The Mark of the Cane
Smack!
The moment the willow switch, bending soft as a whip, lashed across his palm, Kasvren bolted upright as though springing from the bed itself. His eyes flew wide open. He was breathing hard, as if he'd run a mile in his sleep, and the room swam blurrily around him. Only after turning his head this way and that several times did he realize he was in bed.
Damn it. Just a dream.
The firm muscles of his back were knotted taut, his spine rigid. Cold sweat slid down him in a slow trickle. He raised his arm to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow—and shuddered with a sudden chill. Then he felt it: a stinging in his palm.
He spread his hand open and stared in horror. There, etched long and thin across his palm, was a mark he hadn't seen since he was very small—the mark left by a teacher's merciless cane.
"A mark, you say?"
When Kasvren told her what had happened, Isolde said nothing more and simply held out her hand. He stared quietly at her, not understanding what the gesture meant, until she spoke with visible impatience.
"Give it to me."
"Give you what?"
Isolde let out a scornful laugh.
"Your silver tray and your neck, of course. What else would I want?"
When Kasvren flinched and frowned, Isolde snorted. But her eyes weren't laughing.
"Your hand, you fool. What else could I mean? What a witless man you are."
"Ah."
Only then did Kasvren catch her meaning, and he held out his hand with a short exhale. Even so, the feeling that he'd just been teased crept over him, and his face reddened.
She had told him to give her his hand—now. But it was obvious that if she ever truly wanted it, she would take his neck just as readily, at any moment. The image of her rose in his mind with a strangeness so vivid it bordered on the uncanny: her pale head, the blood not yet dried, resting on a silver tray as she drifted among the stinging nettles, tracing a chaînés on the very tips of her toes.
That was how she toyed with him. No—perhaps mockery was the more accurate word. And it could not be dismissed merely as the eruption of an inescapable, gnawing sense of inferiority—the frustration of a woman who owned this vast mansion yet had nothing left to call her own. Absolutely not. Isolde, clearly, took something close to pleasure in watching Kasvren thrown off balance. Something akin to the pleasure of a small scaled serpent that has found its prey…
"It's swollen."
"It is. It swelled up in no time at all."
"Don't worry. I'll bring something to draw it down."
The moment Isolde released his wrist, Kasvren found himself trailing after her without thinking.
"Something to draw it down? You mean you know what this is?"
He was thinking of the dream. The sensation of the cane coming down across the soft skin of a child was as vivid as a brand of scarlet. Was this mark not the very proof of it? And yet Isolde's attitude had been one of brisk indifference—as if to say, what of it? Kasvren had never believed in fantasies or superstitions, but passing through the small doors and corridors of this silent mansion, he had begun to wonder—could the dream truly have wounded his hand? Could the darkness hanging over Dravenmoor Mansion itself have slipped its fingers through some unseen crack to play its vicious trick on him?
"Wait here."
Isolde cracked open the side door leading toward the kitchen only a sliver, glancing back at him as she said it. He stopped short, staring down at his hand, which had begun to throb all the way to the wrist.
"If the remedy's in there, wouldn't it be better if I came along?"
"I hate repeating myself. Wait here—or throw a tantrum and follow me, and suffer for it. Choose."
Once again, Kasvren understood with absolute clarity that this was not a matter of persuasion or common sense. Pleading, begging, demanding a logical explanation—none of it would ever work on this woman. She was like solid, cold porcelain, and she seemed to have already guessed exactly what he would choose, for she slipped away through the doorway without a sound. The instant the door closed, he heard a clack.
She's locked it.
The thought had barely formed when—
Clack. Clack.
THUNK!
The sequence of iron sounds froze Kasvren solid. How many locks could possibly be fixed to a single door? This was surely some side passage leading to the cellars—what conceivable reason could there be for fastening so many bolts? Was there a heap of gold hidden inside?
He couldn't know. The half-moon pattern on one of the black locks hanging from the door seemed to droop and writhe, grinning slyly. And then it began to whisper.
'No one will ever know. Am I right? Who's to say what that woman has hidden down below? Perhaps she's had her Drasken kin—the ones she killed with her own hands—stuffed and mounted. Glass beads set in their eyes, their bodies packed with flax and rushes, seated at the table. And on their plates, lined up neatly: pebbles and opium, and the heads of a chicken and a serpent….'
'Stop it.'
Kasvren spun on his heel and turned his back to the door. Once the laughter that had swayed like a drunkard's jester dissolved, the murmuring vanished with it. He felt his forehead grow hot. His palms were already burning so fiercely he worried the veins might melt away. Everything was vivid enough to be real, and everything was a mirage. What was the pot atop that dying hearth boiling, he wondered? Come to think of it, this mansion kept no chickens, no sheep. No pigs either. And yet meat appeared at dinner every single day. Why? Surely it wasn't…
"What are you looking at?"
With his back still turned, Kasvren squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them slowly. That was how he steadied the shock—by sparing himself the humiliating spectacle of jumping out of his skin.
A moment later he turned to find Isolde standing there, her expression perfectly untroubled. The sight of her composure kindled an unreasonable anger in him. Would the whole mansion really collapse if she made the slightest sound? How could she appear and vanish without so much as a breath of presence? And all those locks! He hadn't heard a single one of them being unlocked—how?
That habit of hers—surfacing without warning, anywhere—was, of course, not the only reason his anger flared. He wasn't so petty as that. No, what seethed in him, with something close to murderous resentment, was his own frailty and futility: the fact that Isolde's every appearance caught him off guard, every single time.
From around the time the twins had begun to grow and thrive, he had been forced to live in the marquis's house as though he did not exist. If he made noise, or wandered into any room he pleased and risked startling the infants, his mother would reprimand him without mercy and drive him out. Yet at the same time she complained, grumbling with irritation, that he crept about too quietly, always watching, always on tenterhooks.
Caught between situations where neither moving nor standing still was permitted, the boy Kasvren had learned to keep constant watch for the sounds and stirrings of people, until whole days spent without leaving his room became commonplace. His naturally delicate, sensitive nerves grew as limp and trembling as a body gnawed away by disease, and the merciless gazes of the marquis and his wife—whom he had believed his parents, yet who treated him worse than strangers—seemed to find him and surveil him from every corner, leaving him in perpetual dread.
Here in Dravenmoor, the oppressive weight of the mansion and the deep darkness of the forest still pressed down on him, unaccustomed as he was. But the blade-sharp eyes of the marquis couple were gone now. And still he startled like a guilty dog at every turn, and despised himself for it.
"Give me your hand."
Kasvren, who had been scowling, swallowed his displeasure once more and reluctantly extended his hand toward her. His fingers, long and thick at the knuckle, trembled slightly. Isolde seized his firm wrist without ceremony. He had taken her for someone who recoiled from being touched by others—this was a surprise.
While Kasvren stared down at her, taken aback by the unexpectedness of it all, Isolde opened a small round silver case. Only then did he understand what she intended, and he pulled his hand back.
"I can apply it myself."
But Isolde had already scooped out a measure of the salve with her fingertip. She jerked her chin at his hand.
"With those clumsy paws of yours? Have you ever so much as handled a medicine before? The ointment has to go on over the wound—and that wound is so raw and excruciating you can neither curl it nor open it flat, and you'd be lucky if all you did was scream. And both of your hands are wounded, besides. A mild infection may already have set in. And above all, I have no intention of wasting my ointment. It takes a very long time to make."
At an answer cold enough to draw a bitter laugh from him, Kasvren had no choice but to hold out his hand obediently.
A bitter, acrid smell hit him all at once, sharp enough to sting his nose. The ointment was spread in thin layers across his outstretched palm, again and again. Isolde had been right. An agonizing pain like the sting of ten hornets at once crashed over him. Unable to bear the indignity of crying out, he could only bite down on his lip with all his strength.
"I told you so."
Isolde murmured it offhandedly. Instead of offering even a token worry—does it hurt much?—she had tossed him an I-told-you-so, and it was so absurd that a hollow laugh nearly escaped him. But for all her tone, her hands were remarkably deft as she slowly wound a clean linen cloth around his palm and secured it.
"There. That's done."
In that moment, Kasvren noticed how the vilely bitter scent wove itself, almost magically, into Isolde's own smell. Ever since he'd come here, his sense of smell seemed to have sharpened. It was the scent of that instant in late summer when the season begins to turn—the last breath exhaled by grasses that had been terrifyingly, luxuriantly alive, now crying out as they withered.
"Now the other hand."
Isolde held out her palm again. Kasvren, unable to tear his eyes from her face, offered his other hand without hesitation. The piercing pain as the salve touched his palm; and then Isolde's fingertips, moving carefully, as if to soothe and stroke the hurt awake—soft and intense at once, as though stirring some vague sleeping sense. Her eyelids, lowered as she wound the bandage, were pale to the point of translucence, tinged with the faint bluish green of new leaves.