Читать книгу Before Winter - Nancy Wallace K. - Страница 9

“You told me you knew a way into the tunnels,” Devin said, extending Lavender a piece of bread.

She nodded as she tore at the crust in her hand. “It is down the mossy steps. A whole town used to be there. It’s deserted now. No one has lived there in years.”

Devin wished there had been time to read Tirolien’s Chronicle. Surely, an entire deserted town would have found its way into the Chronicles at some point. He recalled the map they had found in the Bishop’s Book, which outlined the resettlement of people from towns in danger of being wiped out by the government. His nearly perfect recall brought the map to mind with all its details but he remembered no designation for a deserted town in the mountains above Calais.

“What was the town called?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” Lavender replied, fondling one of the wooden heads of her brothers. “It was very, very old.”

“It sounds too good to bypass,” Devin replied.

“We’re not on an archaeological expedition,” Marcus warned him. “We’ll investigate only if it will get us back to Arcadia sooner.”

Devin shifted so the back of his head was against the rock face behind him. The coolness of the stone soothed the dull ache that persisted. “Where do the tunnels go, Lavender?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know. We don’t like the dark.” She seemed to grow smaller when something frightened her; she scuttled backwards, nervously cradling the carved heads of all her brothers in her lap.

Devin tried to imagine what her life had been like, to have lived once as a child, in a household of wealth and affluence, and then spend the remaining decades as a wild thing that lived off the land and hid wherever she could find shelter. The parallels to Angelique’s life were uncanny but while he found Angelique both endearing and repelling at different times, Lavender merely seemed pathetic. How terrifying it must seem to be elderly with no prospect of anyone to care for you. If she died in these woods or even in the shelter of the cave, she would leave little alteration in the landscape: just a small bundle of bones in a few shreds of cloth.

Marcus arrived triumphantly. Surprisingly, in the short time he had been gone, he had caught two fish. He gutted them on a flat stone and fileted the meat, dividing it into three portions.

“Lavender claims to know a way into the tunnels,” Devin said quietly, as Marcus worked.

Marcus looked up, his knife poised in midair. “Can you show us the way?” he asked.

Lavender bit into a piece of fish, mashing its white flesh between her brownish gums. Devin found himself alternately disgusted and then sympathetic to her. “We’ll go down the mossy steps,” she repeated, gesturing somewhere over her shoulder.

“How far away are the mossy steps?” Marcus asked.

“We can reach them by tomorrow night,” she answered, reaching for another piece of fish.

Marcus glanced at Devin. “Is it hard walking?”

Lavender flicked a fly from her bare toe. “We will need to walk carefully. The woods can be cruel.”

The woods had obviously been cruel to Lavender, Devin thought. Life had been cruel to her just as it had been cruel to Angelique. One of them had a chance at redemption; whether it was too late for Lavender remained to be seen. He ran a hand over his eyes, hoping his blurred vision corrected itself soon. It left him feeling unsteady and nauseated. He slipped down and rested his head on his hand, letting Marcus’ questions and Lavender’s staccato answers be drowned out by the wind in the trees and the rush of the stream below them.

Chaotic dreams had the wooden heads speaking to him, one after another, hinting at terror and brutality that existed long before René Forneaux. Their jabber became constant. Each of them interrupted the other, their voices becoming louder and louder until Devin couldn’t separate them. Without Lavender to identify them, they might as well have been an angry mob intent on violence.

Devin tossed and turned, chased by terrifying shadows of the past and a clear image of his enemy in the present. The wooden head of the Captain of the Guard suddenly opened its mouth crying “Danger! Danger!” until it dislodged itself from the others on the rock ledge and rolled off down the ravine, its mouth screaming its alarm until it landed with a plop in the stream below. It bobbed along as the stream carried it and its garbled warning off toward Calais and the sea where it would be lost forever. The other heads watched in horror as it bobbed away on the current.

Devin wakened with a start. Lavender lay curled like a pile of rags, her father’s head in her hands. Marcus stared out at the woods below them, starlight tracing glistening ribbons in the water. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Devin hissed.

Marcus glanced at him. “I sleep better than you, apparently. What was all the excitement about?”

Devin shook his head. “Strange dreams. I wonder whether I’ll ever be rid of them.”

“Forneaux?” Marcus asked.

“And his ilk,” Devin said quietly. “If Lavender’s home was burned and this town she’s taking us to was destroyed, obviously, there have been evil men at work in these mountains who lived long before René Forneaux.”

Marcus stretched out his right leg, the barrel of his pistol glinting for a moment before he came to rest. “There have always been evil men, Devin.”

“There’s something else, though,” Devin said. “Don’t you feel it? Lavender must have lost her home fifty years ago, at least. Forneaux couldn’t have had anything to do with that.”

“I’m not certain you can believe anything she says,” Marcus replied. “She thinks she is the Lavender from the Chronicles and that she had a white pony.”

“Perhaps she did have a white pony,” Devin countered. “She may also have been named for the legendary Lavender and now she confuses the two in her head.”

“Those damn heads give me the creeps!” Marcus said with a shudder. “And she’d better not expect me to carry them for her. There must at least forty of them!”

Devin suppressed a laugh. “If my dreams have any element of truth, there are now thirty-nine. The Captain of the Guard is no longer with us.”

“What?” Marcus asked, giving him a strange look. “Go back to sleep. You’re as crazy as she is.”

“I’ll explain in the morning,” Devin assured him.