Mark of Betrayal (Dark Secrets #3)(23)
Author: A.M. Hudson

“Good morning, my lady.”

“Morning, Arthur.” I crossed my arms and leaned on the doorframe, watching him place his violin in its case on the table.

“I hope my playing did not disturb you.” He snapped the case shut then turned around to face me.

“No. But that would be a sound I could wake to happily anyway.”

“Then, I shall play for you at every sunrise.”

We smiled at each other across the room.

“Please, do come in, Princess.”

Unlike the hesitation I always felt to enter Mike’s room these days, I felt none walking into Arthur’s. I wandered over and took his hand, smiling when he kissed it. The smell of rosemary and mint, and the dry parch of ash from a fireplace not lit for a long time filled my nostrils. My head turned instantly to the scatter of plants and herbs all over the box seat, sitting neatly in the cove of the window.

“The song I was playing, you know it, don’t you?” he asked.

I looked back at him. “It’s the same one in my music box—the one David gave me.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Who composed it?”

He leaned on the heavy wooden table and folded his arms. “Vampirie.”

I felt privileged then, felt a kind of intimacy that comes from knowing a secret no one else knows. Just the notes of that song were so wondrous, so ancient—written so long ago, in a time before pianos, in a time before great composers like Mozart, who would have given anything to hear such a masterpiece—to hear notes arranged in a way no mortal had ever thought to try. And here I was, just a girl of the twenty first century, not a historian or a person of any great importance, and yet, I had been privileged enough to know such a tune—a story that came from a place before time.

“May I ask—” Arthur turned to me, “—who taught you the words?”

“The words?”

“Yes. You sung them once, I was told, when…the day David died.”

I swallowed, blinking. “I…I don’t remember doing that. Did I really?”

“Yes.” His gaze dropped to the floor.

“Well, how would I know them?”

“A question, my lady, I had hoped you might answer.”

I wandered over to his window and rested my head where the bricks cornered outward, forming a cosy nook around the box seat. Outside, a rainy sky darkened the greens, making the hedge labyrinth, the garden that looked like a chessboard and the forest border look richly coloured—something toned by enhancing the hues artificially. “Did Jason know the song?”

“He did. Why do you ask?” Arthur said, and light filled the room behind me, coming through the window as Arthur opened the curtains on the other side of the fireplace.

“Maybe he taught me the words.” I smiled at his memory.

“When would he have done that?”

“In a dream. Many dreams.” My arms tightened around myself, my distracted gaze, full of thought, on the day below.

“Dreams, you say.” There was a fondness to Arthur’s voice. “He called them mind-links.”

“Yes. But I like to think of them as dreams.” So they don’t seem so real.

“Then he came to you other times, aside from when he bound you.”

“Yes,” I said. I knew I probably shouldn’t trust Arthur with this, especially since Mike and Morgaine didn’t even know, but something in my heart told me he would keep this secret for me.

“Was he kind to you?”

I nodded, letting my head fall softly against the bricks again after.

“I never believed he did not love you.” He stood beside me, smiling down at the rainy day; I looked up at him, tilting my head slightly since he was that bit taller, like David. “He had the council convinced his affections were a ploy, but I never believed it.”

I swallowed. “I did.”

“I know. He needed you to believe that.”

“No, that was how he felt,” I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I didn’t feel the meaning in them I usually did. Arthur knew that, too. It was in his smile. “Was Jason sick as a child?”

“Sick?”

“Mm.” I nodded, not really feeling like I was in the room—still standing on the cusp of my last dream. “He showed me memories.”

Arthur cleared his throat. “Yes, he was sick.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“He…Jason was four when his father saw fit to punish him for speaking out of turn by leaving him on the doorstep for the night, like an ill-mannered pup.” The anger from hundreds of years passed remained in his undertone. “The boy was near death by morning. He came down with the fever and was not predicted to last the winter. But he did, and when spring came, he showed promising signs, but was never quite the same again. His lungs were weak—his body, even the poor boy’s soul.”

“And where were you while he was being neglected and abused?”

“Running the Set,” he said factually. “I returned that morning to find Jason pale, burning with fever, shaking under a thin blanket a maid had placed over him in the early hours of dawn. I swept him up in my arms and, once he was stable, gave his father a beating parts of his body never recovered from.” He walked away then, taking to the other window. I watched him for a moment, seeing the weight of what his nephew suffered bearing down on him, even so far into the future. “The laws I live by, Amara, prevented I should stay with them, and it haunted me each time I left, for I knew I would return to more stories of horror. But I had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

He only looked up from the window and smiled at me, a conceited smile. “I will forgive that, Princess, because you do not know Drake—the promise I made to him in my own blood—nor do you understand fear of cruel punishment.”

I turned away and looked back out the window. “I’m sorry, Arthur. I don’t mean to imply you didn’t care for them. It just makes me angry to think of what they went through. And I never understood it before, but it makes so much sense now—the way David is—was.” Oops.

“In what way?”

“He was so guarded, you know. He never really let me in.”

I heard Arthur sigh. “His childhood was something he tried to push aside. It wasn’t that he kept it from you, but that he wished to forget.”

And that just made my heart bleed for him—for both boys, actually. “Why did Jason show me, then?”