The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [58]
During this period, Louis told us that things were becoming unsettled in the highlands. There were even rumors that the ghosts of the Oldtimers had been stirring restlessly on the Beforetime ruins at the edge of the Blacklands.
A ghost of a different sort, Selmar now drifted about Obernewtyn like a gray wraith, unsmiling, silent, and pale. After the initial shock of her appearance, nobody took much notice of her, and as before, she was permitted to wander freely.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all, though, was the relationship that arose between Rushton and myself. I could not like him, exactly, but his gentleness about Jes’s death made me wonder why I had ever thought him a sinister figure. I had found out from Louis that he was a paid overseer who had been given the job by Madam Vega when he came to the mountains after his mother died, and sometimes I wondered at the purpose he had spoken of so fiercely.
For his part, Rushton no longer sneered at me whenever the opportunity arose. Ariel was another matter entirely. He had a queer mania that made him hurt people just to see them cringe—as though he wanted proof of his superiority. It had been even worse since he had brought Selmar back. As the days shortened, he took every opportunity to torment or hurt people, and everyone stayed out of his way as much as they could. He seemed to have forgotten about Cameo, but one day, near the end of the harvest season, he came to Cameo and bade her go with him to the doctor’s chamber.
We watched her trail after him with dread.
That night, she was in her bed, but not the next night or the one following. Soon her nightmares recommenced. I tried again to make her talk to me about what was happening to her, as did Matthew, who tortured himself with dreadful speculations. He could not bear even to look at Selmar. But Cameo refused to speak.
One night, she woke me with her mental cries, but when I went to comfort her as I had done before, I was appalled to see that her eyes were again the fierce eyes of a stranger.
“You’ll never find where I hid the map.” She laughed the rasping cackle of an old woman.
I stared at her. “What map?”
“Lukas said it was dangerous to think so much about the Beforetime, but I searched and I found it. I knew I would,” said Cameo.
Suddenly, I realized what Cameo’s altered eyes reminded me of—the yellow eyes in the portrait of Marisa Seraphim. Marisa, whose crabbed scribing was all over the Beforetime maps in the doctor’s chamber.
She suddenly fell back into a natural sleep.
“It could be that she muddled our talk of needing a map with something she heard when she was in the doctor’s chamber,” Dameon said the next day. “If she was hypnotized, she would be very suggestible.”
“You didn’t see her eyes,” I insisted. “They were yellow, like the eyes in the portrait. And she laughed like an old woman!”
“Are ye tryin’ to say she’s being haunted by the shade of a long-dead mistress of Obernewtyn?” Matthew asked bluntly.
I stared at him, knowing that this was exactly what I did think. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” I admitted. “But I’ve been thinking: what if the reason Alexi and Madam Vega want a Misfit with mental abilities is they think it will help them locate something that Marisa Seraphim found and hid? This map Cameo mentioned might show where it is.”
“A map to what?” Matthew wondered.
I looked at him helplessly.
Cameo’s decline accelerated rapidly after that; she lost weight and color until she was as fragile and ill-looking as she had been before. One day Matthew said, “Every time we talk about Cam, ye shake yer heads an’ look worried. But we’re nowt doing anything. I say we should get away from Obernewtyn before it is too late for her. Maybe we can still make it to th’ highlands before th’ pass freezes.”
Dameon shook his head. “Look at the skies. It could snow any day. We cannot