The Heartwood

Chapter 10

Asher listens to his parents fight. They do this after he is in bed, but he has never heard their voices clash throughout the walls like this before. He aches as he burrows under the quilt draped across him. The heavy fabric smells stale and the boy finds the weight of it unfamiliar. He doesn't know where he is.

Cracking an eyelid encrusted with sleep, he finds the decor intimately familiar. Asher is in Heart Wood's study, planted in the chaise by the fireplace. The curtain is drawn back and daylight is weakly gleaming. It is either a new morning or the clouds have broken on the old one. The smell of smoke remains, but only due to the modest blaze before him. He is warm, but not burning from within. Sage or some other weed is smoking in the heart of this room.

Asher shifts to peek at the desk, finding the effort very difficult. His limbs feel as if they are constructed of a different kind of matter. The incense leaves his gaze unfocused and his eyelids heavy.

He is alone as his parents fight. The verbal repartee seeps in through the door, cracked open, that Asher eventually identifies from the awkward angling of his chair. No...

He rubs his face into the warm upholstery of the chair. Those are not the elder Walshes that he hears. It is Master Fry and...Asher stalls. Listens. An indecipherable crescendo of words with an unmistakably unfriendly tone eventually reveals another voice: Darren Kingsley.

Asher swallows, his tongue dry and his throat sticky with bile. He is surprised to find no cuts or swelling in that orifice. He tests the drag and pull of his tongue, but there is nothing wrong with his mouth.

He frowns. He wants to slip back to sleep, but already his eyes are scanning the shelf. Asher can see that the casket is absent, from what the glaze of firelight reveals. The space it had once occupied now holds a small statue of a jade feline that flickers and hisses along with the source that illuminates it. The accusatory glare it seems to deliver causes Asher to slide his attention away.

Of course the casket would have been moved.

Having no recollection of being placed here in the study, having no casket to solidly remind him of his conspiracy, nor injuries to prove his trauma is more than a fragment of a strange and uncharacteristic nightmare, Asher settles into a lucid sense of shame. He drags the fusty thick cover around himself like a shield and tries to accept the awful day as an illusion. He is somehow in Mr. Fry's care and the remaining facts can be negotiated at a later and more reasonable time. The black peace of empty dreams pulls at Asher and he once more begins to obey their siren call to -

"You will be the death of him!"

The barked cry, louder than prudence would call for indoors, carries like a song. It skips and echoes up stairs and against walls and through cracks in sheltered rooms. Asher's ears notice, and they catch a deeper, more primal voice reply in kind. The first words are an audible: "And you..." but if more is spoken, the house swallows those details.

Ignored or forgotten, Asher holds himself still. He blearily thinks that if he does not succumb to the fire and the quilt and his body's demands, he will lose a chance to deny something. He could escape a memory more unscathed. It is the queerest thought, and with the fire growling peaceably and a cat totem staring unfeelingly, Asher is far from terror and the weighty world. Even with men shouting somewhere close, the study has a calming effect.

A refuge, it stands. Despite any invasions or breaches made by...

His eyes sting. He squeezes them shut, aware again of the shame. The guilt. The sensations slip over the edge of Asher's mind. They chase a voice in his memory commanding another with strange words, tangible and weaving about. If Asher turns his recollections one way, the Count's oppressive tone drags him back. A body, lifted from the ground. Pathetic. Dying, perhaps. Freed or pitied. Good Knight Walsh.