The Duke of Snow and Apples (32 page)

“Don’t do this,” he wheezed.

Littiger said nothing, his gaze resting on Frederick only briefly before listing toward Sir Bertram. Frederick called his power, but it was like staring at a blank wall, solid Gray, without so much as a chink to peer through.

“He won’t listen to you,” Sir Bertram said. A muscle in his cheek twitched violently, lifting his mouth into a brief grimace. “I told him there’s no reason to.”

Frederick rounded on his stepfather.
No reason
. That same flat tone. His throat closed once more, the skin on his neck tightening at the memory of Farnsby’s iron grip crushing his windpipe. “And he does whatever you tell him to.”

“I don’t tell him to do anything.” Sir Bertram took a slow, jerky step toward him. His fingers fluttered and clenched in a way that suggested he couldn’t really control them. “I never have to tell anyone. After I feed, reason is all they have left, and that’s easily persuaded.”

“Feed?”

Sir Bertram laughed, a dry coughing sound. “Who could have guessed, that in all the wide stretches of Allmarch, two such as we would find each other?”

We
. Frederick swallowed against a rising wave of nausea. Is that what
he
looked like, beneath the trappings of skin and bone and name? Was he nothing but a gaping pit?

“I should have paid more attention,” Sir Bertram said. He came to an abrupt halt and hissed in pain. His eyes squeezed shut. The darkness within him pulsed and yawned wider. “The pitiful little duchess should have been easy pickings. So isolated. So heartbroken. All those delicious little miseries bottled up inside of her. I could have kept her for years, then had her sign her fortune over to me once she ran dry.”

Ran dry
. Frederick thought of Littiger standing behind him, the stifling lack of color, leached of all emotion, all life, all passion. Because, somehow, Sir Bertram
fed
on it? Hot, sick rage thrummed in his temples.

“But no,” Sir Bertram continued, “I had to find out about
you
. At first I thought it couldn’t be possible. I was the aberration, special, gifted as no one else was. Turns out I wasn’t so special after all. ”

Sir Bertram misinterpreted Frederick’s repulsed expression. “I’m not a fool. I recognize my own kind. We peer in through windows no one else can see. Windows that show all the secrets and fetishes and repressed desires society likes to keep under lock and key. Windows we can smash to take what’s inside without anyone being the wiser.

“I no sooner recognized what you were before I also realized how untrained you were. How oblivious to the true nature of our gift. How vulnerable you were to
persuasion
. It was easy enough to time my moves by your childish tantrums. If you were too busy blaming yourself, you’d have no time to think of me.”

Realization filled Frederick with loathing. All those times he’d surrendered to spite, every time he’d lost his temper, Sir Bertram had been
watching
, and had used his own ignorance against him.

Sir Bertram’s lips curled into a snarl. “But then your mother died and left me penniless, after I’d spent
years
working my powers on her. She must have held onto that last gasp of control by the skin of her teeth.”

Or with her love for me.
Frederick noted the trembling of Sir Bertram’s knees. His stepfather was a large man, but obviously weakened by something. Could he overpower him before Littiger stepped in to help?

“Don’t act as if you don’t know exactly what I speak of.” Sir Bertram’s face hardened. “As if you’ve never tasted the heady giddiness of someone else’s private joy like honey on your tongue, stolen for your own pleasure. The many vintages of sorrow and suffering. Other men have to work, to live, to suffer for such things, but not us. They are
ours
to take as we please, to feel as we please without any of the risks.”

Frederick had never even known such things were possible. A sliver of doubt niggled at the back of his brain. If he
had
learned to do such things,
would
he have done them? Could he have become the monster Sir Bertram was? Was this what his power had been originally intended for?

“You’re no better than me,” Sir Bertram growled. “Except, perhaps, in your ability to defend yourself against useless idiot gamekeepers. I should have done the job myself once I realized how much of your mother’s money your interference cost me.”

Staring at the horrifying hunger of Sir Bertram, Frederick heard the creak of a footstep behind him a moment too late. He dodged Littiger’s first punch, but the man’s second blow caught him on the jaw, snapping his head to the side, splashing stars across his vision. Through the ringing in his ears he heard the mutterings of Benine as the air charged with magic.

“No, you fool—we need him alive!” Sir Bertram called.

Littiger hesitated, giving Frederick an opening. Littiger excelled over him in technique, likely from a greater study of the gentlemanly sports of boxing and fencing, but the former duke had never had to sprint up three flights of stairs carrying tea for seven. Frederick threw his strength into his lunge and caught his cousin around the waist in a flying tackle. Littiger’s head cracked painfully against the floor as they landed.

Frederick might have made good on his attempt to escape if Littiger had struggled, or spat, or cursed. Instead his cousin lay beneath him, eyes as placid and guileless as a cow’s, his heart emptied. Littiger was barely older than him. How young had he been when he’d inherited his title—and Sir Bertram as his “particular friend”? And all because Frederick had fled rather than face his problems.

Frederick hesitated.

Meanwhile, Littiger’s hand crawled like a pale spider toward the apple Frederick had dropped in the melee, curled his fist around it and smashed it across Frederick’s face. The floor slapped against Frederick’s back as Littiger flipped him over.

“Littiger. Charles. Don’t do this. You can fight this.” He bucked up from the floor, but now two sets of hands held him down, Littiger and Sir Bertram, and his sight drowned in a world of Gray and black and poisonous green. “You can fight, Ch—” Littiger forced the fruit between Frederick’s jaws, cutting off his plea. Apple juice slid down Frederick’s throat. Panicked breaths hissed noisily from his nostrils.

“I should have taken care of you myself, from the very start, from the moment I met you,” Sir Bertram said. “There can only be one of us, Frederick. You’ve thwarted me too many times already. Your mother, the silly Erlwood girl. It’s your own misfortune that I haven’t fed since you revealed yourself. It’s made me decidedly
hungry
.” His lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl, and his eyes glowed bright, burning green.

Green seared Frederick’s vision, blinding him to everything else. He tried to shut his eyes, tried to block that awful magic, but hands clamped down on his face, forcing his eyelids open, forcing him to watch with a queer double sight. His human gaze existed for nothing but green, but to his other sight, to his magic—darkness boiled out of his stepfather’s face. Thick, ropy tentacles forced their way in, slithering down to his very core. Black and green. Poison and filth. Claws and teeth scraping against the sides of his heart like a child devouring fruit and leaving the rind behind. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t fight. He couldn’t scream.

The distant, sweet taste of apple followed him into darkness.

Chapter Thirty

As the carriage rattled down the frozen winter road, Charlotte had time to apprise the Dowagers of the fantastical and more than a little unbelievable aspects of Frederick’s power, and her particular theories. It seemed impossible. It seemed ridiculous. If Charlotte hadn’t spent the last week slipping beneath the guise Frederick had forced himself to wear for the better part of a decade, she wouldn’t have believed it herself.

Darkness descended about halfway through the drive, and sounds of clinking, hissing, and cursing filtered in through the windows as the coachman driving the team lit a brace of ghostly green witchlights to deter the wights and hungry spirits.

Silence had descended far earlier than that.

Charlotte glanced out the window, but saw nothing except the faint glow of the witchlights and the reflection of moonlight on snow. She knew she must appear a perfect fool to her great-aunt and her friends, but at least they’d allowed her to come this far. Frederick needed to know.

Sylvia clutched her hand. “Maybe Frederick has some Elassine in his ancestry. I’ve heard they practice mind-powers there.”

“But that’s heathen magic,” Lady Enshaw said.

Lady Alderley arched an eyebrow. “It’s magic the church chooses not to recognize because the Fey never practiced it. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

“Lord Snowmont comes from an exceptionally pure Allmarchian bloodline, however,” Lady Leighwood pointed out.

“I believe there are still a great many things about this world that we do not understand,” Aunt Hildy said, in an uncommonly serious tone. “In such cases, the only way we can be sure of anything is to keep our eyes open. Such as Charlotte has done. If she believes it, I believe it.”

Charlotte frowned.
I should have believed in Frederick, even if he didn’t.
She should have known from the start that a man as compassionate, as selfless, as honorable as Frederick, who hid his passions away for fear of hurting others, could never be responsible for damaging the ones he loved. All magic, even foreign “heathen” magic, required intent.

The jolting of the carriage eased as it turned onto a paved drive. The manor at Neigent Hill loomed ahead of them, a deeper square of black, with tints of silver where the thin moonlight caught panes of glass.

Lady Alderley’s eyes narrowed. “Why is nothing lit?”

Lady Leighwood clutched at her reticule, the numerous bottles inside clinking.

A cold fist gripped the back of Charlotte’s neck, and refused to relent even after five minutes of determined banging upon the front door produced an arrogant, sour-faced butler who informed them His Grace was not receiving callers, as if flocks of anxious purple women arriving at unreasonably late hours were a normal occurrence.

“We are not paying a social call!” The plumes on Lady Balrumple’s cap wavered in affront. “This is important.”

“I’m afraid my employer has made it clear that no guests were to be admitted.”

“Your employer?” Charlotte asked. He’d mentioned
His Grace
only a few moments ago. The cold hand on her neck grew icy claws. “And who is that—Sir Bertram or His Grace?”

“That’s no concern of yours,” the butler snapped.

As Aunt Hildy swelled with offense, Sylvia caught Charlotte’s eye, and very slowly winked. She pulled off her gloves with genteel delicacy and folded them into her reticule, and then she placed both index fingers in her ears.

She couldn’t.

Sylvia settled into a wide-legged, sturdy stance.

She wouldn’t
.

Sylvia took a deep breath, holding it for two beats. Then released it in a shrill, piercing shriek.

The butler’s mouth dropped open in shock, his hands rising in a placating motion. Charlotte’s sister ignored him, and continued to scream, her eyes squeezed shut and her face reddening.

The flunky’s gloved hands fluttered like helpless birds. “Mi-Miss I must ask th-that you compose yourself! People might hear—”

Sylvia started to stamp her foot, shaking her head in time to the rhythm.
No. No. No. Never. Never. Never. Won’t. Won’t. Won’t.
Blond curls began to work themselves free from her coiffure, giving her a kind of rakish halo around her violet-stained face. Charlotte stared at her in a kind of awe. This was the first time in years Sylvia had allowed herself to become disheveled and disorderly.

Clearly, she refused to relent until her bedtime was extended and steamed turnips were banished from all nursery meals.

“Be quiet!” cried the helpless butler. He craned his neck behind him, as if expecting his employer to arrive any moment. “I’ll be sacked!” In a fit of desperation he clamped a hand down over Sylvia’s mouth—scurrying three steps away from his post at the door to do so.

Seizing the opportunity, Charlotte shot forward and into the house, ignoring the butler’s startled shout. While warmer than the outdoors, inside the house was only intermittently lit with old glowstones that cast no more than a faint, watery light. While clean and aired, the house’s darkened corridors and gaping, open doorways spoke of emptiness and absence, as if Frederick had never existed, as if the house had simply swallowed him up.

Terror clawed out of her throat, but she clenched her teeth and swallowed it back. The spark, that little piece of red, burned in her chest as strongly as always. Surely Frederick was still all right. He had to be.

A muffled footstep sounded behind her in the corridor. She whirled around and nearly collided with Mr. Littiger.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, as if observing the color of her gown.

Charlotte’s brain stuttered to a halt in sudden panic. She had no explanation for what she was doing unannounced in his house—well, former house—after nightfall. Littiger clearly still operated under whatever hold Sir Bertram had on him. She opened her mouth, and tried to come up with a reason…

Reason
.

Charlotte stood taller and raised her chin. “You’re wrong. This is exactly where I should be.”

Mr. Littiger cocked his head to one side, like a curious bird. “Why?”

“My carriage broke down outside, where it’s cold,” Charlotte said, almost but not quite tripping over her own words. “In here, it’s warm. Isn’t it warm?”

“It is,” said Mr. Littiger. “I do prefer being inside.”

“Exactly.” Charlotte smiled.

“But I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be just as warm at Charmant Park,” Mr. Littiger continued. “Sir Bertram says that no one should be here except for him, me, and Frederick.”

Her heart thumped, once. “Where is he? Tell me where Frederick is!”

For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t tell her, that there was nothing left behind those silver eyes to say anything of use. Charlotte still shuddered at the memory of one day spent underneath the Gray. Littiger had endured it for years.

Mr. Littiger turned away with a jerk, but not before Charlotte caught a…a
softening
in his slack features. A faint, stunted glimmer of something long suppressed. He started down the hallway in a different direction, and, operating on an unknown instinct, Charlotte followed him until they reached a small, dark study, crowded with shadowy furniture that gleamed dully by the light of a dying fire in the hearth.

“I can barely see anything,” she said.

“There’s nothing to see.”

The cold fear crouched on the back of her neck bit hard into her spine, sending chills shooting all the way down. “Then why did you bring me here?”

The man blinked. “To show you that there’s nothing to see, that there’s no reason for you to be here.”

Charlotte backed away in confusion. He didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt her, but did anyone really
want
anything while under the Gray? Mr. Littiger stood between her and the door. She raked her gaze across the room to look for a second entrance, some means of escape.

A glitter of red caught her eye.

Her indrawn breath froze in her chest. A withered salamander flared briefly in the hearth, catching the shine of scarlet again. She drew closer. A ruby, vivid against the pale gleam of skin. Her steps stuttered across the floor toward it.

A ring, a hand, an arm draping down to the floor, a few feet from a half-eaten apple, the exposed flesh already browned. A body, still and cold, slumped bonelessly upon a chaise longue.

No.
No
. She reached out and passed her fingers over his face, tracing the bent crook of his nose, the dark curve of eyebrow. Somewhere inside her head, a high, piercing whine started. A pitch shrill enough to shatter glass. To shatter her heart. Her hands slid down his cheeks, as cold and soft as bed linens no one had slept in.

As her fingers passed down his neck, something twitched against her hand.

A pulse.

Scarcely daring to breathe herself Charlotte bent and placed her cheek against Frederick’s chest. She heard the thump of his heart, slow, heavy, and quiet like a despairing prisoner struggling in a distant cell.

“He’s alive. Frederick’s alive!” She pressed her hand against his heartbeat as if to shield it from the elements. With the other hand, she gave his shoulder a shake. “Wake up, Frederick. Come on.”

“There’s nothing to see,” said Littiger. He hadn’t moved from his spot just inside the room.

“I can see him perfectly,” Charlotte shot back. “I can see that he’s alive, and he needs my help. He needs your help.”

“There’s nothing I can do.” If Charlotte hadn’t understood the Gray so well, she would have interpreted his slow tone as one of exaggerated patience. “Because there is no one to help.”

“He’s your cousin.” Surely, even beyond the Gray, some part of Charles Littiger had to react to that.

“Not anymore. Sir Bertram took him away. Drank him up. All of him at once.”

Fear settled like a lead weight in Charlotte’s chest. “Then why isn’t he like you?”

A long moment of silence extended between them. Littiger’s chin tilted down, slightly. “Because he’s never taken it all before. It comes back, slowly, and then he can take from me again. It hurts him if he doesn’t have it, so he doesn’t waste.”

“I’m sorry.” Despite how useless those words sounded against the enormity of Littiger’s suffering, Charlotte felt she had to say them.

“He took all of Frederick,” Littiger said. “Once he knew Frederick was a footman, and had been watching him the whole time, he stopped taking it from me and the others. This made him hungry, I think. And angry. So he took all of him.”

Charlotte turned back to Frederick. So still, so cold. His heart beating, but his body unmoving. “Wake up,” she whispered. “Please. You’re still in there. You have to be.
Wake up
.”

Taking a deep breath, she forced his eyelids open with her thumbs. Two chips of blue slate greeted her. Flat, unchanging blue. No whirling shades. No light. Even without his power his eyes were always shifting from blue to aqua to sun-brightened cerulean. Now they gleamed as dully as glass lanterns with the candles inside blown out. No light. No color.

No life. His chest moved in and out beneath Charlotte’s hand, but his eyes held no hint of recognition. How was it possible to be both alive and dead at once? How could a heart as complex as Frederick’s—such a mixture of quiet and courage, humor and sadness—just vanish? Not only the misery and hope of life, but the will to live, the unfurling passion of intellect? The shrill buzz of grief rang in her ears, drowning out the snap of the fire and the approach of footsteps.

“Good. You found the girl.”

Charlotte turned around. Sir Bertram, despite being of average height, seemed to fill the doorway as he stood in it. He carried about himself a sense of, if not size, then a largeness of expression that resulted in his suddenly imposing demeanor. He swung his arms and legs in a noticeable swagger.

“Where are your manners, Littiger? We have guests. Several of them, all unannounced.”

“Where are they?” Littiger asked.

“The footmen are seeing to them. Go and see to their continued hospitality.”

Littiger hesitated, his chin dipping lower.

Sir Bertram’s face erupted in a snarl of anger. “I said
go
, damn you!”

After the former duke left, Sir Bertram turned to Charlotte and smiled, an expression unnaturally open for his square, blunt features. Emotion fuelled his grin, his obvious enjoyment of the situation, but it wasn’t his own. Charlotte knew that now, and the knowledge sickened her. It was like watching a horse peel its lips back from its teeth—it was a smile only in semblance.

“Sometimes I feel like a cowherd,” he said, in a false, confiding tone. “I can command obedience well enough, but rarely the intellect, the
initiative
sometimes required to perform a task well. That’s likely how Frederick survived, even after I sent his precious gamekeeper to murder him.”

Charlotte’s mind whirled over what little she knew about the scandal surrounding the young duke’s death ten years ago. Drowning, she recalled. Frederick would have been fifteen—fifteen and faced with a friend who had turned against him. And Frederick had blamed himself.

No wonder he’d run away.

Sir Bertram moved with an almost childlike bounce, so different from the last days of his visit at Charmant Park.
He went hungry
, Littiger had said, and now Charlotte believed it. She could hardly connect this falsely genial man with the brittle baronet who had spent his hours curled into himself like the dry corpse of a beetle.

“You chose a poor time to visit, I’m afraid,” Sir Bertram said. “None of the guest rooms have been aired, Cook has nothing prepared, and besides, I don’t think I could eat another bite.” Again, the horse-grin, that gruesome flash of teeth.

Staring at him, Charlotte dimly realized there’d be little feeling to suck out of her, if that had been his intent. Looking at Frederick’s quieted features, fighting and succumbing to the truth, she felt as if someone had popped a cork within her, allowing all emotion to drain out of her, leaving her hollow and echoing.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Everyone at Charmant Park knows we came here.”