The Last Stitch (The Chronicles of Eirie: 2) (8 page)

Chapter Thirteen

‘It must be close to dinner. My belly burbles.’ Gallivant pulled his feet down from where he had them propped on the window-seat. He had sat patiently stitching the last couple of hours, Adelina having been encouraged to teach him how to embroider berries. Now he had accomplished it with some relative success, he had a desire to make a vest. Adelina didn’t feel like quelling his enthusiasm because in fact he was quite proficient... for a man.

‘I’m not hungry.’ She bent over the fritillaria leaf she had applied to the gown. It wouldn’t bend properly over itself and she risked losing the firm shape of the wire if she fiddled much more.

‘Well milady, and how stupid would it be not to eat everything laid before you? You need to keep up your strength.’ Gallivant placed his small hoop on the table with pride, waiting for Adelina to comment. She glanced up.

‘It is good for a first effort.’ Compared to Ana, she thought, who was quite brilliant, who
had
been quite brilliant. ‘No, I don’t want to eat because Luther brings the food to my room and I don’t want him to have any excuse to come near me.’

‘Pah. Don’t be a ninny. I can sort that out, never you mind.’ Gallivant was in one of the brash moods Adelina felt so typified his Otherwordliness. Reality was surely only something he grasped on the rare occasion. As he spoke, as if to underline Adelina’s thoughts on his usefulness or otherwise, the door rattled as the key was turned and Luther entered, bearing a tray.

Adelina froze. The brute’s expression was unreadable but he had washed and used some sort of woody fragrance and his clothes were fresh. Her heart sank.

‘Well then, embroiderer. I had cook send up some salmon with capers and she has given you some fresh baked bread and butter. And she made you a Queen Pudding she said to tell you.’ He kept up the gravelly patter as he put the tray down and laid out the food. Gallivant, invisible, noticed the ruddy flush on the fellow’s neck and wisely deduced the potential for trouble. ‘I brought you up a bottle of Madame’s finest wine which I thought we could share, yes? A goblet for you and a goblet for me?’ He busied himself with the cork of the bottle, using an ugly knife from his belt.

Adelina, her heart pounding, eased herself from the table and edged away. Closer to the open door and closer. One more step... and she was through! She ran down the curling stair.

She heard the curse behind. Curving round and round until she got to the bottom, to the massive cedar door which led to the garden that she had forgotten was walled, enclosed, surrounded. She pulled on the latch and shook it and pulled again, hearing Luther’s steps slowing, realising she was trapped and had nowhere to go. He rounded the corner, his face blotched with anger.

‘
Bicce!
’ He grabbed her arms. He twisted one up her back with force so that her shoulder and elbow wrenched. ‘Here I was trying to be pleasant, trying to do something nice for you and you repay me by running out on me. Adelina, that’s just not acceptable.’ As he articulated the last word, he yanked her arm further up her back and pushed her ahead of him back up to her room - her room which seemed empty of Gallivant, her room where the wretched robe lay across the table, mocking and teasing. She felt such fear and rage, all melded together in a sticky morass from which she could separate neither one from the other.

Luther kept pushing her past the table toward her bed and seeing her situation for what it was she allowed the morass to bubble over. She began to fight and kicked back hard, missing Luther’s groin by inches and dragging her fingernail down his cheek to rip it open and lay it bare, gore dripping.

‘AAH, how dare you!’ He jerked her body hard and naked lust and excitement at her rebellion rippled across his face as he threw her onto the bed. He licked his lips with a red, wet tongue, grabbing her flailing hands with one giant maw of his own and twisting them above her head, his heavy body pressing her into the covers.

Gallivant had been behind the door and had crept forward as Adelina fell back on the bed. He had debated what he could do as she ran down the stairs, knowing his skills were to create mischief not mayhem. But he had been entrusted as a companion to the mortal. ‘Sink me,’ he sighed petulantly.

He passed his hand across his front in a mesmer, focusing all his attention on Adelina, knowing he must get Luther away, get her safely out of his clutches. Besides, he had a feeling...

A churning began in Adelina’s belly, a burning ascending to her gullet and just as Luther brought his lips to her frantic face, she vomited - a stream of all that was old and foul-smel
ling of her meals launched itself over his face and clothes. He shrieked and jumped away as Adelina sat up and continued to vomit and retch, the room filling with the sour smell. ‘Aagh! Gah! You foul little whore, what is
wrong
with you?’

But Adelina had no answer and continued to retch until the tears streamed down her stained face and she thought her insides would become outsides. Luther hurried to the door.
‘You… you’ll pay for this. By Behir.’ He glanced down at his clothes, holding his own hand over his mouth as the smell drifted to his nose and then rushed from the room and dragged the door behind him. In the silence that followed, Adelina’s gasps fading as the vomiting eased, she heard the lock turn and rolled over on her belly and began to cry.

‘Well you could thank me,’ Gallivant waved his hand like a fan in an effort to remove the tainted air under his nose. He grimaced.

Adelina lifted her head blearily. ‘If this was your mesmer, your idea of saving me,’ her head collapsed back down, ‘then I am speechless.’

‘Oh don’t be so woebegone.’ Gallivant waved his hand again and Adelina felt the nausea recede with speed. More wafts and the room righted itself, a delicately fragrant whirlwind rushing over everything, cleansing, cleaning, refreshing. In minutes it was as if it hadn’t happened. The lamps glowed and the room was again the plain prison for an embroiderer and her work. Outside, an owl hooted and the seabreeze flowed through the window.

‘Why couldn’t you have mesmered
him
instead of me and then we could have taken the keys while he was wretched and be gone?’ Adelina tested her legs in case she should feel weak.

‘Because as you discovered, we wouldn’t have got very far. My skills are not,’ he had the grace to dip his head and an embarrassed blush spread across the baby cheeks. ‘They are not like Faeran skills. I cannot do what they do. I’m a hob. I shape-change and create a little mischief and if I like someone, I can be a friend and help in what little way I can. I’m sorry I didn’t perform to your expectations.’

‘Gallivant, I’m sorry. I owe you such a debt. You stopped him,’ she looked at him, her eyes swimming.

‘All’s well that ends well, because that’s the thing you see, I have a feeling...’

***

He had a feeling.

He was a funny thing, Gallivant; different from the other of my strange acquaintances… like a babe learning his way. But he was good company, he had a way of making me laugh, was a cruel mimic and a good storyteller. And he was carrying out Lhiannon’s orders to the best of his ability. He was keeping me company and in his own way he was keeping me safe. If I had been a little less traumatised that night I would have pursued the issue of his ‘feeling’. As it was I jumped when I heard Luther’s voice shouting there was a pail, mop and water outside and finishing with a trail of threatening obscenities. I went to the door and reached out a hand. The thug covered his nose and mouth and looked away muttering
‘Take it, take the bloody stuff,’
and beat a retreat, locking the door as he went.

I turned to Gallivant but he had gone and so I climbed onto my bed and lay back, allowing thoughts of Kholi’s love and affection to fill my mind, overflowing to every dark, damaged corner, to lull me to a deep, unbroken sleep - the first for many weeks.

Chapter Fourteen

Severine had taken a meal in her chamber at the hunting lodge and now sat in a rocking chair by the window gazing out at the night-shrouded Styx Forest. The chair suited her mood. For someone who was always frenetic, always in agitated motion, this allowed Severine to sit, to be in motion and soothed all in one.

It was a graceful piece of furniture, for if Severine had anything worthwhile, she had an eye for good pieces to fill her houses. The chair came from a woodcarver’s market in Trevallyn and suited the lodge, the timber mellow with age and the arms, seat and back lovingly upholstered in excellent canvas work - a tapestry of fruit and vegetables.

Her forehead creased as she pulled at the weave with one hand. In the other, she had a piece of silk and she took her agitated fingers away from smoothing the wool of the canvas work to smooth out the silk. It was a tiny piece of Adelina’s discarded embroidery. A pansy - inky violet and yellow with a leaf in emerald green. Crawling across the leaf was the ubiquitous ladybird and under the leaf, directly on the silk, a black money-spider sitting in a silver web. The work was perfect and yet Adelina had consigned it to the rubbish.
Why?
Severine knew the truth of her own embroidery skill, its ragged unevenness, its lack of finesse. So why would Adelina throw something this perfect away? She growled. What was it about the wretched woman that so disturbed her to the point of murder?
Jealousy?
She tipped her toes against the ground and set the chair gently rocking again, rejecting the idea of such an infantile emotion. Scrunching up Adelina’s rubbish, she consigned it to the floor at her feet.

Next door, Gertus would be bent in a dusty huddle over the stones trying to decipher their meaning. She smiled the cold grimace that never reached
her eyes and which barely touched the corners of her lips, lifting a crystal goblet to sip the golden wine inside.

She drifted on nostalgia, reviewing her thrilling ascent to this point. Not long after Gertus arrived in her life, she had fretted about the Count
’s voracious need of her, as though to him the sexual act defined his manhood. Luther suggested a solution to her problem with the calm and deliberate manner for which she payed him. That night, after giving the Count a warm glass of milk laced with enough belladonna to stop an ox, Severine lay in bed listening to the old man’s rasping, erratic breath. At one point his eyes flew open and he clawed his way to her side of the bed whereupon she jumped out to stand and watch him. He knew. Oh he knew as every sinew, muscle and nerve screamed in his silent death-throes that his wife was a murderer. His eyes stared back sightlessly in the end, and she waited for some measure of emotion to bite - guilt, horror, dismay, even sorrow. Instead, euphoria swept like a wave of applause through her body, affirming her dreams and the process that must secure those dreams. It hadn’t hurt at all and she knew she could do it again.

Where does this emotional lack come from?
She shrugged her shoulders at the empty room as she reminisced, and thanked the Fates she’d been blessed with such cool carelessness because it made everything simple. It also marked the massive difference between her and her peers. Changeling indeed!

Thus she entered a wealthy widowhood; with two servants literally worth their weight in gelt and power that others... she laughed,
Nay, even Others,
would die for.

The evening Gertus happened into her life, not long before the old Count had ‘died’, she couldn’t sleep. Slipping from the despised marital bed, she had wrapped herself in a silken shawl and crept along the darkened corridor of their palazzo on the Grand Canal of Veniche. In the moonlight filtering through elongated windows, dreary, equally elongated and bearded faces of bedecked ancestors peered down at her. White marble busts on carved plinths glimmered in the moonbeams slanting across the terrazzo floors. Bare-footed, she proceeded like a wraith to the library, to her favourite tomes, because she was lured to the presence of stories on Others like those lured by the poppy. Already her mind was far from the constraints and distrait of her husband’s demands, scanning line after line of the grimoires in her possession. If only…

A queer glow stopped her in her tracks. Flitting about inside the doorway of the library was a small gold luminescence. At first she thought it was the Teine Sidhe, the tiny will o’ the wisps of fire and light. But on quick reflection she recalled they were creatures of enchanted forests like the Luned. Not the canals and watery alleys of Veniche. Her breath caught as she crept to the door.

A strange figure slipped from one wall-hung picture to the next. Lifting, looking underneath. Moving on. Then to boxes, lidded bowls and caskets. Opening, closing. But becoming anxious. Swearing as each item apparently held nothing - some quaint, gutteral language.

It’s Other.
Severine’s heart jumped.
He’s a goblin looking for jewelry, gems.
He approached the door and she slipped behind an arras, laying her magnificent black pearl and diamond betrothal ring on a table where it caught the light of the moon and glimmered in a beguiling way. She held her breath.

The goblin passed through the door into the moonlight-striped corridor. He took a cautious step forward but then paused, his nose twitching as if sniffing a scent. His head turned and his eyes scanned the furniture against the walls.

The diamond flashed with white fire and the pearl gleamed. The goblin’s breath gushed as his hand reached out.

Severine grabbed. She fastened her hand over the unfortunate’s wrist and he shrieked like a
young girl.

‘Be quiet and you shall have more.’ Severine’s urgent whisper cut through the cry like wire as the word ‘
more
’ could be seen settling into the malicious wight’s consciousness.

‘More? Like what?’ His globular eyes narrowed.

‘This?’ Severine pulled the opal pendant from the neck of her fine lawn nightgown. He gazed at its pure-as-milk-surface, the red and blue veins of fire streaming deep inside like some subterranean vein of hot lava. The goblin sighed as if it were the most desired jewel in the world and he reached his other hand to touch it.

‘No,’ she said, more hiss than whisper. ‘You work for me and I will pay you in gems and gold. No work, no touch.’

The goblin shook off her clasp and moved backward away from her, all the time staring at her, gauging the price of the passion. His hands wrung themselves over and over. ‘As you say,’ he said finally. ‘A payment up front though.’ He bent his head in a quasi obeisance, holding his hand out, wiggling his fingers.

‘Shall we make it the ring then?’ Severine held the pearl and diamond geegaw out.

‘Mistress,’ he smiled the way a sycophant would, the wrinkled fingers closing over the jewelry. ‘I am your humble servant.’

They had come so far together and now he was next door sliding not precious gems but arcane stones around under his fingers, trying to find the gates to what Severine perceived as her long lost home - the world of Faeran. She rocked back and forth.