Gallant(48)

The one missing from the downstairs hall. In it, her uncle stands in the garden, stern-faced but human and whole, one arm wrapped around his wife, Isabelle, holding her close. And there, before them, a pair of boys seated on a stone bench. Matthew, thirteen maybe, already long and lean, tawny hair swept half across his face. And a smaller boy, looking up at him with adoration.

“Is that who you saw?” asks Matthew, his words tight and small, as if they’re caught inside his chest.

Olivia sinks to her knees before the portrait, studying Thomas Prior, laying this image over the one in her mind. He is younger than the boy she found in the fountain, but not by much. Here his eyes are bright and wide, there they were closed; here his curls look light brown instead of gray. But everything is gray beyond the wall. And there is no denying the slope of his cheek. The line of his nose. The angle of his chin.

“Is that him?” presses Matthew.

Olivia swallows and nods, and her cousin folds into the nearest chair, his bandaged hand pressed to his mouth.

“It’s been two years,” he says, and she doesn’t know if he’s thinking that the boy in the fountain can’t be his brother, or about how long he left him there. How long he thought him dead.

All the movement in the halls has drawn Hannah. She stands in the doorway, uncertain.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

Matthew looks up. “It’s Thomas,” he says, eyes bright with fear and hope. “He’s still alive.”





Chapter Twenty-Three




“I have to find my brother,” he demands. “I have to bring him home.”

They are standing in the kitchen, the only four people in the too-large house. Edgar scrubs the garden from his hands, and Hannah twists a kitchen towel between her fingers, and Matthew paces, the color high in his cheeks, and Olivia wonders if she’s made a terrible mistake.

Back at Merilance, she learned about life. The way it started, and the way it ended. It was always talked about as a one-way street, first alive and then dead, and even though she knew it was more complicated—because of the ghouls, who had clearly been alive, and then dead, and now were something else—the truth is, she isn’t sure what to make of the boy in the fountain.

She doesn’t think the boy was dead, but she also didn’t see the rise and fall of his chest, the subtle stirrings of a body just asleep. If it is a spell, she hopes it’s one that she can break. Hopes that she will touch his hand and he will wake.

Then there is the fact of time. It’s been two years. He should be fourteen, but the shape on the cracked stone floor was still a child. Then again, nothing seems to grow beyond the wall. Perhaps it is the same for people.

“Is it even possible?” asks Hannah, busying her hands with a pot of soup no one intends to eat. Olivia has told the story now, of her trip beyond the wall, or at least of finding the boy, and Edgar has done his best to translate, his brows knitting more with every word.

He clears his throat. “I hate to say it, but it could be a trap.”

As if that isn’t obvious. Of course it is a trap. A stolen child, left out like bait. But traps are like locks. They can be picked. They can be opened. A trap is only a trap if you get caught. Olivia knows better now, and when she goes back—

“I’ll go tonight,” says Matthew.

“No,” say Hannah and Edgar and Olivia at the same time, two out loud, and one with a single cutting swipe.

“He’s my brother,” persists Matthew. “I left him once. I will not be the one to leave again.”

Olivia lets out a short breath. And then she walks up to her cousin and pushes him once, hard. Matthew staggers back into the counter, looking more shocked than hurt, but she has made her point. He can barely stand. The color in his cheeks is not health, but sickness. He is worn thin, hollowed out by lack of sleep, and she has been beyond the wall and back again. She has seen what lurks in the shadows, what lives in the dark.

She looks from Matthew to Edgar to Hannah.

She doesn’t know how to tell them about the ghouls, the way they rise to meet her when she calls. She makes no mention of the life that stirs beneath her fingers there, sudden and wild. She doesn’t say that she is her father’s daughter, too, that some part of her belongs beyond that wall. That if anyone can cross into a world of death and come out alive again, it’s her.

Matthew’s hand clenches into a fist against the counter. “He’s my brother,” he says again, a pleading in his voice. Olivia nods and takes his bandaged hand in hers.

I know, she says with a look, the subtle squeeze of her fingers. And I will bring him back.

They have six hours until dusk.

Too much time, and not enough.

Hannah thinks she should eat, and Edgar thinks she should rest, and Matthew thinks he should be doing this instead. Olivia cannot eat or rest or hand the burden over. All she can do is prepare—and the more she knows about the workings of this place, the better. She has spent the last few days learning the layout of the halls, but now she looks around, at the walls and the floors, and wonders.

The world you saw beyond the wall is a shadow of this one.

Matthew’s words turn inside her head, like the houses in their metal frame. The houses, Gallant and not Gallant, one soft and frayed, the other in a state of disrepair, but otherwise, they are the same.