Unnatural Issue (17 page)

She kept a sharper watch, and finally she had the proof that it wasn’t just her imagination; the animals were reacting to
something.
And if the animals felt it too, then this wasn’t nerves or an active imagination; it meant that her father was not merely watching her, he was concentrating on her in a way that even a rabbit knew wasn’t healthy.

She began to get angry at that point. There had been that lingering doubt, that perhaps she had been feeling unease about the change in her situation and ascribing that to her father, since after all, he had caused it. But . . . no. And this morning over breakfast she decided that she’d had enough. If he was going to spy on her, well, she was going to turn the tables on him.

“I’m going to trick him,” she said to the robin that had come to sit on the edge of her rug and stare meaningfully at the basket that held her luncheon. “And serve him right, too. All these years, it has been
me
that has had the care of these lands, kept the earth healthy and sound. I’m the one that has taken care of all of the magic things that needed doing. And did he notice that someone else had stepped in after he ran away from his responsibilities and hid in his rooms to brood? No. Did he think to find out if anyone would? No. And now, oh,
now,
he uses his magic, and for what? To spy on me? He hasn’t made one bit of effort to take up his duties again! And with all this spying, has he even noticed that it’s
me
that is caring for everything? Has he noticed that I am an Earth magician
at all?
”

Giving voice to this raised her ire rather than cooling it. Saying these things out loud made her examine the injustice of it all, and she was so angry now, she would have given her father a right tongue-lashing if he’d been in front of her. After all, she wasn’t just his daughter, she was his peer, his equal in magic, and he should have given her that much respect, instead of acting as if she were somehow feebleminded because thanks to
his
neglect she didn’t have the education proper to a girl of her station!

“Well, we’ll show
him,”
she said to the bird. “And if he doesn’t realize what I’ve done, well, the more fool he.”

She assembled what she needed swiftly: a clean white handkerchief, a scrap of the dress she was wearing, snipped from an inside seam, a little earth moistened with her own blood, a single hair, an appleseed. She tied it all up tightly in the handkerchief, set it down in front of her, and concentrated. She built up in her own mind the image she had studied this morning in the mirror, all the while calling the Earth’s slow power to her. She fed that power into the little packet, drop by drop, as she imposed her will and her image on it. She was a child of Earth, a Daughter of Eve. And she was going to create a reflection of herself.

She closed her eyes to concentrate better; she’d actually done this several times in the past, when she was much younger, and she had wanted to run off to the woods to play with Robin but didn’t want to frighten Agatha. Robin had taught her how to make an image of herself, something that would repeat a single action over and over so that there was some movement and life although it wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny. She had loved to swing, so that was what she had the image do; and every time Agatha looked out, she would see what she thought was Susanne, swinging in the orchard, and be content, when Susanne was actually far, far from the Manor.

But that only had to fool ordinary folk. This would have to fool an Earth Master, at least at a distance. It not only had to look like her, it had to
feel
like her. It still wouldn’t pass muster from up close, but he would never come out to look, and the others wouldn’t come disturb Miss Susanne without direct orders from her father.

Finally she opened her eyes.

And looked into her own eyes.

The simulacrum stared at her, blankly. It was obvious the moment you got close and looked into those eyes; there was no intelligence there, no warmth, no real life. But no one was going to get close. Her father had put up a wall between herself and those who had been her friends, and
he
was not going to leave his rooms.

“Read,” she told the thing, and it took one of the books and cast its eyes down, occasionally turning a page. She stared at it for several moments, and finally she was satisfied that it passed muster.

Before that
watched
feeling could return, she ran off deeper into the orchard, pausing only long enough to scatter some breadcrumbs for the robin, who accepted them as his due.

Once she was far enough under the trees that she was sure she couldn’t be seen from the windows, she doubled back, this time using every bit of the stealth she had learned as a child, creeping and hiding from those who would demand she return to some tedious chore, like shelling peas.

She knew a dozen ways in and out of the Manor that did not require the use of doors, but there were only a few that could be negotiated when wearing a white dress. That was enough for now, and so she came around to the front of the Manor and all the disused rooms there, with furniture shrouded in sheets. The windows themselves were curtained heavily, and Agatha only went into them a few times a year to make sure that moths and mice were not getting into things.

She studied the front of the house, finding the window she wanted, one on the ground floor. This wasn’t the first time she had wanted to come or go without anyone knowing. There, in the room that had probably, in days when the squire entertained, been used by the men to gather after dinner, was her best access: a window with a broken catch, a window that she kept meticulously lubricated and spotlessly clean. She should be able to get in and over the sill without snagging or dirtying her dress.

She scurried up to the side of the building and ducked in behind shrubbery that was rank and overgrown, leaves yellow and blighted. A piece of log she’d propped against the side of the building served as a stepping-stool; she slid the window up and climbed over the sill. She swung her legs over, dropped to the floor, and closed it again.

She paused in the gloom of the smoking room for a moment, stilling her own breath, and cast another simple spell. This one gave her hearing as keen as a rabbit—or a robin, who could hear an insect burrowing under the earth—or an owl, who knew exactly where the mouse scuttling through the grass was. As the magic settled in place, she heard the sounds of pots and pans, of cutlery, and laconic conversation. She identified Agatha, the cook, Patience, and Prudence. At this moment, all the house servants would be in the kitchen, preparing supper. This hadn’t been true when she’d been one of them, but now, they were at least one pair of hands short, and other things that didn’t matter so much—such as cleaning unused rooms—would just have to go undone. The men wouldn’t come any farther into the house than the kitchen, and then only to be fed. No one would find her prowling about.

So there was only one person left to guard against . . . one person and, just possibly, something that wasn’t human. She had left her shoes and stockings in the orchard; her feet were so calloused and so unused to shoes, at least in the summer, that the soles were as hard as leather. Now she closed her eyes and invoked the power of the Earth again. This time she wrapped herself in another sort of magic, the kind that worked on the minds of those around her. Again, this was something that Robin had taught her, so that she could slip up unseen on the shyer of the forest creatures and spy on young hawks and owls in their nests without ending up with a face full of talons.

I’m not here,
the magic whispered into those minds around her.
You see only what you expect to see.

It wouldn’t work if she made a noise; it also wouldn’t work if someone expected to see her, or if she touched them. But for anything else, yes, it worked beautifully.

This spell, this magic, had a
feel
to it; it felt as if she had wrapped herself in a veil or a cloak. Sometimes she wondered if this was how the fairy stories of cloaks that granted invisibility had started.

When she felt herself shrouded in the magic, she moved, keeping close to the wall and taking step by slow, soundless step up to the second floor, and the part of the house where her father’s rooms were.

She listened closely at the door, pressing her ear against it, and heard . . . nothing. Not even the sound of breathing. So unless her father was dead, and the eyes that had been upon her all this time were those of a ghost, there was no one in that first room.

Slowly, she turned the knob; slowly, she eased the door open. First, just a crack, which she put her eye to. Then, she opened it just enough so that she could slip inside. It was well oiled; she remembered once how Agatha grumbled about the master insisting that every hinge of every door, used or not, be kept oiled so that creaking wouldn’t disturb him.

She closed the door behind her, kept her back tightly to the wall just inside, and looked around.

By now her eyes had adjusted to the gloom in this part of the house; the window was curtained so she wasn’t staring into glare from darkness, and she was able to actually see the room she had been brought to by Agatha. This was obviously the study. There were books lining the walls, floor to ceiling. If there had ever been any objects on those bookshelves other than books, they were gone now. The only place where there were no bookshelves was above and to either side of the massive wooden mantel around the fireplace. Above the mantle, there was a place where a painting might have hung once, but now the wall was blank. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture—a couch, two chairs, a desk in front of the window with a third chair behind it. The carpet, like the one in her room, was old and worn. She eased around to the doorway she saw on the other side of the room and peeked in.

A bedroom, This was like her own set of rooms, then: the study or sitting room and a bedroom. The bed was made, and the room was empty.

So where was her father?

Just as she wondered that, she heard the sound of creaking wood from what she had thought was a wall full of bookshelves on the right of the fireplace. Even as she watched, her mouth falling open with surprise, the bookshelves moved—

No! It was a false wall, and the bookshelves were actually mounted on a
door!

She held her breath and ducked around the frame of the doorway into the bedroom, sure she was about to be discovered.

But instead, her father strode impatiently into the room, looked about, muttered something, and seized a book from the desk and went back into the opening behind the shelves. The door swung closed, and she heard a latch click.

She hurried out, scarcely knowing what to think.

Except—there was a secret room. What that could mean she couldn’t imagine. All that she knew for certain was that she needed to get back to the orchard and dismiss the simulacrum. Or rather, dispel the image. She was going to keep that little bundle because she was going to need it again.

There was a great deal more going on here than she had thought. No one among the servants knew about this room. Now, perhaps her father was using it for the practice of magic. It certainly had been a secret for a lot longer than she had been alive, because Agatha had been here for forty years at least, and she would have known all about a newly built “secret” room.

But if he was practicing magic, it certainly wasn’t in the course of his responsibility as the local Earth Master, because there had been no stir in the Earth magic hereabouts, no rumors among the Elementals, and no shift in her own protections and spells.

So what was he doing in there? And why?

So father is keeping secrets?
Whatever they were . . . she was going to uncover them. She had a right to know. And if they had to do with magic—she had a responsibility to find out what they were.

 

There was more than enough moonlight to see well in her clearing. She had slipped out of the Manor again, once everyone was asleep, and come straight here. She knew how to call Robin when the need was urgent, and she had done that tonight; she pinned an oak and an ash leaf together with a thorn, impressed her need on them, and called one of the fauns and asked him to find Robin as quickly as he could.

Robin had come. And she had made her request.

“Why do you want to know true invisibility?” Robin asked, looking at her oddly. “It’s not easy magic. Humans take years, decades, to master it.”

She frowned. “I don’t have years.” She had never been less than scrupulously honest with him and now was not the time to change that. “I discovered something. My father has a secret room in that house and he was in it today . . . Robin, I don’t know
why.
I only know that I have to find out how to get in there. I have to know what he’s hiding. I think it’s important. And the only way I can do that is to become invisible, because I can’t let him catch me doing it.”

Robin scratched his head. There were Gypsies passing through, and today he looked like one of them: curly black hair, big dark eyes, skin as brown as if he’d stained it with walnut hulls. “Well,” he said, finally, “I think you’re right. And I have no power inside houses, so I can’t tell you what’s in that place. Wanting to be invisible though, that’s quite a different matter from learning the magic. And that, I can help you with, better invisibility than any mortal can manage.” He felt around in his belt pouch. “Here,” he said, finally, pulling out a ring made of finely woven horsehair. “That will give you invisibility five times.” He handed it to her. “Put it on; that’s all you need do. Take it off to be seen again. After the fifth time, it will fall to dust, and you’ll have to come back to me for another.”

She took the ring and impulsively kissed his cheek. “Robin,
thank
you!”

“Eh,” he said, with a shrug and a grin, “Those are things I keep about to give to folks as want to do a bit of mischief. Made some for my Gypsy friends so they can snare some coneys, maybe take a hen or two. They know who I’ll let them rob and who to leave be. And they know they had best not confuse one with the other.” He sobered. “I think you are right, though. There’s something very wrong about the man that is your father, and the keys to it must be in that secret place. Be more careful than you ever have in your life when you do this, though. Something warns me that you do not dare be caught.”