It’s roughly twelve strides from the wall’s edge to the door—she measured—but she has walked that much, and now the crumbling edge hovers in the distance, another twelve ahead. She walks toward it, but with every stride, the wall grows longer, the end out of reach.
She breaks into a clumsy run, trying to outpace the stone, but it is always one step ahead. It goes on and on, and Olivia slows, breathless, panic worming through her limbs.
She twists round, intending to head back for the iron gate.
And stops.
The field is gone. There is no tall grass. No thistles. No wild world.
In its place, there is a garden.
Or at least, the shriveled remains of a garden. Withered limbs and wilting blooms, their petals pale, their leaves devoid of color. There is an orchard to one side, its branches bare, and the remains of a vegetable patch to the other, its contents long gone to seed and rot.
And there, at the top of the ruined garden, sits another Gallant.
Chapter Seventeen
Once, back at Merilance, Matron Sarah held a drawing class.
Olivia had already begun to teach herself—a habit started early. There was a kind of power in capturing the world around her, distilling it to lines and curves, a language of gestures that anyone could understand.
But in this class, the girls were told to draw themselves.
The matron gave each a sheet of paper and a pencil and showed them how to render their own face, how to measure the distance of their eyes, the angle of their nose and cheeks and smile. And then she set them loose.
A small stack of mirrors lay in the center of the table, some new and others silvered, some cracked and others whole. There weren’t enough to go around, so the girls had to share, stealing glimpses of themselves whenever they could, which meant the angles and the light were always changing, and when the time was up, and the portraits tacked on the wall, the room was full of faces, and every one of them was wrong.
A distorted reflection, strange, unnerving.
That is what Olivia sees when she looks at the house beyond the wall.
It has all the right features, arranged the wrong way. A drawing done too much from memory or a contour sketch, where you do not lift the pen, and all the lines connect and bleed together into something abstract, a stylized impression.
Overhead, the dusk has somehow dropped away, the sky an inky black. There is no moon. No stars. And yet, it is not empty. No, it is like a lake, a vast expanse of dark water. The kind of dark that tricks the eye. Makes you see things where there are none. Or miss things when they are there. The dark that lives in the spaces you know you should not look, lest you catch sight of other eyes, staring back.
Olivia retreats, pressing herself back against the wall, expecting stone, and shivering when she feels the kiss of iron instead. The door.
She pushes, but it doesn’t move. She searches for a keyhole—but there’s not even a handle, nothing but a film of debris on the metal, dead ivy and leaves that flake away like rust or skin.
She presses her eye to the narrow gap and sags with relief when she sees Gallant—the real Gallant—still sitting on the other side, dusk settling over the garden. Her mind goes to the strange metal sculpture in the study, the two houses facing each other across the twisting spheres.
A shadow moves across a window—Hannah—and Olivia pounds on the door, expecting the sound to carry, to echo, but it doesn’t. The iron swallows the noise like silk, or down, or moss. And as she watches, Hannah lifts one hand to close the shutter. Locking out the dark. And her.
Olivia takes a step back and feels the small crunch of something beneath her boot.
Looking down, she finds a handful of small white seeds scattered at her feet. She bends to take one up, feels the point between her finger and thumb and realizes they are not seeds at all, but tiny teeth. She looks around and sees a handful of other bones, thin and brittle. Bits of beak and paw and wing, and her first thought is, here are all the animals she should have heard and seen at Gallant.
She doesn’t realize her hand has closed over the little tooth until it jumps. Shudders like a bee against her palm. Olivia gasps, cold prickling up her arm as she lets go, and by the time it hits the ground, it is not a writhing bit of bone, but a mouse.
A small, gray-furred thing that skitters away into the wasted garden.
Olivia stares down at her palm, now empty, and wonders what the hell is happening, if she fell in the field and hit her head. If this is yet another dream.
She looks up at the house that is not Gallant.
The shutters hang open, and a pale glow suffuses the windows. A light is on somewhere inside.