The Bell at Sealey Head

Nineteen

When Ysabo went to feed the crows that morning, she found the tower door locked.

She stared at the unmovable iron latch in her hand. She wrenched at it frantically a few times; the door, thick wood bound in iron, did not even rattle in its frame. She could hear the crows gathering on top of the tower behind the door, their faint, harsh cries, as though they were calling for her.

Terror weltered through her, turning her fingers icy; she nearly lost her grip on the scrap bowl. In all her life, the door to the tower stairs had never been locked. She had no idea where to find a key.

She had no idea whom to tell.

Maeve? Aveline? They were sitting tranquilly in Maeve’s chambers, shortening the dress for Ysabo’s wedding. When the moon was full. Whenever that was. To a man whose name she was not exactly sure she knew. Who barely spoke to her. With whom she was expected to beget a child.

Who could feed the crows every morning for the rest of her life.

A cold tear rolled down her cheek, dropped into the scrap bowl. She looked down at it, the shreds and bones of last night’s supper, bloody bits of meat, wilting salads, torn bread smeared with drippings and butter, fruit with the mark of someone’s teeth in it. She was trembling, frightened nearly witless by the broken ritual, the disastrous unknown looming in her life if she did not feed the crows.

Deep in her, a thought surfaced, colder than the terror riming her bones.

Somebody had locked the door. So she couldn’t feed the crows the unappealing leftovers of people’s suppers. They probably wouldn’t drop dead, if she didn’t feed them. They probably wouldn’t eat her instead. And even if they did, it was likely better than to be married to a knight whose heart, from what she could tell, was colder than her terror, and so tangled in the web of ritual he didn’t have a thought in his head that hadn’t been shaped by it.

Still shaking, she put the bowl down very quietly on the floor. The crows could find an open window if they were truly hungry. Anyway, they were birds. There was a great wood all around them. They wouldn’t starve.

They’d think of something.

She turned stiffly, her steps as nearly soundless as she could make them as she walked away from the scrap bowl into the unknown.

The door didn’t slam suddenly open behind her; the crows didn’t pursue her. She went down and around, down and around, making her way through empty walkways and inner halls, past the great hall with its noisy, clamoring, thoughtless knights. She couldn’t go back to Maeve and Aveline, not sit there quietly and embroider, not hiding such a monstrous deed from them while they hemmed her wedding dress.

Why should she marry this knight? She didn’t want to. Why not be condemned for two failed deeds as well as one? Or for three? Or five?

What if she didn’t lock this door, unlock that, light this candle, leave the sword across the chair? What if she did everything backward, and at the wrong time?

So what if the roof fell in?

She felt another tear roll down her face, warmer this time. Grief was mingling with fear now, kindled by the loss of the only life she knew. It burned her throat, her heart. What if she destroyed her world?

What if she didn’t?

She ignored the doors, the candles. She would leave the ancient sword in its scabbard. Let someone else take it out if it were truly needed. If not, let it gather dust. She went down, hours too early, as deeply as she could go, to the subterranean chambers where the water, if nothing else in the entire place, could at least find its way in and out of the house.

And so will I, she thought suddenly, fiercely. So will I.

She yielded to one point of the ritual: lighting a taper before she went underground. It was not the one she was accustomed to lighting. But it looked no different and burned just as equably; the lantern hanging beside the entrance to the rock-hewn steps accepted its fire.

The little boat with its mast and furled sail was moored as always in the dark, slow water beneath Aislinn House. She studied it a moment. The water that welled up among the stones and ran down to the sea would carry it, but only as far as the grate running across the passage into the wood. But, she thought stubbornly. You are a boat. You are meant to follow water, not sit on it in perpetual gloom. Someone made you to go out into the world. You cannot pass beyond the grate unless it opens for you. So. It must open somehow. How?

On the boat a little flick just on the edge of the lantern light, quick and soundless as an eye blink, made her breath catch. She lifted the lantern higher, trying to see what had startled her. There was a very human murmur from the air. Then a figure took shape, sitting in the boat, darkly cloaked from hood to heel, holding a book open. A page had turned, she realized. And then she recognized the book.

She raised the lantern abruptly, recognized the face within the hood.

“Ridley,” she whispered.

He looked astonished. “How did you see me when I was invisible?”

“I didn’t. I saw the book.”

He grunted, murmured puzzledly, “I thought it was invisible as well. Perhaps it has a mind of its own. What are you doing down here? It’s not time—”

“For what?” she asked evenly. “Time for me to leave the lantern on the prow of the boat and go away again so that someone else can come and put out the light and hang the lantern back on its hook by the entrance so that I can come back again tomorrow and light it and leave it on the prow of the boat so that someone—Did you lock the door to the crows’ tower?”

He thought about that; his face, stubbled and smudged with shadows, grew suddenly rueful. “I did. When I passed it earlier to get this book. I didn’t want them attacking me again. I was going to return the book and unlock the door before you got there. But I lost myself in this book...” Something in her still, blanched face made his voice trail away. He rose quickly. “I’ll unlock it now. It’s a simple spell. There’s time.”

“Is there?” She shook her head, her eyes glazed with unshed tears. “Is there, Ridley Dow? You made me step beyond the ritual. I can’t go backward. I can’t stop thinking what I think, or wanting what I want. I think the crows are something more than crows, and what they want most is not their breakfast. I think the boat goes nowhere after I put the lantern in it. How can it? It is chained. Trapped by the grate. I want to know why. I want to know what you see in the book.”

Gazing at her, he tried to say something, gave it up. He held out his hand. “Come and see.”

She took it, stepped into the gently rocking boat and sat down beside him. The thick, heavy book, whose blank pages she had turned, one after another, every day since she could walk, had, in Ridley’s hands, finally begun to speak.

It said colors; it said wonders, marvels drawn with ink and painted with such hues that melted into life, spilling across every page like a tide of ancient, forgotten treasure. There were words among the images, each letter a tiny work of art, each word, extravagantly decorated and totally incomprehensible.

“I think it’s a spell book of some kind,” Ridley said. “Maybe poetry as well. I’m not sure. It’s all in a secret, or perhaps an ancient, language. But the book itself was spellbound, probably by Nemos Moore. That’s why you saw only blank pages.”

Ysabo touched a bird the color of dawn, perched among the golden leaves of an immense tree.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “All this time I never saw it. I turned empty page after empty page, never knowing... Why, Ridley?” She stared at him, her eyes wide, burning again, as though he might have an answer to her life. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he answered softly. He turned a page, looking for answers there, maybe, then another. And then she stopped him, touching something familiar: a feast in a great hall, tables filled with knights and ladies, bright banners hanging above their heads. “Is that us?” she wondered. But no: the hall doors were open to reveal a meadow full of wildflowers, birds flying across a cloudless sky. And a crowned figure sat at the center of the table, an old man with hair like gray tree moss beside her. She turned another page, lingered there again, gazing at the dark water, sky the color of silver, trees loosing their last leaves. Upon a tiny island in the middle of the water, a silver shield lay like something lost, a torn pennant beside it.

“I know this,” she whispered. “Why do I know it?”

“How could you?” Ridley asked with wonder. She lifted her eyes, looked at him, but saw Maeve and Aveline instead, embroidering the air with memories as they sewed.

“It’s a place they described, Maeve and Aveline. As though they’d been there.”

“How could they have?”

“I don’t know.” She turned another page, her fingers trembling. “I don’t know. Here.” She stopped at another image, of huge, worn stones in a wild wood, ancient trees around them tangled together like brambles. Queen Hydria was there, too, with an entourage of knights and nobles, and the strange old man in his long robe. “It was a place full of magic, Maeve said.” Her voice shook. “She said she could feel it.”

“But how?” Ridley’s own voice vanished for a moment. “How could they have left this house?”

“I don’t know, Ridley. When we sew together in the mornings, they talk about other times, other places, as though they remember them. As though they had other lives beyond Aislinn House. Or in this book, somehow ... But if they are part of the ritual, they must have been born here, like I was.”

Ridley’s voice returned abruptly. “Can you ask them?”

“They wouldn’t answer anything. They would only be furious with me for taking the book out of the tower, disrupting the ritual. That’s all they would see. Not the strangeness of their lives, their memories, but the ritual.”

“They may know who made the book.”

“Never ask. That’s what they have told me all my life. They don’t answer even if they know.”

Ridley was silent, his eyes on the painted stones, his mind elsewhere, Ysabo guessed. He said finally, “Princess Ysabo, is there a place you can stay safe and out of sight in this house while I work?”

“I don’t know where to go to be safe,” she answered, taking a bleak look at her life. “Can you raise the grate in the river at the wall, so that I could leave Aislinn House in this boat? I could wait for you beside the sea. The knights and the crows might not find me there.”

“I doubt that you would find the sea through those woods,” Ridley said grimly. “They’re part of the magic. When the knights leave the house at midday, where do they really go? I’ve watched them. Wherever they go, it’s into a different wood. Or a different time. They vanish the moment they ride away from the house.”

She stared at him, chilled. “Then there truly is no way out of this house?”

“Unless you go through the stillroom pantry door into Emma’s world. But I have no idea what would happen to you, even if you could. From this side, that door might just as easily open to nowhere as well.”

She was silent, her thoughts threading their way through the maze of her life, coming up again and again against solid walls, locked doors, passages that spiraled endlessly and went nowhere. “Well, then,” she whispered. “Well, then, Ridley Dow, we must find our own way out. You must undo what Nemos Moore did. You must unbind the spell.”

“Yes.”

“But what—Where do we begin?”

He was gazing at her, his lips parted, his eyes invisible behind reflections of light in his lenses. “You’re sure,” he said finally. “I could unlock the tower door, you could feed the crows, you could wait for me safely within your life.”

She shook her head wearily, looking down at the shadowy stream flowing silently out, away, into. “I don’t want to pretend anymore. Not even to the crows. Where should we go from here?”

“That bell,” he said slowly, “has enough power in it to disturb perfectly comfortable lives as far away as Landringham. It is the single strangest, oldest, and most consistent link between two worlds. I want to find it. Do you have any idea where it is?”

“No.”

“Who rings it?”

“No,” she said again. “I never wondered about it. It’s part of the ritual, part of our lives, a piece of the pattern of someone’s day. Light this candle, lock that door, ring this bell.”

He nodded. “I watched many pieces of the ritual. Most of them, like yours, were either absurd or hauntingly evocative, like the midday ceremony of the knights. I followed everyone I could, including Maeve and Aveline. No one led me to the bell. I spent much of yesterday trying to find that bell in books. Nemos Moore heard it; it’s what drew him here. But if he saw it, he kept it hidden between the lines.”

“How can we find between the lines?” she asked, her red brows crooked. “It isn’t part of the ritual.”

“No. It’s not. That’s the point...” His voice faded; he stared at her with absolute intensity, and without seeing her at all. When he spoke again, his voice had no sound. “That’s where you are now. Between the lines.”

“What?”

He saw her again, but slowly, as though he were struggling to waken from a powerful dream. “And that’s where the bell is. Between the lines. It isn’t part of the ritual at all. That’s why I didn’t see anyone ring it.”

“But, Ridley, it is,” she protested. “The bell calls me to the great hall to arrange the chairs, fill the cups. It summons others to the table. It is what we listen for, at the end of every day. It rings the sun down.”

“It is hidden, disguised within the ritual. But it is not part of the ritual. It’s like the book. When you see it as part of your ritual, it is blank. But if you look at it as it truly is—”

“It is full of treasures,” she breathed. “Outside of the ritual, it is itself.”

“And that’s where the bell is. Outside of the ritual.”

“Nobody in this house is outside of the ritual but you, Ridley Dow. And even if we could look for it, how would we find such a place?”

“You found it,” he told her, “when you turned your back on the crows and came down here instead. It’s the place where you are Ysabo. Where you live your life as you choose, where you ask questions and search for answers. Right now, you are outside. Between the lines of your daily patterns.”

“Yes,” she said, glancing again at the silken flow of water in the light, the stone arching above them. “I shouldn’t be here at this time. But I still don’t see a bell, inside or outside of the ritual, and if it truly is outside, then who outside is ringing it?”

He was silent again, staring at her again, as though if he looked hard enough, waited long enough, she might come up with an answer for him. But it was himself he searched.

“Oh,” he whispered; she watched his eyes filling with wordless answers. “Oh, Ysabo, I think I know where it might be. What we might be looking for, trapped within the lines ... Those were never blank pages you saw in this book. They were closed doors. And now, look: every one of them is open.”

“Ridley—”

“Don’t be afraid. Now we know where to begin.”

“Ridley,” she whispered, for her voice was gone, drained by the shape of whatever it was watching them in the dark just on the edge of their circle of light.

“You don’t die easily, Mr. Dow,” a dry, sinewy voice commented, and Ridley stood up so fast that the boat tipped wildly in the water, sent up a splash between wood and the stone it was chained to.

The man who stepped into the light was tall, lean, fair-haired, with eyes of a dark, brilliant blue; their alertness and attentiveness reminded Ysabo of Ridley. The stranger was also fashionably dressed, with the same rich and subtle details. His face, pale and lightly lined, was scarcely middle-aged. His eyes said differently. Ysabo, staring into them, thought they must be as old as the dark, still water beneath her feet.

He smiled briefly, aimed a bow her direction.

“Princess Ysabo. Surely you should not be down here at this time of the morning. I thought Maeve and Aveline had trained you better than this. You know that the moon will fall out of the sky and the sea run dry if you do not attend to the ritual.”

“How do you know such things?” she demanded, prickling with wonder and sudden fear.

Ridley answered her abruptly. “Mr. Moren,” he said, rocking with the boat. “Or should I call you Mr. Pilchard? Or are you finally admitting to the name of Nemos Moore?”

“Call me what you like,” Nemos Moore said, shrugging. “You’ll not need any of them much longer, Mr. Dow. You are truly the last person I would have expected to find here. The mild and scholarly and rather gormless young man adrift in the wake of Miranda Beryl’s circle, hopelessly endeavoring to interest her, in the rare moments she found herself with nothing better to do than to speak to you, in the life cycle of toads. Yet here you are. I am forced to wonder why. I am forced to adjust my ideas of you. Clever enough to find your way here, fearless enough to breach these dangerous walls, powerful enough to stay alive this long . . . Why, Mr. Dow? What possessed you to come here?”

“The bell.” He was quite still now; so was the boat, as motionless in the water as though something had seized it from beneath.

“Ah. A wonderful mystery for those willing to brave centuries of dusty tales.”

“Your book.”

“My book. Of course you would have run across it eventually in your studies. But how did you know it was mine?”

“You.”

Nemos Moore’s brows leaped up. “What could I possibly have done in Landringham that caught your myopic attention and persuaded you that Mr. Moren is Nemos Moore?”

“You reminded me of me.” The sorcerer, rendered speechless, stared at him. Ysabo, her hands over her mouth, glimpsed a rippling, glittering, amorphous thing he wore like a shadow over his skin. “I was curious,” Ridley went on, “about Nemos Moore’s antecedents. Imagine my surprise when I found I recognized them in my own. Ancient relatives should have the grace and good manners to depart this life in an appropriate fashion, not make trouble across the centuries and leave cruel, spiteful distortions of magic for their descendants to clean up.”

Nemos Moore found his voice finally. “Ah, I’ve had too much fun at it to give it up. Are we really related?”

“My great-great-great-great—”

“Surely not so many greats.”

“Far too many,” Ridley agreed.

“So that’s where you got your gifts . . . And how you kept them hidden from me.” He was silent again, briefly, his eyes narrowed, seeing things in the air between them. “Is that what you really want, Mr. Dow? A chance to possess this ancient labyrinth of power and wealth? Surely you can’t imagine you would win Miss Beryl’s extremely flighty regard simply because you have solved the mystery of the house she is about to inherit? I doubt that she would understand anything at all about it, even if you opened a door and showed her what marvels exist in Aislinn House. She would assume it’s all part of her own house party, her guests entertaining themselves.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know so. Besides, I have my own plans for this house, as well as for Miss Beryl. I don’t like to be thwarted, Mr. Dow. It makes me mean-spirited and spiteful. As you have seen. Haven’t you?”

“Amply.”

“So you should just go away. Leave Sealey Head, leave Landringham, leave the country. Will you do that, Mr. Dow?”

“You didn’t offer me that option yesterday,” Ridley said with a touch of asperity, “when you tried to kill me with your cooking.”

“I didn’t know we were related then, did I? For the sake of family ties, I might consider offering you some recompense to go away. Money? A share in my long and extraordinary experience of the magical arts? Perhaps, if I can learn to trust you, we might form some kind of a partnership. Such gifts you inherited from me shouldn’t be wasted. And perhaps, over time, I could teach you to think like me.” He paused. Ridley said nothing, did not move, did not, to Ysabo’s eyes, seem even to be breathing. The sorcerer shrugged. “I could never understand a man who would not compromise when there is no other option. Good day, Mr. Dow.”

Ridley flung up his hand instantly, murmuring. But the strange, darkly gleaming shadow around Nemos Moore had already flared. Light flashed through the chamber, turned the water to molten silver. Half-blinded, Ysabo threw her arm over her eyes. She heard Ridley cry out. The air rustled around her like satin, like dry leaves, like paper. She felt a hand clamp around her wrist just before she fell out of the world.