Tide (The Sarah Midnight Trilogy) Page 17

  “Nicholas! Wake up! It’s fine, it’s just a nightmare.” It was the first time in her life that she had to comfort someone who was having a bad dream, and not the other way round.

  “Martyna!” he called.

  Martyna?

  Sarah frowned, and took hold of his hand. “Nicholas. Shhhh. It’s OK. I’m here. Wake up, you’re safe.”

  Nicholas’s black eyes opened in the darkness, and he sat up with a jolt. Sarah embraced him at once, stroking his hair, caressing his back, cradling him gently. She felt something wet against her cheek, and scalding hot. His burning tears.

  “Nicholas.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He clung to her in a way he’d never done before.

  “Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK.”

  “Sarah. I’m sorry.”

  “It was just a bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

  It wasn’t a bad dream. It was my life. It is my life. “I can’t. I can’t go back to sleep.”

  Sarah nodded. She knew very well what this felt like, not wanting to close your eyes again. “I’ll light the fire and I’ll make you some tea, OK?” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She tiptoed out of the room, closing the door behind her, made her way towards the stairs, but just as she reached the top step she stopped in her tracks. There was a figure standing on the landing, shrouded in shadows.

  Sean.

  “I heard a noise. I thought I would come and check on you,” he said.

  “It was Nicholas. He was having a bad dream.”

  “Right.” He didn’t move.

  “It’s not what you think. We aren’t—we didn’t—” Words failed Sarah. She just couldn’t explain. And why did it feel like a betrayal?

  She turned and walked away without looking back.

  31

  Chrysalis

  Seasons have tempered us

  Like water to a burning sword

  Nicholas was finally asleep, but Sarah was wide awake.

  She couldn’t lie in bed any longer. The house was calling her. Since they’d arrived she’d barely had time to walk from room to room, to hear Midnight Hall’s whispered welcome to its rightful owner.

  She got up and slipped her white jumper around her shoulders. Quietly, she opened a drawer of her mother’s dressing table; of course, they were still there. Every room was equipped with an emergency kit of candles, matches and a torch, as there were often power cuts on Islay. The torch would have been more practical, but Sarah preferred the golden, soft light of candles. She took hold of one of the two silver candlesticks sitting on either side of the mantelpiece and stood in front of the dressing table. The match sizzled feebly as she lit it, and she turned towards Nicholas to make sure he was still asleep. He didn’t stir.

  The candle’s small, warm light flickered and danced, revealing the draughts in the room. It lit up Sarah’s face with a honeyed glow, and she was surprised as she caught her reflection in the dressing table mirror to see how much her face had changed. There was a strength in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Her eyes widened as she realized how much she looked like her mother.

  Sarah’s footsteps were too light to make a sound as she walked out of the room, protecting the flickering flame with her cupped hand. To walk with a candle in her hand made her think of her ancestors, her grandmother, before electricity came, and their nightly walks through the house, guided only by the light of this tiny fire between their fingers. The whole house was asleep and there was no noise to be heard.

  She wasn’t sure where to go, but her feet took her down the corridor, past the stained-glass window and down the stairs. She was shivering in spite of her jumper, and her feet felt cold on the steps. Still, in a strange way, she enjoyed feeling the stone against her bare skin, as if she were feeling the house itself, settling and creaking and breathing like a living thing. She put her right arm out, her fingers brushing the wall lightly. Step after step, the light of the candle illuminating her naked feet, and then the vast, high-ceilinged vestibule. She stopped for a second and breathed in. The house smelled of peat, of damp and of something else, something she recognized but couldn’t quite place.

  Lilies?

  She closed her eyes and inhaled again. Yes, lilies.

  Sarah smiled to herself. She knew now where she wanted to go. Past the small living room where Niall had been taken when unconscious, past the library whose walls were covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves, past her grandmother’s study. The grand hall opened dark and cavernous to her left, but she turned right instead.

  She entered the music room, where she’d spent so many peaceful hours listening to her grandmother and her parents playing, and practising the cello herself. She stepped into the darkened room, illuminating in turn a piano, a harpsichord and the shape of a covered harp, taller than her, resembling a bulky hunchbacked figure. Her fingers lingered on the piano. Carefully she opened its lid and played a few notes, balancing the candle with her other hand. The sound echoed in the silence of the night. Her mother Anne had been an extraordinary pianist, she remembered sadly.

  Sarah closed the piano lid as the notes reverberated. She didn’t want to wake anybody, and she didn’t want to be disturbed in her journey through memory and time.

  She walked on, towards the wall opposite, and fingered the soft, aqua and gold wallpaper. Under her touch, an invisible door hidden by the wallpaper opened. Sarah smiled, her secret hideout, the cosy, protected place where she went to read and daydream, was still there. It hadn’t been secret at all, of course – everyone knew of its existence – but it felt like that to her, as a child.

  It was a tiny room – more of a cupboard – whose purpose had been unknown even to Morag and Hamish. They had no idea why whoever built the house many generations before had decided to carve that small chamber just off the music room. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

  Sarah stepped in, the light of the candle illuminating the small space. It was covered in the same aqua and gold wallpaper as the music room, and along the back wall ran a small wooden ottoman. Knowing that Sarah loved sitting in there with a book, Morag had had the ottoman covered in blue velvet cushions. Sarah smiled to herself again, remembering her grandmother’s act of kindness. She placed the candlestick on the wooden floor carefully and kneeled in front of the ottoman, opening its velvet-covered lid.

  It was full of treasures, intact from the last time she’d been in the room. As a teenager she hadn’t used the hideaway as much; the prized possessions she had placed in the ottoman must have been there for at least five years. Inside, there was a pink fabric bag, embroidered with little pink sequins. Sarah opened it, and gasped in delight to uncover the treasure it hid. It was a tiny wooden box painted with blue and green flowers – she had forgotten all about it. She lifted the lid, and smiled upon seeing a pair of blue butterfly-shaped earrings that her father had given her on his return from a trip to London when she was ten years old. Those earrings had been her very first piece of jewellery. She slipped the box in the pocket of her jumper.

  Next, she took out an address book, with a white kitten on the cover. It was full of phone numbers of former classmates.

  Mary Elizabeth McGregor

  Sophie Singh

  Patrick Thomson

  Patrick Thomson! Her first crush. How she’d sighed because of him. And still, when he’d finally noticed her and asked her to go for chips, she’d chickened out of it. The poor guy had waited for an hour and a half in front of the chip shop. She felt a pang of guilt at the memory. Poor Patrick. One of the many boys who’d fallen for her shy, prickly charm and her lovely dark looks, only to be bitterly disappointed. Nobody had ever come close to her, not even remotely.

  Nobody, that is, until Sean arrived.

  Her eye fell on a book with a green cover and the image of a red-haired girl in a dress and straw hat sitting on a rope swing staring up at her. She took the book in her hand: Anne of Green Gables. How muc
h she’d loved that book. She’d read it endless times. She opened the first page.

  Happy Birthday, Sarah! From Aunt Juliet to Sarah, October 2005.

  She’d been eleven years old.

  The feelings of joy and tenderness gave way to a wave of sorrow. Aunt Juliet was gone and would never come back. She recalled their last day together, when she’d been so hard on her, so impatient. Like she’d always been, really. Only now Sarah was beginning to realize how present Aunt Juliet had been throughout her life, and how often she had rebuffed her for it, instead of being thankful. Now Aunt Juliet was gone – and her Uncle Trevor, and surely her cousins, didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. She’d been severed from the last of her family.

  Maybe that’s what happens to all Midnights, sooner or later. One by one the people we love are picked apart and destroyed.

  Something cold and steely blossomed in her heart. She would not let all this loss annihilate her. It would be easy to give in to the pain, but she wouldn’t – she’d turn the grief into strength. She would be tempered, like metal in water. From the day she’d been told about her parents’ death, to her first hunt, to Sean’s appearance in her life and throughout the destruction of Cathy’s Valaya, during those terrible times a new Sarah had emerged. The little girl lying alone in an empty house had grown into a resilient young woman who had learnt to face her destiny. Even the way she walked had changed, the way she held her body straight and proud.

  Like Morag.

  A small, soft nugget of the old Sarah was still nesting in her heart – the girl who longed to be loved – but it was hidden from sight. The new Sarah stood by herself.

  Except when Nicholas was around. That’s when her strength ebbed away somehow, albeit temporarily. Why did he have that effect on her?

  And most of all, where were her dreams? Were they lost forever?

  She shook her head at those uncomfortable thoughts and opened the wooden box again. She slipped the butterfly earrings into her ears. That’s what she was, a chrysalis that had turned into a butterfly. And she wouldn’t let anyone steal her newfound strength.

  Sarah took hold of the candlestick again and closed the door on her former hideaway. She’d leave the little memories where they were. She felt they belonged there.

  She wasn’t ready to go back to bed, to share her space with Nicholas. He was fast asleep anyway, with no sign of nightmares anymore.

  Who is Martyna? she asked herself as she closed the heavy wooden door of the music room.

  She hesitated for a moment, then crossed the corridor and pushed the heavy, two-panelled door of the grand hall open. The light of the candle, flickering with the omnipresent draughts, seemed very small in the vast room. The ceiling was crisscrossed with black wooden beams, and the polished floor was covered in precious, exotic-looking rugs. Beams of golden light glimmered against the ceiling, the candlelight reflected in the crystal chandelier.

  Sarah walked on slowly, turning around to illuminate the whole room – a stag head hanging on the far wall, together with tapestries and paintings. Suddenly, Sarah remembered her grandfather, Hamish, saying how much he would have loved to have demon spoils hanging on the walls – but he’d never been able to have them, because the Surari ended up dissolved in the Blackwater. Sarah shuddered, thinking of severed demon heads hanging on the walls of this place, watching them as they ate around the huge oak table.

  She contemplated the velvet curtains drawn over the windows, a colour somewhere between crimson and burgundy, and then she moved the fabric aside slightly, to get a view of the beach. The sea and the sky were fused in blackness, pale clouds moving slowly like frayed, ghostly sails. Something stirred in Sarah’s mind, the hint of a memory, something important, something she had forgotten, dancing at the edge of her consciousness.

  In her mind’s eye, Sarah saw herself as a small girl standing on the watermark, wrapped in her red coat and scarf, holding her grandmother’s hand. It had been the day before Morag died, when they’d walked on the beach together.

  Sarah shook her head slightly, trying to clear her thoughts, but the feeble memory was gone, too insubstantial to be held long enough to know what it meant. Sarah frowned.

  The candle swayed violently from the draught that seeped through the window and threatened to engulf the curtain. Sarah jerked the flame away from the fabric as quickly as she could. When her eyes moved from the candle to the room again, she gasped. The hall had somehow turned into a blackened shell, covered in debris and ashes. Her feet felt wet, and she looked down to see that she was standing ankle-deep in Blackwater. The curtains beside her were now threadbare and frayed, crumbling to ash. Sarah panted, breathless and dizzy from the sudden vision. She blinked hard several times, and the vision was gone.

  She stood under the impossibly high ceiling, the stag head looking on with its glassy, indifferent eyes, trying to steady her heart – she’d seen the whole place burnt down and destroyed. Was that a vision of what would have happened had she not moved the candle as quickly as she had? Or was it of something still to happen? It wouldn’t be the first time a vision came to her when she was awake, and with her dreams having disappeared, maybe her gift had found a way to tell her what she needed to know.

  What she needed now, for sure, was some tea to steady her nerves. She looked at her watch, twenty past three in the morning. She turned her back to the stag head and its staring eyes, and stepped out of the grand hall, pulling the thick door closed behind her. She stopped for a moment, trying to catch her still ragged breath.

  She turned left on her way to the kitchen, considering how frozen her feet were, but something made her stop in front of her grandmother’s study. She hesitated for a second, and lifted her free hand to feel her butterfly earring dreamily – then, on impulse, she opened the door and stepped in.

  She inhaled the scent of old books and damp that had always been the signature of that room. The candlelight illuminated the enormous bookshelves and the dark wooden desk at the farthest corner, where Sarah had found the letters. A painting of wild horses hung over the desk. Sarah’s eyes lingered on it. She walked on slowly, holding the candle so that its light would fall on the painting. The elusive memory that had visited her in the grand hall came back, shimmering faintly and disappearing, then reappearing for a second and fading again.

  It’s important. Remember.

  Sarah jumped out of her skin. The words had resounded in her mind as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud. The hand holding the candle was trembling now.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Sarah jumped again, turning around with a gasp. Nicholas’s tall, muscular body was framed in the doorway.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, advancing towards her. He slipped his hands under her jumper, feeling the skin on her shoulders. Sarah fixed her eyes on his obsidian ones.

  “I woke up and you were gone,” he said.

  “Sorry. I just wanted to have some time alone … with the house. If that makes sense.” She smiled apologetically.

  “Am I interfering? Ruining your moment with the house?” He smiled back, his voice soft and dark.

  “No, of course not,” she began, but his lips were on hers and she couldn’t speak anymore.

  Remember. It’s important.

  But her thoughts were unravelling already.

  32

  Runes

  Take all I have

  And when there’s nothing left for me to give

  I’ll give you more

  Because

  He isn’t you

  Sean

  So this is the day after the night before. After realizing that Nicholas was sleeping in Sarah’s room, I wasted the rest of last night feeling sorry for myself.

  Today Elodie asked me to teach her to trace the runes, and to my surprise, Sarah joined us. We spent all afternoon practising in the living room, with Sarah and I resolutely avoided meeting each other’s gaze. And with Nicholas looking on. Awkward doesn’
t even begin to describe the atmosphere in the room. But the runes may serve Sarah and Elodie well. We can’t be distracted by our feelings.

  However, it doesn’t help that Sarah’s hair is loose down her back and she’s wearing the blue top I love, the one that shows her shoulders. She might as well be carving the runes into my heart.

  “Right. Try this. It’s the most basic one.” I guide Elodie’s hand, tracing a simple rune.

  They’re eager learners, especially Sarah – Elodie takes a little longer. Still, it doesn’t come easily to either of the girls. It’s strange for me to see, really. I never found the runes that difficult. I’m surprised to see how slow, how weak other people can be when they trace them. Even two powerful heirs like Sarah and Elodie. Maybe it’s because they just started and they need practice. Still, even the most basic ones seem challenging.

  “No. Look. That won’t work. You need to be more focused.”

  Elodie is getting frustrated. “You make it seem so easy!”

  “It is easy! It is to me, at least.”

  “To you, yes. Harry always said your use of the runes was incredible.”

  I shrug. “Maybe. But you can learn, too, like I did.”

  Elodie crosses her arms. “We’re useless, let’s face it.”

  “Hey, speak for yourself. Look.” Sarah repeats the basic rune. The knife flies out of her hand, making a graceful arc across the room and wedging itself into the wooden floor.

  “Duck!” laughs Nicholas.

  “Ha ha.” Sarah walks over to where the knife fell, her heels clacking on the floor.

  “Useless, like I said. How do you do it, Sean?” says Elodie.

  “I don’t know. All you need to do is learn the different signs, really. Harry taught me, I can teach you.”