Gallant(27)

“Always. That’s what my father said. As if we’ve always been at Gallant. But we haven’t. The Priors didn’t build this house. Gallant was already here. It called out to our family, and like fools, we came.”

Olivia frowns, confused. The house did not write her that letter. Someone in it did. Someone who wanted her to come. Someone who claimed to be her uncle.

“We came to Gallant once, and now we cannot leave. We are bound here, chained to the house and the wall and the thing beyond, and it will not end until there are no Priors left.”

My father said I was the last.

“Have you begun to hear it yet?” He looks at her, eyes fever bright. “Does it come into your dreams?”

Olivia shakes her head, uncertain what he means. She has dreamed twice, and both times were of her mother. But Matthew’s voice rings through her, the harsh sob she heard the night before.

“You don’t know what it feels like,” he says, pain breaking like a tide across his face. “What it can do. What it can take.”

What is this it he speaks of? She reaches for his hand, but Matthew is already moving away, the last thing he says little more than a murmur.

“If it hasn’t found you yet, there is still time.”

And then he is gone, marching up the path, no doubt searching for Hannah to ask about the car. Olivia presses her hands to her temples, a headache forming there. Matthew’s words are like her mother’s, another needless riddle. Why can’t her family speak in simple truths? She looks down at the drawing.

. . . chained to the house and the wall and the thing beyond . . .

Her gaze drifts up, past the garden. Her cousin clearly is not well. He doesn’t eat, he cannot sleep, he talks of curses, of gates, but there’s just a battered stretch of rock at the edge of the garden. Olivia stands and scans the grounds. There’s no sign of Matthew now. Or Edgar, though his ladder still leans against the house.

She doesn’t make a straight line for the wall. She just . . . drifts toward it. Through the garden, past the last line of roses, down the gentle slope of grass.

The old ghoul in the graveyard watches her go. It doesn’t abandon the orchard, but she can see the tilt of its half-there head, its arms folded across its missing chest, clearly displeased to see her at the wall. I know, I know, she thinks. But she doesn’t stop.

As Olivia nears the wall, she sees why her drawings never worked. It’s the light. The sun doesn’t seem to hit the wall, not as it should. Even though it is behind her now, casting her shadow down the hill. Even though it should shine directly on the stones, it doesn’t reach. Instead, the shadows bend and pool around the wall, and Olivia shivers a little as she steps into that strange cool shade.

And then, at last, she sees the door.

She can’t believe she didn’t notice it before. It’s old iron, a shade darker than the surrounding stone, and if the sun had fallen on it, perhaps she would have seen it sooner. Still, now that she has seen it, she cannot imagine thinking the wall was solid stone.

The gate, she thinks, reaching out to touch the door, shocked to feel how cold the metal is. There’s a small handle, sculpted like an ivy runner, but when she tries it, it’s locked. She crouches, looking for a keyhole, but there’s none.

How strange.

What good is a locked door in a wall that simply ends? The wall isn’t even very long—a dozen paces to either side and she would reach the crumbled edge. Her feet are already carrying her toward it when something makes her slow, then stop.

According to Matthew, there is something beyond the wall.

Olivia chews her lip. It is ridiculous, of course. She can see the space beyond, the open field stretching out to either side. But she cannot bring herself to round it. Instead, she returns to the door.

There is a narrow gap where the iron gate meets the wall, the width of her finger, the space interrupted by a pair of bolts, and the sight of it tickles something in her mind, but she cannot place it. She rises on her toes, pressing her eye to the gap.

She has read enough stories about doorways, thresholds, and for a moment she imagines herself balanced at the edge of something grand, something dark or dangerous—but when she looks, all she sees is a field of tallgrass, swaying in the breeze, the craggy mountains in the distance.

Her heart sinks a little, and she pulls back, feeling silly.

Of course, the wall is just a wall. Nothing more.

Something cracks, and to her right a few bits of stone tumble free, the sound like rain on an old tin roof. It’s one of the spots Matthew tried to patch—she can tell by the color, lighter than the surrounding rock—but the mortar is brittle, already flaking, traces of it shed onto the grass, as if the wall had stirred and shaken off the mends like dust. Up close, she sees the source of the latest crack: a thin gray weed has forced its way through. She reaches out to pull it before remembering the cut along her palm and Matthew’s fury. Instead, she takes up a fallen stone and wedges it back in place.

“Olivia!”

Her name rings out, drawn thin across the yard, and when she looks back, one hand to her eyes to shield the sun, she sees Edgar waving, the ladder leaning on one shoulder.

“Give me a hand?” he calls, and Olivia jogs toward him, out of the cold shadow and into the sun, the warmth shocking but welcome. As she crosses the grassy rise, she hears the soft scrape of more stones coming free.