Before Sunset

Chapter 6

"Get up."

I sat up so fast my head spun. The maid was standing at the foot of the bed with a jug of water and a towel over her arm, and she was looking at me like I was a stray dog somebody had let inside.

"What time is it?"

"Almost eleven." She set the jug down hard. "He wants you in the west hall at noon. Wash your face. You look like hell."

"Who wants me?"

She stopped. Looked at me like I'd asked her what color the sky was.

"Who do you think," she said, and left.

I washed my face in cold water. My shirt was ruined, so I put on the one thing in the room that wasn't mine — a plain gray dress hanging in the wardrobe, too long in the sleeves, smelling faintly of lavender and dust.

I was not going to look at the black windows on the other side of the courtyard. I looked anyway. They were still black. In daylight, somehow, that was worse.

A different servant walked me down. Through a corridor with paintings of men on horses, past a door with a wolf carved into it, down a stair, through a room so big my footsteps echoed four times.

The west hall had a fireplace you could stand up in and a long table and a man at the end of it in a black suit, reading a piece of paper.

I knew it was him before he looked up.

Not from his face. I hadn't seen his face — I'd seen him on his hands and knees in a pit, covered in somebody's blood, and then a coat, and then nothing. This man was clean. Shaved. Hair still wet.

I knew it from the way the air in the room was wrong.

He looked up.

Gray eyes. Same eyes. I'd been expecting something else. Something in them.

"You're Ella Vance," he said.

"Yeah."

"Sit down."

"I'd rather stand."

"Then stand." He went back to his paper. "You're leaving tonight. Before sunset. There's a car at six and a road that goes back the way you came. My steward will give you money for the trip and enough to keep your family quiet for a year. You'll tell them you were rejected at the Culling and sent home. That's all you'll say."

I stood there.

"That's it?" I said.

"What else would there be?"

"Last night—"

"Last night didn't happen." He turned the page. Didn't look up. "Last night a feral animal was put down before it hurt someone and a thousand people had a very exciting evening. You'll forget it and they'll forget it and if either of you doesn't, I'll have Arthur handle it."

"He bowed to me."

The paper stopped moving.

"He bowed," I said again. "In front of a thousand people. The thing that kills everyone bowed to me, and you want me to get in a car and go home and say I was rejected?"

He set the paper down.

"You want to know what happened in that pit?" He stood up. He was tall. Taller than he'd looked sitting down. "I'll tell you. I woke up in a cell with blood in my mouth and a headache that would drop a horse, and Arthur told me a girl walked out of the pit alive. That's it. That's everything I know. Now." He leaned on the table with both hands. "Do you want to be the girl who walked out of the pit? Because there's a line of men in this valley who'd pay to see what she's made of, and none of them are gentle."

I should've been scared. I was scared. But scared and stupid are cousins, and I was two coffees and one sleepless night past caring.

"You don't remember anything," I said.

"I just told you that."

"Nothing at all? Not the hall? Not the pit?"

His jaw moved. "Nothing."

"Then who put that scratch on your hand?"

He looked down. On the back of his right hand, four thin red lines, angry and fresh, like somebody had dug their nails in.

"It's a scratch," he said.

"It wasn't there at noon yesterday."

The room went quiet. Not the quiet of a big room. The other kind.

"Get out," he said.

"Look, I don't want to be here either—"

"Get out." He turned his back to me. "You leave before sunset. Six o'clock. If you're still on this property when the sun goes down, I'm not responsible for what happens."

"What happens when the sun goes down?"

"Be out of the house before it."

"Tell me why."

"Because I'm telling you to."

"That's not a—"

"Because I don't know!" He turned around. His eyes were still gray. His voice wasn't. "I don't know what happens. I know I wake up and there's blood and Arthur won't look at me for three days and the maids won't come up the west stair for a week. I know enough to get you out of this house. That's all I've got."

I stood there with my hands at my sides.

"Okay," I said.

He blinked. That okay hit him. I watched it land. He'd been braced for begging, same as Arthur had.

"Okay," he said back. Slower. Like he was testing the word. "Then we're done."

"One thing."

"What."

I put my chin up. "The girls who came before me. In the pit. Eight of them?"

"Nine."

"Nine." I hadn't known the number. I'd guessed. It turned out to be one too low and my stomach dropped. "Did they know? Before they went in. Did anybody tell them it was a death sentence, or did they get told the same thing you just told me?"

He didn't answer.

"Did you even know their names?"

"Get out of my hall," he said, very quietly, and walked away from me.

I got out of his hall.

They put me back in the tower room. I sat on the bed. The maid came with a tray, and I ate this time, because it turned out being scared made me hungry.

Around five I stood up and packed nothing, because I had nothing.

Around five-thirty the light outside the window started going gold.

I could see the road from up there. The wall at the ridge, the trees. A car came up the drive at a quarter to six and stopped in the courtyard, and I stood there and watched it and made myself feel bad about all of it.

Then the sun dropped behind the ridge.

And it got dark in that valley faster than anywhere I've ever been in my life.

I didn't go down. I want to be clear about that. I told myself there was no way I was walking through that castle in the dark and getting in a car with a driver who wouldn't look at me.

I told myself I was leaving in the morning. When it was light.

At six-forty I heard the sound.

It came up through the floor. Deep and long and wrong, and every hair on my body went up.

It wasn't a wolf's howl. I've heard wolves my whole life.

I walked to the door and put my hand on the handle.

Locked.

I tried it again. Pulled it. Put my shoulder into it.

"Hello?" My voice cracked. "Hey. Hey. Somebody. The door's locked. Somebody—"

The howl came again. Closer.

And then I heard the stairwell.

Something was coming up.

Chapter 6 Ends