Pine and Blood

Chapter 17

The hair was still in my hand when the door opened.

He didn't knock. He came in with a tray in one hand and a book under his arm and he stopped two steps inside the room when he saw me sitting up.

"You're awake," he said.

"What time is it?"

"Almost noon."

I'd been asleep for twelve hours.

He set the tray down on the table. Bread, broth, a little pot of honey. Then he put the book down next to it and pulled the chair over and sat down like he planned to stay a while.

I put my hand under the blanket.

"Eat something," he said.

"What happened last night?"

"You tell me. I got a report from the gate at midnight saying you walked out of it."

"I walked out of it because nobody stopped me." I sat up straighter. "Three of your men tried to kill me on the ridge road."

His face didn't change. That was how I knew he already knew.

"Two of them are in the cells," he said. "The third one's dead."

"Dead how?"

"The report says he fell."

"The report's lying."

"The report is what I'm going to show the Council." He picked up the bread and held it out to me. "Eat."

I took the bread because my hands were shaking and I needed something to do with them.

"The one in front had a rope," I said. "He wasn't gonna stab me. He was gonna hang me or drag me. It had to look like rogues."

"I know what it had to look like." He said it quietly. "I read the letter too. You left it in your apron pocket and your apron's in the wash and Doreen brought me the letter at five this morning with a face like a funeral."

I stopped chewing.

"So you know about the fourteenth," I said.

"I know about the fourteenth."

"And Karl."

"I know about Karl."

"And the twenty minutes of nothing on the west stair."

"I know about that too." He rubbed his jaw. "The guard's been reassigned. He's on the wall now, and he'll be on the wall until he's an old man, and he's lucky I didn't do worse."

I set the bread down.

"There's something wrong with your arm," I said.

He looked at his left arm. The sleeve was rolled to the elbow and there was a bandage wrapped around his forearm, white and neat, with a little dark spot coming through the middle of it.

"It's nothing."

"You're holding it like it hurts."

"It's a scratch."

"Show me."

"No."

"Lucifer."

"No." He pulled the sleeve down over the bandage. "Eat your breakfast and then get dressed. We've got four days and a Council and a dead man in my cells and I don't have time to show you my arm."

He got up.

"Where were you last night?" I said.

He stopped at the door.

"Here," he said.

"All night?"

"All night."

I sat there and looked at his back.

"Because I woke up in this bed with my hands clean and my shoes lined up and a bandage on my palm that I didn't put there," I said, "and the door was shut and I didn't hear anybody come in and I want to know who did that."

He didn't turn around.

"Doreen," he said. "I sent her up at six."

"Doreen would've had to get past you."

"She did. I was asleep."

"You told me you don't sleep."

"Then I was awake and I let her pass." His hand was on the doorframe and he was gripping it hard enough that the knuckles had gone white. "Ella, I don't remember last night. I remember going to bed and I remember Doreen knocking on my door at six with your apron in her hand and I don't remember anything between."

The room got very quiet.

I thought about the road. The Beast coming out of the trees. The feel of its nose against my shoulder.

I thought about how I got from that road to this bed and how nobody had told me.

"You don't remember," I said.

"No."

"At all."

"Not one second." He turned around. His face was gray again, that same gray from the study. "It's the curse. It's been like this since I was seventeen and it's never been this bad and I don't know what's changing."

I sat there.

Then I leaned over and picked my coat up off the chair and pulled it into my lap. It had been brushed clean. The mud was gone off the hem.

I turned the collar over.

There was a smear on it. Dark. Small, right at the edge of the collar where a hand would grab.

Not mud.

I held it up.

"Come here," I said.

"Ella."

"Come here and look at this."

He came across the room. He took the coat out of my hands and turned it over in the light, and I watched him find the smear, and I watched him go still.

"That's blood," I said.

"That's blood."

"Mud comes off with a brush. Blood doesn't. Not all the way." I held his eyes. "Whoever cleaned my coat didn't know that."

He didn't say anything.

"Lucifer. I smelled it when I woke up." I put my hand flat on the blanket. "Pine and blood. It's all over this room. It's on the pillow and it's on the blanket and it's on my coat. I woke up in a bed that smells like the inside of a forest and the inside of a wound and nobody in this castle is gonna tell me why."

His jaw moved.

"I can't tell you what I don't know," he said.

"Then tell me what you do know. What did the men in the cells say? What's their story? Did they say who paid them?"

He opened his mouth.

Then he closed it.

"Lucifer."

"They're not talking," he said. "Both of them are unconscious. The doctor's got them on a drip and I've got two guards on the door and neither one of them has opened their eyes since they came in."

"So somebody shut them up."

"Or the Beast hit them too hard." He said it and then he flinched. Actually flinched, like the word had come out wrong. "That's what the report says. That's what everybody's going to say."

I sat there.

"You're lying," I said.

"I'm not lying."

"You're doing the thing where you say something true and leave off the part that matters."

He set my coat down on the chair.

"Here's what matters," he said. "Somebody in this castle wrote a letter to your sister telling her to kill you before the fourteenth. Somebody paid three of my own men to take you off that road. Somebody's been cutting keys and lighting fires and leaving my mother's hairbrush in drawers." He looked at me. "And last night I woke up in my own bed with blood under my fingernails and no idea how it got there."

The fire cracked.

"And you think it was you," I said.

He didn't answer.

"Lucifer. The thing on the road killed two men and didn't touch me. If it was you—"

"It's not me." His voice was flat. Dead. "The Beast is the curse. The curse is a thing that happens to me. It's not me."

He picked up the tray and turned toward the door and the light from the window hit his arm and I saw it.

The bandage on his forearm. It had slipped down when he reached for the tray.

Underneath it, the dark spot had spread.

And the skin around the edge of the bandage wasn't torn.

It was scorched. Black at the edges, curling, like something had burned it from the inside out.

I didn't say anything. He caught me looking and pulled the sleeve down and got out of the room so fast the door swung on its hinge.

I sat there in a bed that smelled like pine and blood.

Then I picked the hair up off the pillow and put it in the drawer next to his mother's brush and closed it.

Chapter 17 Ends