Chapter 5 - Previous Owners on Premises

Fenwick Undergable was shorter than his folio and twice as dangerous.

He stood beside our breakfast table in a mustard-colored coat, polished riding boots, and a tall hat that brought the top of him level with the edge of the table. Two feet of gnome carried enough confidence for a duke. His leather folio took both arms to hold and contained, according to Lily, every property outside Ashbourne that nobody sensible wanted.

I had decided on the stairs that I wasn’t going to like him.

“I don’t need a realtor,” I told him, before he had said a word. “I want that understood at the start. I need a room. One room, outside the walls, with a door that locks and a window I can leave through. A man can find one room without professional help.”

“Certainly,” said Fenwick, and climbed onto the empty chair beside me without assistance.

Lily sat across from me with both hands around a cup of tea. She had her blue scarf on indoors and her white-blonde braid over one shoulder with a red ribbon in it, and she was smiling into the tea in a way that meant she had already won something and was waiting for me to notice what.

“You promised to listen,” she said.

“I’m listening. I’m listening very hard to the part where I don’t need him.”

Her boot found my ankle under the table and stayed there. The last time Lily’s boot had done that, she had been naked on top of me an hour later, and my cock remembered it before I did. It stood up in my trousers and leaned toward her across the table like a dog that has heard its name.

I ate a potato and looked stern.

“A room outside the walls,” Fenwick said, and opened the folio, “is a gift presented to the first six men who arrive with a ladder. Country property requires stone, ditches, and somewhere defensible to sleep while undesirables test the shutters.” He turned a page. “You do not need a room, Mr. Thornwood. You need a holding.”

“I’ve never held anything in my life.”

“You’re holding Kaniz’s chain,” Lily said.

I was. Kaniz sat on the bench at my right shoulder, half a step behind me even sitting down, which shouldn’t have been possible, and the loose end of her wrist chain lay across my thigh. My hand had wrapped itself around the links sometime during the potatoes. I hadn’t told it to.

I let go. My hand went back and took hold of them again.

Kaniz looked down at my fist on her chain, and her eyes went dark and pleased, and she shifted on the bench so her thigh pressed against mine from hip to knee. My cock, which had been leaning toward Lily, changed its mind and leaned toward her instead.

“And yet,” Kaniz said.

The Tome lay on the table between the salt and Lily’s cup with its eye half open. It had been listening to all of this with the expression of an emperor watching peasants haggle over a goat.

“A HOLDING!” it said. “Finally, a word with some dignity in it. I REQUIRE A TOWER. A library would be acceptable, if it has a tower attached.”

“You’re getting a shelf.”

“I have been shelved by three dynasties, boy. Each of them fell.”

Fenwick and Lily bent over the folio together to argue about a roof, and the Tome’s eye came round to me. Its voice dropped to the low one it hardly ever used, and the back of my neck prickled.

“And if this alleged realtor fails to find a house?”

I thought about my room upstairs, with its one window and its little fireplace and its bed I had loved since the first night, and the Guild order on the table beside it with fourteen days written on it.

“Then we both leave,” I said.

The eye stayed on me a moment longer. For once, the Tome had nothing filthy to say.

Fenwick slid a woodcut across the table between my plate and Lily’s tea.

It showed a farmstead on a low hill behind a wall of sharpened logs. A ditch ran outside the palisade. Inside there was a long stone house with a thatch roof that sagged, a granary up on stone legs, and a big hay barn with a railed watch platform on the roof. Behind the house somebody had drawn a walled kitchen garden in careful little lines, six beds and a pear tree in the corner. It seemed like a lot of work for vegetables.

I looked for the ways out first, out of habit: over the palisade, or off the barn roof. As far as I was concerned, that was all I needed to know about the house.

Lily put her cup down, slowly. She leaned over the woodcut, and her braid slid off her shoulder and touched the paper, and she looked at the garden for a long time, and she didn’t say a single word about the price.

I knew that look. I had seen it on her in her shop, in the spring, when somebody came in with a cutting from a plant she had never seen before. It was the only time Lily Winterbrook ever looked like she wanted something she hadn’t already worked out how to get.

My stomach went cold.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked Fenwick.

“It is twenty minutes from the north road, defensible on all sides, with a sound well and a granary of the first quality.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Fenwick pulled the woodcut back across the table and looked at it himself, fondly.

“The previous owners,” he said, “remain on the premises.”

The farmstead was everything the woodcut promised and smelled worse.

Fenwick had hired a covered wagon built for ordinary-sized clients, with a driver who looked at the four of us and Bertha on her lead and didn’t ask a single question. I liked the driver enormously. I liked him better than the farmstead, which came out of the snow on its hill at midmorning with a long, wet stink rolling down over the palisade that I could taste in the back of my mouth.

“The previous owners,” Fenwick said, climbing down with his folio hugged in both arms, “contracted a wasting condition in the hungry winter four years ago. They took to the root cellar, and they have declined to leave.”

“How many?” Lily asked.

“The household numbered seven.”

“Seven what?”

Fenwick consulted his folio, although I would have bet Bertha he knew every word in it. “Long-term residents,” he said, “with dietary preferences.”

“Ghouls,” Kaniz said happily.

The root cellar was in the yard, between the house and the granary. It had a stone front built into the slope and a heavy oak door, with a bar as thick as my thigh across it, held down in two iron brackets with a padlock the size of a loaf. I could have opened it in a minute, and I had no intention of touching it. When we walked past it, the breathing inside stopped. When we walked away, it started again, slow and wet, through the boards.

I liked that a lot. I had walked into the yard with my shoulders up around my ears, and every breath out of that cellar let them down an inch. A house with seven ghouls in the cellar was a house nobody could make me buy.

Kaniz went straight to the cellar door and put her ear against it.

My hand went out for her collar before I remembered she could take care of herself. She listened with her eyes half shut and her lips parted, and her dark cheeks had gone red up high from the cold, and her nipples pushed against the thin linen of her shift, because Kaniz didn’t believe in winter. My mind left the root cellar entirely.

“They sleep in the cold,” she said. “Mostly. Malkor kept two in the lower pens for a while. He fed them on feast days.” She tilted her head against the oak. “They wake when they smell blood.”

“Then nobody bleeds,” Lily said.

“Or anything else.” Kaniz looked at me with great interest. “The smell is close. They are not particular.”

Fenwick took Kaniz off to see the drainage. She was fascinated by drainage. To be fair to her, she had grown up in a fortress where the drains had been designed for blood, and she had opinions about slope. The two of them went round the back of the house, Fenwick going on about the history of the culvert and Kaniz asking pointed questions about capacity.

That left Lily and me in front of the garden gate.

I didn’t want to open it. I opened it anyway, because Lily was standing beside me with her hands in her coat pockets, waiting, and I am weak.

The garden was dead. It had been a good one once. The beds ran in long rows edged with stone, and a slate path went down the middle of them to a rusted iron bench at the far end, and the south wall was tall, which Lily would care about and I didn’t. Brambles had taken the far end. The pear tree in the corner had gone over sideways in some storm and lay along the wall with its roots in the air, and it had still put out a row of stubborn little shoots along the top of its trunk. The only thing in there worth stealing was the iron bench, and nobody would have given me a copper for it.

Lily stopped in the gateway.

She stood there with one gloved hand on the gatepost and her scarf slipping off her chin, and her eyes went from bed to bed, and down the slate path, and up the south wall to where the sun would reach, and back to the fallen pear tree with its shoots. She stared at the garden longer than she had looked at anything since I’d known her, including me naked.

I should have said something clever. My mouth had gone dry.

I watched her ass instead, because it was there and it was easier. She had leaned one shoulder on the gatepost and cocked a hip, and her coat had ridden up at the back, and the wool of her skirt lay snug over the compact, round curve of her that I had held in both hands yesterday while she told me to keep talking. I kept my eyes on that, hard, and my cock thickened, and I felt a lot better, because a hard-on was a problem I understood.

“It gets the sun from eleven to four,” Lily said, without turning round.

“It gets ghouls from now until forever.”

“I know.” She was still looking at the pear tree. “I didn’t say I wanted it.”

“You didn’t have to.”

She turned her head then and looked at me over her shoulder with those blue eyes, and I saw her catch the whole thing: the bulge and my feet planted in the gateway, refusing to go a step further in. Her mouth curved at one corner.

“You’re relieved,” she said.

“I’m horny. It looks like relief.”

“Samuel.” She patted my chest twice, briskly. “It’s a garden. Nobody’s making you plant anything.”

She walked down the slate path alone to look at the bench. I stood at the gate for a moment with my heart going hard for no reason I would admit to, and then I went to look at the barn, because I couldn’t stand there and watch her look at a dead garden like that.

The barn door stood open on a long dark row of stalls. The far corners were thick with shadow. I stopped on the threshold and narrowed my eyes and searched every one of them, the way I had checked the dark corners in Ashbourne for a year, because Felix Skotos could turn up anywhere and usually did.

The stalls looked empty. The corners had no Felix in them, which was all I was checking for, and I never gave the dark under the loft a second look. I let my breath out, satisfied, and climbed the ladder to the loft to inspect the watch platform, which I had decided needed inspecting right away.

At the top of the ladder a hand came out of the hay and took me by the front of my trousers.

“You checked the stalls,” Felix said. “You did not check the loft.”

He pulled me up off the ladder by my belt and into the hay, and I went, because the alternative was falling twelve feet onto a stone floor and because his hand was where it was. He lay on his back in a drift of four-year-old hay in the gray light from the gaps in the boards, in his black clothes, with his gold hair spread out under his head and straw in it, and he had the face of a man who had been waiting for an hour and had enjoyed every minute.

“How did you get here?”

“Does it matter?” He had my belt open already. “Would the answer please you?”

“This is a viewing. I’m working.”

“You were standing in a gateway staring at a florist’s ass while she looked at a garden she cannot have.” He pulled my trousers down off my hips in one tug, and the cold of the loft hit my bare ass and my cock sprang up into the air between us, which was the only part of me that had been consulted. “I watched you through the boards. You were very sad about it, in your trousers.”

“I’m not sad.”

“No?” He wrapped his hand around me, warm and dry, and stroked me once, slowly, from root to tip. “Then what is this?”

“That’s a different conversation.”

My whole plan for the morning had been to stand in a yard and look disappointed in the property. My plan for the next ten seconds was to tell Felix to let go, climb down the ladder, and go and stand by Lily. I had it all worked out. My hips pushed into his fist, and the plan went out through a gap in the boards and was never seen again.

Felix laughed under his breath and rolled us. He put me on my back in the hay with my trousers round my knees and my shirt rucked up, and he knelt over my thighs and watched me with his violet eyes half shut, and he took his time about it. He always took his time when he knew there were people twenty yards away. It was his favorite thing about me, he had told me once, that I was the loudest man in Ashbourne and he could make me try to be quiet.

“Lily’s in the garden,” I said.

“Then she will hear you.” He stroked me again, slower. “Try not to let her.”

I tried. I tried with everything I had. I bit the inside of my cheek and stared at a rafter and thought about Marcus’s contract and the Guild order and seven ghouls, and Felix bent down and put his mouth on the inside of my thigh and bit it, and I made a sound like a kicked goose.

“Badly done,” Felix said against my skin.

“You bit me.”

“I am going to bite you again.” He came up the length of me with his mouth, over my hip and my stomach, and he kissed me, hard, with his hand still working me between us, and the hay prickled through my shirt, and I got my hands under his shirt and onto his bare back and stopped thinking about anything at all. His mouth was hot. His hand was perfect. He knew exactly how tight to hold me and exactly when to slow down, and every time I got close he slowed down, and every time he slowed down I grabbed him harder and he laughed into my mouth.

He caught my bottom lip between his teeth and bit down.

It was hard enough to draw blood, and I tasted copper, and Felix made a pleased sound and sucked the lip into his mouth and licked the blood off it, and his hand moved faster, and I was so close I could see colors.

Under the hay, right by my left shoulder, the floor moved.

It bulged up against me. Something knocked on the underside of the boards from below, slow and heavy, three times. Felix went still above me with his hand still around my cock.

“That,” he said, “is not me.”

The board cracked. A hand came up through it.

It was gray. The fingers were too long, the nails had grown out black and curling, and the skin hung loose off the knuckles in wet folds. It patted around in the hay a foot from my bare ass, found the hem of my shirt, and tore a strip off it with a long ripping sound, and pulled it down into the hole.

“That’s my shirt,” I said.

The rest of the board came up, and the ghoul’s head came after it, and it was the worst face I had ever seen in a barn, which is saying something, because I grew up in Willowbrook. It had been a man once. His hair was gone. His lips had shrunk back off his teeth, and his eyes were milky and huge, and he turned his face toward me and sniffed, long and deep, at my bleeding mouth.

Felix got off me.

He did it in one smooth movement, without hurrying, and he went up a post to the crossbeam over the loft in three moves, which I would have admired on any other day, and sat down on the beam with his legs hanging over the edge. He brushed the hay off his knees.

“Felix!”

“I am observing,” he said.

The ghoul came up out of the floor after me.

I discovered at that moment that you cannot fight with your trousers round your knees. I tried to stand up and fell over. I kicked one leg free, and the other caught round my ankle and stayed there with my belt in it, and my dagger was on my belt, and my belt was on my trousers, and my trousers were wrapped round my left foot, so I hopped backward through the hay, bent double, with my cock still hard and slapping against my stomach, groping at my own ankle for the hilt while a dead farmer crawled after me on his elbows.

“Your left shoulder is dropping,” Felix said from the beam.

“I’m naked!”

“From the waist down. Your shoulder is dressed, and it is dropping.”

I got the dagger free. The ghoul lunged. He was slow, but he was not slow enough, and his black nails raked across my bare calf, and the pain went bright and hot all the way up my leg. I cut him across the wrist. He didn’t care. I kicked him in the face with the foot that still had a trouser on it, and he grabbed the trouser leg in both hands and pulled.

I went down on my back in the hay with my leg in the air and a ghoul hauling on my pants.

“Is everything in order up there?” Fenwick called from the yard.

“No!” I shouted.

The ladder creaked behind me. Lily’s head came up over the edge of the loft, then her shoulders, then her arm, and she took one look at the scene, which was me on my back with my cock out and a ghoul on my trouser leg and Felix sitting on a beam above us with his legs dangling, and she didn’t even blink. She reached up to the beam over the ladder where a row of old horseshoes had been nailed for luck, wrenched the nearest one off its nail, and threw it.

It went past my head end over end and hit the ghoul square between the eyes with a crack that rang off the rafters.

The ghoul let go of my trousers. He sat back on his heels and looked surprised for a second, and fell backward down through the hole in the floor and landed in the stall below with a heavy, wet thud.

I lay in the hay and breathed.

Lily climbed the rest of the way up the ladder. She had a second horseshoe in her hand already and her cheeks were bright red, from the climb or from the view, and I didn’t want to ask which. She looked at me, then up at Felix on his beam, then back at me.

“Hello, Felix,” she said.

“Miss Winterbrook.” He nodded to her. “A beautiful throw.”

“You were sitting on a beam.”

“I was observing the property.” He looked down at me with enormous satisfaction. “It has excellent views.”

Lily looked at my bleeding calf, my bleeding lip, my cock, which had not got the message about the ghoul and was still standing straight up in the cold air, the stupid thing, and the trousers still tangled on my foot. She put the horseshoe in her coat pocket.

“Did it bite you?”

“Felix bit me.”

“Your leg is bleeding.”

I looked down at my calf. It was, quite a lot.

From the yard came a bang, and another bang. I rolled over and looked down through the hole in the floor. The ghoul lay in the stall below, twitching, and beyond him, out through the open barn door, I could see the oak bar across the root cellar jumping in its brackets, over and over, as everyone else who lived there woke up and smelled my mouth.

“Samuel,” Kaniz called from somewhere behind the house. Her voice had gone bright and eager. “You are bleeding.”

We passed.

Fenwick wrote PASS across the bottom of the woodcut while we ran for the wagon, which I respected, because Kaniz was carrying him under one arm at the time and he still had the presence of mind to do the paperwork. Lily ran beside me with her skirts in one fist. I ran holding my trousers up with one hand and my dagger in the other, my calf leaving red spots in the snow, and Felix walked out of the barn door behind us taking his sweet time with his hands in his pockets, and the first ghoul to break out and come up the cellar steps looked at him and went the other way, because ghouls have more sense than I do.

The driver had the wagon turned and the horse moving before we reached it. I loved him. I would have married him.

We went down the hill at a pace the wagon wasn’t built for, with Bertha cantering behind on her lead and making her opinion of all of us known, and I lay across the back bench with my head in Kaniz’s lap and my leg in Lily’s and bled on both of them.

Kaniz had my lip between her thumb and finger, examining it. She looked fascinated and offended.

“He bit you,” she said.

“Felix bites.”

She turned my face toward her, and her dark eyes went over the split in my lip with great care, and she bent down and kissed it with the tip of her tongue, and I felt it all the way to my heels. “I will bite you later,” she said, “so that the last bite on you is mine.”

My cock, which had finally gone down somewhere around the cellar steps, came straight back up and lifted the blanket Lily had thrown over me.

Lily looked at the blanket, then at Kaniz. She tied her blue scarf tight round my calf with her teeth set, pulled the knot hard enough to make me yelp, and kept her hand flat on my knee after it was tied.

Felix rode on the driver’s bench beside Fenwick, facing backward so he could watch me. I don’t know where he got a seat on the driver’s bench. I don’t know where he came from in the first place. He was twirling a piece of straw between two fingers.

“For the record,” he said, “I did not help.”

“I noticed.”

“I want it noticed.”

Fenwick opened a shutter on the wagon lantern, unbuckled his folio on his knees, and paged through it by its light. His hat had stayed on through a ghoul and a ride under Kaniz’s arm, and I was starting to think it was nailed on.

“I will be revising the asking price,” he said, “to reflect the floor, the condition of the cellar, and the various other disclosures I overheard from the yard. Most of them were yours, Mr. Thornwood.”

Lily put her hand over her eyes.

I lay there with my head in Kaniz’s lap and my blood on everybody, and I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. I laughed until my split lip opened again and my ribs hurt, and after a moment Lily started laughing too, helplessly, bent over my knee with her face in her hands, and I thought it was the best morning I’d had in a week.

“Tomorrow,” said Fenwick, and flipped a page, “something with more character.”

“No,” I said. “No more character.”

He turned the folio round on his knees so Kaniz could see the woodcut, which was a square stone tower on a hill. Below the tower, in careful little lines, he had drawn the cross-section of a cellar, with rings set in the walls and a heavy wooden frame in the middle of the floor. I had a pretty good guess what a frame like that was for, and it wasn’t drying herbs.

“The lower chambers,” Fenwick said, “retain their original fixtures.”

Kaniz stopped breathing.

She went perfectly still with my head in her lap. Her fingers tightened in my hair. I looked up at her face from below and saw her lips part and her dark eyes go wide and black, fixed on the little drawing of the rings in the wall, and under my head her thighs pressed together.

“Chains?” she asked.

“Iron,” said Fenwick. “The original iron.”