“I’ve been hoping someone would come,” she whispered. “It’s gone on for far too long. He’s up there right now. I won’t call the guards. I’ll keep playing and hide the noise. Just please get her out.”
I watched Griselda closely. “Who are you talking about?”
Her face fell. She turned back to the piano, riffled through a pile of sheet music. “I have to start playing again,” she said quickly, “or else he’ll come yell at me.”
I grabbed her thin wrist with one hand and clamped my other over her mouth, holding her tightly enough to hurt.
“When I let go,” I said quietly, “you’ll tell me what’s happening here, and you’ll do it fast, or I’ll break your wrists so you can’t play at all. Do you understand?”
She nodded, and when I released her, she wasted no time. “They keep Lily in the room at the top of the stairs,” she whispered frantically. “I don’t know why. She’s just some farmer’s daughter. Mama brought her to us months ago, right when the Knotwood started growing. And Papa put her up in the room, and he left Eldric in charge of her. He goes to her often, and when he does, I’m to play down here until he’s had his fill of her and leaves.”
She drew in a shuddering breath. “I’m to play as loud as I can so no one will hear her. Eldric doesn’t want to upset our staff. And he hates me,” she added, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “He always has. He likes to terrify me.Mouse, he calls me. If I don’t do this, he’ll punish me, and he likes few things more than that.” Her mouth trembled. “So you see, I have to do this.” She selected a piece of music with shaking fingers.
My mouth tasted sour with fury. “Is it just the two of them up there? Eldric and Lily?”
Griselda nodded.
“No guards?”
She shook her head.
“And the stairs are the only way in or out?”
She nodded again. Tears plopped onto her fingers.
I gritted my teeth and placed a gentle hand on Griselda’s shoulder. This single kindness was all I could offer her, and even my light touch made her flinch. A moment later, she was playing again, her fingers crashing onto the keys with such vigor that I could barely hear myself think.
I hurried back to Gareth. “Did you hear all of that?”
“I wish I hadn’t,” he said, his voice hard and angry. He glanced up the stairs. “Do you think this Lily is unaware of her true nature?”
“Yes, like Mother was, and Yvaine too.” I quickly looked around the room one more time, but no guards burst in, and Griselda was completely immersed in her own frenzied performance. The ceiling’s canopy of vines suddenly seemed ominous. “We’ll have to act fast, before Eldric can use his magic against us.”
Gareth glanced up at the vines. “Yes, if we can avoid it, I’d prefer not to be strangled by greenery today.”
I hurried to the stairs and climbed them, Gareth on my heels. At the top, I turned back to scan the room, but we were still alone with Griselda.
I tried the door, but it was locked, and as I stepped back to kick it open, a woman’s scream rang out from inside the room. The music cloaked it, but not well enough. Gareth flinched and held the torch higher. Griselda faltered at her piano, the music breaking off for an instant before resuming, louder and sharper than before.
My body lit up with rage. Whether that was Neave in there or truly just a farmer’s daughter named Lily, this demented arrangement had gone on long enough.
I kicked down the door and sent it flying across the room, where it crashed through a window and sailed out into the night. A young man scrambled out of a canopy bed: Eldric Lemaire. He had icy-blond hair that fell in waves to his shoulders, and he wore a loose white tunic and rumpled trousers of fine gold brocade. He was sweaty, wild-eyed. His mad gaze darted to the shattered window, which was framed by quivering vines. The wholeroomteemed with greenery; hundreds of vines, maybe even thousands, stretched across the ceiling. The walls were thick with them. And in this house, vines might as well have been swords.
I tore across the room and rammed Eldric in the chest with my shoulder. The impact cracked his ribs and left him crumpled against the wall, gasping for breath.
I went to the bed at once, where a woman who looked to be about my age lay curled up in a mess of silk sheets. She wore a white nightgown, and she stared at nothing, her eyes puffy and red. Her pale skin was a tapestry of cuts and scars, and the blood glistening at each wound was both red and gold. Red, the blood of her human host; gold, the blood of her true godly self.
For a brief moment, it felt like all the breath left my body.
Mother had been right.
Neave.
I knew it was her as surely as I felt the floor under my feet. All of my senses whirled in alarmed recognition. This was Neave, in the body of a farmer’s daughter named Lily, who might not even know what—who—she carried inside her.
“Mara,” Gareth said sharply, a warning in his voice. At the same moment, a bolt of magic shot through the room, raising all the hairs on my arms.
I whirled around. Eldric, huddled against the wall and cradling his ribs, had summoned the vines. They moved fast, slithering like snakes. Some of them came for me, others for Gareth. And still others wentstraight for Eldric, wrapping him in a hissing green cocoon several layers thick. Not even I would be able to get Neave and Gareth to safetyandgive this disgusting worm of a man the grisly fate he deserved. Not before the vines consumed us.
