Читать книгу: «Before Winter», страница 2
“Please don’t,” she whispered. “I have no one to talk to but myself. Once I ate at a fine table, with wine and tarts; there was music and laughter and dancing. Now, I am lost and I don’t know where home is.”
Devin closed his eyes, thinking wretchedly of Angelique and all she had lost.
“Lavender, how old are you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I have forgotten.” She picked at the fabric of her clothing for a moment. “Did you know my pony is missing?”
“I had heard that,” Devin said. “I don’t believe you will find him here though. You need to go back to Arcadia.”
“Is it a long way?” she asked.
Devin looked at her bare feet worn hard and leathery from walking. “I think you could make it,” he said, pointing above them. “You should follow the road.”
She made a sharp keening sound, making herself as small as possible. “Men travel the road. They are cruel, cruel men. They burned my father’s chateau.”
Devin sat forward, making his head throb more. “Your father’s chateau burned?”
“It’s gone,” she said in faint voice. “All my people are gone. There is no one left but me and I have nowhere to go.”
Devin put a hand to his head. “Marcus, surely there is something …”
“No,” Marcus repeated. “We can’t get involved. There is too much at stake, Devin. We need to move on, Madame, and leave you to your cave.”
She nodded, sitting in a forlorn heap.
“Do you have any money?” Devin asked.
She shook her head and spread thin fingers. “I have nothing but my friends,” she said, gesturing behind them into the small cave.
Marcus whirled, pointing his gun behind them but there was nothing there but the rocky cave floor.
“What friends?” Devin asked.
She crawled behind Devin into the shadows. “These friends,” she murmured, collecting small rounded wooden balls from the floor of the cave. She placed one of the balls gently in Devin’s hand. “This is Simon.”
Devin turned the ball in his hand, revealing features cut deeply into the wood with a knife or stone. The wooden ball was a head with recognizable features: plump cheeks, a bulbous nose, and a mouth wide open in laughter. “Who is Simon?” he asked.
“My father’s baker,” Lavender said. “He made all the tarts, cakes, and sweets. He always saved me something special in his apron pocket.”
Devin reached carefully for another ball. “And this one?”
“My father,” Lavender said, her fingers reluctant to release it into Devin’s hand. She turned it so the features were apparent but did not pass it to him. The face was strong, the nose long and thin, the smile betrayed a gentleness that Devin recognized in Lavender’s own face.
Lavender collected it, cradling it in her lap like a child. “I would like to see him again,” she whispered.
Devin looked at her gnarled hands, the skin that hung from her wiry frame and thought that she must have outlived her father by at least fifty years. “I would like to see my father again, too,” he answered gently.
She looked up. “Do you know where your father is?”
“I know where I left him,” Devin replied. “I hope he is still there but nothing is constant. Time changes everything.”
“I went back one time,” Lavender said. “There were horrible men there. They had killed my father’s guards and burned the chateau.”
Marcus returned his gun to his jacket. “When was this?”
Lavender shrugged. “Many winters ago. I saw the men on horseback and the torches and I ran. I didn’t even try to help them,” Lavender murmured, her voice barely audible. “I carved their faces here, so I wouldn’t forget them.” She swung her arm out, encompassing the wooden heads. “I have them all except for the stable boy who didn’t latch my pony’s stall.” She chose one head from the collection and held it up. “This is the Captain of the Guard. His name is Amando. He would have fought to the death to protect them!”
Devin glanced at Marcus. “Had you heard about the destruction of this chateau?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing. Although much of what transpires in these far northern provinces goes no further. I doubt your father knows either.”
Lavender let out a huge sigh and leaned back against the rock as though the conversation had exhausted her.
“Lavender,” Devin asked. “Did you have any brothers or sisters?”
Her little head bobbed up and down as she scrambled forward on her knees. “They are here, too.” She lined four wooden balls up on the rocky shelf above them. “Sébastian, Abelard, Michel, and Charles.”
Devin felt a shiver run down his back at the detail she had worked into the faces. It was almost as though she had collected a host of men’s heads that had been decapitated. He took a deep breath, trying not to show his revulsion. “Is it possible that they might have escaped?”
Lavender began to cry. “I don’t know. I ran away. I didn’t stay to help them fight. I simply saved myself.”
“God!” Marcus commented angrily, his face unreadable in the shadow of the rocks. “This world seems filled with women who have been abused and yet feel responsible for their families’ deaths.” He remained silent for a moment and then put a hand out to grasp one of her scrawny shoulders. “Lavender, we’ll take you back. Surely there is someone who can help you in your own province.”
CHAPTER 4
Dreams
“You told me you knew a way into the tunnels,” Devin said, extending Lavender a piece of bread.
She nodded as she tore at the crust in her hand. “It is down the mossy steps. A whole town used to be there. It’s deserted now. No one has lived there in years.”
Devin wished there had been time to read Tirolien’s Chronicle. Surely, an entire deserted town would have found its way into the Chronicles at some point. He recalled the map they had found in the Bishop’s Book, which outlined the resettlement of people from towns in danger of being wiped out by the government. His nearly perfect recall brought the map to mind with all its details but he remembered no designation for a deserted town in the mountains above Calais.
“What was the town called?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” Lavender replied, fondling one of the wooden heads of her brothers. “It was very, very old.”
“It sounds too good to bypass,” Devin replied.
“We’re not on an archaeological expedition,” Marcus warned him. “We’ll investigate only if it will get us back to Arcadia sooner.”
Devin shifted so the back of his head was against the rock face behind him. The coolness of the stone soothed the dull ache that persisted. “Where do the tunnels go, Lavender?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know. We don’t like the dark.” She seemed to grow smaller when something frightened her; she scuttled backwards, nervously cradling the carved heads of all her brothers in her lap.
Devin tried to imagine what her life had been like, to have lived once as a child, in a household of wealth and affluence, and then spend the remaining decades as a wild thing that lived off the land and hid wherever she could find shelter. The parallels to Angelique’s life were uncanny but while he found Angelique both endearing and repelling at different times, Lavender merely seemed pathetic. How terrifying it must seem to be elderly with no prospect of anyone to care for you. If she died in these woods or even in the shelter of the cave, she would leave little alteration in the landscape: just a small bundle of bones in a few shreds of cloth.
Marcus arrived triumphantly. Surprisingly, in the short time he had been gone, he had caught two fish. He gutted them on a flat stone and fileted the meat, dividing it into three portions.
“Lavender claims to know a way into the tunnels,” Devin said quietly, as Marcus worked.
Marcus looked up, his knife poised in midair. “Can you show us the way?” he asked.
Lavender bit into a piece of fish, mashing its white flesh between her brownish gums. Devin found himself alternately disgusted and then sympathetic to her. “We’ll go down the mossy steps,” she repeated, gesturing somewhere over her shoulder.
“How far away are the mossy steps?” Marcus asked.
“We can reach them by tomorrow night,” she answered, reaching for another piece of fish.
Marcus glanced at Devin. “Is it hard walking?”
Lavender flicked a fly from her bare toe. “We will need to walk carefully. The woods can be cruel.”
The woods had obviously been cruel to Lavender, Devin thought. Life had been cruel to her just as it had been cruel to Angelique. One of them had a chance at redemption; whether it was too late for Lavender remained to be seen. He ran a hand over his eyes, hoping his blurred vision corrected itself soon. It left him feeling unsteady and nauseated. He slipped down and rested his head on his hand, letting Marcus’ questions and Lavender’s staccato answers be drowned out by the wind in the trees and the rush of the stream below them.
Chaotic dreams had the wooden heads speaking to him, one after another, hinting at terror and brutality that existed long before René Forneaux. Their jabber became constant. Each of them interrupted the other, their voices becoming louder and louder until Devin couldn’t separate them. Without Lavender to identify them, they might as well have been an angry mob intent on violence.
Devin tossed and turned, chased by terrifying shadows of the past and a clear image of his enemy in the present. The wooden head of the Captain of the Guard suddenly opened its mouth crying “Danger! Danger!” until it dislodged itself from the others on the rock ledge and rolled off down the ravine, its mouth screaming its alarm until it landed with a plop in the stream below. It bobbed along as the stream carried it and its garbled warning off toward Calais and the sea where it would be lost forever. The other heads watched in horror as it bobbed away on the current.
Devin wakened with a start. Lavender lay curled like a pile of rags, her father’s head in her hands. Marcus stared out at the woods below them, starlight tracing glistening ribbons in the water. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Devin hissed.
Marcus glanced at him. “I sleep better than you, apparently. What was all the excitement about?”
Devin shook his head. “Strange dreams. I wonder whether I’ll ever be rid of them.”
“Forneaux?” Marcus asked.
“And his ilk,” Devin said quietly. “If Lavender’s home was burned and this town she’s taking us to was destroyed, obviously, there have been evil men at work in these mountains who lived long before René Forneaux.”
Marcus stretched out his right leg, the barrel of his pistol glinting for a moment before he came to rest. “There have always been evil men, Devin.”
“There’s something else, though,” Devin said. “Don’t you feel it? Lavender must have lost her home fifty years ago, at least. Forneaux couldn’t have had anything to do with that.”
“I’m not certain you can believe anything she says,” Marcus replied. “She thinks she is the Lavender from the Chronicles and that she had a white pony.”
“Perhaps she did have a white pony,” Devin countered. “She may also have been named for the legendary Lavender and now she confuses the two in her head.”
“Those damn heads give me the creeps!” Marcus said with a shudder. “And she’d better not expect me to carry them for her. There must at least forty of them!”
Devin suppressed a laugh. “If my dreams have any element of truth, there are now thirty-nine. The Captain of the Guard is no longer with us.”
“What?” Marcus asked, giving him a strange look. “Go back to sleep. You’re as crazy as she is.”
“I’ll explain in the morning,” Devin assured him.
CHAPTER 5
The Wilderness of Llisé
Devin wakened to the sound of sobbing. He rubbed blurry eyes with one hand to see Lavender scouring the ledge above them, her muddy hands feverishly patting the rock. Some of the wooden heads cradled in the remnants of her skirt had fallen to lie in the dirt at her feet. Devin prevented two of them from falling with the toe of his boot as they rolled precariously close to the edge of the ravine.
“He’s gone! He’s gone!” Lavender sobbed. “We can’t go on without him to protect us!”
“The Captain of the Guard?” Devin asked resignedly.
Lavender turned to fix him with a suspicious eye. “How did you know?”
Devin sat up. “I didn’t actually know for sure. But I dreamed about him last night. He kept shouting, ‘Danger! Danger!’ and then he rolled off the ledge and down the ravine. I watched him float down the stream toward Calais.”
Lavender rose to her diminutive size, her hands on her hips. “You didn’t even try to stop him? To save him?”
“I was asleep!” Devin protested. “I saw this in a dream. Have you asked Marcus if he heard anything?”
Marcus shook his head. “I certainly didn’t hear him roll down into the stream, Lavender.” He gestured at the wooden heads scattered around her feet. “Are you certain he isn’t there?”
She flopped onto the dirt, sorting balls into groups around her, murmuring each name lovingly to herself. Devin watched her, wondering how much of reality she had any true hold on. She looked so pathetic, tears drying in dirty streaks down her cheeks, her fingers shaking as she tallied up the only remnants of her family and friends that she had left.
“What have we done to our people,” Devin whispered to Marcus, “that they have been left so fragile and pitiful? Angelique’s story shocked me when I realized how much she had to bear and then there was Elsbeth, Dariel Moreau’s wife. She went to the market and came home to find her husband tortured and murdered on the floor of Tirolien’s Bardic Hall. Who knows what unhinged Lavender’s mind or how many more there are like her? How many children have watched their parents die and have been left orphaned to …”
“Just stop!” Marcus demanded. “Why are you so maudlin this morning? It won’t help anything to dwell on this. You’ll end up spouting gibberish yourself, if you haven’t already.”
“He’s not here,” Lavender wailed suddenly. She glared at Devin. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t help him! He would still be here if you had caught him when he fell.”
Devin sighed in exasperation. “Well obviously, I didn’t. I wasn’t even awake, Lavender. I thought I dreamt the entire thing.”
“He took the time to warn you!” she pointed out with an accusing finger. “And it cost him his life.”
Devin resisted the urge to point out that a wooden ball was not alive. “He may have warned me,” he said quietly. “But he didn’t tell me what he was warning me about.”
“We can’t stay here,” Lavender stated, gathering the wooden heads in her tattered skirt. “We need to move on, now. Surely you can understand that!”
“Perhaps he was warning us about the deserted town down the mossy steps,” Devin said. “There is more than one place here where we may encounter danger.”
“Well, I’m leaving,” Lavender said with a huff. “I don’t need to be told twice that my life is in danger. If the Captain of the Guard gave his life to save me, I would be foolish to disregard his advice and so would you!”
Marcus dropped his head in his hands. “God! This is insane!”
“Call it what you will,” Lavender replied sulkily. “But remember that I warned you.”
Marcus clapped a hand on Devin’s shoulder. “Let’s go! There’s no use arguing with her and call me a bleeding-heart moron, but I won’t let her go on alone.”
Devin smiled and stood up, one hand on the rocks behind him, hoping to hide his persistent dizziness from Marcus. His bodyguard didn’t need another thing to worry about.
They slithered down the slope to the stream bed. Marcus persuaded Lavender to let him carry the wooden heads in the food sack after two escaped her skirt on the way down the incline. The smell of earth and pine reminded Devin sharply of his bodyguard’s gun pointing at him in another part of Tirolien but he pushed the memory away and concentrated instead on Marcus’ broad back ahead of him. Lavender led them deeper into the woods, where the ferns grew so large they towered over her. They followed the stream as it meandered to the northeast. The air was chilly this morning and wood smoke wafted through the trees.
Marcus put a hand out in front of Devin. “That smoke is from a cooking fire. Those soldiers may have stopped for the night. Walk quietly and be ready to hide should we come across them.”
“The smoke is from Martigues,” Lavender volunteered. “It is off the road, a mile or so to the north. There are only a handful of houses there. Hunters and trappers, mostly. They sell their meat and furs in Calais until the winter snows make the roads impassable. They are rough men. I stay away from Martigues.”
Devin glanced at Marcus and saw a shadow of worry cross his face before they started off again. The smell of wood smoke faded as they moved farther away from the road. Devin didn’t believe he had ever traveled so far into the wilderness before. The pines here were as tall as cathedral spires and even in August there were telltale glimpses of autumn color among the maples and aspens. In a heartbeat autumn would be over and winter would be upon them. They had to reach Coreé before roads were impassable and the icy storms on the Dantzig had effectively halted travel for the season. He hoped that Lavender’s promise of a way into the tunnels was a legitimate one and not a figment of her irrational mind.
By late afternoon, they reached the deepest part of the ravine. On either side crumbled stone foundations rose up, still attached to the cliff walls. In the center, the stream threaded its way through part of a broken wall in a series of small waterfalls. The streambed below lay scattered with huge stones, as though giants had tossed them in some mythical battle.
Marcus turned to look behind them. “That valley behind us must have been carved out by the lake and these stones are what remain of a dam. There must have been a very powerful storm that overfilled it and then burst through and flooded the land below.”
“The dam was burst intentionally,” Lavender said. “My father told me. He said the people of the town refused to pay their taxes and the government sent soldiers who sabotaged the dam. They drowned every man, woman and child in the village.”
“My God,” Devin muttered. “When was this?”
Lavender shrugged. “I don’t know. The area has been deserted for many, many years. No one else wanted to rebuild in such a vulnerable spot. Legend says that this was the oldest town in Llisé.”
“Really?” Devin asked, yearning to pull Tirolien’s Chronicle from his jacket and read it but he dared not risk letting Lavender know that he had it.
“It’s said to be haunted,” Lavender continued darkly. “But I’m not afraid of a few ghosts.” She turned to look at Devin, her eyes glinting. “Are you?”
Devin thought she looked like a wraith herself as she wound through the heavy undergrowth, always keeping the stream to her right. He lost his footing more than once on the rocky edges of the streambed, his vision still taunting him with blurred images of where he needed to put his foot next. One misstep filled his left boot with icy water and he had to stop, hopping on one foot to empty it.
They were so deep in the ravine that the sun had already effectively set for them when they reached the site of the ruined village. Their footing, which had been unsure before, now became precarious. The deep shadows did lend a ghostly quality to the scene before them and mist rose from the water as a chill drifted down the ravine behind them. Tumbled stone lay everywhere; a few buildings were marked by what remained of their foundations. Although, on the left side of the stream what must have been a church nestled into the hillside. Its nave had been ripped apart by the flood waters but its ragged steeple remained. There was something incredibly forlorn about it and Devin found his eyes drawn to it again and again. Moss and ivy softened the harsh lines of the ruins but there was a tremendous sensation of loss that permeated the scene.
“That’s it,” Marcus said as he called a halt to further exploration for the night. “We’ll have no broken ankles or legs to complicate matters.” He slung the sack of wooden heads down with a smack which made Lavender jump and murmur something uncomplimentary under her breath. “There’s an L-shaped wall over there which will offer some protection for the night.”
Devin was grateful to stop. His headache had returned by mid-afternoon and he was tired of straining his eyes to see what lay ahead of them. He slid down the wall that Marcus indicated and rested his shoulders against the stone.
“If you would gather some sticks, Lavender,” Marcus said, “I think we could chance having a fire.”
Lavender gave Marcus’ sack a loving pat and hobbled off to collect wood. Devin glanced at Marcus. “She promised us a way into the tunnels. It seems the church is the only possibility.”
“I agree,” Marcus responded, watching her slow progress at gathering kindling.
“But where are the ‘mossy steps’?” Devin asked.
Marcus pointed up the hill. “Maybe they come down toward the church from the other side, which is odd because she claimed the entrance was ‘down the mossy steps.’”
“She must have discovered them from above then,” Devin speculated.
“Perhaps,” Marcus said.
“You don’t trust her?”
Marcus pursed his lips. “I don’t trust anyone but the Chancellor and you, Devin.”
“Which Chancellor?” Devin asked.
Marcus stopped, a wounded expression on his face. “Do you really need to ask?”
“Yes,” Devin replied. “I do. Because I am determined to do everything I can to keep my father in power. I just want to make certain that you feel the same way, too.”
“You have my word,” Marcus replied, holding out his hand.
Devin avoided his eyes because there was still a part of him that didn’t trust Marcus. He wondered if the mistrust would ever be gone, but they seemed to be bound whether he wanted it so or not. He didn’t shake Marcus’ hand and Marcus was quick to withdraw it when it wasn’t accepted.
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