The Duke of Snow and Apples (31 page)

He turned and uncovered another painting: his father in his dark green Council of Blooded robes, his right hand (graced with the Fey-blessed ducal ruby) over the Holy Book of Elements, his expression serious but not grim. The startling azure of his eyes leapt out amid the somber greens, grays, and blacks in the portrait.

No.
Sheets flapped and rustled like startled birds as Frederick clawed more of them away, filling the air with grit, breathing it in until it coated the back of his throat. His father as a boy of six, seated next to a hunting dog near as large as himself. His father as a youth, depicted as Reidon, Saint of Oceans. His father during all the stages of his shortened life, his eyes the only constant. No artist could capture the true color, but they all tried, searing cyans and aquamarines and indigos.

Wheezing, Frederick whirled, faced with a hundred shades of blue, the answer to a hundred thousand questions. He stopped at last, in front of the first portrait he’d seen, but the world continued to spin around him, away from him, leaving him lost and abandoned to confusion. He stared at the young Lord Phineas, with his gun and his gnome and his cursed smug look on his face.

“You
bastard
.” His voice emerged as a croak. His words tasted like dust.

Kelok words flew into his mind, fire spells, spells for burning, incinerating that calm smile painted onto his father’s face, but his parched throat seized with coughs. He grabbed a tarnished candelabrum off an abandoned escritoire, instead. His muscles bunched and flexed as his world focused onto this one action, landing a blow against this absent ancestor, and then another and then another, until the canvas tore and paint flaked and dust whirled about him in a dizzying eddy.

Arms circled his waist and dragged him back. Frederick bucked in Edward’s grip, dropping the candelabrum with a heavy
thunk
. Rage swelled inside him, eating him alive under his skin. He twisted, breaking Edward’s hold, and his hand flew out, catching the valet’s cheek in a loud, backhanded slap.

The
snap
of the blow cut off all sound as cleanly as a scalpel, leaving Edward and Frederick gaping at each other, adrift in a world by themselves where suddenly they were enemies. The moment hung between them, pure as the sound of a chime, until it faded just as quickly and Frederick remembered to drag air into his lungs.

“You never told me.” Frederick flexed his arms. “You
knew
, you all knew, and no one told me.”

Edward’s cheek already burned a furious red from Frederick’s hand, but he met his master’s gaze squarely. “I was eight when your father died, and belowstairs besides. How could I have known?”

“
Someone
knew. Someone ought to have known. You should have
told
me.” A memory jolted him as suddenly as a cold hand on the back of his neck. His mother, looking down at his small face full of questions, and saying,
Your father is gone, but you are here. It is enough
.

Or Lord Enshaw—
Saints above, if he got an angry look in his eye, he made sure you knew it.

“Told you what?” Edward asked.

That I wasn’t alone.
But of course, he still was. He turned to stare at the portrait, torn, tattered, and ruined. “Burn it.”

“What?”

“Burn it.” Dozens of blue eyes continued to stare at him, mocking him, but his rage drained away like low tide, leaving behind a line of broken pieces on the sand. “Burn them all. I want them all destroyed.”

“Y-Your Grace.” Edward’s face softened, even as understanding kindled in his eyes. “Are you sure? He’s your father.”

“And what good did he bloody well do?” he roared. Just like that, hot, hopeless anger surged back. He drew it up into his eyes until they blazed so brightly Edward took a step backward. “He could have
taught
me how to control this, how to use it. He could have stayed and protected me. Instead, he left before I could know him. He
left
.”

“He
died
, Your Grace.”

Is there a difference?
His shut his eyes against the looming threat of grief he’d never allowed himself to feel before. He’d never mourned his father; he didn’t even remember him. Now, realizing what he’d almost had, what he could now never have…

“Here, Your Grace.”

Frederick opened his eyes. He had to blink furiously several times before the white blob in front of him coalesced into the folded handkerchief his valet offered. Edward held it out, a tentative smile on his face even as his cheek reddened and swelled. The muscles in Frederick’s chest clenched in a sob, and he pressed the clean linen to his face in a boyish attempt to hide until he regained his manful composure.

He took a deep breath. Then another. The handkerchief came away damp and streaked with dirt, but the room had stopped spinning, the eyes had stopped staring. The world around him had settled back into a shape he understood.

There was another like me
.
There
could
be others like me
. Frederick had never considered that notion before.
Would they have the same problem with the Gray?

Frederick and Edward descended from the attic in silence. Frederick ploughed his brain for answers, overturning thoughts and suspicions to see if anything new lay underneath. How long had his parents been married for—six years? Seven? And no Gray, in Mother or Old Grubs of any of the servants or tenants.

Come here, Frederick. Show me those eyes, my boy. See? No tears today.
With the sudden memory of his mother’s hands on his face, a queer emotion stabbed him, and he almost stumbled down the last stairwell. His mother had known, accepted, and loved who he was—because he was
like his father
. She had known joy in his father’s eyes, as well as joy in his.

Edward, ever the proper servant, anticipated Frederick’s desire to be alone. “Look at those sleeves, covered in grime. Shall I prepare you a bath, milord? Leave it to me, Your Grace.” Edward bowed and darted off in the direction of his master’s rooms, down hallways now lit with candles and fire-stones to accommodate the approach of night.

Frederick, grateful, didn’t follow him. He would have to accustom himself to the idea of having servants working for him instead of with him, but as yet he hadn’t quite attained the nonchalance required of a true Pure Blooded to watch other footmen as they struggled with claw-footed tubs and buckets of scalding water just yet.

He set off in another direction, but stumbled to a halt as he noticed a flicker of light from a half-open door. The apple in his waistcoat pocket thumped against his chest. He pulled it out, smiling ruefully.
I shall treasure it always
. He could laugh at his sudden burst of sentimentalism. He lifted it to his mouth, sank his teeth in, suddenly hungry for something sweet and simple.

He padded toward the door, which opened to a small, private study. Sir Bertram stood in front of the fireplace, his hands braced against the mantle, his back rigid.

Sir Bertram had always seemed a distant, cold man. Frederick couldn’t honestly pretend to an affectionate relationship with his stepfather. Somehow, however, he would have to deal with the pain he’d inflicted. He owed it to his mother, at least. His mother might once have told him that his eyes were enough, but she’d chosen to marry Sir Bertram, a man he’d never known very well. By choice. Because he was strange. Because he was cold. But hadn’t he, himself, been both of those things over the last ten years? He expanded his senses.

While Sir Bertram’s shadow splayed behind him, another shadow pulsed within him, a yawning, hungry darkness that seemed to devour all color.

Something in Frederick’s mind toppled over, a heavy, hard truth. As this truth rolled down the steep incline of his understanding, it gained speed and purpose and size. He could see the answer coming, the utter realization, almost too large and obvious to comprehend.

There could be others like me.

There
were
others like me
. His chest tightened. He needed air—to roar, to howl, to accuse—but a piece of apple lodged in his throat. He choked, and Sir Bertram turned around. Eyes, too green, too bright, stared at him, piercing him through. Eyes Frederick had ignored, disrespected, disregarded—to his family’s detriment. Sir Bertram’s gaze shifted to a point somewhere over Frederick’s shoulder. “Come, Littiger. And bolt the door behind you.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

After a week spent at Charmant Park, Charlotte didn’t so much as blot her ink during the explosion. Late-afternoon sun streamed through the library windows, lighting up swirling constellations of dust motes and the delicate golden hairs on her arms as she leaned over her letter. The second explosion brought her a moment’s pause, with her quill poised above the paper, before it swooped down to finish signing her name in sloping cursive script.

There. She hoped this would provide at least part of the explanation due her parents for her changed circumstances, and that the enormity of the good news would soften their disapproval toward the suspicious speed at which she had received a proposal from a duke everyone believed dead. A duke she’d thought was a footman. With a sigh, she folded the sheaf of paper into a square and spelled it shut with a ward.

She crossed to the window, lifted the latch, and cracked it open. Frigid air streamed in. Before her lips grew too numb, she called out in the low-tongue, and a burst of cold wind wove itself into a waiting sylph almost immediately. Charlotte smiled at the little air sprite, its near-transparent, elfin arms raised to receive her letter. Sylphs could be changeable, tempestuous little things but they had always obeyed Charlotte. And no wonder—wind was her element. She need no longer be ashamed of it.
And who taught me that?
She forced such thoughts away.

She gave the sylph her letter, and the address in low-tongue, and watched the elemental flit off into the sky, the envelope fluttering like an awkward, square bird.

The third explosion
did
surprise her, and the windowpane rattled as she brought it down too quickly. Tiny, violet bubbles started to float in from the hallway.

I do believe Lady Leighwood has outdone herself.

Charlotte crossed to the door. Swathes of purple bubbles flooded the corridor, bouncing off the walls, wavering on an unseen breeze. A particularly fat one landed on Charlotte’s outstretched hand and wobbled.

Suddenly, a short, redheaded maid barreled down the corridor, her waving hands encased in thick black gloves. “Don’t let the bubbles touch you, miss!”

“Why not—” The bubble on her hand shuddered, then—
splat
. Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut just in time as the bubble exploded in a spray of lavender liquid.

“Oh, miss! Oh, I am sorry, miss!”

Charlotte froze for several heartbeats, then raised careful hands to her face. Her skin had already dried. “I think I’m all right.”

“I
am
sorry miss. Her ladyship thought the explosion was contained.”

“No, I’m quite all right.” Charlotte opened her eyes, taking in the maid’s horrified, white-faced countenance. “No, truly, I’m fine.”

“I’m so sorry,” the maid babbled. As her head bobbed frantically, a fat red curl slipped out from under her cap, and recognition beckoned from the back of Charlotte’s mind. Ellie, the maid with the lavender freckles. The same girl who had asked Frederick to dance.

They hardly appeared the same person. As the still-room maid launched into an explanation involving a miscalculation in measurements and an insufficient application of heat, her hands bunched and fluttered in wide gestures, her head bobbed, and her eyebrows swooped up and down. A far cry indeed from the drooping girl with the violet freckles who shuffled down hallways like a doll robbed of its stuffing. Or someone afflicted with—
what had Frederick called it?
—the Gray.

“Are you the maid who—” Charlotte held out her arm, and squeaked. Her arm, from wrist to elbow, boasted a deep, splash-shaped purple stain. “I’m
purple
.”

“There’s an oil for that,” the maid said quickly.

Horrified, Charlotte pressed her hands to her face—was it discolored, too? “I’m
purple
.”

“Closer to plum, I’d say,” the maid said, in a tone meant to be soothing. “Come with me, miss. I’ll put your complexion to rights.”

The maid led her to a cool, clean room lined with pale tile, set off from the still-room. Measuring implements, cups, spoons, and funnels, lay scattered across the plain square table in the center of the room, and the sunlight coming in through the small window flashed against the ranks of glass jars and vials lining the walls on sturdy pine shelves.

The maid sat Charlotte down on the single chair. “I’ve got just the thing for it. I stewed up a batch of it after Lady Leighwood’s last failure.”

“Oh, good.” To distract herself from what she probably looked like, she asked, “You’re name is Ellie, am I right?”

The maid hesitated, her features pinching in worry. “Yes, miss,” she said, reluctantly, as if confessing to a crime. She turned her back to inspect the shelves. Charlotte heard the resonant
pop
of a cork freed from a bottle. “I’m going to have to make more of this, most likely.”

Charlotte fidgeted. “Should we be this close to the still-room?”

“What? Oh—this didn’t happen in the still-room.” Ellie returned with a small vial of gray oil. “Lady Leighwood gave a jar of her latest creation to Patricia to send to a fellow potionsmistress for a second opinion, and the silly chit dropped it. Serves Patty right, the clumsy cow. Now she looks like she fell in a wine-maker’s vat. At least it only stains skin.” She stopped in the middle of her babbling, then flushed almost as deep a color as Charlotte.

The blush spread all the way to the back of her neck as she started massaging the grayish, sour-smelling oil onto Charlotte’s face, and then her arm, as the silence swelled between them. Questions about the Gray wavered on the tip of Charlotte’s tongue, but before they could tumble out of her mouth, Ellie blurted, “You’ll keep him happy, won’t you?”

“Who?”

“Freddy.” The maid ducked her head. “I mean,
Lord Snowmont
.”

Charlotte’s mouth opened and closed as she fought her surprise—then that itch at the back of her mind lured a memory up from oblivion.

“He never notices me.” A small whimper.

A darker voice. “You don’t want the hurt anymore, do you? I can take it away again.”

Realization followed close on the memory’s tail. Someone had
given
this girl the Gray—someone who wasn’t Frederick.

“Ellie,” Charlotte pulled her arm, now much paler, from the maid’s grip. “Ellie, is someone keeping
you
happy?”

Ellie turned away. “We’re not permitted followers. Freddy’s a friend, that’s all.”

“So no one…” Charlotte stopped, moistened her lips. “No one took your pain away?”

Charlotte took the vial of oil before Ellie’s nerveless fingers dropped it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ellie said, in a strangled whisper.

“No, of course not.” Charlotte kept her voice low, her tone understanding, her gaze open and fixed on Ellie’s to keep the girl from running away. “Because he didn’t take your pain away, did he? He just hid it, behind walls. He filled up your mind with smooth gray blankness until you had nothing but reason left.”

Charlotte took Ellie’s trembling browned hands in her own, felt the rasp of her calluses.
How topsy-turvy this world’s become
. Never before would Charlotte have thought of offering comfort to a servant. Now, all she understood was that Ellie shared the same horrid experience.

Ellie dipped her head, and a tear slid down one cheek to splash onto the tile. “I thought it would be better to keep it all wrapped up too tightly for me to think. It weren’t like I could change anything. It only made things worse, more confusing. Like I couldn’t get out of my own head. I thought I was going mad. I didn’t know he did it to others.”

“It’s nobody’s fault but his.”
He, who?
Charlotte wanted to yell. She could barely remember her own experience—if Ellie couldn’t, there was no hope at all. All Charlotte knew now was that the Gray didn’t come from Frederick. All of his guilt and loneliness were for nothing. Just as Charlotte’s discovery would be, if she couldn’t get a name.

Ellie scrubbed at her eyes, at tears she couldn’t afford. “At least he’s gone. I’d rather chip congealed slug potion out of a thousand washbasins than see his toad-green eyes again.”

“Maiden above.” Her mind sang the answer so easily, like the chorus of a popular song. Sir Bertram, a man utterly colorless and nondescript except for those unsettling eyes, who struck so quickly that Charlotte remembered him as a color first, and a person later. “He’s no longer at Charmant Park, all right. He’s with Frederick—
alone
.”

…

Charlotte flew down the corridor, her heartbeat roaring in her ears. Only one or two bubbles wafted through the air, but housemaids in patens were already hard at work, scrubbing potion off the floors.

Frederick’s in danger
. He had no idea. He’d never had any idea. All those people, people he loved and servants he cared about, Sir Bertram had enslaved them all. Sir Bertram was his stepfather, wasn’t he? It had been him the entire time. After all, who would have suspected? Magic in Allmarch that didn’t require words or language or commands. Magic that grew from the mind instead of the earth and its elements.

The little red spark in her breast burned like a brand, until she thought it must be visible to everyone. She had to tell someone. She turned toward the sound of voices in the music room and slid gracelessly to a halt to find Lady Leighwood (an impressive shade of ocher) attempting to placate a group of Dowagers and guests who ranged from mauve (Aunt Hildy, with two spots of angry violet high on her cheeks) to lavender (Sylvia, who seemed to have escaped the worst of it behind the pianoforte).

Without waiting for a break in the conversation, Charlotte pushed forward. “Aunt Hildy, I need to go to Neigent Hill.”

Lady Balrumple waved an impatient hand. “Darling, it’s four in the afternoon. It’s far too late to travel so far.”

“Aunt Hildy, it is imperative!”

The open, friendly look on her great-aunt’s face slammed shut like the lid of a trap. “It is imperative that you do as you’re told. You’re engaged to your duke, and I’ve sent his signed contract to my solicitors in Trinidon. You’re as safe as I can possibly make you.”

Charlotte gaped at this sudden display of anger. “Aunt Hildy!”

“Don’t ‘Aunt Hildy’ me. You’ve put yourself in enough trouble, and making half a day’s journey uninvited, unannounced, in the late afternoon is senseless frivolity!”

Poor Lady Enshaw nearly slid off the piano bench in surprise. Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte actually saw the indigo-hued footman’s jaw drop open before he composed himself.

It was like hearing the Saint of Oceans declare he was tired of the damp. Or salamanders refusing to answer summons in summer because it was too hot. Even Lady Leighwood, who normally devoted the entirety of her powers of observation to her experiments, blinked in confusion.

Aunt Hildy’s iron countenance lasted for exactly three seconds before it collapsed under the weight. “When I was a little girl, I promised I would never grow up to become the withered old woman who smacks children’s fingers with her fan. Now look at me. I’ve made a hash out of everything.”

She slumped onto a settee, blinking back tears. “I have my grandnieces over to visit for the first time in years, and what happens? One is forced into marriage to a scoundrel I harbored under my own roof!”

“It’s not like that,” Charlotte said, sinking to sit by Lady Balrumple’s feet. She pressed her great-aunt’s soft, blue-veined hand, and Sylvia came up to rest a hand on Aunt Hildy’s shoulder. “It’s not awful at all. I need to see him because…because I
love
him, Aunt Hildy.” One little hiccup, and the words emerged so easily. She couldn’t hide from them anymore.

“You’ve only known the boy for a week! What can you know of him? A month from now you may feel differently and by then it will be too late.”

“I’m sure,” Charlotte said. The spark in her chest leapt to life. “It barely seems like any time at all, but I know him to his deepest self.” Further speech died on her tongue. She hadn’t meant to share it so frankly, with people who could only interpret it as a gaudy metaphor instead of the literal truth. “I want to marry him.”

“You will. I’ll make sure of it.” Her great-aunt snuffled into her handkerchief. “But then what? I’ll never see you again. What husband would visit the woman who made him buff furniture and haul coal?”

“A husband who loves his wife,” said Charlotte. “And he loves me, Aunt Hildy. That’s why I need to see him. It’s important.”

“Neigent Hill is hours away,” said Lady Alderley. “Would not a sylph post do?”

“It could be too late by then!” Charlotte blurted.

Aunt Hildy straightened in her chair. “Is Freddy in danger?”

Charlotte hesitated. “Yes.”

“
Mortal
danger?” breathed Lady Enshaw.

“Y-yes.”

“And you’re the only one can help him?” asked Lady Alderley.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got just the explosive potion!” Lady Leighwood said. “I’ve been meaning to try it out!”

In another situation, one less immediate and dire, Charlotte might have been moved to pity for Sir Bertram.

“John!” Lady Balrumple shouted. The familiar-looking footman stepped to attention. “Have the coachmen ready my carriage. Freddy needs us!”

Tall John
, Charlotte remembered. “John, you’d better come with us, too.”

The footman bowed, too well trained to ask the obvious question, too human to repress the spasm of confusion that crossed his face.

“You’re his friend,” Charlotte said, “and he’s in trouble.”

John froze halfway up from his bow, just for an instant, and he risked one moment of grateful eye contact. “Thank you.”

Aunt Hildy honked loudly into her handkerchief, recovering her cheerfulness almost immediately. “Then what are we waiting for? John, bring the carriage ’round! And pack witchlights—we’ll be out past dark.”

…

Frederick pounded at his chest, at the obstruction in his throat, as Littiger slid the bolt home and stood in front of the door. With a strangled cough, Frederick spat the gobbet of fruit onto the carpet, not ten inches from his cousin’s foot.