A Ghost in the House of Iron

Chapter Eleven

ADAIN

Leon finds me sitting on the lip of one of the fountains in the garden, staring at the water. "Where are your guards?" he asks.

"My mother sent them away," I tell him, sighing. "She said, 'birds need to be able to fly.'"

"Oh." Leon seems puzzled by my dejected tone. "The king allowed that?"

"My father loves her," I say.

Leon sits next to me. "So what are you going to do?"

I grimace and toss a pebble into the fountain. "I don't know. I don't want to disappoint her," I say. "And… I've been thinking about what Gerald said. About protecting people from magic. Maybe they're right. My father and him. Maybe it's bad."

"Maybe," Leon says, and I expect his usual nonchalant shrug. Instead, he frowns and says, "But they still follow the Ironborn. We all go to the ceremonies. The High Priest shouts and lectures about demons and witches, orders us around, orders the king around. No one questions it, because he says he's protecting us, that he's speaking for the Goddess. No one argues."

His rant catches me by surprise. I raise my eyebrows at him. "Do you think they aren't protecting us?"

"I don't know," he says. Still no shrug. "I don't trust them. Back home, before…" Before his father died. Any then his mother. Before he was sent here to be Gerald's ward.

"Where I used to live," he starts again, "there were pixies napping in flowers, and gnomes in the apple trees. And sometimes there was an angry troll who would stomp around and smash things, or ghoul haunting the old mill, but people were more scared of the Ironborn coming than they ever were of pesky faeries. We wore rowan berries and sprinkled salt in our pockets. We never hung those stupid chains around our necks."

"There were pixies and gnomes and...and trolls?" I ask. "But there aren't supposed to be faeries in Ylvemore! Not since the war. They were driven out." But even as I say that I think of the girl in the library, with her green skin and her pleading eyes. I remember what Rogemere said to me, about the kingdom being infected with tiny seeds of evil. And I hear the girl's strangled cry in my head, the sound of her struggling to breathe as he smothered her with the force of his magic.

When I open my eyes, Leon is watching me with a knowing look. I have my hands pressed to the sides of my head, elbows propped on my knees. It feels like the world is spinning.

"There was a little girl," Leon says, tilting his chin to stare up at the sky. "Her parents brought her to the manor and begged my mother to help. To protect her. She was my age. But she wasn't normal. I mean, she looked like us, but she had wings, like a dragonfly's, all shimmery and… breakable. I was really little, but I remember."

"What happened to her?" I ask.

"They found her. They ripped off her wings and stabbed her. Kept stabbing her. With iron pikes. They made sure we all watched. She stopped making any sound, but her parents…" Leon clenches his jaw. "I can still hear them screaming, sometimes. When I'm trying to sleep, or when I hear a different sound and it… It just won't go away."

"I'm sorry," I say, so softly it's almost a whisper. The words don't feel like enough, but I don't have any others.

"Me, too," he says.

After a minute of sitting silently, he says, "Want to get some food?"

.

With arms and pockets full of bread and sausage, cheese and apples and half-crushed berry tarts, we walk out into the fields to have a picnic. For a second, I think I see someone following us, a flash of light reflecting off silver, a blur of gray. But when I look back to check, there's no one. Just afternoon sunshine filtering through clouds, casting dancing shadows.