CHAPTER THREE
Sudden Death at Drood Hall
Molly and I threw on some clothes while Howard waited impatiently outside in the corridor. I could hear him shuffling heavily from foot to foot. And all the time I was thinking, He has to be wrong. It has to be some kind of mistake. She can’t be dead. Not her. I reached out to Ethel with my mind.
“Ethel, what the hell is going on? Is the Matriarch really dead? Has she been murdered?”
I don’t know! said Ethel. I can’t tell! I can’t tell anything! The entire Hall is awake, thousands of minds, all of them yelling at once!
“Are we under attack? Has someone broken into the Hall?”
No, Ethel said immediately. All defences are in place, all protections are in order. We’re the only ones here.
By now, Molly and I were dressed and out the door, following Howard down the corridor to the Matriarch’s suite. The corridor looked dim and unfamiliar in this early hour of the morning, and my head was still half full of sleep. I kept throwing questions at Howard, and he kept trying to answer, but couldn’t, because he was fighting back tears. All I could get out of him was that the Sarjeant-at-Arms had told him the Matriarch was dead, murdered, and that he should come and get me. ˚ I was still having trouble believing it. My grandmother couldn’t be dead. How could someone as important, as powerful as her, be dead? Martha was the longest serving and surviving Matriarch the family had ever known. Most living Droods had never known another. To so many of us, she was the family.
I was still too numb, too confused, to feel anything. She tried to have me killed, and then supported me when I led the family against the Hungry Gods. She was always the authority figure I hated, with good reason, and the grandmother I loved, for no good reason. She’d always been there, my whole life, for good and bad. I could always depend on her . . . to be her. I couldn’t imagine life without her. Molly moved silently along beside me, clinging tightly to my arm, trying to support and comfort me with her presence.
When we finally got to the Matriarch’s suite, the door was standing open. That was enough to make me stumble to a halt. The Matriarch’s door was never open. You always had to knock, politely, and then wait to be summoned in. The open door was a slap in the face—a sign that things would never be the same again. Howard stopped in the doorway, looking back at me inquiringly. So I took a deep breath and went in, Molly pressed close at my side. We passed through the antechamber into her bedroom, and there was the Sarjeant-at-Arms, standing at the foot of the bed, scowling fiercely, looking at nothing, his arms folded tightly across his chest as though to keep him from flying apart. The Armourer was sitting on a chair pulled up to the side of the bed, holding one of the Matriarch’s hands in his. He looked old and tired, and broken.
Martha Drood lay in bed, on her back, her nightdress and the sheets around her soaked in blood. She was utterly still. Her eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. Her long blond hair, of which she was always secretly proud, stretched shapelessly across the pillows, in a state she would never have allowed herself to be seen, in life. And then, finally, I believed it.
“About time, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. His voice was unusu ally harsh, even for him, but somehow unfocused. “Our Matriarch has been murdered.” He looked at Molly. “What is the witch doing here? She’s not family.”
“Not now, Sarjeant,” I said. I made myself walk past him, to the side of the bed. Made myself look closely at the body. “What happened here? How was she . . . murdered?”
“Stabbed,” said the Sarjeant. “A single thrust, from the front, through the heart. I knew it, the moment it happened. One of the little secrets of my position—I’m linked to the Hall, and everyone in it. It is necessary for me to know exactly where everyone in the family is, so that they can always be found, and disciplined. So I always know, when one of us dies. The Matriarch’s sudden death brought me right up out of a deep sleep. For a moment, I tried to tell myself it was just a bad dream, but I knew it wasn’t. So I came straight here, found the door open . . . and found her dead in her bed.”
“Ethel’s quite positive the Hall is still secure,” I said. “No one’s broken in, or out. No intruders means . . . this wasn’t the work of any of our enemies. This was an inside job. The killer is one of us.”
“One of the family?” said Howard, still just inside the doorway. He couldn’t look at the body. “How could one of us do something like this? It’s not possible! She’s . . . she’s the Matriarch!”
But I was looking at Molly, and we were remembering what she had said to me earlier about Immortals infiltrating the family. Our deadliest enemies, hidden behind familiar faces. And I suddenly had to wonder about the timing of the Matriarch’s death. Could we have been overheard? Had the Matriarch been killed just to send me a message? Was this my fault? Molly started to say something, and I stopped her with a quick gesture. We couldn’t talk here. Not when there was no telling who might be listening.
The Sarjeant-at-Arms saw the look, and the gesture. He started to say something, so I cut quickly across him.
“Stabbed right through the heart,” I said, bending over the body and examining the wound closely. “A practised, professional blow. And no defensive wounds on the arms . . . No signs of any struggle, the bedclothes are hardly disturbed. All of which suggests the attacker was someone she knew, and trusted, right up to the last moment. He must have just knocked on the door, and been invited in. She sat up in bed, he walked up to her, and . . . He must have been quick. She was a teacher of unarmed combat for thirty years. No one could have overpowered her, if she felt threatened. She could have held off even the most determined assassin long enough to summon up her armour. But a face she trusted, with a knife she never saw until it was far too late . . .”
“But how could the killer just walk in here?” said Molly. “Didn’t she have any guards outside her door?”
“Inside the Hall?” said Howard, shocked. “We don’t have guards here. We’re safe, here. Danger always comes from outside.”
“There are . . . protections in place, to prevent any outsider from doing harm inside the Hall,” said the Sarjeant. “But they wouldn’t affect any member of the family, or a really powerful magic-user . . .”
I didn’t like the way he was looking at Molly. “Now wait just a minute . . .” I said.
“You threatened to kill the Matriarch,” the Sarjeant said to Molly. “To her face, in front of the Advisory Council.”
“I was angry!” said Molly. “But I’m not stupid enough to kill her here, surrounded by her family. And I’m certainly not stupid enough to stick around afterwards. Besides, I wouldn’t just stab someone! I’m the wild witch of the woods! I’d use some really subtle magic, make it look like natural causes. Or, if I wanted you to know it was me, I’d do something really vile and horrible, and then disappear while you were all still throwing up. I don’t do stabbings.”
“What better way to disguise your involvement, than a crude attack with an anonymous blade?” said the Sarjeant.
“Stop this,” I said. “Stop it right now. Molly had nothing to do with this. She’s been with me ever since we left the Sanctity. It couldn’t be her.”
“Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” said the Sarjeant. “But even if it were true, you had to sleep sometime. She could have left your side, done the deed and returned while you were still sleeping. Couldn’t she?”
“No,” I said. “No.” I looked at the Armourer. He was still holding the Matriarch’s dead hand, his head bowed over it. “Uncle Jack? You don’t believe it was Molly, do you?”
“Hush, Eddie,” he said, not looking round. “My mother is dead.”
A thought struck me, and I looked back at the Sarjeant. “Does Alistair know? Has anyone told him?”