“Take me to it, please,” she ordered. “I’d like to have some notion of what is in there.”
There was no evidence of confusion. The blue ribbon obediently led the way out the door.
More corridors — ordinary ones as well as murder-corridors. More rooms, most of them with the curtains closed and the hint of dust in the air. Then, finally, Sapphire flung open the door on what seemed at first as if it was outdoors, so bright was the light streaming inside. Yet there was no burst of freezing air — in fact, the air that puffed out toward Bella was warm and moist as a spring day.
She stepped across the threshold and into summer.
At least it smelled like summer. Green and moist and warm — it was really warm here. And she had never seen so much glass in her life — the walls, the roof, were all made of it. The place was perhaps half the size of the Great Hall of the Wool Merchants Guild and it must have cost a fortune to create all the glass panes, bring them out here and put them together. There were plants in raised beds everywhere, with narrow walkways between them, and in the middle, trellises covered with vines that reached to the roof.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been expecting something that looked like a garden. Well, it did look like a garden — a kitchen garden. There were a few beds of flowers, but most of the space was taken up with raised beds growing vegetables and herbs. Even the vines were peas and beans.
Once she got over her initial disappointment, however, she began to appreciate it. The beds of fresh herbs alone were a marvel, and the vegetables like asparagus and lettuces, the peas and beans in several stages of ripening trailing upward over trellises that one only saw in summer, here with a background of snow outside the glass — well, it really did seem as much like magic as Sapphire.
And it was so warm here, as warm as a hot summer day. “How is it kept so warm?” she asked Sapphire. Surely it wasn’t just the sun —
“Hot spring,” said a laconic voice from behind them, electrifying her with a jolt of panic. She jumped and squeaked, turning at the same time, not sure whether she should look for a weapon or utter a greeting.
Eric von Teller lounged in the door frame, arms crossed over his chest. He was dressed in his Gamekeeper leathers, without the cloak. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see a definite family resemblance. He and Sebastian had the same cheekbones, the same brow, the same nose; their hair was very different, though. And their eyes. Sebastian’s were a gray; Eric’s were dark, some color close to the slate of a storm cloud. He raised one black eyebrow as she relaxed marginally.
“Don’t bother asking anything complicated of the menials,” he continued, with a little smirk. “It’s rather like trying to teach a cow to fly. You get nowhere, and annoy the cow. They’re obedient, they will do what you ask of them provided you phrase it the way you would phrase an order to a dog, but they are of no help whatsoever when it comes to anything even a child would understand.”
“I see,” she replied, in as neutral a tone of voice as she could manage, and gestured behind her back, hoping Sapphire would understand that she should hide the slate and chalk. “Well, since you can talk, and obviously know a bit about this place, what do you mean by ‘hot spring’?”
“There is a spring of hot water underneath this place. It’s why it was built here in the first place,” Eric replied, not moving at all from his spot in the door frame — meaning that when she wanted to leave the hothouse, she would have to somehow get by him. “Originally, when this was just a hunting lodge, it was used for heat. Later, when the place was rebuilt, it was repurposed. It’s not a very big one, and once the Manor expanded to its current size, it couldn’t be used to heat the place as it once had. Now it supplies the hot water for bathing, and keeps this glasshouse warm.” He shrugged. “The glasshouse was a conceit of the late Duke’s father. I think this is a waste of effort, really, but he liked to impress his guests with spring and summer vegetables in midwinter.”
“Was that so important to him?” she asked, curiously.
He grimaced a little. “The Duchy is a farm, a forest and a few mines. The small size never troubled anyone up until that point, but I suppose Sebastian’s grandfather felt differently. I will say that getting hot baths whenever you like is very welcome. And since Sebastian’s slaves are the ones doing all the work here, it’s not as if it was costing us anything to keep it up. It would be different if we needed to keep a staff of human servants to tend the plants.” He nodded at the ribbon around Sapphire’s arm. “Clever idea. I’ll order mine to wear armbands so I know when they’re in my rooms. I don’t like the feeling there might be something looking over my shoulder all the time.”
He seemed to be making an effort to be pleasant. She regarded him with as neutral an expression as she could manage. “It is unnerving,” she agreed. “More so for a woman, I think. I don’t believe that men have our natural modesty.”
He raised an eyebrow, looking skeptical, but said nothing for a moment. Finally, he shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for our meeting in the woods,” he said abruptly. “It’s my job to be as unpleasant as possible, especially around the full moon, to keep people out of there after dark. Now you know why.”
She frowned a little. “If that is your job, you are doing it very well.”
“It’s been Duke Sebastian’s orders,” he pointed out. “I have to do so in such a way as to prevent people from getting too curious about why I’m running them off. I’m the Woodsman, so people expect me to act as if everyone I meet is a potential poacher, so that’s what I do. It saves on explanations.”
Bella tilted her head to the side. “That — actually makes sense,” she agreed, with great reluctance.
“Of course it does — it’s the clever way to handle this situation.” He shifted his weight a little, and the leather of his outfit creaked. “If I was solicitous and warned people nicely that there might be a savage monster out there, ready to rip their limbs off, they’d assume I was hiding something besides where the deer lay up, and do their best to find out what it was. So I’m a bastard about it. Too bad, if I frighten people. I want them frightened. Just because we’ve managed to keep Sebastian locked up so far, it never followed that we could always count on doing so.” He unfolded his arms, and made a little gesture of impatience. “Sebastian assumes the best. I assume the worst. That has been my job since he changed. I don’t want potential victims in our woods, and I’ve done a damned good job of keeping them out of danger, since you’re the first accident we’ve had since Sebastian started changing.”
It was a very reasonable explanation. And she might have believed him entirely, if it hadn’t been for that other little encounter she’d had with him at the Guild festival. He was in disguise then and presumably thought he would not be recognized — and he wasn’t in the woods, trying to frighten people out of them.
So, while she would accept his explanation about chasing people out of the woods, so far as the caddishness went —
