The Fate of Mice (23 page)

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. Gregory wasn’t explaining a new dance at all: he was telling Caitlin how to reach the rose garden, the secret place where she and Randolph hid while Alison and I searched so frantically.

Doubtless he went with his wife to keep her from the spot; with Alison’s bad leg, and the maze this far from the castle, it wouldn’t have been difficult.

I land a few feet behind him and return to myself again. Hunger and hatred enhance my strength, already greater than his. He isn’t expecting an approach from behind; I knock him flat, his weapons and charms scattering in darkness, and have his arms pinned behind his back before he can cry out. “I am not dead,” I say very quietly into his ear, “but your wife is, and soon you will be.”

He whimpers and struggles, but I give his arm an extra twist and he subsides, panting. “Why, Gregory? What was all of this for? So you could spy on them murmuring poetry to one another? Surely not that. Tell me!”

“So I can be a duke.”

“By your wife’s death?”

“By the boy’s.”

“How?” I answer sharply, thinking of Randolph and Caitlin sharing the same goblet. “How did you mean to kill him? More poison?”

“She will kill him,” he says softly, “because she is aroused, and does not yet know her own appetites or how to control them. Is it not so, my lady?”

My own hunger is a red throbbing behind my eyes. “No, my lord. Caitlin is no murder weapon: she does not yet know what she is or where her hungers come from. She can no more feed on her own than a kitten can, who depends on the mother cat to bring food and teach it how to eat.”

“You shall teach her with my puling nephew, I warrant.”

“No, my lord Gregory. I shall not. I shall not teach her with you either, more’s the pity; we mangle as we learn, just as kittens do—and as kittens do, she will practice on little animals as long as they will sustain her. I should like to see you mangled, my lord.”

Instead I break his neck, cleanly, as I broke Alison’s. Afterwards, the body still warm, I feed fully; it would be more satisfying were he still alive, but he shall have no more pleasure. Feeding me aroused him as coupling seldom did; he begged to do it more often, and now I am glad I refused. As terrible as he was, he would have been worse as one of us. When I am finished I lick my fingers clean, wipe my face as best I can, and drag the body back into the cul-de-sac, where it will not be immediately visible. Shaking, I hide the most obvious and dangerous of Gregory’s weapons and step into the rose garden.

Caitlin, glowing in moonlight, sits on the edge of the fountain, as I saw her from the air. Randolph is handing her a white rose, which he has evidently just picked: there is blood on his hands where the thorns have scratched him. She takes the rose from him and bends to kiss his fingers, the tip of her tongue flicking towards the wounds.

“Caitlin!” She turns, startled, and lets go of Randolph’s hands. “Caitlin, we must leave now.”

“No,” she says, her eyes very bright. “No. It is already after midnight and you see—nothing horrid has happened.”

“We must leave,” I tell her firmly. “Come along.”

“But I can come back?” she says, laughing, and then to Randolph, “I’ll come back. Soon, I promise you. The next dance, or before that even. Godmother, promise I can come back—”

“Come along, Caitlin! Randolph, we bid you goodnight—”

“May I see you out of the maze, my ladies?”

I think of the watchers on the road, the watchers who may have been set on the maze by now. I wish I could warn him, teach him of the world in an instant. Disguise yourself, Randolph; leave this place as quickly as you can, and steal down swift and secret roads to your father’s bedside.

But I cannot yet speak freely in front of Caitlin, and we have time only to save ourselves. Perhaps the maze will protect him, for a little while. “Thank you, my lord, but we know the way. Pray you stay here and think kindly of us; my magic is aided by good wishes.”

“Then you shall have them in abundance, whatever my aunt says.”

Caitlin comes at last, dragging and prattling. On my own I would escape with shape-changing, but Caitlin doesn’t have those skills yet, and were I to tell her of our danger now she would panic and become unmanageable. So I lead her, right right left, right right left, through interminable turns.

But we meet no one else in the maze, and when at last we step into open air there are no priests waiting in ambush. Music still sounds faintly from the castle; the host and hostess have not yet been missed, and the good father must still be muttering incantations in his chamber.

And so we reach the carriage safely; I deposit Caitlin inside and instruct the driver to take us to one of the spots I have prepared for such emergencies. We should be there well before sunup. I can only hope Lady Alison’s watchers have grown tired or afraid, and left off their vigil; there is no way to be sure. I listen for hoofbeats on the road behind us and hear nothing. Perhaps, this time, we have been lucky.

Caitlin doesn’t know what I saw, there in the rose garden. She babbles about it in the carriage. “We went into the garden, in the moonlight—he kissed me and held my hands, because he said they were cold. His were so warm! He told me I was beautiful; he said he loved me. And he picked roses for me, and he bled where the thorns had pricked him. He bled for me, Godmother—oh, this is the one! This is my prince. How could I not love him?”

I remain silent. She doesn’t yet know what she loves. At length she says, “Why aren’t we home yet? It’s taking so long. I’m hungry. I never had any dinner.”

“We aren’t going home,” I tell her, lighting my lantern and pulling down the shades which cover the carriage’s windows. “We have been discovered, Caitlin. It is quite possible we are being followed. I am taking you somewhere safe. There will be food there.”

“Discovered?” She laughs. “What have they discovered? That I am poor? That I love Randolph? What could they do to me? He will protect me; he said so. He will marry me.”

This is the moment I must tell her. For all the times I have done this, it never hurts any less. “Caitlin, listen to me. You shall never marry Randolph, or anyone else. It was never meant that you should. I am sorry you have to hear this now. I had wanted you to learn some gentler way.” She stares at me, bewildered, and, sadly, I smile at her—that expression she has teased me about, asked me for, wondered why I withhold; and when she sees it she understands. The pale eyes go wide, the beautiful hands go to her throat; she backs away from me, crossing herself as if in imitation of Lady Alison.

“Away,” she tells me, trembling. “I exorcise thee, demon. In vain dost thou boast of this deed—”

I think of kind Thomas, chanting valiantly in an empty stone chamber as men at arms wait outside the door. “Keep your charms, Caitlin. They’ll do you no good. Don’t you understand, child? Why do you think everyone has begun to look at you so oddly; why do you think I wouldn’t give you a mirror? What do you think was in the soup I gave you?”

The hands go to her mouth now, to the small sharp teeth. She cries out, understanding everything at once—her odd lassitude after the first few balls, the blood I took from her to cure it, her changing hours and changing thirsts—and, as always, this moment of birth rends whatever I have left of a heart. Because for a moment the young creature sitting in front of me is not the apprentice hunter I have made her, but the innocent young girl who stood holding that first invitation to the ball, her heart in her eyes.
I? I have been invited?
I force myself not to turn away as Caitlin cries out, “You tricked me! The story wasn’t true!”

She tears at her face with shapely nails, and ribbons of flesh follow her fingers. “You can’t weep anymore,” I tell her. I would weep for her, if I could. “You can’t bleed, either. You’re past that. Don’t disfigure yourself.”

“The story was a lie! None of it was true, ever—”

I make my voice as cold as iron. “The story was perfectly true, Caitlin. You were simply never told all of it before.”

“It wasn’t supposed to end like this!” All the tears she can’t shed are in her voice. “In the story the girl falls in love and marries the prince and—everyone knows that! You lied to me! This isn’t the right ending!”

“It’s the only ending! The only one there is—Caitlin, surely you see that. Living women have no more protection than we do here. They feed off their men, as we do, and they require permission to enter houses and go to dances, as we do, and they depend on spells of seeming. There is only one difference: you will never, ever look like Lady Alison. You will never look like your mother. You have escaped that.”

She stares at me and shrinks against the side of the carriage, holding her hands in front of her—her precious hands which Randolph held, kissed, warmed with his own life. “I love him,” she says defiantly. “I love him, and he loves me. That part of it is true—”

“You loved his bleeding hands, Caitlin. If I hadn’t interrupted, you would have fed from them, and known then, and hated him for it. And he would have hated you, for allowing him to speak of love when all along you had been precisely what his aunt warned him against.”

Her mouth quivers. She hates me for having seen, and for telling her the truth. She doesn’t understand our danger; she doesn’t know how the woman she has scorned all these weeks died, or how close she came to dying herself.

Gregory was a clever man; the plot was a clean one. To sacrifice Randolph to Caitlin, and kill Caitlin as she tried to escape the maze; Gregory would have mourned his nephew in the proper public manner, and been declared a hero for murdering one fiend in person as the other was destroyed in the castle. Any gossip about his own soul would have been effectively stilled; perhaps he had been seduced, but surely he was pure again, to summon the righteousness to kill the beasts?

Oh yes, clever. Alison would have known the truth, and would never have accepted a title won by Randolph’s murder. Alison could have ruined the entire plan, but it is easy enough to silence wives.

“Can I pray?” Caitlin demands of me, as we rattle towards daybreak. “If I can’t shed tears or blood, if I can’t love, can I still pray?”

“We can pray,” I tell her gently, thinking again of Thomas who spared me, of those tenuous bonds between the living and the dead. “We must pray, foremost, that someone hear us. Caitlin, it’s the same. The same story, with that one difference.”

She trembles, huddling against the side of the carriage, her eyes closed. When at last she speaks, her voice is stunned. “I’ll never see my mother again.”

“I am your mother now. What are mothers and daughters, if not women who share blood?”

She whimpers in her throat then, and I stroke her hair. At last she says, “I’ll never grow old.”

“You will grow as old as the hills,” I tell her, putting my arm around her as one comforts a child who has woken from a nightmare, “but you will never be ugly. You will always be as beautiful as you are now, as beautiful as I am. Your hair and nails will grow and I will trim them for you, to keep them lovely, and you will go to every dance, and wear different gowns to all of them.”

She blinks and plucks aimlessly at the poor fabric of her dress, once again a kitchen smock. “I’ll never be ugly?”

“Never,” I say. “You’ll never change.” We cannot cry or bleed or age; there are so many things we cannot do. But for her, now, it is a comfort.

She hugs herself, shivering, and I sit beside her and hold her, rocking her towards the certain sleep that will come with dawn. It would be better if Randolph were here, with his human warmth, but at least she doesn’t have to be alone. I remember my own shock and despair, although they happened longer ago than anyone who is not one of us can remember; I too tried to pray, and afterwards was thankful that my own godmother had stayed with me.

After a while Caitlin’s breathing evens, and I am grateful that she hasn’t said, as so many of them do,
Now I will never die
.

We shelter our young, as the mortal mothers shelter theirs—those human women who of necessity are as predatory as we, and as dependent on the invitation to feed—and so there are some truths I have not told her. She will learn them soon enough.

She is more beautiful than Lady Alison or her mother, but no less vulnerable. Her very beauty contains the certainty of her destruction. There is no law protecting women in this kingdom, where wives can be poisoned in their own halls and their murderers never punished. Still less are there laws protecting us.

I have told her she will not grow ugly, but I have not said what a curse beauty can be, how time after time she will be forced to flee the rumors of her perpetual loveliness and all that it implies. Men will arrive to feed her and kiss her and bring her roses; but for all the centuries of gentle princes swearing love, there will inevitably be someone—jealous wife or jaded lord, peasant or priest—who has heard the whispers and believed, and who will come to her resting place, in the light hours when she cannot move, bearing a hammer and a wooden stake.

Every year, my mother vanished on the evening of the first snowfall. She left the house without cloak or bonnet, wearing only the thin woolen shift, blue or green or gray, which was her constant winter outfit. Her feet would be clad in thin slippers, because she could not bear the boots that the rest of us wore to keep our toes from freezing. She always left at dusk, when my brothers and father and I huddled most closely around the fire; and always she headed west, towards the mountains, vanishing quickly—if we cared to watch her—into the thick forests that furred the lower slopes.

We did not often care to watch her, for our father had told us that these journeys into the forest healed the sickness that plagued her the rest of the year. And indeed, she would always return to us the next morning with a new lightness in her step and a new brightness in her eyes; and if she also spent her first few days back home staring yearningly towards the mountains and crying over the stove, tears she thought we failed to notice dripping into our roasts and stews, the sadness left her soon enough. “You mustn’t ask her any questions,” our father told us once. “They’d only make her feel worse about her illness. It is a great grief to your mother that she does not have more energy to spend on loving us.”