Since Sapphire didn’t have the slate at the moment, the ribbon merely bobbed in place before heading out the door.
“All right, then,” she said, thinking aloud as she took her first bite. “I don’t actually need to change anything in the way you are organized, obviously.”
“Good” came the unprompted answer, which made her smile. So, Verte had some spirit and a mind of his — her — its own!
“I really don’t need to know anything about any of you except for the intelligent ones.” She took another bite, and tried not to be distracted. Really, Thyme could do simply amazing things with food! “So, aside from the kitchen staff, you and Sapphire, and the one in charge of Eric’s quarters, what do the rest of the smart ones do?”
“Stable: 7. Chickens, rabbits, pigeons: 2. Gardens: 10. Sebastian: 5.”
“And the rest?”
“Fix things.”
Aha. That made sense. They wouldn’t be doing the same job all the time; things that needed mending could be anything from roof slates to a pipe.
“What Sebastian asked me to find out was whether any of you can play musical instruments,” she told Verte, finally. “But when you told me how many of you there were, I got rather distracted. So let me try the direct approach. How many of you are musicians?”
She really expected an answer like Sapphire’s frequent “Dont no,” but to her delight, she got an answer.
“Nine. Seven good. Three very good.”
Well, that was more than enough! And with that slight problem solved, she could tackle the larger one.
“When can I talk to the rest of you?” There was a fundamental problem here. Why was Sebastian even a werewolf in the first place? She didn’t want to approach Eric about this, so that left only one other source of information. Sebastian’s servants.
One way or another she was going to get some answers.
7
SEBASTIAN HOWLED ALL NIGHT.
The moment that the moon came up, she knew that it was above the horizon even though she couldn’t see it, for the first howl echoed through the halls.
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound, and it woke a deep and primitive fear in her. It was all she could do not to run to the door and not only make sure it was locked, but to pile furniture in front of it. She shook so with fear that her teeth rattled, and it was nearly an hour before she could calm herself down.
And it kept going on and on — not like the previous night, where he had only howled once or twice. Was this how he usually was?
Now she knew why Eric preferred the gatehouse.
It was horrible, actually, not because he sounded as if he was ravening to get at her, but because once she calmed down a little, he sounded as if his heart was breaking. If a wolf could be said to have such a thing as a broken heart. It was so mournful that she found herself sinking into despair again; Sapphire’s assertions to the contrary, she couldn’t think how the invisible servant could possibly be so sure that she wasn’t going to be changed and join Sebastian in this prison forever.
So as the sobbing howls echoed up from below, she found herself crying with fear and loneliness, and this time actually wept herself into exhaustion, and from there, into sleep. The poor invisible tried to comfort her, but Bella was beyond comfort. It wasn’t that Sebastian was bad company; it was that she simply could not bear the thought of spending the rest of her life out here, never seeing anyone but him, Eric and perhaps Granny —
Living a life of fear; fear that one day she might break loose and kill some innocent person, perhaps someone she loved. Fear that someone besides the Godmother and the King would find out about the little colony of werewolves and decide to take matters into his own hands.
She could see that happening, all too easily. After all, it was possible to overlook Sebastian; he was protected by the King, he was of noble blood, he had not harmed anyone until he bit her, and he was carefully watched and guarded. But she was not protected by the King, she was not protected by noble birth, and although she was incarcerated in the same Manor and under the same circumstances — well —
Eventually someone would find out. It could not be kept secret forever. A male werewolf and a female werewolf? Together? That all but shouted that there would likely be a family of the creatures before too long. No matter what their intentions were when human, when they changed, all that would change, too. And what sane person would want a breeding pair of monsters living within hunting distance of where he lived?
They would both be hunted down and killed. She knew it.
She dropped from weeping into nightmare, predictably an endless series of nightmares in which she was being pursued by a hunting party led by Eric, crying out for her blood.
Nightmares in which she knew she had killed someone; she just didn’t know who.
And nightmares in which she awoke out of a red haze of madness to find her father’s dead eyes staring up at her, his throat torn out. That was the worst of them. Those were the ones from which she woke up weeping until she could scarcely breathe.
When the morning finally came, she felt exhausted, limp and disinterested in anything, even food, although she wrote out the menus for Thyme. The breakfast she forced herself to eat tasted like straw, and with an aching head, eventually she went back to bed, simply unable to face the day. Sapphire brought her snow packs to cool the ache in her head and soothe her sore eyes, and put hot bricks into the bed to keep the rest of her comfortable; she finally drifted into a dreamless sleep for a little.
