David Liss - The Twelfth Enchantment - A Novel

“Wards get tired?”

“They grow strained and frayed, like old rope, or stronger and weaker, like winds. Her wards will work most of the time, but they did not work this time, because you are powerful and she is old. She is strong, Lucy. Very strong. She is stronger than you can imagine, but not as strong as she thinks, and that is our only advantage.”

“The journey continues,” said Lucy as she looked out the window. Suddenly, she felt a sharp terror. “Where are we? I do not recognize this road. Is this the way to London?”

“No,” said Mary. “We are returning to Nottinghamshire.”

Lucy gripped the side of her seat in panic. “No! Did you not hear me? I must return to London. If I am not back by sunset, I will be discovered missing. They will know how long I have been gone. Why have you tricked me?”

“Because I knew you would not listen,” said Mary. “I knew you would still go because you care too much for what the world thinks of you.”

“You speak more like Byron than you would credit.”

“You will not say that to me,” she snapped. Her anger was sudden and terrible. She was like a jungle cat, crouched as it readied itself to pounce. Her face flushed dark and her eyes widened and her pupils narrowed. Teeth showed through parted lips. “I am nothing like him, and you will never say such a thing to me, nor even speak his name to me if you can avoid it. I will—” She then began to weep, and she pulled Lucy to her breast. “Forgive me. Your comment was innocent, and my anger unjust.”

Lucy pulled away. “You may not wish to be likened to him, but you are as careless with my name and reputation as he is. Who are you to decide if they are worth preserving? My reputation is mine, Mary. I do not wish to let it go so lightly. I have no means, I have no name, I have no station. I cannot live as a whore in the eyes of the world. I am not so foolish that I don’t understand that the world’s thinking it so shall make it truth in the end. I may try to resist it, but I must have bread, and in the end, I will become what they say.”

“There is no fate that can be thrust upon you but what you permit,” said Mary, beaming like a proud parent.

“I thank you for your confidence, but I must go to London. Turn us around while there is still time.”

“You cannot go to London,” said Mary. “Things are going to happen, and they will be beyond even your control. London will soon become a city of chaos.”

“My friends are in London,” Lucy said.

“Many people are in London, but there is no helping that,” Mary answered. “It is time for the change to begin. It has to happen in some way, and revolution can never be quiet or peaceful or easy. I wish that it could be, but it cannot. Revolutions must be bloody. You may condemn me for a monster, but the men who have allied with the revenants are willing to endure suffering for their cause, and so there is no other way. I have set things in motion, and we are now powerless to stop what we have begun. We have no choice but to flee from its destruction.”

How much of this was metaphor or speculation or sheer nonsense? Lucy did not know. Mary did not lie to her—she believed that—but she withheld much when it was convenient, and Lucy was tired of being manipulated and moved about like a game piece. It was time to make her own decisions.

With hardly a thought of what it would mean, Lucy leapt up, hurled open the door of the coach, and threw herself out onto the grass. She landed more violently than she would have expected, and she felt the sharp scrape of something cut against her cheek. Her arm struck something hard, and she heard herself cry out in pain as she rolled, and then she rolled again. The world passed by in a nauseous blur of grass and tree and rock, and Lucy understood that she had jumped out upon the top of a hill. From some unfathomable distance she heard Mary shouting and then horses crying out their complaints, but Lucy was tumbling—tumbling fast and hard and with terrifying speed; the gray of the sky rolled past her eyes as she gained momentum and a strange calm came through her. She thought she was at the center of things and that all roads began and ended with her, and yet here she was, about to have her head broken open by a rock and a tree.

And that was when she landed into the nearly frozen stream of water. She opened her mouth to cry out, but water filled her lungs. She thrashed, hardly knowing which was up or down, but managed, owing to the shallowness of the stream and nothing else, to lift out her head and find cold, welcome air. She cried out in relief and confusion, only to realize her head lay only inches from a horse’s hoof.

Lucy raised her head to see a great black and brown stallion, and atop it, smiling without humor, sat Mr. Olson. Then Lucy’s world went dark.

Lucy awoke feeling surprisingly warm. Her dreams were filled with cold water and mud, but now she was dry. She felt aches in her arm, her back, both her legs. Her face stung, and she remembered leaping from Mary’s coach. And she remembered Mr. Olson.

She opened her eyes.

It could well be that Lucy possessed some sort of expectation of what she would find when she opened her eyes, but whatever it was, surely this was not it. She sat in a rough-hewn wooden chair near a fire in a rude cottage with a dirt floor and nothing upon the walls. She could see through the windows that it remained gloomy outside, and in the cottage all was dim and shadowy. Her gown was dry and brittle, much stained and caked with hard mud. So was her skin. Her hands were clotted with dirt, making them hard to move. They were also bound behind her back.

Across the cottage, at a long table, sat Mr. Olson, wearing a mud-splattered riding coat. He sat working at a piece of wood with a knife, but sensed that she gazed upon him. He set down the wood, but not the knife, and looked at her. Even in the dimness of the cabin she could see his face was set in something like anger. He was red-eyed and haggard, and had three or four days’ worth of beard upon his face.

“You woke up,” he said in a heavy voice, deep and scratchy.

Fear thudded in her chest. She needed to get free. She needed herbs and plants and a pen. She needed to make a charm and escape. It almost made her smile to think how magic was now the first thing she thought of in a crisis.

“Please, Mr. Olson,” she said. “I am hurt, and I must go. I must be in London as soon as I may.” Time was running out, and she was stuck here, with Mr. Olson who appeared not himself. Lucy gritted her teeth with anger. She would not cry. She would find a way out of this. She was at the center of things, and she would find a solution.

Mr. Olson pushed himself from the bench by the table and stood menacingly over her. “I am shocked by your behavior. Lady Harriett summoned me to her home, and when I arrived, I saw the damage you had done. Breaking her door, killing her dog. All was chaos. You had only just departed, and Lady Harriett just returned, but she made everything clear. I understood that I had to go after you. I was so tired, but I had to have you, Lucy, and now I do. At last, you are mine.”

“I am not yours,” said Lucy, trying hard to sound both determined and reasonable. He did not seem the cold, unfeeling, methodical man she had known. There was something unrestrained about him, darkly passionate. He seemed like a madman. “I do not wish to be here. Whose cottage is this?”

“As to that, I have no knowledge. I found it, and so it is mine, as you are.”

“Listen to me,” said Lucy. “You must let me go at once, or there will be consequences.”

“What consequences can there be?” He looked about the small house, straining his neck theatrically in a grotesque mimicry of humor. “Soon we shall be married, and that shall be the end of it.”