.