Читать книгу Hidden Warrior - Lynn Flewelling - Страница 17

Arkoniel stretched the stiffness from his shoulders and went to the workroom window. Unfolding the letters Koni had brought that morning, he slowly reread them.

Outside, the afternoon was quickly waning. The tower shadow stretched like a crooked finger across the new snow blanketing the meadow. Except for the churned-up trail left by Koni’s horse, it was smooth and white as a new bed sheet: no snow forts beyond the barracks house, no foot trails snaking away to the river or woods.

And no echoing laughter outside his door, Arkoniel thought glumly. He’d never been lonelier. Only Nari and Cook remained now; the three of them rattled about the place like dice in a cup.

He sighed and turned back to the letters. His presence here remained a secret, so they were ostensibly addressed to Nari. Arkoniel smoothed the first parchment against the windowsill, rubbing his thumb idly over the broken seal. Both boys had written to him of Orun’s death. Iya had sent word earlier, but he was most interested in their versions.

Tobin’s was brief: Orun had had some sort of fit, brought on by bad news. Ki’s was the more useful, though he’d not been with Tobin when it happened. Arkoniel smiled as he unfolded the double sheet. Despite Ki’s initial resistance to writing, and a less-than-beautiful hand, words seemed to flow as easily from the boy’s pen as they did from his lips. His letters were always the more detailed. He told of the bruises on Tobin’s neck and the fact that he’d been carried home unconscious. Strangest of all, he’d closed with the line: Tobin still feels awful bad about it. Iya had made no mention of any regrets in her letter, but Arkoniel guessed that this was no idle platitude. Ki knew Tobin better than anyone, and had shared his friend’s loathing for their guardian. Why would Tobin feel badly about the man’s passing?

Arkoniel folded Tobin’s letter into his sleeve to return to Nari, but added Ki’s to the neat stack on his writing table.

I nearly killed him, but I did not, he reminded himself, as he did each time he placed a new letter on that pile. He wasn’t sure why he kept them, perhaps as proof against the nightmares that still haunted him, dreams in which he did not hesitate and Ki did not wake up ever again.

Arkoniel pushed the memory away and glanced at the window to check the sun’s progress. Yesterday he’d stayed too late.

When he’d first come here, the keep had been a tomb haunted by both the living and the dead. He and Iya had cajoled the duke into restoring it to a proper home for his child, and for a time it had been. It had become Arkoniel’s home, too, the first he’d known since leaving his father’s house.

The place was falling back to rot and ruin now. The new tapestries and painted plaster already looked faded. The plate in the hall was tarnished with disuse, and spiders had reclaimed their kingdom in the rafters of the great hall. Without regular fires in most of the rooms, the whole place was once more damp and cold and dim. It was as if the boys had taken the very life from the place with them.

He turned back to the desk with a sigh to complete the day’s notes. When the journal was safely locked away, he cleared up the wreckage of his latest failed efforts.

He was nearly finished when something brushed softly past the door, no louder than a mouse’s whisker. Arkoniel caught his breath. The glass rod he’d been cleaning slipped from his fingers and shattered at his feet.

Just a rat. It’s too early. Golden light still lingered in the eastern sky. She never comes down this early.

Gooseflesh prickled his arms as he lit a candle and walked slowly to the door. His hand trembled and a rivulet of hot wax ran down over his fingers.

Nothing there. Nothing there, he repeated, like a child in the dark.

As long as Tobin and the others had been downstairs, he’d managed to hold his fear at bay, even when Bisir’s unexpected stay had trapped him up here for days on end. With others in the house, he didn’t mind so much the half-heard whispers in the corridor.

Now that the second floor lay empty, however, his rooms were suddenly much too far from Cook’s warm kitchen and much too close to the tower door. That door had been locked since Ariani’s death, but that didn’t stop her restless spirit from wandering out.

Arkoniel had climbed the tower stairs only twice since his first encounter with her angry ghost. Driven by curiosity and guilt, he’d gone up the day after Tobin left for Ero that first time, but felt nothing. Relieved but unsatisfied, he’d worked up the courage to return at midnight—the same hour Tobin had taken him there—and this time he’d heard Ariani weeping as clearly as if she were just behind him. Torn between fear and anguish, he fled and slept in the kitchen with the tower key clutched in his hand like a talisman. The next morning he threw it in the river and moved his bedchamber to the toy room downstairs. He would have shifted his workroom, too, but the furnishings were too heavy and it would have taken him the rest of the winter to carry down all the books and instruments he’d amassed. Instead, he resigned himself to keeping daylight hours.

But today he’d lingered in the workroom too long. Taking a deep breath, Arkoniel gripped the latch and opened the door.

Ariani stood at the end of the corridor, tears streaming down her bloody face, her lips moving. Frozen in the doorway, Arkoniel strained to hear, but she made no sound. She’d attacked him the first time they met after her death, but still he waited, wanting desperately to hear her words, to give some answer. But then she took a step toward him, face shifting to an angry mask, and his courage failed.

The candle cast antic shadows around him as he bolted, then it went out. Squinting in the sudden darkness, he went down the stairs two at a time and missed his footing before his eyes could adjust. He trod air for an instant, then fell heavily, tumbling down the last few steps into the welcome lamplight of the second floor corridor. Resisting the impulse to look back, he limped quickly toward the stairs to the hall.

One of these days he was going to make a ghost of himself.