The Night the Forest Burned

The rain had hammered down without mercy for an entire day, and only toward the following dawn did the downpour finally thin to a drizzle, dragging the heavy, leaden clouds away with it as it vanished southward.

"One more day of that, and Dravenmoor would have been swept clean away," Kasvren murmured, watching the sky lighten to a washed-out gray. Then a laugh seized him without warning, and he sat up in bed giggling like a madman. Swept away — this entire land! Where, pray tell, could it possibly be swept to? An darkness beyond human explanation lay chained about this ground like iron bonds.

Slowly, his snickering died away. The hollows beneath his eyes were sunken and nearly violet, giving him the wretched look of an invalid.

He was ashamed to admit it, but Kasvren had scarcely slept the night before. The thunder had cracked overhead like some enormous drum beaten directly above the mansion's roof, and he'd been certain the ceiling would come crashing down at any moment. Lightning had struck again and again into the deep, dark forest — darker even than the night itself — until the whole world flashed white before his eyes. He'd pulled the blanket clear over his head, and that was when the dream began: the entire forest engulfed in flame.

I have to put out the fire. He thrashed through the dream, pinned to that single thought. I have to put it out. But there was nothing at hand — nothing at all. Worse still, a frantic glance around revealed that he was naked. The fire only grew, greedily devouring the great trees and every living thing in its path.

When he finally woke — staring, stricken, at the great wall of flame bearing down on him — Kasvren caught the tail end of the dream: a hem of ghostly white cloth, tangling itself in the scattered fragments of his consciousness before slipping away. It was Isolde. He was certain of it. But no words would come, and when he opened his eyes the room was still pitch dark. The rain had begun tapering off around then; all he could hear was its soft tapping against the windowpane — tik, tik. Yet the image of that fire dancing like a witch in the dark was not so easily forgotten.

When he was a child, his old nurse — a woman from one of the northern tribes — used to interpret his nightmares whenever he had them.

"A great fire or a flood in a dream is an omen of good fortune, young master. Don't be so frightened, now."

She had been an exotic-looking woman who never lost her peculiar northern accent, and yet one morning she was simply gone — branded a thief through the scheming of a cunning maid, driven from the mansion overnight. How old had he been then? Five? Six? Declaring her innocence — this is a false charge, I have never stolen a thing in my life — she had faced her expulsion with such defiant spirit that she seemed less a woman being cast out than one walking proudly out of a filthy place on her own two feet. Kasvren, crouched under the banister of the upper gallery, too heartsick to even consider going down, had swallowed his sobs in silence.

Sometimes, while caring for him, the nurse would sing him lullabies in a language he didn't understand. He couldn't grasp a word of it, but her quiet, even singing had given the young Kasvren a comfort beyond naming. Is it so hard to believe that a child of two or three could feel something like comfort? Ah, but he truly did feel it. He simply didn't learn until much later that the name of that feeling was comfort.

A knock sounded at the door. It was Rad Dat. Stranger still, the old butler entered carrying water for washing, shaving cream, and the like. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before. It was odd.

"That is a surprise," Kasvren offered dryly, but Rad Dat wore his usual impassive expression. Gazing at the silver basin of clean water and the neatly laid-out towels, Kasvren felt a perverse stubbornness rise in him — he would simply have to ask why the man was behaving so out of character today.

"What exactly is going on? This is hardly the sort of work you do, is it?"

"If it is Miss Isolde's command, I stand ready to perform any lowly task whatsoever."

Kasvren faltered, momentarily at a loss for words.

"You mean to say Isolde ordered you to prepare all this?"

"Yes, sir. At dawn, the young miss said that you seemed to be suffering nightmares, and that I ought to look in on you this morning."

"Where is she now?"

For an instant — no more than the flicker of an eye — Rad Dat hesitated. And so Kasvren pressed harder.

"Rad Dat. Tell me where Isolde is."

"The young miss is sleeping."

He's lying. Kasvren thought. He wanted to dig further, but Rad Dat simply stood at attention, his face fixed like tallow that had hardened over a hundred years.

Why lie? What could Isolde possibly be doing, and where? It wasn't as though she often left the mansion and its gardens. It was one flaw in the arrangement that he never knew when or where she might appear — but a figure that materialized and vanished like a ghost had to be somewhere inside the mansion. He simply didn't know where. That was all.

After a brief, unspoken battle of wills with the butler, Kasvren plunged both hands into the clean wash water. He'd expected it to be bracingly cold; it wasn't. It was pleasant. He washed his face, and as he lathered on the shaving cream, Rad Dat fetched the small mirror from the wall and stood opposite him. Now that he thought of it, he hadn't shaved regularly since arriving here. He had gone out of his way to avoid even looking at mirrors, and his beard had grown into a disgrace.

"Good heavens. What a wretched sight I've become. You might have said something, you know."

At his joke, Rad Dat merely shrugged.

"I have no intention of passing judgment on whatever the young master does. Nor should I."

"Because your only interest is Isolde?"

"That is partly so. But I was also raised to believe that a good servant does not put his mouth to his betters' affairs. And I happen to agree with that teaching."

Schick — the razor whispered across his cheek and jaw. It was very sharp; he could feel it. Once the gleaming silver blade had stripped away every last hair, he rinsed off the remaining cream and finished washing. Somehow it felt as though even the soot of the dream he'd wandered through in the night's crevices had been scrubbed away clean, and his expression brightened a degree.

"By the way, Rad — about what you said just now." Rad Dat, who was tidying away the basin, towels, and razor, looked up. Kasvren went on. "Isolde told you to look in on me because she thought I was having nightmares?"

"Yes, sir. Those were her exact words."

"And how would Isolde know that?"

"I couldn't say, sir. The young miss does have a habit of remarkable intuition."

A lie again. Kasvren smiled hollowly to himself. This was a man exquisitely courteous, exquisitely careful — a man who would cast his master's secrets into the hearth and reduce them to ash no one could ever read. Or, failing that, carry those secrets into his own cold sarcophagus in place of flowers.

So loyal, and yet so willing to lie without a flicker of conscience to anyone who was not his master. What complicated creatures humans were. No — perhaps, in Rad Dat's case, complicated wasn't the word at all. He lived for Isolde, and for Isolde alone.

"...Understood. You may go."

Rad Dat bowed his head and moved to leave as quietly as he'd come. It was then that Kasvren spoke.

"Thank you."

The butler's hand paused on the door. For a long moment he regarded Kasvren with eyes whose depths were impossible to read, and then he said:

"The honor is entirely mine, sir."

The door closed. Rad Dat's footsteps faded down the corridor. Kasvren ran his fingers over his freshly washed face and thought of the night before. At the very edge of the dream — in that final instant when his consciousness had pushed back against the flames — a trailing length of white cloth had brushed across one corner of his mind. Isolde's hem.

And that touch — faint, so faint, but unmistakable.

It might not have been a hallucination at all. She had certainly been in his room at dawn. But why? Had he thrashed about in his sleep, cried out in terror? Even so — walking unannounced and utterly unguarded into a man's bedchamber — was she fearless, or simply reckless beyond reason?

Without meaning to, Kasvren drew a hand across one side of his forehead. The memory of smooth fabric gliding over that spot came vividly back to life, impossibly vivid after the fact. Yes. It had been Isolde, without question. Isolde, a lamp in one hand, standing in her white nightclothes and watching over him as he slept. Her pale hand rising without a sound, like a ghost's. Touching his brow. Pressing at the space between his eyes, tracing down the bridge of his nose...

Impossible — and yet the mere imagining of it sent a shiver through him, and with the shiver, a surge of something feverish and exhilarated, both at once.