This is how they force him to live? Hidden from the world in the most neglected corner of the keep. I’d thought I couldn’t get angrier, but now rage boils my brain inside my skull.
A heartbroken sound reaches me, so faint that I might be imagining it. Yet I chase those little sobs, making wrong turns and backtracking because the east wing is a maze, full of locked doors and inexplicably ominous rooms. Sometimes I stop outside a closed door and I’m simply certain to my bones that something frightful lurks on the other side. I move on, trial and error, until I find Njål hidden in the smallest of chambers. No window, it’s more of a cupboard, but I can tell that he sleeps here. He’s weeping as quietly as he can manage, face tucked into his knees, armed hooked around his lower legs like he wishes he could make himself so small that he would disappear.
I’m intimately acquainted with that desire.
As I step closer, his head snaps up, and he appears to be staring right at me. He can see me? The others definitely couldn’t, and he didn’t seem to before. I have no explanation for any of this.
“Who are you?”
“Eloise.” The reply slips out before I can stop it—my second name, given for my paternal grandmother. I’m named for two of them, Amarrah from my mother’s side.
“Do you work here?” Njål doesn’t wait for my response, hastening to add, “You should go. The baron will punish both of us if he finds you here.”
In fact I do work here, just not right now, so my silence is not precisely a lie. Instead of leaving from fear of reprisal, as he doubtless expects, I close the door and sit before it, leaving sufficient space between us that he shouldn’t fear my intentions. If this is how Njål lived, no wonder he’s more comfortable in the dark, never being seen. I thought that preference related to his current appearance, but perhaps it started earlier than I realized. Here, the shadows are complete.
“I heard what they said. I’m sorry,” I say, because too many words clot my throat, and none of them will come out properly. I could easily burst into tears, like the ones Njål is valiantly fighting.
“That’s odd. Nobody ever comes, no matter what they do to me.”
“I’m new.” Which is also sort of true. I probably ought to be careful what I reveal to Njål in case this isn’t a dream and I’m somehow touching his past.
I wish I could hug this version of him as I did the older Njål in the kitchen, but this version of him would find it entirely alarming. He’s skittish as a feral cat, using the darkness as a shield, even from me. His breathing steadies though, the sobs receding to an occasional unsteady inhalation.
“That means you arrived recently. Is it true what they said about the plague? You wouldn’t know about my family, but if there’s a disease you’d have word of it.”
That much is true, but I don’t have much formal education and before the lending library closed, I read only on matters that interested me. I search my memory and come up with a whisper of knowledge. It does seem that there was a disease that ravaged the land four centuries ago, taking fully one-third of the population. Women were burned as witches for starting it and doctors went about in bird-face masks, claiming it prevented transmission of the illness.
Could Njål have lived that long?
“The plague is real,” I say then, aware that I’m condemning him to despair.
He only reacts with a subtle drop of his shoulders. “Then it’s probably true that my family is gone as well.”
I can’t bring myself to speak aloud the possibility that they might not be. If they’ve made some terrible deal with the baron and agreed not to demand Njål’s release, how would that be better? “I’m sorry,” I say again, like those are magic words.
“It’s not your fault. Don’t you mind, though?”
“Mind what?”
“I already said you’ll get in trouble, that you’ll be punished. You might be beaten or let go for being here with me. Aren’t you afraid of the baron?”
“Not even slightly.” I can say that with complete assurance because in my time, the baron is gone, no more than a bitter memory. In fact, Njål might be the only one who remembers what happened here.
“How are you so brave?”
It’s easy to be brave when you can’t be hurt. I start to demur and realize he’s inching closer. Tiny incremental movements that close the distance until his knee nudges mine. The door is against my back, so I can’t withdraw, not that I want to. He’s so desperate for companionship that anyone will do.
“I’m not, really. It just seemed as if you could use some company.”
His leg is still touching mine, all bony with adolescent awkwardness. “I miss them. My father was cross with me when I left, and I don’t even remember why. He said I wouldn’t be here long. I believed him. Do you think he had no intention of retrieving me?”
So that’s occurred to him as well. That the baron could feel free to lie about everyone dying because Njål’s family has abandoned him to the tender mercies of this place. What’s more, I can’t conceive of the right words to comfort him when I know that for him, the situation only gets worse, not better. Ages hence, he’ll still be trapped, unable to put Bitterburn behind him.
“It’s better to believe they died,” I say with brutal honesty.
“I think so too, but it hurts knowing that nobody is waiting for me.” Such a small voice, cracking with the start of
