Page 5 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
CHAPTER 3
Hester came awake in the night because something had ended.
At first her sleep-fogged brain thought that it might have been a sound. Had there been rain? Had she woken because the drumming on the roof had stopped? No, there wasn’t any rain last night, was there? It was clear as a bell and chilly from it.
She lay blinking up at the ceiling, the posts of the bed framing her vision like trees. What had stopped?
Fear took her suddenly by the throat, a formless dread with no name, no shape, only a sense that something was wrong, something terrible was coming this way. Hester gasped, reaching for her neck as if to pull off a murderer’s hands, but there was only the darkness there.
She was in her own room, in her own bed, in her brother’s house that had been her father’s house and her grandfather’s before him. She knew exactly where she was. If it had been a nightmare, she could have shaken it off, but she was firmly awake now, and the dread was not receding.
Something was coming. It would be here before long. Not tonight, perhaps not even tomorrow, but soon.
Ah, she thought, remaining calm even in her head. It was my safety that ended. Yes, of course.
Hester had felt such a nameless fear once before in her life, when she looked into the eyes of a young man that her parents had picked out for her. She had gathered her courage and cried off the wedding. It had cost her dearly but she stood her ground in the face of all opposition. Her parents had raised her to be good and biddable and not cause a fuss and it had shocked both them and Hester herself to learn how much stubbornness she had saved up over the course of those years.
Years later, when the young man’s proclivities came to light, she was held to have had a lucky escape. By then, of course, it was much too late. She had been branded a jilt and she was not beautiful enough to tempt any other suitors, nor was there enough money in the family coffers to tempt their pocketbooks. She had been considered firmly “on the shelf” by the time that word came down of what he had done, and the hanging that had followed.
Her father had apologized. Her mother hadn’t, but Hester had no longer expected such things.
This had the same taste, the same sense that doom followed and she had only a little time to avert it.
“All right,” she rasped aloud. “All right. I hear you. I’m listening.”
Acknowledgment seemed to be all that it wanted. The dread released her and Hester gasped in air, feeling sweat oozing from her skin and soaking into the sheets.
She wished suddenly, powerfully, that Richard were there in the bed beside her. They had been lovers a decade earlier, and then he had offered her marriage and she had turned him down, not willing to have him sacrifice his prospects out of pity. He was Lord Evermore to most, with an immense estate and money enough to set half the matchmakers in the city baying at his heels. He needed an heir and a spare and a woman young enough to give him both.
Hester did not exactly regret that choice, but it would be so much easier now to roll over and shake him awake and tell him that she’d had a nightmare. His arms would close around her, and she would lean her forehead against his shoulder and breathe easier. It would have been good to have.
But I don’t have it. And whatever is coming, it seems that I will have to deal with it myself.
Hester sighed. She was fifty-one years old now, and her back ached and her knees ached and when the barometer plunged, she found it easier to use a cane. She did not want to be standing in the path of the storm.
And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride, she thought, and rolled over, and tried to get a little more sleep before something terrible arrived.
In the morning, Cordelia saddled Falada and rode him out of the stable. She took nothing with her, because she had not dared to plan anything in advance. She did not even dare to think about rebellion. She simply rode away, in the opposite direction from her rides with Ellen, staring at the road between Falada’s ears.
They went for perhaps three miles, as far as they had ever gone from home, and then Falada stopped.
Cordelia squeezed with her knees, and clucked her tongue. He did not move.
She got off his back and tried to lead him. “It’s all right,” she said. “Come on.” Her voice was shaking for reasons that she didn’t dare think about. “Come on, Falada, good horse.”
He did not move. She tugged on his halter and he set his feet in the road and did not move.
“It’s all right,” she told him. “We’re going away. You and me. So she won’t make you do anything that will get you killed.”
He might as well have been carved of quartz.
“We can’t stay. She’ll make you obedient again, and I can’t stop her.”
Falada did not stir a hoof.
“We’ll go another way,” she said, and tried to lead him off the road.
Again, he did not move. Not forward. Not back.
