“Ai tog, Francesca. Don’t ever apologise for being scared, my baby. If your chest went tight, there was a reason for it. You trusted yourself; that’s good. I’m proud of you.”
She ushers me towards my bed, and the castle is eerily silent at this hour. I watch her hands smooth the sheets in the same way she’s been doing since childhood. I let her fuss with the pillows and pull the duvet up to my chin, where she flicks it and then kisses the crown of my head.
Tonight, I’m sleeping in the castle because it’s expected of me. Uncle claims it’s safe now, that the locket is an object again and the events that led it to me are logical once more.Iask myself, how could he forget that logic unravels on our soil? Maybe if it werejustthe locket, I could believe him, yet when tested against the weight of Tommy’s absence and the unsettling feeling of being watched, I’m unable to swallow the neat explanation.
Once, I could feel her everywhere; now, when she does reappear, she feels thinner somehow, her presence weakened. I fidget with her bracelet around my wrist, thinking of all the men on Redford and how they walk through ghosts as though they’re mist. Even Pascoe and Philip, part of Gran’s circle, remain oblivious to their presence. Never do they feel; never do they notice the apparitions watching them from the shadows.
But Eric does.
His sensitivity to this place makes the skin at my throat itch. Maybe it’s something in his blood. Godwyn’s blood. Logic says prank; my nerves say something way older is jump-roping with my senses again. Eric’s observation keeps circling back, that Cillian wasn’t just a butler but a brother. Something fundamental shifts in the foundation of our history the more I repeat it.
What did Godwyn ask of his brother that night? What could he have entrusted to hisheiron the heels of unmaking a duchess?
I’ve been searching for answers in the wrong places. Loyalty, as Gran warned, is dangerous because of its intangibility. Of course I couldn’t find Cillian. Loyalty leaves no residue from which to follow. Blood, though, that stains. Cillian wasn’t just loyal to Godwyn; hewashim.
His brother. His heir. His right-hand man.
There are too many gaps left in the story, and, perhaps foolishly, I’d hoped Nanna could fill them. That her journals could provide a foundation upon which to build, at the very least.
Not sure when she’ll be ready for a discussion like that, though. Could be days. Months, even. Time I don’t have. The blankets become bandages as I struggle to move against their grip. My lungs tighten; I kick off the duvet and drag myself to the window.
With alift and push, it unlatches and gets thrown open so I can greedily take in the icy night air. The lamplight throws a pale glow across the gravel, and I catch something unseen disturbing the stone, right where Philip delivered the princes. It’s the imprints of footsteps, gravel caving under invisible weight. No body to cast a shadow, nor anything to claim shape. They stop below my window, two small ovals pointed squarely at me.
I see no face, yet feel Tommy’s gaze all the same. Half habit, I reach for the bracelet as a summoning bell, hoping to call her without having to scream into the night. My fingers close around nothing. Ice-cold skin, no linen, no silver. I look down in confusion, checking the windowsill and then tearing my blankets apart.
“It was here a minute ago,” I mutter to myself.
Tossing my head back to let out a screech of frustration, something glints in the corner of my eye.Up, not down. The bracelet is looped around the curtain’s finial; theBarbieI bought Tommy suspended beneath it, dropped from the makeshift noose. Wide blue eyes stare down at me, full and pink plastic lips parted in a bleached smile. The mildew creeps in faintly, and I inhale once, twice, desperate to get even a word in with my little shadow before she vanishes.I drag my vanity chair to the window and reach up for the doll, but the second I touch it, the world rips wide open.
Ink slithers into my vision, and everything goes dark as I slip into a nightmare with my eyes wide open. A thousand mouths split open in my ears, moaning in a chorus until they become one long cry. I’m trapped in a tunnel of ribs as I stumble forward,tripping over dead skin, blood gurgling down walls of bone. On my hands and knees, I gawk down at a floor made of what looks like ground beef.
All around me, disfigured bodies gnash their teeth, and through the sea of horror, I see her—a red-haired girl, skin shredded and rotted, eyes too wide. She runs while glancing back at me, and my vision distorts into fisheye, her little face warped, a silent scream tearing her mouth wide until it cracks at the sides.
She’s screaming at me, “Chess!”
Thomasin. That certainty stabs me through the chest. “Tommy!” I call back, foot sinking into a hollow body as I force myself to run.
The cage of ribs buckles, stretches longer; Tommy holds her arm out, but the distance is too much. I push harder, close enough to where I can see the shape of her bones beneath the frock.
No, she mouths,stay back.
I’m almost there when the corridor tilts sideways and I slide down the pipe of it into a chamber made of rotting meat. Massive braziers line the sides, iron cages above them, stuffed full of screaming spirits. A man rises from the left, stalks towards Tommy and takes her by the throat. The paintings in the undercroft are too kind; those oils lied, for the Godwyn I see before me isn’t a nobleman with a sharp jaw and kind blue eyes. He’s not the handsome man from Cillian’s memory.
Here he’s a skeleton with meat pasted back on without a care for anatomical accuracy.
He doesn’t squeeze; he just holds that little girl’s neck in his hand whilst her feet kick at air until she realises she belongs to him. I’m running and running but never getting there, crying out her name. There’s a massive furnace at the head of the room, flames reaching towards them.
No, no, no—she’s too little. She’s just a baby, and I’m not moving fast enough. I wail as Godwyn throws her underhand, and the iron circle swallows her. Fat spits. The ghosts in their cages hammer their own bones against metal, and her childlike scream tunnels up through the floor until the fire deadens it.
Godwyn turns first to the cages, and the room rights itself to accommodate him. “Down.”
They quiet instantly, backtracking into piles like injured dogs. I freeze when he finally shifts, attention landing on me. Up close, he’s even uglier.
“Thy dead are loyal, I do confess it,” he says conversationally. “But hear me, Duchess-heir, thy test is thine alone. Each time a shade warns thee, I lay my hand upon it and cast it into the fire. When death re-knits them—as it must in this cursed place—I burn them anew. I shall do so as oft as thou call for help from thy dead.”
My voice burns my throat, and I subtly move to pinch the skin of my arm. Nothing happens. “What is this place?”
Shit, is this hell? Am I in hell?
