The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [23]
“It is not permitted for temporary guardians to stay in the main house. You know that. If our arrangement does not please you, I am sure another can be found.”
Guardian Hester clasped her hands together. “Please. No. I … forgot. I’ll go to the farms with the coachman,” she said.
Guardian Myrna inclined her head regally after a weighty pause. “You should hurry. So much talk has delayed you, and I think the dogs are out,” she said. The other woman paled and hastened to the door. Guardian Myrna watched her go with a cold smile; then she took some keys from her apron pocket. “Come,” she said.
We went out a doorway leading off the circular entrance chamber and into a long hall pitted with large doors. Clumsy locks hung from each, and I thought that if this was an indication of the security at Obernewtyn, I would have no trouble getting away. Distantly, I heard the bark of a dog.
The guardian unlocked one of the doors. “Tonight you will sleep here, and tomorrow you will be given a permanent room.” She shut the door behind me and bolted it.
I stood a moment in the total darkness, using my mind to ascertain the dimensions of the room. I was relieved to discover that I was alone. It was too cold to get undressed, so I simply slipped my shoes off and climbed into the nearest bed. I drifted uneasily to sleep, thinking I would rather be anywhere than Obernewtyn.
9
THE DOOR BANGED violently open.
A girl stood on the stone threshold with a candle in one hand. With her free hand, she continued to hammer loudly at the open door with a peculiar fixed smile on her face.
“What is it?” I said.
She looked at me through lackluster eyes. “I am come … I have come …” She faltered as though her brain had lost the thread of whatever message she wanted to impart. She frowned. “I have come to … to warn you.” There was a glimmer in the depth of her muddy eyes, and all at once, I doubted my initial impression that she was defective.
“Warn me about what?” I asked warily.
She made a warding-off movement with her free hand. “Them. You know.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I am new here. Who are you?”
She jerked her head in a spasm of despair, and a look of anguish came over her face. “Nothing! I’m nothing anymore.…”
She looked across the room at me and started to laugh. “You should not have come here,” she said at last.
“I didn’t choose to come here. I am an orphan, and now I am condemned a Misfit.”
The girl giggled. “I was no orphan, but I am a Misfit.”
Unable to make any sense out of her, I reached out with my thoughts. At once I learned that her name was Selmar and her mind was a charred wreckage. Most of her thought links did not exist, and little remained that was normal. I saw the remnant of someone I could have liked. But whatever she had gone through had left little of that person. Here was a mind teetering on the brink of madness.
Her eyes rolled back in panic, and cursing my stupidity, I realized she could feel me! She must have been one of those people with some fleeting ability. For an instant, her eyes rolled forward, and she looked out with a sort of puzzlement, as if she was struggling to remember something of great importance. But all too quickly, the muddiness in her eyes returned, and with it a pitiful, cowering fear.
“I promise I don’t know anything about a map,” she whispered.
I stared. What was she talking about now?
“Selmar …,” I began, throwing aside my covers and lowering my feet to the cold stone floor.
Before I could say more, a voice interrupted. “Selmar, how is it that you take so long to wake one person?”
It was a sweet, piping voice, high-pitched and querulous. Not a voice to inspire fear, yet, if it were possible, Selmar paled even further as she turned to face the young boy behind her. No more than eleven or twelve years, he was as slender as a wand, with delicate blond curls; slim, girlish shoulders; and large, pale eyes.
“Answer me,” he hissed. Selmar swayed as if she would faint, though she was older and bigger than him.
“I … I didn’t do anything,” she gibbered.