Not by her.
Something massive and dark bounded out of the night darkness and smashed into him. It was snarling and swiping at his head and then it and he tumbled and rolled down the slope toward the cliffs. It was the keywrasse: many-legged and fanged and clawed and filled with a fury Alice hadn’t seen before.
But she didn’t stop to watch. She was hauling Oskar up out of the dirt and running for Komako and lifting her to her feet and then they were all climbing onto the horses, unhitched now by Ribs, and they rode out bareback three on each; they rode fast and crowded and leaning low over the horses’ necks and Alice, with her heart breaking, only looked back long enough to see the keywrasse seize Marber’s skull in its powerful jaws and drag him kicking to the edge of the cliff, and then both of them plunged over into the brooding black waters below, the surface of the loch closing over them, rippling outward, going still. In the illuminated night, the island crumpled in upon itself, collapsing. Alice’s cheeks were wet. Her bitten shoulder was on fire. Behind them the old manor burned and burned in the darkness. Their horses ran.
EPILOGUE
The sky in the east was red. Charlie found Miss Davenshaw in the ruins just as day was breaking. She was still alive, the only one. He helped her up the ridge and lay her down in the moss at the edge of the cliff, bloodied, streaked with ash and soot, her clothes torn. Carefully he covered her with a singed blanket salvaged from the smoking wreckage and gently he put a hand to her face and silently he begged her not to die. His wrist where Berghast had gripped him was still hurting. Below he could see in the gathering light the smoldering shell of Cairndale Manor, two walls standing yet, and he knew among its dead lay all the old talents and the beasts in their stables and others, servants, groundskeepers, young talents whose names he’d never learned. In the black waters of the loch the island had crumpled in upon itself so that nothing now remained but a deep scarred depression, filled still with the night’s dark and slow to illumine.
Marlowe.
That was in his head. Marlowe. Over there on the island, lost. No matter how he tried not to think about it. Marlowe descending into the orsine, the spirit dead swept away before him, that fierce blue shine fading, all of it being drawn shut by Marlowe’s fists and then the explosion. Charlie lowered his head to his chest, eyes moist. He’d gone back to the island and searched the ruins for his friend but of course not found him. There was for Charlie only this world now. Later at the manor he’d picked through the rubble calling for Miss Alice or Komako or Ribs or Oskar or anyone, anyone at all, but there was no one, nothing, no sign of life, until he glimpsed Miss Davenshaw under a collapsed beam in what once had been the doorway of the east wing. She was all white with the dust, like a litch, just exactly like a litch. But if the others had got away or fallen somewhere far or were buried right under his feet he couldn’t tell and the not knowing was almost the hardest part.
It was all of it like that. He just didn’t know what to do. Whatever had happened to Jacob Marber and his litch, they were nowhere to be found. He’d dragged Miss Davenshaw clear and tried to wake her and when that didn’t work he’d looked around helplessly and then begun the long awkward climb with her held upright in his arms, up the ridge, away from the ruins, just trying to get away. There wasn’t any clear thought in his head other than that. She was clutching white-knuckled to a leather-bound journal, half of it burned away, but when he tried to take it from her he couldn’t pry her fingers from it and he gave up.
He went back down through the ruins and found in an unburned shed a planked wheelbarrow. The little panes of glass had been blown out in the explosion and he cut his hand on a shard and he stared at the blood welling up in his grimy palm and the way the blood dapped slowly on the handle of the wheelbarrow. That kind of pain didn’t matter. Not to a haelan.
At the loch he got Mrs. Harrogate’s body out of the rowboat where he’d left her and he wheeled her up to the ridge, her legs folded out over the front, her arms crossed at her chest, him not really knowing what else to do. It didn’t seem right leaving her. Miss Davenshaw still hadn’t stirred. He knew the columns of smoke would draw neighboring locals and that it wouldn’t be long—midmorning at latest—before the constables and newspapermen arrived. He wanted to be gone before then. He knew Scotland wasn’t Mississippi but still he didn’t want to be the only one left alive, a young black man, surrounded by destruction and white bodies.
But then, as the sun cleared the loch, Miss Davenshaw woke up. She raised herself groaning up on one elbow and turned her face from side to side in the red morning.
“Who’s that?” she croaked.
For a moment he couldn’t speak. “It’s me, it’s Charlie,” he said in a rush, suddenly overcome. All at once he was gulping air and sobbing, his shoulders heaving.
She was slow to reply. A quick complicated host of expressions crossed her face. “Charlie … Are we—? Did anyone else—?”
“It’s just us, Miss D,” Charlie said. “I haven’t seen anyone else alive. It’s only just us.”
That was when he saw the smear of blood on the blind woman’s sleeve where he’d reached for her, and he lifted his palm in wonder. The cut wasn’t healing.
* * *
When he thought back on it later, he understood it must have been Berghast, at the edge of the orsine, who had done it. Somehow, with that burning grip, he’d ripped Charlie’s talent right out of him, had gutted him, left him drained and husked and ordinary, as ordinary as anyone.
He wrapped his burned wrist in a strip of torn shirt, carefully, awkwardly, and then also wrapped his bleeding hand. Almost at once a spot of blood seeped through. The pain throbbed. He was too surprised, too exhausted, too filled with sadness and anger at all that had happened to make any real sense of this new loss.
“Maybe it’ll come back?” he whispered to Miss Davenshaw, afraid.
She reached out a bloodied hand, as if to hold him. “Oh, Charlie,” she murmured.
They left Mrs. Harrogate’s body under a sheet in the courtyard at Cairndale, knowing the locals would bury the dead. That was Miss Davenshaw’s notion. But they took what they could find out of the rubble, a traveling satchel, some foodstuffs from the pantry. The closest thing to a clean change of clothes. Miss Davenshaw instructed him to go to the standing shed and in an overturned pot he found a coin purse and a stack of banknotes and these he brought to her. The bodies out in the field he stayed clear of and later when he found the little hand of a boy sticking up out of the wreckage he looked at it and then walked down off the slope and sat and he didn’t go back up.
By the time the long shadows had retreated halfway back across the loch they were already walking. Charlie could see riders on horseback approaching even as he and Miss Davenshaw left the grounds for good, clambering over the low stone wall of the perimeter, the columns of smoke still rising slowly from two of the outbuildings behind them.
Later in the morning they were picked up by a market wagon and rode the rest of the way into Edinburgh and when they got to Princes Street they went at once to the railway station and bought a ticket direct to King’s Cross, in London. “We can disappear there,” Miss Davenshaw explained. He didn’t ask why, or from whom, or for how long. He just kept touching his bandages, feeling the prickle of a pain that would not leave him. She told him they’d go south to an address that had belonged to the institute and stay there for a time while they decided what to do next.
She meant, of course, the building at Nickel Street West.
* * *