Page 89 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
A single candle on the table was no longer enough light to read by, but Hester had stopped reading. She rubbed her eyes wearily. The books were exhausting to read. Sometimes, for a few minutes, she could pry some sense out of them, but then it would all fall apart into nonsense about immortality and homunculi and magnetic fields. The foolishness of it seemed to actually steal meaning from the other parts, until she was no longer sure that there was anything there at all.
Maybe I’m deluding myself that I understand any of it. Probably you have to be an alchemist or a member of a secret society or a scholar of ridiculous texts.
She stared broodingly across the low stone wall at the patio’s edge. Only a narrow band of rosebushes separated her from the lawn, and across the lawn, the almost tropical lushness of trees. Normally she loved the woods that bordered Evermore House, but now they seemed oppressively secretive. Their green depths might conceal anything. Even a horse risen from the dead.
She reached for her wineglass. The glass door behind her opened. She didn’t turn her head, hoping that it was Richard, suspecting by the lightness of the tread that it was not.
“I am right,” said Imogene, “and I can prove it.” She dropped a book on the table. “Prepare to be dazzled.”
Hester stifled a sigh. It didn’t surprise her that Imogene had managed to keep her focus. Being right was the one thing that she loved more than winning at cards.
“Very well,” she said. “Dazzle me.”
“I found a chart of alchemical correspondences. It’s like the bodily humors, I think, only they’ve made it infinitely more complicated.” She opened a book and shoved it across the table. “Look. It breaks down how they defined people as water, wine, salt, or… well, there’s a lot of them, I’m afraid.”
Hester picked up the book, realized she couldn’t read it in the gloom, and was reaching for the candle when she froze.
There was a light in the woods.
“Imogene,” she said, her own voice very calm in her ears, “look over there.”
Imogene turned her head, just as the distant honking and hissing of agitated geese reached them.
Falada was coming through the trees.
“Oh no,” said Imogene. “No, no, no.” She rose to her feet, knocking over the chair.
Without a head to anchor the eye, the horse’s outline had gone dreadful and alien, like a half-crushed spider scrabbling across the grass. The remains of his neck flopped limp and bloodless. Hester stood, frozen in horror, as the dead familiar scurried toward them.
She might have sat there until he actually reached the stone wall, petrified like a rabbit under a hawk’s shadow, if not for the geese.
The flock landed heavily on the grass, led by the short-legged gander. Falada veered, trying to avoid them, but they struck at his legs, hissing and flapping. Suddenly he reared up, striking out, that bloodless neck flapping horribly, and the unmusical squawk of a goose in pain cut through the night.
It freed Hester from her paralysis. How dare this monster attack one of her geese?! She shoved herself upright, grabbing at her cane, as the flock scattered and the familiar came on, moving almost sideways, like a crab.
“What are you doing?!” Imogene snarled, grabbing her shoulder. “Get inside! It’ll kill you!”
“The geese—”
“Can fly! You can’t!”
Very much struck by this logic, Hester hobbled toward the door. Imogene snatched the book from the table and followed. They slammed the door behind them, and Imogene grabbed for the chest of drawers. “Mary! Mary!”
Hester’s maid appeared in the doorway. “Eh? What’s all the commotion?”
“Take the other end of this and help me bar the door,” snapped Imogene, getting a grip on the dresser. “I don’t trust the glass to hold.”
“Hold against what?”
“Mad horse,” said Imogene shortly.
Mary’s expression indicated that she thought the horse wasn’t the only thing that had gone mad, but she grabbed the other end of the dresser and helped Imogene drag it. Hester grabbed the bellpull and yanked on it until the servants’ rooms must have sounded like a church belfry.
Crash! Glass shattered as something—“something” my ass, you know what it is—hit the door. Jagged silver rained down and the dresser was knocked back several inches. Mary screamed, as much in shock as fear. Imogene snatched up an ornamental vase and flung it in the direction of the door. Her aim was terrible and it smashed against the wall, leaving a dent and a second spray of shards.
Hester abandoned the bellpull and grabbed a chair, shoving it toward the broken glass door. Imogene hefted the second vase of the pair. On the patio, geese hissed and screamed and something thumped hard against the stones.
Then silence.
