Untold (35 page)

There was never going to be a time when he could think, Yes, all right, enough. So he turned away, because he had to, and turned to Aurimere.

It was easy to see in the dark. The flames around it were still burning.

* * *

By the time he was halfway up the hill, the heat of the fire felt as if it was scorching Jared’s skin. Standing on the crest of the hill looking into the flames, he could barely see Aurimere at all. The house was hidden by fierce light, the fire crackling like harsh laughter.

Sweat stung at his hairline, burned in his eyes like tears. There was no way through the fire. Unless you were a sorcerer.

Jared concentrated on the fire the way Ash had taught him. It felt different from regular fire, like running your hand over a tire and knowing it had been mended. Magic had been used recklessly to make it. He could put this whole fire out now, and Sorry-in-the-Vale would be glad.

He didn’t. Somebody in Aurimere would be bound to notice. He created an opening for himself, like pushing a door ajar. A shadow fell across the fire and he walked in it, through to the other side.

Once inside the fire, he could see Aurimere, the sheer walls turned silver in the moonlight. There were yellow lights in the windows.

There were invaders in Aurimere.

Jared asked the night to cover him, and it did, loaning him a little of its darkness and wrapping him in shadows so that when he passed by windows all the people inside saw was night. He moved around to the garden, the crumbling wall where he and Kami had talked once, and found the back door under one of the eaves, the one that had a door handle shaped like an iron hand. The small hand, fingers curved, was moon-silvered and moonshine-cold against his fingers. He felt as if there was a cool press on his hand for a moment, before he released the handle and slipped in the door.

The corridor was shadowy, the only lights coming from somewhere up the stairs and far away. Jared was glad: he didn’t want to see Aurimere overrun, not all at once.

He tried to walk softly, because the high ceilings and stone of Aurimere carried echoes.

He remembered how alien it had seemed, this echoing chilly place, when he’d first come. But he’d missed it while he was living in the Water Rising. He hadn’t realized Aurimere meant something to him until he found how much he hated having it taken away.

Maybe it was just that, chilly and strange as it was, it reminded him of Aunt Lillian.

He couldn’t lie to himself. This mission wasn’t just for Kami. He was coming to get Ten, but he wanted to save Aunt Lillian as well.

Aunt Lillian had stolen away Kami’s little brother, like an evil sorcerer in a fairy tale, as if a sorcerer had to be something the whole town was afraid of. As if his family hadn’t done enough to Kami’s family already.

Aunt Lillian had more than proven Kami’s mother’s point. No wonder Claire Glass wanted her daughter to stay away from him.

And Jared still wanted to save her. Maybe to save her so he could murder her himself, he was that furious with her. But he remembered the night he had moved back into Aurimere, when he had woken to a feeling like someone stroking his hair, very lightly so he would not wake. Except that if you slept on the streets for any length of time, you learned to always wake when someone was touching you.

He hadn’t woken fast, or in alarm. It was like he knew even in his sleep that he was safe, that he was being watched over, and that meant he stirred more slowly than he would have usually.

That gave whoever it was time so that when Jared opened his eyes and lifted himself from his pillow, all he saw was a crack of light made by the not-quite-closed door.

Maybe he had not quite closed the door himself when he was going to bed. Maybe it was just a lingering remnant of a dream about family, turned into a memory by his sleepy mind and wishful thinking, and nothing real at all.

He was still going to get Aunt Lillian out.

Aurimere had no place to keep prisoners: no dungeons or crypts to use in a pinch. Jared’s guess was that Rob would’ve put his wife in her room and sealed the door.

He slipped up the stairs by the library, past the marble bust of a Lynburn, silent as a shadow. The night was still wrapped around him, a kind cloak, though glints of moonlight off furniture and glass tore at it.

He reached the second floor, crossed to the wing where Aunt Lillian’s room was, and had to flatten himself against a wall as two sorcerers ran by. They rushed heedlessly past where he stood in the shadows, shoes clattering on the marble floor: one was a girl who looked younger than he was, hardly more than a child. Her face was familiar, as if he’d seen her in school.

Jared felt the shadows cling to him as he left the corner, the night of Sorry-in-the-Vale telling him that he could not remain hidden long.

He paused and looked at himself in a mirror as he passed down the hall: it had an ornate gold frame and the glass was speckled. His face faded in and out of vision, his hair a gleam in the dark. He looked like the ghost of a Lynburn, still walking Aurimere’s halls.

There was a little table below the mirror, with a lamp on it. The lampshade was fringed with points that glowed in the moonlight. Jared’s eyes went to their light: they were seed pearls. Seed pearls, caught in the hollow of paws belonging to some very small animal. The lampshade was hung with paws and pearls.

This crazy house
, Jared thought, and almost smiled.

His quiet progress down the hall was stopped when he came in sight of Aunt Lillian’s door and saw his guess had been right.

The door was closed. He couldn’t see Aunt Lillian.

But he could see his mother, standing in front of the door. She was looking at it as if there was some riddle inscribed on the dark wood, as though if only she could make out what it said, she would know what to do and how they could all be happy.

Jared didn’t know if she was a guard, or if she had simply come to visit her sister. But he remembered that once she had protected Aunt Lillian from Rob. Once, she had even protected him.

She stood hesitating and trembling in front of the door, her streaming hair a cascade of moonshine. Jared wondered how long she had been there; it could have been hours.

He walked softly until he was standing very close to her.

Then he pulled the shadows away so they were standing face to face.

Jared smiled at her, baring his teeth. “Hi, Mom.”

* * *

His mother started backward in surprise and hit the wall, holding up a hand as if to ward him off. It made him sick to see her flinch, always had, but this time Jared bit his lip and looked away, and did not back down. Her intake of breath was shuddering and sharp, echoing in the hallway louder than her whisper: “What are you doing here?”

“I missed you,” Jared said. “Come on. What do you think?”

His mother pressed her hands together briefly, as if she had to pray for an instant. “If you go to Rob, he’ll forgive you. He wants you.”

“Is that what you want?” Jared asked.

His mother’s hand fluttered to her throat, a gesture reminiscent of a bird startled out of a tree. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You hate me.”

“I don’t,” his mother said, sharply. “I don’t—hate you.”

“Well, you don’t want me around, do you?” Jared asked. His mother looked at him in the same blank way as she had looked at the door, as if he was a riddle she could not figure out and had given up trying. “And you certainly don’t want Aunt Lillian around, do you?”

“Lillian’s my sister,” Mom snapped, claiming Aunt Lillian apparently as easy as claiming Jared was impossible. “I don’t want her hurt. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her at all.”

Jared felt his lip curl. “But you want her husband.”

“He was mine first!” Jared’s mother said. “He came to me, all through our childhood.
I
was the one he told about my parents killing his.
I
was the one he told about his plans to get justice.
I
was the one who understood him. Lillian never did.”

So Rob had laid the guilt of murder on another child’s shoulders. Because to Rob and Rosalind both, killing regular people wouldn’t have mattered. But killing Lynburns, especially to defeat other people, well. That was a real crime. That had to be avenged.

Jared was used to hating his mother and feeling painfully sorry for her. He crushed both feelings down.

“I bet she didn’t,” Jared said. “But Rob will either reconcile with her or hurt her. And you don’t want him to do either. So why not let me take her away?” He hoped that his mother would assume he meant “and then we will never come back,” rather than what he was actually thinking: “and then Aunt Lillian will take back Aurimere and murder Rob.”

“Just open the door, Mother,” Jared said. “That’s all you have to do.”

“You can’t open the door,” she said in a rush. “There’s an alarm spell, and a spell on the lock as well. Two different sorcerers did the spells. You can’t concentrate on opening the door, because you’ll set off the alarm. And if you concentrate on silencing the alarm, you won’t be able to open the door.”

“Won’t I?” Jared asked. “You’re forgetting I’m a delinquent.” He concentrated on the alarm spell and reached forward, stomach lurching as his mother shied away from him and stared at him with wide horrified eyes. “I would never hurt you,” Jared whispered, and slid the earring out of her ear.

He unwound the wire and slotted it into the lock, listening for the click of the lock giving, the satisfaction of the handle turning under his palm. The door fetched up against an obstruction: Jared put his shoulder to it, hard, and heard wood splinter. The door swung open; splinters the size of daggers lay scattered across the floor.

Jared slanted a look over at his mother. “Look, Mom. Just like magic.” He stepped over the splinters and stood by the gauze-draped bed. Aunt Lillian lay there unconscious. Her face was slack and defenseless, robbed of character.

Jared heard the sound of an indrawn breath and turned to see his mother at the doorway.

“She looks like me,” his mother murmured. It seemed an absurd thing to say about her identical twin, but Jared looked at Aunt Lillian, so terribly vulnerable, and saw what she meant.

He also saw Aunt Lillian’s fists, closing on the material of the bedclothes, trying to fight her way out of unconsciousness. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, walking over to the bed and pulling Aunt Lillian up into his arms. “You two look nothing alike.”

Aunt Lillian was tall, and had some muscle, and her body was limp with unconsciousness: she was rather a heavy armful. But Jared found himself tucking his chin protectively on the top of her head. It didn’t matter that the muscles in his arms burned holding her. She was a welcome weight.

“You’re very strong,” his mother murmured. “Like your father.”

“Which father would that be?” Jared asked. It was a casual enough question, meant only as an insult flung back at her in return. But his mother looked at him silently, her lips parted, and it became more than that.

“Oh well.” Jared would have shrugged if not for the burden of Aunt Lillian. “If you don’t know, I guess I never will.”

“Rob wants you,” she said again.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jared told her. “I don’t want him.” He walked toward the door carrying Aunt Lillian. His mother retreated before him, her eyes wary as the eyes of an animal that has been incessantly hurt and cannot trust again.

“You don’t need him either,” Jared said. The words burst out of his throat. “Come on, Mom. Come with us. That’s all you need to do. Just leave him: just walk away.”

His mother shook her head, and it seemed to Jared that perhaps she couldn’t leave: perhaps so much of her had grown around Rob that she would have to tear herself away and break in the process.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me where Tenri Glass is.”

His mother shook her head again, but this time it was instant and vehement. “No. Rob would be furious.”

“And he won’t be furious about Lillian?”

“You don’t understand,” she said. Her voice echoed down the corridor in a way that made chills run down Jared’s spine.

“You’re all mixed up about that girl,” his mother continued. “You always were. You were forever insisting that she was real.”

“You swore to me that she wasn’t.”

“I was telling you the truth!” His mother’s eyes glowed, the eyes of something hunted in a wood. “She isn’t real. You have to see that. The people who can’t do magic, who aren’t connected to the earth, they aren’t real. Not the way we are.”

Jared looked into her eyes and said, “She was always more real to me than you.” If he hadn’t had Kami in his head to turn to, he wondered, would he have turned to his mother? Would she have loved him, if he had?

“Where’s Ten?” he asked. “I’m coming back for him. The only thing you can do is help me not get caught when I do.”

His mother trembled.

“Or do you want me to get caught?” Jared asked.

“No,” his mother said, the word less than a breath. “I want you safe. The child is in the attic.”

“Thank you,” Jared said. He walked down the corridor with Aunt Lillian cradled in his arms. He left his mother behind.

His tread walking down the stairs was heavier, and the shadows could scarcely wrap around both of them. Jared was sure someone would hear, or see, but he kept walking and no one did. He walked into the Aurimere garden and out through the fire again: it parted easily as if it was glad to have them free. And then they were past the fire and away from Aurimere, safe in the cool dark.

Jared laid Aunt Lillian on the ground. Her hair spread out like a river, locks forming silver tributaries in the dark grass. She stirred and muttered something, sounding imperious and lost at once.

“God, Aunt Lillian, you idiot,” Jared said, stooping over her and brushing back the hair from her face. “What did you think you were doing?”

She lay there, silent and safe. Jared settled shadow over her like a blanket and turned back to the leaping flames, leaving her hidden in the friendly dark.

* * *

Aurimere was less welcoming this time, as if the house was angry he had been stupid enough to return. The reflection of the fire cast evil red glints on the glass, as if behind every window there were watching eyes narrowed in laughter. Jared touched the walls as he went by apologetically. The firelight made them look like real gold.