Whisper of Waves

59

13 Eleasias, the Year of the Wave (1364 DR)

BERRYWILDE

Construction on the country estate house began a hundred years ago at the request of Phyrea’s great-great grandmother. In the century that followed, rooms, whole wings, gardens, outbuildings, and so on were added here and there and Inthelph still didn’t consider it finished. Most of the central house was built in the Sembian style, all rich hardwoods and marble with fittings usually of gold. It could have housed a hundred people comfortably, and if the downstairs and kitchen were fully staffed, they could have entertained ten times that many.

Phyrea was alone there.

She had dismissed the regular staff-an upstairs maid, two downstairs maids, a cook, two gardeners, a handyman, and the dour old butler-on the third day. They took it well, having been dismissed before. They’d gone back to the city to visit family and friends while her father continued to pay them. When she was ready to go back to the city, they would resume their duties at Berrywilde as if nothing had ever happened.

Phyrea couldn’t stand the thought of anyone watching her, of anyone walking into a room when she thought she was alone. She wasn’t necessarily doing anything she didn’t want anyone else to see, but the point, for her at least, of the country home was to get away from people.

Her father had begun to pressure her to marry the simpleton from Cormyr, so it was getting harder for her to enjoy herself in the city. Wenefir hadn’t quite forgiven her for the ransar’s egg, so she couldn’t work either.

She spent her days on a variety of pursuits. Mostly she explored the house and grounds. Some days-most days even-she didn’t leave the house at all. One room led to another and another and another, and in each was a separate treasure trove of trinkets, furnishings, and everywhere gold and silver. One dead relative after another looked down on her from portraits, most of which were so big the figures were larger than life size. The ceilings in the majority of the rooms soared thirty feet or more over her head.

In the daytime, light streamed in through enormous windows, and Phyrea made sure that all of the heavy curtains were kept open so that light and air would fill the house.

She’d spent time at Berrywilde as a little girl but never roamed the halls. She’d always hated it there. Nightmares plagued her then-terrible images of violence and death. They got worse after her mother died. She remembered begging her father not to take her there anymore, and for the longest time he hadn’t.

Eventually, though, Phyrea grew older and forgot all that little girl nonsense. She still didn’t spend any appreciable time in the country, but the ghosts she imagined there as a girl were pushed aside by the young woman she was becoming and the very real violence she put herself in the way of over and over again on the streets of Innarlith.

On the thirteenth day of Eleasias, Phyrea sat on a leather sofa in her father’s library, absently sorting through a sheaf of paper on which some long-dead great-uncle had written some notes concerning the history of the estate. The family historian puzzled over the name Berrywilde, as if the estate had been called that before any of her family even built the place. No one seemed to recall where the name came from.

It was late, the windows that in the daytime would flood the room with brilliant light stood as black rectangles twenty feet tall, reflecting the entire room from the light of the candelabra she’d carried in with her. Phyrea rested her head against the soft arm of the sofa but didn’t close her eyes. She tried to read more of the notes, but the handwriting was dense and that particular great-uncle wrote in a dry and stiff style that was hard to get through even when she wasn’t so tired, and Phyrea was so tired.

She’d never felt so exhausted. Was it the fresh air? The hours spent in silent solitude? She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

“… and the last of the bloodline,” someone whispered and she was wide awake.

Her heart skipped a beat then began to thunder in her chest. The papers slipped from her fingers to spill out onto the bearskin rug. Phyrea sat up straight, curling her bare toes into the soft fur. Her hand went to her chest, and her fingers pinched the fine soft silk of her negligee. Eyes darting from corner to corner, Phyrea fought down the fear and tried to tap the well of anger she used so often in the city. It was that anger that made her a thief and gave her the strength to fight off men twice her size and ten times her strength.

She spotted a gilded letter opener on her father’s desk and crossed the room in three quick steps to snatch it up.

Whirling, she looked again into every corner of the room, but there was no one there. She was alone.

Had she dreamed it?

Her heart still raced. A noise echoed from the next room, a chair or some other piece of furniture being pushed across the wood floor.

Phyrea swallowed, skipped to the door, and threw it open. Brandishing the letter opener as if it was a sword, she burst into the next room-a small parlor dominated by two enormous wing chairs on either side of a sava board carved from seven colors of marble-fully prepared to kill the intruder she somehow knew she wouldn’t find there.

Of course there was no one in the room.

Wind whistled outside.

Phyrea went back into the library and closed the door behind her. She almost called out, “Is someone there?”

Her father had a crew building a new winery on the western edge of the estate, but that was three miles away.

There was no one in the house but her.

“Here,” the wind whispered.

But it wasn’t the wind whispering.

No, it was the wind, but it hadn’t whispered anything.

It was just the wind.

Still holding the letter opener, Phyrea sat back down on the sofa. The notes lay at her feet and she looked down.

He had been killed with a heavy blade, she read from one of the sheets. He was found amidst his own blood. He was cold. He had been dead for some hours. He could have been killed by any number of the guests.

Phyrea closed her eyes, put her bare foot on the sheet of paper, then pushed it under the sofa so she didn’t have to read it again.

She sat there with her eyes closed for a while, listening, but the wind didn’t whisper and the furniture didn’t move.

Her heart didn’t stop pounding until she dragged the point of the letter opener across the inside of her left thigh, breaking the skin.

She dabbed at the cut with the hem of her shift. She didn’t want to get blood on her father’s sofa.