“You’ll have to ask him,” Butler replied.
“Why? I’m asking you.”
They were standing on either side of the gate in the picket fence. She wondered why he didn’t invite her inside. She wondered if, unlike the outside, which looked well maintained—if you didn’t look too closely at the flower beds—the inside of the cottage was a decaying mess. After all, he’d been living there for a long time.
Then again, her family had been living at SaDiablo Hall for a very long time, and no one could say any room in that huge place was untidy, let alone a mess.
No one would dare—at least not in Helene’s hearing.
“I don’t know your father’s story,” Butler said. “I don’t know what happened to him between the last night that he saw Jaenelle and when he arrived in Kaeleer thirteen years later. Besides, we’re not here to talk about your father.”
How much of her father’s past—and Uncle Lucivar’s—would she know if she’d listened to the stories they’d shared during family gatherings?
“Why did Wilhelmina come to Kaeleer?” Maybe it wasn’t the right question to ask next, since, like Daemon Sadi, Wilhelmina didn’t arrive in Kaeleer until thirteen years after the night her sister was taken away for the last time.
“Whenever she was afraid, whenever she felt threatened, she would hold on to that Sapphire Jewel and hear Jaenelle’s voice telling her to come to Kaeleer, telling her she would be safe in Kaeleer. There weren’t many in Terreille who knew how to open the Gates between the Realms, so she might not have known how to reach the Shadow Realm. She could have gone to Ebon Askavi and asked for sanctuary. The ones who look after the Keep in Terreille would have opened the Gate there and escorted her to the Keep in Kaeleer. For whatever reason, she didn’t attempt to reach the Shadow Realm until the last service fair.”
“Did she feel threatened living with her family?”
“Yes.” Butler stared at something in the distance. A physical distance, or the distance of time and memory? “One of Jaenelle’s friends in Briarwood urged her to create a trap for the uncles—the men who used that place for sex and other gratifications they couldn’t afford to indulge in elsewhere—a trap that would be sprung if Jaenelle’s blood was spilled.”
A room and a bed. And blood. So much blood.
“And that’s what Jaenelle did. She wove a tangled web that took in Briarwood, was Briarwood. She included her friends—both the ghosts and the demon-dead—and she created the pretty poison. To each was given what he gave. That became the price of Briarwood.
“The last time Jaenelle was taken to that place, she was raped by a man named Greer, who was Dorothea SaDiablo’s favorite assassin—until Surreal found him in Briarwood and slit his throat.”
The first time she had walked through Briarwood, she’d seen the moment when Surreal killed that man.
“I bet Rose was the one who talked Jaenelle into making that trap,” she muttered. Rose had been her sharp-tongued, unsympathetic guide when she’d seen Briarwood.
“Yes,” Butler snapped, “she was.”
She didn’t know how, but she’d just stepped onto dangerous ground.
After a moment, Butler said, “There was some justice to Surreal being Greer’s executioner, since Greer had killed her mother when Surreal was twelve. Slit Titian’s throat.” Butler’s eyes held a strange glitter. “Titian made the transition to demon-dead and became the Queen of the Harpies. She had no use for men except as prey, but she did respect Daemon because he was Tersa’s son and he had helped her and Surreal, and she allied herself with Saetan to protect Jaenelle. If you were a man, even someone who served in the Dark Court, you needed to be very careful if you crossed paths with Titian.”
Was her cousin Titian named in honor of Surreal’s mother, just as she’d been named for . . .
“What does all that have to do with Wilhelmina feeling threatened?”
“That night the trap was sprung, and Briarwood caught every man who used that place. It took a while for the uncles to understand that the relentless pain and nightmares of being tortured and raped, of feeling hands or legs being cut off, of feeling the terror and slow death caused by suffocation after someone walled them into an alcove specially made for such a punishment . . . It took a while for them to realize that they were feeling everything the children had felt—because there were a few boys there too. They wouldn’t admit the truth, so all of those men from the important aristo houses sought out Healers. But the Healers couldn’t find anything wrong with the men, had no explanation for the pain that was slowly consuming those men.” Butler’s smile had a nasty edge. “There is no cure for Briarwood. Some of those men tried to seek relief from the pain by choosing the physical death, but they couldn’t succeed until they had paid the debt they owed. Then their bodies could die. But they hadn’t known that the High Lord of Hell would be very interested in them once they made the transition to demon-dead. Saetan found out a great deal about Briarwood. More than Jaenelle would ever want him to know. But she had nightmares about that place all her life, and she sometimes talked in her sleep, so Saetan wasn’t the only one who learned the truth about Briarwood.”
Marjane. Myrol and Rebecca. Dannie. Rose. When she’d walked through the memory of Briarwood, had she seen any of the girls who had been walled in? Or had Witch spared her that much?
“Some of the uncles believed that having sex with a virgin would cure them,” Butler continued after a minute. “Being one of the afflicted, Robert Benedict—or Uncle Bobby, as Jaenelle had called him—targeted Wilhelmina to be his cure. Philip Alexander intervened when he was home, but he was often absent while escorting Leland or Alexandra, which left Wilhelmina vulnerable. When she gathered the courage to tell Alexandra that Robert was trying to force himself on her, the Queen of Chaillot refused to believe her. She was making things up, trying to cause trouble by telling tales. Like her sister had done before she disappeared.
“Wilhelmina ran away, went into hiding with the help of a stable lad named Andrew who, at some point, lost an eye while trying to protect her. There was some speculation that Philip had found her, but he denied it, finally trying to do the right thing for one of his girls. No one had any news about Wilhelmina until she showed up in Kaeleer. And the person who made that discovery and broke that news to Alexandra was Dorothea SaDiablo.”
“Why would Dorothea care about Wilhelmina?” Saetien asked.
“She didn’t. But shortly before that last service fair, Daemon Sadi showed the most powerful and uncorrupted witches in Chaillot the truth about Briarwood, and Alexandra was about to be unseated as the Territory Queen because many of those powerful witches had lost young relatives in that place. When Alexandra learned that Wilhelmina was in Kaeleer and being controlled by a Warlord Prince who also controlled an eccentric girl who was strangely powerful, she had to go to the Shadow Realm to find her granddaughters, didn’t she? She thought, being a Queen, she was Dorothea’s ally, but in truth, she was the High Priestess of Hayll’s pawn—and she played her part well.”
Butler took a step back. “That’s enough for tonight.”
Nowhere near enough, but her head was swimming with the images from this recounting of Wilhelmina’s life. And while she didn’t think telling her this story was easy for Butler, she had a feeling that they were coming to parts that would be . . . difficult.
“See you tomorrow night,” she said.
“Yes.”
It felt rude just to leave. “What do you do at night?”
He gave her an odd look. “I’m sorting out my affairs. My time here is almost done.”
As she walked down the lane to where Kieran waited with the pony cart, she imagined a giant hourglass slowly turning and the sand whispering Almost done as it fell.