Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(13)

‘Are you nicer than that other one?’ asked Daisy.

Abi wanted the ground to swallow her up, even as her mother’s face blanched. But astonishingly, the young man before them simply laughed.

‘I try to be,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry for what you just experienced. It’s unpleasant, but necessary. I do ask Silyen to at least warn people, but he never does. He says he finds their reactions interesting.’

‘It was horrid,’ said Daisy. ‘Why don’t you do it, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad?’

Abi wanted to put her hands over her sister’s mouth before anything even more ill-advised came out.

‘I can’t,’ was the unexpected response. ‘I mean, none of us could do it quite like Silyen, but I can’t do it at all. I possess as much Skill as you do, Daisy Hadley. I presume you are Daisy,’ he added gallantly, ‘unless you are Abigail, and a little on the small side for your age, while this tall young Daisy here . . .’

Jenner Jardine turned to Abi, while Daisy spluttered and giggled and assured him that no, no, he had them the right way round.

Abi had been going to apologize to the Kyneston scion for Daisy’s big gob. And she had intended to ask him what he meant about having no Skill, because they all had Skill, all the Equals.

But her words died behind her lips when she looked at Jenner Jardine. Not from a distance on his horse, or with one eye on her indiscreet little sis, but properly at him.

He had warm brown eyes and coppery hair. His face was dusted all over with freckles, and though his mouth was wider than usual in a man, it was balanced by strong cheekbones. Abi took in all these details, yet none of them really registered. She felt giddy again. Felt naked again.

But none of it was due to Skill. And it didn’t leave her cold. No, not cold at all.

Jenner was looking at her oddly, and Abigail realized she had been staring. Her cheeks scorched.

A wash of shame, heavy and humiliating, broke over her. She stood before this man not as the bright, quick, passably attractive girl she knew herself to be, but as a slave. That seemed to Abi, in that moment, the worst and cruellest thing the slavedays could possibly do. It could take away everything that made you who you were. Then place you in front of someone whom, under wholly different circumstances, you might let yourself love and who might even have loved you back.

Jenner’s words were kind, but she shouldn’t delude herself. He was an Equal. And despite his inexplicable claim to be Skilless, he was a Jardine. He would never see Abi for who she truly was. It was as that Millmoor brute had said: to the Equals they were all simply chattels, things to be used – or rejected as useless.

Her humiliation burned away in a flare of anger and guilt about her little brother. It was Abi’s carefully crafted plan that had exposed Luke to the pitiless judgement of the Jardines. His banishment to Millmoor was all her fault. She shook her head, dizzied by the force of this realization.

‘Are you all right?’

There was a firm hand grasping her elbow. Jenner. Then an arm around her shoulder. Her father. The hand let go.

‘Skill can affect people sometimes,’ Jenner said. ‘If you’ve never been exposed to it, you need to acclimatize. It’s strongest with Silyen around, but you might feel it again when my father and older brother return from London. Let’s get you all to your cottage. I’ve put you over in the Row; you’ll like it.’

Jenner led the way. He didn’t get back on his horse, but walked alongside them. Dad hefted his and Abi’s bags onto his shoulders, while Mum swung hers and Daisy’s, one in each hand. Daisy scampered back and forth, admiring the horse and peppering Jenner with questions about it. Abi walked by herself, off to one side, trying to make sense of everything that was roiling through her.

‘Oh!’ Daisy’s exclamation was so loud that the small group stopped, alarmed. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing back the way they had come. ‘It’s gone. Is it invisible?’

Where the shining gate had been was a single, unbroken expanse of wall. The Hadleys stared.

‘You were right with “gone”,’ Jenner said, coaxing his horse to a stop. ‘The gate only exists when one of my family calls it into being, and it can be summoned anywhere along the wall. That’s why there’s no driveway and no roads inside the estate. It’s also why my father keeps busting the suspension on the classic cars he loves so much, and why Sil and I prefer to get around on horseback. Gavar takes his motorbike. It can only be opened by Skill, though. That’s why just now . . .’

He trailed off.

‘Why are you telling us?’ said Abi. ‘Isn’t that sort of stuff, I don’t know, a state secret or something?’

Jenner fiddled with his horse’s bridle, pausing before replying.

‘Kyneston isn’t always an easy place to be. Sometimes people think about trying to leave.’ He turned to Abi. ‘My brother told me that before we arrived, when you were still on the other side, you did a bit of exploring. No, don’t worry’ – for panic had wrapped its fingers tightly round Abi’s throat and squeezed – ‘you didn’t do anything wrong. But just . . . try not to be too interested in things. It’s easier that way.’

He sounded subdued, and Abi suspected he wasn’t talking generally, but recalling something specific and distressing. Was it ridiculous of her to want to comfort him?