Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(39)

Abi looked at the key, reluctant even to close her fingers around it. She didn’t want to be this creature’s keeper – this man’s, she corrected herself. She would take the key back to the house and deliver it to Lady Hypatia. Let her do with it what she would.

Maybe the old woman would still be in the library. Maybe Jenner would be, too.

Abi gratefully let her mind fill back up with thoughts of the Skilless Jardine son. What he had shown her and what it meant. What had passed between them earlier. What might have happened, had they not been interrupted.

So when the hand seized her ankle, she screamed. The fingers were ice-cold and bone-thin, but strong. Much stronger then she had imagined.

‘Shhh . . .’

The sound was almost unrecognizable as a human voice. If wolves could speak, they’d sound like this after a night of howling. It made the hairs on the back of Abi’s neck prickle up. The grip on her ankle tightened, and sharp nails pierced her sock through to her skin.

The voice rasped again.

‘Help me.’





10



Euterpe



He’d told her his name was Silyen.

Euterpe couldn’t say for sure how long he’d been visiting her here at Orpen. But he’d been just a boy when he came for the first time.

On that day she had been sitting in a deckchair in the sunshine, looking around for Puck, who must have scampered off after rabbits again. She heard the soft sound of a violin playing somewhere nearby. It seemed like ages since she’d last seen anyone, so she had called out to the musician, inviting him into the garden. A short while later a dark-haired young boy appeared between the rose bushes, and when she gave him a wave he followed the box-hedged path to where she sat.

He’d stood there looking at her with some astonishment – and she was no less surprised by him. He was aged about ten, and his resemblance to her and Thalia was startling. It was almost like seeing a male version of herself. For a fleeting, confused instant, Euterpe wondered if this child was her brother. But how could you have a brother and not know it?

A dull throbbing started up at the base of her skull – she must have been sitting in the sun too long without her hat. But she forgot her discomfort when the strange boy’s glance flicked past her to the house behind. His face lit up with wonder.

‘Is that Orpen?’ he’d asked. ‘Orpen Mote?’

‘Yes. Don’t you know it?’

She turned to follow his gaze towards her beloved home. The sky was blue today and the moat was less water than mirror, holding a perfect reflection of the house. Orpen’s lower parts, vanishing into the water, were solid stone; the upper half was plastered and timbered. Small leaded windows were inset here and there, in a crooked line. Sometimes they were stacked up over two storeys, sometimes three. The great octuplet chimney, eight flues all in a row, loomed over the North Range. However, there was no smoke pluming from them today. In fact, the whole place was uncharacteristically tranquil.

‘But Orpen is lost,’ the boy said, seeming reluctant to look away. ‘It’s gone.’

‘Lost?’ she said, puzzled. ‘Well, you appear to have found it well enough. Did someone let you in through the gate?’

‘You did,’ the child said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Silyen – Silyen Jardine. And you’re Euterpe Parva. But you’re younger.’

‘Younger? I’m twenty-four, which makes me quite a bit older than you,’ Euterpe told him. He really was a peculiar child.

The boy – Silyen – scowled and looked like he wanted to correct her, so she quickly took the offered hand and shook it. It was small and fine-boned but his grip was firm, and she felt the rasp of calluses from his violin bow.

‘You’re a Jardine?’ she asked. ‘We are to be relatives, then. My sister Thalia is engaged to marry Whittam, Lord Garwode’s heir.’

Whittam was a beast and Garwode a bully, Euterpe thought privately, but she wasn’t going to share that opinion with her Jardine visitor.

‘They’re not married yet?’ Silyen asked. He appeared disconcerted to hear it, though he recovered his composure quickly. He waved his hand, dismissive of weddings as only a young boy could be. ‘It doesn’t matter. We are relatives already.’

And Euterpe supposed that was the truth. The Jardines and the Parvas had been connected for hundreds of years, through Cadmus Parva-Jardine himself, and his father Lycus the Regicide. Both men had lived here at the Mote, and their likenesses still hung on the walls. Their faces were as familiar to Euterpe as those of her own sister and parents. In fact, Silyen bore a more than passing resemblance to them – much more so than to his actual family, the red-haired, green-eyed Jardines.

‘Would you like to see the house?’ she asked the boy. ‘I think you’d like some of the portraits.’

His smile, unexpectedly, was just as impish as her sister’s.

Silyen had been wide-eyed as they’d walked through the house, and had run his hands over everything. He’d rapped his knuckles on the armour in the hall, and picked at threads in the corridor tapestries until she’d told him off. He’d even stopped to smell the flowers she’d had cut that morning and placed in a vase in the dining room. He was clearly a clever child, and she thought she knew what room he’d like most.