Anne Bishop - Sebastian

But would the girl Lukene feared and yet still believed had a good heart make two students disappear the way Lukene had disappeared?

The wall has been breached.

Probably a lie. She had been moving toward the archway when he’d stopped her, so how could she know?

But if it wasn’t a lie…?

Reluctantly, Gregor moved toward the archway. The daylight seemed to pale with every step he took, but he kept moving forward. He shuddered as he passed under the archway. His body shook as he crossed the ground covered with bloated mushrooms and shadowed by thorn trees. His heart raced as he stared at the broken lock and open gate that meant someone had done the unthinkable and entered that garden.

Unwilling to open the gate any farther, he squeezed through the space. As he stared at the simple stone wall, he had a moment to feel relieved, to think it had been a lie after all.

Then he noticed the stick…and the crumbled mortar…and the small hole in the wall.

“Guardians of Light and Guides of the Heart, help us,” he whispered.

He turned away from the wall, but before he reached the gate, he heard…

“Help me. Please. Someone help me.”

A familiar voice. A beloved voice.

“Lukene?” He looked at the wall. Icy fear filled his heart. “Lukene?”

“Gregor? Gregor! Help me.”

A patch of ground near the gate shifted, lifted just enough to reveal a dark space.

He edged toward the gate, toward the dark space, toward the voice of the woman he loved.

“Gregor!”

A pale hand, scraped and bruised, reached out from the dark space.

Caution and love warred in his chest, making his heart ache. “How…?”

“I saw the breach in the wall and tripped into another landscape when I ran to warn the others. I…The tunnel is steep. My leg…hurt. I can’t…Gregor, please.”

He reached for her hand. He’d get her away from this garden, away from that wall. Then he’d leave her in the care of the first students he could find while he ran to the school to warn the Landscapers.

For a moment, with her hand clamped in his, she resisted his effort to pull her out of that dark space, as if she needed to savor the contact before gathering her strength.

Then the ground lifted like a trapdoor. Tentacles whipped out and wrapped around him. A head emerged. A sea creature. But the body and other four legs were those of a large spider.

Pain in his belly as It bit deep. Then he stopped thrashing as the toxins in that bite paralyzed his limbs.

It pulled him through the trapdoor, down a steep tunnel. It pulled him into a pool of water at the bottom of the tunnel—his legs, his waist, his chest.

His heart pounded. His lungs still labored to breathe. But he couldn’t move his arms or legs. Couldn’t struggle to escape.

He screamed when It began to feed.

The meal should have been delicious, but one unpalatable nugget had spoiled it all. While It had feasted on the flesh, It had slipped into the human’s mind and filled that mind with terrors that had sweetened the flesh. But even as the mind shattered from the fear, there was one shimmer of Light, one seed of hope. Not for itself, but for its kind. For the world.

The male had sacrificed his sanity in order to lock that seed of hope inside a meaningless word—and had died before It could darken that shimmer of Light, break open that seed of hope, and discover the secret inside.

It would go back to that place where the Dark Ones lived. They would know the answer. And if they did not, they would find the answer.

Then It would know the meaning of the meaningless word that made It feel uneasy—and guarded a seed of hope.

Belladonna.

Lynnea hunched her shoulders as she studied the land on either side of the road. Pasture, crops, some stands of trees. Not so different from the land she knew, except it looked better tended than ho—the farm where she had lived most of her life.

The farm wasn’t home, had never been home. That truth had sliced through her two days ago and had left her heart bleeding.

“Mam should have left you by the side of the road,” Ewan muttered. “Should have known you were no good as soon as she laid eyes on you.” He slapped the reins against the horse’s back. “Get on there, you worthless piece of crowbait!”

The tired animal shifted into a trot. Lynnea grabbed the side of the small farm cart with one hand to keep from falling against Ewan.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lynnea said, her voice breaking.

“You lift your skirt for a married man while his wife is working to put a meal on the table and you don’t think that’s wrong? No, I guess you wouldn’t.”

“I went into the barn to see the kittens. That’s all. Then Pa—”

“He’s not your pa,” Ewan snapped.

No, he wasn’t. Had never acted like a father, even when she’d been a little girl.

She curled her free hand into a fist and pressed it into her lap to hide the trembling. “I just wanted to see the kittens.” Just to have a minute to cuddle something that wanted to be loved. She blinked back the tears, and whispered, “Mam didn’t believe me.”

Ewan snorted. “Why would she? We’d put the kittens in a sack and dropped them in the pond the day before.”

Lynnea stared at him, the fear of being turned out that she’d lived with all her life exploding into a beast with claws. “You drowned the kittens? But they were babies!”

“Useless. Like you.”

She huddled on her part of the seat, trying not to weep for the dead kittens, trying not to wonder if she was being taken to a similar fate.

Would it have been different if she hadn’t struggled, if she hadn’t screamed when Pa tried to push her down into the stall and pull up her skirt? Would it have been different if Mam had ignored the scream instead of coming into the barn? Or if, when Mam dragged her back to the house, she hadn’t blurted out what Pa had said about the old cow being dried up so she’d have to give him the milk from now on?

It wasn’t until she saw the wounded look in Mam’s eyes—eyes that had flashed a moment later with jealous fury—that she understood what Pa had meant, and then it was too late.

Which was why she and Ewan were traveling to the Landscapers’ School. She was no longer welcome at the farm. Pa had wanted to take her into the village and leave her, but Mam had given him a cold, hard look and said that was keeping temptation too close at hand. So Pa had grudgingly agreed to give Ewan time off the farm to take her to the school, where the Landscapers would send her to another landscape in Ephemera. In a very real sense, she would disappear from the lives of everyone she had known.

They’d been traveling since sunup. The sun was now low in the west. Would they reach the school before full dark? Or were they going to have to find some shelter for the night? From the things he’d muttered all day, she knew what Ewan would like to do to her. Whatever constraints had kept Pa and Ewan at a distance all the years she’d lived with them were broken now. But there had been too many people on the roads throughout the day, and now they were probably—hopefully—too close to the school for him to risk a dark intention that might change things for him.

Ewan gave a hard tug on the reins, bringing the weary horse to a stop beside a wooden post that had an R carved into the wood.

“This is it,” Ewan said, turning his head to look at her. “Get out.”

“What?” Lynnea looked around. The road curved, and trees blocked the view. “Is this the school?”

Ewan gave her a mean smile. “No, but this is as far as I’m taking you. Went up to the village yesterday while Pa and Mam were shouting at each other. Pa figured it was a two-day ride to the school, but I talked to some of the fellows, and they told me about this road.”