Illusions of Fate (27 page)
I reach in to find a sheet of stiff parchment on top.
Last Will and Testament of Lord Finley Rainer Ackerly, son of Lord Thomas Ackerly and her Royal Highness Edeline Hallin. Being of sound mind and judgment, I hereby bequeath all my earthly possessions and inheritances to my betrothed, Miss Jessamin Olea of Melei.
Signed this day in front of witnesses,
Lord Finley Ackerly
I sit on the hard floor, stunned and angry. I don’t know what bothers me more—that he claims me as his fiancée, or that he thought the odds of his death were high enough that he had to find one last way to try and take care of me.
“Fie on you, Finn Ackerly, if you think I’m going to let you die.”
I set aside the will with a scowl and return to the chest. Sitting snug in the bottom is a thick volume of deep green, an unfamiliar crest stamped into the cover. I pull it out, brush off a layer of dust, and crack it open.
Inside are symbols and directions, crammed in tiny writing, page after page after page. I don’t have to be able to use any of it to know that in this book is all of the Hallin line magical knowledge.
I hold in my hands the fate of Melei, the fate of the continents, the fate of Albion. The fate of my Finn.
I have never known such a heavy book.
IT’S LONG PAST FULL DARK WHEN I FINALLY
carry the book back inside the library. The windowpane reappears, sealing itself shut behind me, and the room is pitch black. I feel my way to the desk against the wall where I know I’ll find a small glass kerosene lantern. Fumbling, I pull a match from the drawer and light the wick.
The soft, warm glow throws the room into shadows, and I sit with my back to it, looking at my own shadow. These past days with Finn gone, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit watching my shadow, waiting for glimpses of his, wondering if he’s watching or listening, if he even can from a prison designed for magic practitioners.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I say. “And I know you can’t answer. But I’m lost, Finn, and I wish you were here. I have to make a decision, and whichever way I choose, lives will be lost. It won’t be my fault, it will be the actions of an evil man, but he makes me complicit. I don’t know that I can live with the results of my choice no matter what it is.” My shadows flicker, probably in response to the unsteady light behind me.
“I think you would caution me to do whatever I must in order to keep myself safe.” I smile. “I think you also know me well enough by now to know that I will certainly not listen to your advice on that matter. I’m lost no matter what happens tonight. I wish . . . I wish many things, but I wish I had been able to tell you that I love you, in so many more ways than that word can convey in Alben, and I’m sorry for how things look like they will end. I would have liked the chance to yell at you for claiming me as your betrothed without my consent.”
I pause.
“I would have liked the chance to let you wait in agony and then, maybe someday, accept an offer of marriage.”
The lines of the shadows grow a bit stronger and I smile. “Well, if wishes were water I’d have a well, as Mama liked to say. And since you are not here to tell me what to do so I can decide to do the opposite, I’ll have to make up my own mind.”
I stand, carrying the lamp with me, unwilling to turn on the electric lights and illuminate the empty house I don’t expect to return to. The lamp is elegant, all glass, the bottom globe holding the fuel with a wick going up to the top globe where the flame gleams. It feels fragile, personal.
I go to my bedroom to change, buttoning a dark overcoat on top of my white blouse and long skirts as rain patters against the windows.
If the independent input of fate is the line of my derivative equation, it most likely ends in my death at the hands of Lord Downpike. But how can I shift the other variables around that line to save the highest number of people? Which variable do I sacrifice?
X
, being the Iverian continent, has a vastly higher proportion of people.
Y
, being Melei, has a vastly higher proportion of personal importance.
Z
, being Finn, seems to be so tied to my line I cannot imagine a way to extract him from my same fate.
And is Lord Downpike a variable, or is he the chart on which all other variables are plotted?
No. I will not give him that power. I may not be able to write him out of the equation of my fate, but I can eliminate his variable.
I smile, and whether it is the prospect of my impending doom or the realization that, one way or another, everything will be decided soon, I feel light and disconnected, unweighted by the worries of the world.
I pick up the worn umbrella from the kind woman in the park. It seems like a lifetime ago I accepted it from her. There is goodness everywhere, more than enough to combat the Lord Downpikes of the world. I tuck the book beneath my arm, take up the lantern, and walk down the hall.
“Good-bye, Eleanor,” I whisper.
I open the door to the park and am unsurprised to find my porch lined with big black birds. “Go tell your stupid master I have what he wants. I will be waiting in the park.” I walk past them, missing Sir Bird terribly. I would have liked his company tonight.
The rain patters loudly on my umbrella and drowns out any other night sounds. It’s an actual downpour, more ambitious than Avebury’s usual attempts, and I feel sealed off from the night beneath the curve of my protection. The gravel path is puddling in lower areas, water streaming into more water, which will seep down into the tunnels beneath the city where I first rested my head in the hollow of Finn’s neck.
So much water.
I think of Sir Bird, and a tiny flame inside of me dares to hope.
I make my way to the center of the park, lantern light turning the rain around me into golden drops. When I leave the path, the earth squelches under my feet, already saturated. Overhanging branches drop heavy collections of water in staccato bursts onto my umbrella.
I wait.
Before long, a figure in a dark suit materializes like a shadow from between trees, staying just outside the ring of my light. He has no umbrella, merely a hat set back on his head. He seems unaware of the soaking rain, smiling at me as though we were dear friends meeting under the sun.
“Well done, little rabbit.”
“I want Finn freed. Now.”
“Oh.” He says it as a sigh, a false note of sympathy behind his voice. “Finn made a rash decision just a few minutes ago. Thanks to Eleanor’s industrious brother, Finn was being delivered to the courts to have an audience with the prime minister when the guards reported he stopped and did not respond to anything they said, as though he were listening to something they couldn’t hear.”
The shadow. He
was
listening. A cold dread fills my stomach.
“After a moment he went mad, throwing off his guards and running for the bridge. They had no choice but to shoot him.”
Pain washes over me like the pounding of the tide. “No,” I whisper.
“It’s very disappointing. I had further plans for him.”
“He’s not dead.”
“The royal guards are excellent marksmen, and without his cane he had no magic stored. They’re recovering his body from the river now. Such a pity.”
“You’re lying.”
“Stupid girl, if I wanted to lie, I would tell you he was alive and well and you were doing the right thing to secure his freedom. I would feed you hope. But you know how this ends. You’ve already made the decision to sacrifice everything in order to protect your precious island home. I was worried for a while, that you’d been so seduced by the pale, glittering wealth of this country, by their fine manners and dead eyes and simpering customs, that you might actually be willing to let me burn the village.”
Finn. My Finn.
I want to collapse to the ground, to sink into it. This grief would consume me like a moth in a flame, and I want to let it. I want to hand over the book and be done with it right now. But then I would not be the woman Finn gave his shadow to. I refuse to be anything less than what I am.
“You won’t win.”
“I will. And after I’ve exterminated the Hallin line, I’ll be the most powerful man in the world. But you don’t need to worry about that. You’ve done your part.”
“How do I know you will not still punish Melei?”
He shakes his head. “You really are daft, aren’t you? Everyone always thought you were so smart, but you can’t see
anything
. I was so happy when I found you again that first time. I meant what I said, that I would have kept you for my own. You would have been happy. Maybe I still will keep you.”
“All the magic in the world couldn’t make me love a man like you.”
“Really?” He steps closer, into the soft pool of light around me. His face is covered with glimmering droplets of water. “But you’d kiss me.”
“You’re mad.”
Laughing, he pulls out a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket. “Am I?” He wipes his face. Along with the water droplets, his very skin is taken off, revealing a darker one beneath with the sharp smile and sharp eyes that I caught glimpses of all along.
“Kelen,” I whisper.
KELEN’S GRIN SPREADS ACROSS HIS FACE. “IN THE
flesh. Well, in someone else’s flesh. Most of the time.”
“You’re working for Lord Downpike?” I feel dizzy, unbalanced, disconnected from reality.
“I
am
Lord Downpike.”
“You can’t be. It’s impossible. You only left the island three years ago.”
“Don’t insult me by assuming Lord Downpike could have done all this, set it all in motion. He was so blind he could not recognize his own son when he hired me on as a servant. You weren’t the only one of us with Alben blood. Lord Downpike’s blood just happened to be more useful than pathetic Milton Miller’s. Not so precious as your mama treated you, now, are you?”
“You killed my father.”
“We bastard children have to look out for one another.” He smiles, and I cringe, trying to sink into myself and get away from him, get away from the new light this rewrites our history in. “I spent a year working for Downpike, watching him, studying his books and his magic when he was asleep. But I was the lowly colony rat servant, and he never thought for a moment I was anything more than that.”
“But how did you—you
became
him.”
“It was his idea, really. He was so paranoid about Hallin magic that he’d have done anything for it. He needed an alibi no one could question. So he called me into his study—powerless, faithful servant me—and cast a spell to make me look like him. I was to go and get myself jailed for the evening, which I did.”
“Finn’s parents. He killed them, then.” I wish I could tell Finn, could answer this question for him. Oh, Finn. I close my eyes against the rush of grief. Too dangerous to lose myself now. I force myself to look at Kelen.
He waves his hand, the gesture a knife in my heart. “Downpike came back, as pale as beach sand and shaking, covered in blood. He asked me to help him get the blood out of his clothes. I answered by choking the life out of him. It was no challenge at all to replace him. After I let the servants go, no one noticed a thing. These nobles do not take care of their own.”
“But why? Why any of this? Why would you want to extend Albion’s power, continue your father’s legacy?”
“Spirits below, you are obtuse. My only interest is securing so much power that I control everything. If you are not the most powerful person in the room, you are nothing. And when the Alben gentry is decimated in the coming conflict, well, that is no great loss. I’ll eliminate them all in the end, anyway. I will never be at another’s mercy again.”
I shake my head, unable, unwilling to process all of this. “You hurt me. We were friends, and you hurt me.”
“I
am
sorry about that, little rabbit.” This time he uses the Melenese word for rabbit, and I remember how he used to be the fox, every time we played Fox and Rabbit—how could I not have realized? “I never meant for you to get involved. I saw you the first day you met Ackerly and began watching you out of tender care. Then you gave me an opening with Ackerly, a chance to finally manipulate him. And I wanted to punish your Finn for thinking he could have you, for thinking he could claim one of my people for himself just as his country claimed my entire island. I was going to make you forget. You wouldn’t have remembered the pain, and you would have been so happy to be reunited with me. I would have protected you, Jessa. I would have kept you free from all this. He couldn’t do that for you, could he?”