Of Midnight Born (6 page)

“Liars!” Serena screeched, coming away from the wall. How she hated that story! She kicked the table leg with her insubstantial foot, producing no effect on the motionless table. She kicked it again.

Woding pressed his fingertips to the table, as if to keep it still, and turned toward her.

Serena stopped, looking carefully at his face, feeling anxiety rise up in her. He seemed to sense she was there, in a way that went beyond the fleshly chill she caused in many people. She kicked the table leg again. He blinked; then his eyes narrowed.

This was not good. She didn’t want him knowing she was nearby except when
she
decided he should know. Her invisibility was one of her greatest weapons, and he was showing signs he might be able to take it away.

“That story has been around for years, no doubt getting more gruesome with each telling,” Woding said. “My cousin tried to scare me with it when we were children, on a night we camped in the ruins of the original fortress. He did a fair job of it, too. I was barely able to close my eyes.”

“I’ve heard there was more than that to the night, sir,” Underhill said, a hint of curiosity in his tone.

Woding laughed softly. “So that tale makes the rounds as
well? I suppose I should have expected as much. Feel free to tell any who ask that I was watching falling stars, not my feet, and I lost my footing on a ruined wall. I was careless, and I fell. That is all there is to it, although I almost wish I had been pushed by the ghost of a murderess. It would have made for a better story.”

What was this? She looked at the streak of white in Woding’s hair, suddenly remembering a black-haired boy lying on the stone stairs, the gash on his head bleeding a river on a night when stars fell like rain. The sense of familiarity and longing, was that where it had come from?

“Yes, sir.”

“Go back to bed, Underhill. Even if there were a ghost, she could do nothing to harm you.”

“Yes, sir. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”

Woding waved away the apology. “You might bring a fresh pot of coffee to my study, before you retire.”

“Yes, sir!” Underhill turned toward the hatch, apparently happy to have this chance to redeem himself.

There was a great scraping of claws on stone, and then Woding’s reclining chair was overturned as Otto scampered out from beneath it, pushing past Underhill and all but tumbling down the wooden steps to the study below.

As Underhill started down the stairs Woding handed him the dog’s blanket. “Put it by the fire in the kitchen. Perhaps he’ll be more comfortable down there.” And then, almost under his breath, “The miserable coward.”

Woding closed the hatch, righted his chair, and resumed his supine position, his figure dimly illuminated by the redshaded lamp. He looked completely at ease, as if nothing his manservant had said had bothered him. Serena drifted up to sit on the parapet and study him, as he in turn studied the sky.

He was sly, devious. She had already learned that much. He did not approach obstacles directly, like a normal man,
using strength to conquer. He employed instead the tactics of a wily woman, manipulating and obfuscating to get his way. She had always thought such modes a sign of weakness, proof that one was not strong enough to take what one wanted. Even she, female since the day she was born, had learned to fight with strength, not wiles.

He looked strong, though. If he’d been properly trained, he might have been able to wield a sword with some skill. He had the shoulders and the height for a decent swordsman. She tried to imagine him riding a warhorse, decked out in armor, battle-ax at the ready. Physically it was not too great a stretch, but the soft tones of his voice made such an image ridiculous.

What strange forces had directed this man’s life, and why had he been placed here with her again after so many years? Was he seeking revenge for the fall he had taken? It seemed unlikely, if he did not even believe she existed. Or did he only pretend to disbelieve, and to not remember that night he had seen her? He appeared as foolish as he had been as a boy, his eyes on the stars when there were dangers near at hand, but perhaps that appearance was an illusion.

Whatever the case might be, he would not be able to explain away her actions for long. His servants, by the sounds of it, had already half-spooked themselves. It would be short work to finish that job, and have them fleeing the castle as if their drawers were on fire.

As for him, if he was already aware of her presence in some manner, half her work was done there, too. It would simply be a matter of persuading him that it would be in his own best interest to leave. First, though, she’d have to be certain of what his abilities were. It was always foolish to attack without knowing the armaments of the enemy.

She would triumph in the end; of that she was certain. This Alex Woding had once nearly lost his life because of her. It would be wise of him to remember that.

Alex drew an arrow on his chart through Cassiopeia, noting the time along its length. It was the fifteenth arrow on his chart so far tonight, marking the path of a shooting star. If he were one to believe in omens, he thought it would have been a good one that his first night observing in his new home should be one so rich in data.

He sketched in another arrow, this time through the heart of Pegasus.
Time: 3:20
a.m.

It was strange that it should yet be so early. Most nights with such a frequency of falling stars, the dawn would come before he was ready, the time having flown by with the swiftness of the wind. Tonight he was not concentrating as he usually did, and despite the falling stars could not lose himself in his observations. Ever since Underhill’s abrupt arrival just before midnight, he had been distracted by the sense that he was not alone: that, in fact, someone even now watched him as he made his notes.

He had to restrain himself from checking over his shoulder. This was all probably his own imagination, fired by Underhill’s tales. Ghosts
did not
exist.
Serena
did not exist. He was aware that those were the same thoughts that had gone through his head as a boy, the night he’d fallen.

At any rate, even if Serena did exist, he would not give her the satisfaction of being noticed. Like a mischievous child, if he ignored her long enough she would likely go away. His musings on his possible childhood encounter with her were pleasant only because the incident was distant and unreal, and therefore suited to idle musing.

He returned his gaze to the heavens, and twenty minutes later marked the path of another falling star.

It would be just his luck to have deliberately surrounded himself with the undemanding, relaxed company of men, and then to find himself haunted by a woman.

Serena sat on the path in the sun, amid the flowers of the garden, Beezely stretched out nearby, asleep. The leaves of her cherry tree rustled in a breeze, and she could almost feel the warmth of the sun on its fresh green leaves. The blossoms came and fell later and later each year, the tree warping and cracking with age. She didn’t know what the normal life span of a cherry tree was, but it seemed reasonable to assume that five hundred years was past its limit. She tried to chase the thought from her mind.

The clank of the garden gate latch drew her attention, and she heaved a great sigh of annoyance as an old man and a boy of about thirteen came through, the boy pushing a wheelbarrow from which a hoe and shovel stuck out.

Serena stood, stepping out of their way, but Beezely slept on.

The old man suddenly stopped, looking down at the cat. “Why, hello there,” he said, “I almost didn’t see you.” The man squatted down, reaching out to scratch Beezely, who opened a green eye to stare at the man as his hand approached.

“Grandpa, who are you talking to?” the boy asked.

“This old—” the man began, then stopped as Beezely slowly faded away before his eyes. “Cat.”

The boy leaned to one side, trying to see around his grandfather. “What old cat?”

The man stood, chewing at his upper lip for a moment. “A marmalade, rough old tom by the look of him. He’s gone now. Must have spooked him.”

“I didn’t see any cat.”

“No,” the old man said. “You wouldn’t have.”

Serena left the garden, not wanting to be around in any form while the males worked, and willing enough to leave them unmolested. She appreciated the flowers too much to disturb those who tended them.

She didn’t know why the old man had been able to see Beezely. Was it something to do with him, with the weather, with the alignment of the stars? The cat had been seen often over the years, apparently without any intention on Beezely’s part, although she could not be sure of that. Who knew what went on in the mind of a cat?

She herself had been seen only a scant handful of times: once intentionally, and a very few times accidentally, when her emotions were strong and the observer possessed of a nature that allowed such a sighting. That had been what had happened the night young Woding had fallen.

Serena walked along the path that went around the castle, between it and the parapet of the curtain wall. Grass grew alongside the path, and in several of the bastions there were benches and flower beds, attesting to the castle’s present use as a residence as opposed to a defensive fortification. Hugh le Gayne would be calling curses down on Briggs’s head if he knew there were roses growing on his walls.

Serena sat down on the bench in the corner bastion, her favorite of the arrow-shaped outthrusts of the wall. She could see for miles over the valley from here, see the gray smudges of the villages, and the green lines of the hedgerows that fenced in the sheep, sheep that looked like so many dots of white from this distance.

The view was as lovely as it was achingly lonely, dredging up memories of what used to be. Clerenbold Keep had long since fallen to ruin and been overgrown, not so much as a crumbled wall visible from where she sat. She had watched it happen slowly, over decades, and it was as if her last link with Thomas and her family had died away with it.

It was more than the sight of her old home decaying that gave her a sweet, almost pleasurable pain in her heart when she looked over the valley, though. She had watched villages come back to life after the Pestilence, and watched them grow. She had seen, from her great distance, people at work in the fields and riding or walking along the roads. It was like listening to a story that she could not be a part of, the characters living in a world to which she could not gain entrance however much she longed for it.

That sweet ache was completely different from the pain of having living people actually share her home. That pain was a knife plunging deep into her heart, each solid step that a living person took a slap in her face, reminding her that she was all but dead. There was no buffering distance with which to shield her heart, no comforting barrier of space to keep her from knowing that they were real, and lived, and ate and drank and slept, while she would never again do any of those things.

Was it that pain that had made her visible, and made her frighten Woding as a child, whether intentionally or not? She remembered observing the boys from a distance, listening to that tale of falsehoods Woding’s cousin had spewed out as truth, debating whether it was worth giving them the fright they deserved for invading her mountaintop. She thought she had decided against it.

And then, in the middle of the night, with dawn but a few hours away, something had drawn her to young Woding as he stood in wonder upon the wall, his very soul glowing in his face, completely entranced by the stars. She had reached out, wanting…wanting to touch something she could not name, even now. And he had seen her.

Strange to think that boy was now a man, older than she herself had been when she died.

White clouds drifted in the blue sky, taking nameless shapes, as if trying to speak to her in an unknown language.
Would that they could teach her all she still did not know. Would that they could tell her if there was some purpose to Woding’s being the one who took the place of Briggs.

Did he sleep now, after his night of stargazing?

Alex dozed uncomfortably in his darkened bedchamber, longing for the oblivion of deep sleep. Man, unfortunately, did not seem made to dream while the sun was yet in the sky.

He rolled onto his side, the top sheet sliding smoothly over his naked skin. Little light reached him where he lay; the heavy curtains on the windows were drawn, as were those on the Jacobean tester bed in which he tried to sleep. Despite the darkness, and despite his own weariness, his body somehow knew it was day.

Disturbing images peopled his half sleep: Otto pursued by a shapeless shadow; his sisters standing with quirts in hand, supervising his kitchen staff, who toiled in front of a roaring fire dressed only in loincloths; himself locked in a dungeon room while Underhill stood outside the door, complaining that his feet were cold.

Then he was in his own bed again, lying on his side, and felt the covers being lifted behind him, and then the gentle depression of the mattress as a woman slipped into bed with him. She pressed herself up against his back: he could feel her breasts, her thighs, her arm coming over his side so her hand could stroke his chest. She was tall, able to kiss the back of his neck as her feet entwined with his.

Sighing, he rolled over toward her, his arm wrapping around her to hold her closer, and he opened his eyes. Black hollows stared back at him where her eyes should have been, black, empty wells in a face white as death.

His own shout woke him. He sat up quickly, feeling the sweat that drenched his skin, realizing with relief that he had awoken from lying on his back, not his side. There had
been no phantom woman in his bed. It had been only a dream.

The sound of his own breathing was loud in the confines of the curtained bed, his eyes accustomed enough to the darkness to see the dim shapes of the bedposts and disarranged bedcovers. His breath caught. He felt it again, the sense he had known last night of not being alone.

He stared into the deep shadows in the right-hand corner at the foot of the bed. He could see nothing in front of the bedpost, could see nothing but the dark, bulbous shape of the post itself, yet some sense told him there was something—some
one
—there.

Serena sat frozen. He was looking at her. Right at her: she didn’t dare move. Did he truly see her, or only sense her, as he had seemed to in the king’s hall that first day, and again atop the tower?

She had come to see if he slept, and had sat in the corner of the bed watching him toss and turn, curious, needing to know his secrets. She had wondered what nightmares tortured his sleep.

At last he looked away, flinging wide the curtains on the left of the bed and swinging his legs out so that he sat on the edge of the mattress. He bent over, elbows on knees, head in hands, fingers scratching through his hair, then suddenly looked over his shoulder at her once more, staring hard for a brief moment. He stood and walked naked to his dressing room.

Serena released her breath in a whoosh, still too shaken to move. She wished he would stop doing that—staring at her as if he knew she was there. It was positively unnerving. As had been the sight of his bare buttocks.

Firm, well-sculpted buttocks.

She’d seen plenty of them in her time—her brothers and the men-at-arms had never been shy about bathing, and took some incomprehensible delight in flashing their derrieres at
each other and at any female servants—but buttocks had never widened her eyes the way that glimpse of Woding’s smooth flanks had.

Smooth, hollowed at the sides, just the size to be held and squeezed.

Her mouth turned down, and she was appalled with herself. Where had that thought come from?

She could hear water flowing in the dressing room. He had to be bathing.

She had watched Briggs at the task. Her curiosity over the fittings of the bathing room, with its long, deep tub and built-in basin, had overwhelmed her reluctance to see Briggs’s huge, hairy belly and the jiggling, peeping pink mouse that was his manhood, poking its puny bald head from a nest of wiry hair.

She somehow knew Woding’s manhood would not look the same.

The warrior in her said this was the perfect time to investigate that issue, when he would likely sense her presence and be made uncomfortable. He would not want to remain in a home where he had no privacy, where every time he took his drawers down he felt someone was staring. As much as her brothers had enjoyed flaunting themselves, she knew that they had enjoyed it only while they had control over the baring of their nether parts. Certainly Briggs had not reacted well when she—cringing in disgust the whole while—had reached out and given that little mouse a quick yank.

Something in her balked at the idea of spying on Woding at his bath, though. She didn’t know if it was fear of him that stopped her, or unease with her own desire to look upon his naked body.

She would leave Woding, his buttocks, and his stars to themselves for the present, until she decided what course to follow with him. There was always more than one flank on
which to attack an enemy. It was time she herself went to battle.

“Dickie, bring up a cask of beer from the cellar, will you? There’s a good lad,” Horace Leboff, the cook, told his young assistant.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Leboff,” Dickie said, glad enough to set down his paring knife and give his cramping knuckles a break from potato peeling.

He took a candle and went round the corner of the kitchen to the doorway that led down to the cellars. This household was small enough in numbers, and Mr. Leboff was large and strong enough that no one dared to filch spirits, and so the beer cellar door was left unlocked. Dickie liked that. Although he and a few of the other younger servants had talked about how easy it would be to steal a cask, there was some element of pride in knowing they were trusted not to be thieves.

The stone stairway to the cellar was dark and cold. He lit the candles in their brackets as he went down, the flickering flames turning his own shadow into that of a grotesque, misshapen man upon the opposite wall. He wished there were gas lighting down here, as there was in the king’s hall chandeliers.

He thought of Marcy, who lived two houses down from his parents, and how her big hazel eyes would go wide with awe when he told her how he and a few of the others all but ran the castle. She had thoughts herself of going into service, but he doubted she could find a posting as plum as this one.

He did not much miss home, except for Marcy. Mayhap it was seeing no one but men all day that put her so much in his mind. Mr. Woding was a strange one, having no women in his house, but Dickie wouldn’t complain. A man could let down his guard this way, and be himself. He didn’t have to
apologize for a belch, and no one shrieked and said he was disgusting when he passed a bit of gas.

He raised the candle high when he reached the bottom of the steps, looking over the humped shapes of the casks. Marcy would ask him if he’d seen the ghost of Serena. They had both grown up hearing the legend of the murderous lady of Maiden Castle. He almost wished he would see her, to have something other than secondhand, half-imagined rumors to tell.

He felt a hand lay itself against his cheek, the flesh as damp and cold as a corpse in the night.

He jumped, a strangled shriek gurgling out of his throat. The sensation vanished, leaving his heart pounding painfully in his chest. He stood motionless, breathing like a winded horse, bulging eyes darting about, seeking movement in the flickering shadows.

Nothing happened. He shivered, his skin chilled, the cold going to the bone. All was quiet beyond the noise of his own thundering body. Had he imagined it?

He set the candle in the last bracket, nearly dropping it before managing, with a shaking hand, to wedge it in tight. He went to heft the nearest cask onto his shoulder.

There was a slow creaking sound from the top of the stairs, and he stopped to listen, prickles running up the back of his neck. The sound quickened, the creak going higherpitched, louder, recognizable now as hinges, and then the door slammed shut, all the candles along the stairs blowing out in a rush of frozen air.

He trembled, unable to move, the cask wobbling on his shoulder. Don’t let it touch me, he thought. If it didn’t touch him again, he would be all right. He could hold together. As long as it didn’t touch him.

“Our Father, who art in heaven—” he began to pray, his skin pebbled with goose pimples as if it, too, dreaded what might come.

Cold hands wrapped around his throat.

The cask fell, splitting open on the stone floor with a crashing splash. Dickie howled, scrambling for the stairs in the dark, running headlong into a wall, stumbling into barrels, knocking several off their stands before at last he found the foot of the stairs again, and scampered up them on all fours.