Of Midnight Born (11 page)

Stuffing peas up a boy’s nose suddenly seemed a petty thing to do, much more shameful for her than for poor Dickie, stumbling around with his green-plugged nostrils. For a moment she got a glimpse of how Woding must perceive her—not as a force to be reckoned with, as she had intended, but rather as a spiteful child.

He had dreamed of her as a beautiful woman. He guessed, or knew, that she was tall, with long, pale hair. He must not have seen her face in his dream.

She drifted backward, half disappearing into the stonework of the fireplace as she thought on his words, her mind trying to encompass this shift.

He claimed he wanted to know her.

Had anyone ever wanted to know her?

The night of stargazing was long, but peaceful. Alex could still feel Serena close by, and could still catch glimpses of her from the corner of his eye, but there were no disturbances as there had been at dinner. She did not play with his pen, did not blow on his hair, and did not make thumping noises. She was as well behaved as he could expect. Better, really.

He hadn’t known if his ploy would work, but apparently it had, at least well enough to keep her quiet for a few hours. Serena had shown him that force or insults from him only led to grand, violent retribution from her. While chewing his lamb stew he had accepted that he was basically powerless when it came to the ghost. She could do whatever she wished, and he had no way to stop her.

And yet he had not grown up in a house of women without learning a few things. His sisters, even as children, had been able to wrap his father around their dainty little fingers, obtaining whatever they wished with an adoring look, a bit of flattery, and an astonishing aptitude for creating practical reasons where no such reasons actually existed.

The lessons had served him well. He might not be a fearsome warrior, but warriors did not rule the land. Warriors got their limbs chopped off and died on battlefields. A warrior was but a pawn to those wily enough to rule.

He leaned on the parapet, watching the deep blue sky catch the first hints of sunrise to the east. Demands had not worked with Serena, but it was looking as if flattery might. He caught pale movement from the corner of his eye. She
appeared to be pacing back and forth, parapet to parapet, right through the end of his reclining chair.

It had been somewhat of a lie he had told her. Part of him did not want to know who she was, as her visits to his dreams were unsettling, and she had done nothing to make him think her company would improve upon further acquaintance. She was, quite literally, the stuff of which nightmares were made.

On the other hand, what man of either science or philosophy would not seize the chance to speak with the dead? There were so many questions she could answer, so many things she could explain, if she chose to communicate. And besides that matter, he actually did feel curiosity about who she was personally, and wanted to know if the eerily erotic woman in the dreams was her.

The eastern sky was turning a vivid pink as the sun crept toward the horizon. A breeze ruffled his hair.

If Serena chose to talk, he would learn the answers to questions of life and eternity that man had asked since first he walked the earth.

He would also have to accept the possibility that he had gone stark, raving mad.

Serena followed Woding down to his bedroom, still undecided about what she would do. His words had the distinct odor of manipulation, and yet she found herself tempted by them.

Wily devil.

What would it hurt, to talk a bit with the man?

It would hurt the cherry tree, true enough, to use its energy to create a voice he could hear. The expenditure would be less than that of moving objects or making great, thudding noises, though. Maybe if he knew her, he would understand why she needed him to leave.

She scratched that thought. Whatever Woding’s ways, he was still a man. He would do as he wished, regardless of her desires.

But to spend even as little as an hour in conversation with another person, as if she, too, were real…The thought made her heart ache with such longing, she doubted she could survive if she rejected it. She doubted she could survive stopping if she acted on it.

She could instead fade into oblivion, and wait there until Woding had left the castle, as he eventually would. If he didn’t move out, he would at least die of old age. But then the chance would be lost completely, perhaps never to come again, or the cherry would die in the interim, making waiting him out pointless.

Her fretting distracted her until she saw that he was heading for his bathroom. She made to follow, but then he stopped in the doorway, turning to look over his shoulder toward her.

“Serena,” Woding said. “Would you do me the great kindness of waiting here while I bathe?”

She stood in her tracks, her face flaming, as he shut the door behind him.

Damn Woding.
He had already taken away the pleasure of spying on him in his bath, and she had not even agreed to speak with him yet.

Serena went to sit on his bed and wait, nervous as a bride. She listened to the running of water, and then the splashes as he bathed. She felt as if some of her power in their encounters was already slipping away.

He was a wily, sly creature. Even as she felt the first ebb in her determination to be rid of him, felt the faint shift in the tide against her, she was unable to crush the desire to hear him speak to her again.

He came back in, wrapped in a dressing gown, a nightshirt visible at the neckline. Was she not even to have a
glimpse of his bare shoulder while he slept? This was too cruel.

“Thank you,” he said, looking briefly toward her, then turning away.

She stood up, her hands clasped tightly before her, watching as he moved about the room. He went to the windows first, pulling shut the curtains against the morning light, sending the room into twilight. The half-dark soothed her somewhat, making her feel less visible to him, although she knew the thought was ridiculous. His seeing of her, however strong it was, likely had nothing to do with light.

He came back to the center of the room, then stopped. “Do you wish to speak now?” he asked.

No.

Yes.

She did not know. She wanted him to keep talking, and then perhaps later she would have the courage to join in.

He listened, his head cocked to the side. “I suppose I shall have to take that as a no.” He took off his dressing gown and got into bed, the mattress sighing as his weight pushed out the air amid the feathers. He pulled at his nightshirt as it twisted around him.

She sat at the corner of the foot of the bed and leaned against the post, trying to calm herself. She would have liked to see him propped up by pillows, comfortable and ready to entertain her, rather than lying on his side, hunched up and stiff, pulling occasionally at his recalcitrant nightshirt.

The quiet lengthened, and it became apparent that he would not break it. But he didn’t pull shut the bed curtains, either. He did not look like one ready for sleep, but neither did he look like one who was going to break into the long tale of his boyhood and coming-of-age for her amusement.

Odious man.
Why didn’t he make this easy for her?

Why didn’t he look at her and ask her questions?

His eyelids lowered to half-mast.

Alex,
she said, on a breath as soft as the beating of a moth’s wings.

His eyelids closed.

Alex,
she said more loudly, a wren’s wing beat of air.

No response.

“Alex!” she said, and this time her voice was a swan taking flight. She heard it vibrating through the air, reflecting off the walls and floor. It was a much different sound from the snow-forest muffling she usually heard when she spoke, in the plane of the dead.

His eyes came wide open, and he sprang to a sitting position, up against the headboard. “Hello, what?”

“Alex,” she said again, and her voice settled into the right range, a pheasant or a hawk, clearly heard but not overloud. “Did you have a pleasant bath?”

He looked slightly away from her, as if watching from the corner of his eye. “What?”

“Did you have a pleasant bath?” she repeated carefully. She had grown used to listening to the modern way of speech, but her own words formed themselves as they always had, her vowels stretching and shaping in a manner that must sound foreign to him.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, his eyes still wide.

“That is good.” She sat in silence, trying to think of something else to say. Everything that came to mind seemed inane, although perhaps no more so than breaking centuries of silence with an inquiry about a man’s bath.

“Are you Serena?” Woding asked, perfectly motionless, as if moving might bring her down upon him.

“I am Serena Clerenbold,” she confirmed slowly, enunciating each syllable with pride. She felt her eyes sting, to say her full name, and hear it echo in the air. “I am the fourth child of the warrior Robert Clerenbold, and his only daughter.
I had four brothers, each of whom were as gifted with the sword as my father, and only one of whom survived the Great Mortality.”

“The Great Mortality? Do you mean the Black Death?”

“The Pestilence,” she said, her mind going instantly back to those dark days. How could speaking of it have the power to carry her there so swiftly? “It destroyed without favor. My family. Our peasants. The sheep, cattle, chickens, even the dogs lay dead in the fields, black and corrupted. The scavengers themselves would not touch the corpses, so foul and reeking of evil they were.”

“But you survived it?”

“Aye, I survived. And Thomas, my younger brother. We were all that was left.”

“What happened to you? Why do you haunt the castle?”

“I was murdered!” she said, speaking loudly again. “Murdered by that filthy brute le Gayne. The lying, thieving, stinking bastard, may he rot in hell.”

“The legend says that you killed him.”

“Lies!” she exclaimed, and crawled across the bed to him. A muscle in his face twitched. “Do you see me?” she asked, leaning close.

“Barely.”

“Do you see my face?”

“I cannot distinguish it.”

She sat back on her heels, relieved on that score. “Le Gayne murdered me upon our wedding night, and stole our lands from my brother, who was foolish enough to believe such a trickster’s words.”

“Is that why you became a ghost, because you were murdered?”

She did not answer.

“Serena?” he said.

“I do not know,” she at last replied.

“Isn’t there something you want, like justice or revenge? Or maybe that the truth be known? There must be some reason you haunt this castle.”

“I do not know! All I know is that I want to be alone again. This is my home, and you have invaded it. I want you to go, you and all the rest.”

He leaned forward and reached behind himself to rearrange the pillows, making a comfortable support for sitting up. He straightened the blankets and coverlet, then leaned back and looked toward her.

“Why did le Gayne kill you?”

“I do not wish to speak of it.”

He was quiet a moment. She could see that he was thinking of what next to say. The startled look had gone from his eyes, although she thought his relaxed pose was a lie.

“What became of Thomas?” he asked at last.

She sighed and moved back to her place at the foot of the bed, leaning against the post. “Thomas went to fight under the Black Prince,” she said. “He came home four years later, and was told that I had run off to join a nunnery, but that I had died on the road and been buried in an unmarked grave. Le Gayne invited him to spend the night, which he did, not yet knowing that le Gayne had stolen all his land while he was gone.”

Alex listened, astonished by what was happening here within the confines of his bed, and as Serena spoke he began to realize that he could see her, faintly, in the center of his vision. The more she talked, the clearer she became. On impulse he reached over to the bed curtains, pulling them shut. Her image grew clearer in the darkness, glowing faintly in contrast.

She was transparent, and her colors palely luminous, yet he could see that she was the same woman as in his dreams, with the same strangely beautiful face. She sat leaning
against the bedpost, her long, tangled hair draping her shoulders and coiling on the coverlet.

“I woke Thomas in the night,” she was saying. “I showed myself to him, and told him I had been murdered the very night he had ridden off to war. I bade him to flee, and come back with an army to wreak his vengeance, but he would not wait. He set fire to the castle that very night. When le Gayne came running out from the fire, Thomas handed him a sword and offered to fight to the death, to right the wrong that had been done.

“Thomas killed le Gayne for me, but not before himself receiving a wound that shortly proved his own mortality. I saw him fall, and be hacked to bits by le Gayne’s men-at-arms, the castle burning down around them, casting a bloody glow upon it all.”

“Good God,” Alex said, appalled. He saw that she was looking at her hands, lying palms-up in her lap. Then she raised her gaze, looking at him, her irises black as night.

“He was dead before they put the first blade to him. I saw him standing beside me, looking down on his body. He turned to me and smiled, taking my face in his hands. He kissed me once, with such gentleness as I had never known from him. And then he was gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “So that is how I know it is not vengeance that keeps me here, or a search for justice. I have had that.”

“Why did you stay on the mountaintop, while your brother was able to leave?”

“I do not know.”

“
Where
did he go?”

“I do not know!”

“You must have some idea,” he said.

“No more than you, or any other.”

“But you’re dead!” he said, exasperated. “How can you not know what happens when someone dies?”

“Do you know where your soul came from?” she asked.

“What? No—”

“How can you not know that, and yet live?”

He opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. She had him there. “Will you remain a ghost forever?” he asked, expecting the same answer she’d been giving to every other question: “I don’t know.”

“Why are you not married, Woding?” she asked instead. “You are well past the age when you should have been.”

“I was once,” he said. Her change of topic had caught him off guard.

“What happened?”

“You are avoiding my question,” he accused.

“She must have died. Did you love her?”

“I am not going to talk about Frances with you.”

“You would have me tell you of my life. Why can I not hear of yours?”

“Why do you not show yourself, instead of coming as a voice out of the darkness?” he challenged back, knowing she was unaware he could see her quite as well as he did. “Why do you hide? What are you afraid I’ll see?”