The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (49 page)

What can I tell you of what followed, Father? I fear you know better than I the labyrinths in which an ill mind can be lost. In a fever, nothing seems as it really is. One gets tangled up in the tatters of thoughts and phantasms even as in the bedclothes. The shadows were a cage, coiling around me like black branches.

Here and there were lucid moments. I remember once I rose from the bed and stumbled to the window. Outside, a red light bobbed along the ground, and for a moment in my delirium I wondered if the new red planet had fallen to earth. Then I saw a second light, and I knew it to be Jance and Mr. Quent, that they were walking around the grounds of the house with lanterns.

I crawled back into the bed. My bones ached, and in my dreams I imagined them bending and twisting into new shapes like willow branches in Mr. Samonds’s hands.

W
HEN I OPENED my eyes again, gold light slanted into my room. For many minutes I lay in bed, watching the light move upon the ceiling, until I realized it was not morning but evening.

I turned my head and saw that I was not alone. A figure sat in the bent-willow chair. It was not Lanna.

“Well, there you are,” Mr. Quent said, sitting up straight. His coat hung on the back of the chair. He wore only a white shirt, open at the throat and turned up at the wrists, and his same riding breeches from the night before. Dried mud still caked his boots.

I sat up, but as I did a dizziness swept over me. I would have fallen back but in one swift move he was beside me, and eased me down, and set pillows behind me. Whether it was illness or wonder that had rendered me speechless, I could not say.

“The doctor told me you would not wake until tomorrow at the soonest,” he said in his gruff voice. “However, I said to him, ‘No, you do not know our resourceful Miss Lockwell. She would never stay away so long, not when she is needed.’”

He did something then I could scarcely have imagined, let alone comprehend. He smiled at me.

I was so astonished I could only stare. Was this the Mr. Quent I knew? His curly hair was wild, falling over his brow; his teeth were a fierce white crescent amid his beard; and all I could think was that I had never seen him look so well.

“I’m so sorry,” I started to say, but at once his expression grew somber.

“No,” he said. “No, please believe it is I who am sorry, Miss Lockwell.” For a moment there was a look of such regret in his brown eyes, a look that rendered them so soft, that I could not bear it—not in one so stolid as he. Feigning a recurrence of my weakness (which was hardly far from the case), I leaned back against the pillows and turned my head toward the window and the fading day.

I heard his boots leave, and when the door opened again a little while later it was Lanna. With her help I rose and bathed myself and dressed, and was infinitely better for it. True, I felt a bit hollow and light, but that was all. That I should be perfectly well in a day I was certain. I could only hope the same was true of the children.

After Lanna left, I took a moment to use the little mirror above the chest of drawers to arrange my hair, and I pinched my cheeks to bring color into them. Why I did these things I was not certain. All I can say is that when a knock came at the door, I was not surprised, though my heart gave a leap in my chest all the same.

“Come in,” I called out, and he did.

Like myself, Mr. Quent had changed. He no longer wore his riding gear. Instead, he had put on gray breeches and a dark blue coat I had never seen before. The coat was a close fit, as if it had been cut for him in younger days, though I cannot say the effect was ill.

He told me that he expected I was in want of supper, and since I might not be ready yet to venture downstairs, he had taken the liberty of bringing up a tray. I could not have been more shocked or my expression of thanks more sincere, for I was suddenly very hungry.

He brought the writing table into the center of the room, arranged the willow chair for me, and sat himself on the edge of the bed, and we had our supper that way. There was soup, hard-cooked eggs, and roast pheasant from a bird he had shot that day, and every sort of thing that was suitable for an invalid. I confess, I was not dainty; I ate ravenously, though I could only think he had already supped, for he touched almost nothing.

We spoke little, and he seemed content mostly to watch me, though he did inform me that the children were resting. They, too, had succumbed to a fever, and the illness had gripped them more strongly that it had me. However, the doctor had assured him they would recover, perhaps more slowly than I had but just as fully. I was greatly relieved.

“I want to thank you, Miss Lockwell,” he said at last.

I set down my cup of wine for fear of spilling it. “For what?” I finally managed to say.

It seemed difficult for him to formulate his words. He rose, moved to the window, and peered at the night. At last he turned to look at me. “There are few who could have endured what you have endured here at Heathcrest, Miss Lockwell. This is not, I know, an easy place to dwell, and the task you were given was not a simple one. That it was too much to ask of you, I knew. That to invite you here could only be an act of selfishness such as I had always scorned in others, I knew as well. Yet I invited you all the same, and when others would have been driven off by what they found here, you stayed. For that, I thank you.”

I was struck dumb. That after all that had happened, after the way I had failed him, he could thank
me
—it was too much to comprehend.

“You must know now why I was reluctant to bring them here,” he went on. “This is…it is not a place for children. However, the aunt and uncle who I had hoped would take them had at that very moment lost a daughter of their own, and the sight of a small girl was something their aunt could not bear. So I was forced to take them instead. Knowing how often I must be away, my one hope was that I could arrange for someone who could properly care for them under the most difficult, the most trying of circumstances.”

“But I have failed!” I said, unable to endure such misplaced praise any longer. “The children nearly caught their death of a fever last night. Don’t you see? I nearly lost them!”

He regarded me with a serious expression. “No, Miss Lockwell, you saved them. Had it been any other person I had hired, had it been anyone else who had followed them when they ventured out—as they were eventually bound to do—then truly they would both have been lost.”

I sat back in the chair, gripping the braided wood beneath my hands. Once again I saw the children huddled before the wall, their faces pale and scratched, the branches whipping in the wind. And the figure in white fluttering in the trees above.

“It’s Halley Samonds, isn’t it?” I looked up at him. “They said she was lost. But she’s there, in the Wyrdwood.”

He nodded.

“The children have seen her more than once. She showed herself to them. I think she’s been speaking to Clarette. They believe she’s a ghost. But she’s no wraith, is she? She’s alive.”

“So I believe.”

“Of course,” I said, more to myself than to him. Halley Samonds. The daughter of Miss Samonds’s brother. The sister of Mr. Samonds the farrier.

The great-granddaughter of Rowan Addysen.

“I should have told you sooner,” I said to him. “I knew they had seen someone, but I wanted them to feel I trusted them, so that they would trust me in turn. It was wrong; I should have told you.” I shook my head. “Except you already knew.”

He moved back to the table, though he did not sit. “Knew? Perhaps I did know. I certainly suspected it after her disappearance. And I knew if ever she had a wish to reach me, the children would present a way.”

“Reach you? But why would she—”

“Please, Miss Lockwell, let us save that question. You fear you did wrong by not telling me what you knew. If that is the case, then any offense you have committed is far outweighed by my own wrongdoing. There is more I have not told you. And I will. However, the start of a long night is not the time for such conversations.”

Though these words filled me with great curiosity, I nodded. Despite my whirling mind, a heaviness had come upon me, and I felt an overpowering desire for sleep. I was not yet well. It was by then all I could do to rise to bid him good night.

He bowed, seemed to hesitate, then bowed again and departed. With my last strength I readied myself for bed and climbed beneath the covers. It occurred to me that I should be afraid, yet the darkness did not trouble me as it so often did, not that night. I knew
he
was below and that while he was there no harm could come to me. I slept, and did not dream.

I
WROTE THOSE LAST pages some time after those events took place, Father. Much more has happened in the days since then—so much I hardly know if I can explain it. How can such thoughts, such feelings be composed in ink on paper? They are too brilliant to be rendered in black and white, yet somehow I must explain for you to understand what is to happen next.

I can say only that I have seen what I had not before. Sometimes illness can strike a person blind, but I think sometimes it can grant one new sight as well. Heathcrest Hall had not changed, but the eyes with which I beheld it had. Before, I had thought the house stolid and old-fashioned, with its heavy columns and brooding eaves: well-constructed, perhaps even imposing, but not a thing to be admired.

How my impression of it has changed! Now everywhere I turn I find something to appreciate: handsome panels of old wood, windows as tall as doors, the scents of smoke and sage, and walls that have with silent strength withstood long years of wind and rain. It is not a grand dwelling like the marble edifices in the New Quarter; it is in no way fashionable. But how could I not have thought it the finest, most admirable house in all of Altania?

There! That must be explanation enough for you, Father. Except I have gotten ahead of myself. Let me tell you first about what took place shortly after that night I last described.

When I woke the following morning, I found that, aside from being somewhat weak, I was very well. The children were also improved, I learned. However, in them the fever had burned more strongly, and its effects still lingered, so they were yet confined to their room.

I paid them a visit and embraced them both. We did not speak of what had happened at the Wyrdwood. In fact, their recollection of the prior two days seemed vague. The doctor had said they might never entirely recall all that had happened just before and after they took ill, and if they indeed were never able to fully remember that night, I could not be sorry.

My health continued to improve so rapidly that, when the doctor saw me next, he pronounced that I wanted for nothing but exercise to recover my strength completely.

“Then she shall have exercise every day,” Mr. Quent said.

I was not quite ready to ride, and he did not think it good for me to be out on my own. So it was that the two of us went for walks at least once a day, and more on longer lumenals. At first our rambles took us only around the house, but the more I walked the stronger I felt, and soon we ranged so far as the old heap of tumbled-down stones. These, he told me, had once been what country folk called an elf circle. The stones had not been arranged by fairies, of course, but rather by the ancient people who had dwelled in Altania long before the coming of the first Tharosian ships.

“I have seen the remains of such circles all over the island of Altania,” Mr. Quent said. “How they lifted such massive things we do not know, nor why they did so. They raised the circles as places to gather, the historians suppose, or to hold ceremonies in dread of their heathen deities.”

“No, to honor them, I think,” I said, making an examination of one of the time-pitted stones. It bore faint traces of spirals and angular shapes. “One does not build things up or bring things forth in the name of what one fears. Rather, one tears things down and ruins them in an effort to appease.”

He laughed, a deep, bell-like sound that was all the more engaging for its novelty. “I had never thought of it so. But you are right, of course. Your good sense guides you where the learning of wise men fails. You are remarkable, Miss Lockwell.”