Serpents in the Garden of Winter
Perhaps because of how she had flustered him at breakfast, she did not show herself for the rest of the day. When he finished his meal, Rad Dat appeared only long enough to say that he could leave the dishes where they were.
Kasvren wandered the ground-floor hall like a traveler adrift—despite being indoors the whole time. At first he amused himself by studying the portraits, tapestries, and paintings, but before long a kind of futility crept over him. What on earth was he doing? The entire time he walked the corridors slowly, the only thing following him was the sound of his own footsteps. Now and then he thought he sensed someone's presence and turned to look, but there was never anyone there. It left him feeling pointlessly unsettled.
Then he heard footsteps below. Looking down, he saw Rad Dat, who had appeared from somewhere, polishing the staircase railing. With a waxed cloth in hand, he attended to every last relief and molding with such devotion that he seemed less a butler than a master craftsman tending this house. Kasvren considered speaking to him, then thought better of it and turned toward the inner corridor.
The spacious floor was laid with carpet. It was so immaculate that he doubted how one old man could possibly manage such an expanse alone. Not a speck of dust, not a single stray grain of sand was to be seen. Kasvren gently touched the alabaster pedestal—a stand for vases or statuary—standing between two windows. Nothing rested upon it, but its luster and form alone made it a fine ornament. The pale light falling on it lent its muted silver a quiet allure. Yet not a single maid who should have been cleaning the window frames nearby, nor any valets bustling about on their master's errands, was anywhere to be seen, and the absence struck him as deeply strange.
He circled back down the corridor and looked below again, but Rad Dat was gone. Only moments ago he had been polishing the banister; whether he had gone upstairs or off to some other task, Kasvren had no way of knowing. He began to wonder if this place had been designed for nothing but thorough, deliberate loneliness. Where the curtains were drawn, a leaden, gloomy shadow lingered all day long, and to stand beneath it was to feel a chill as cold as a hundred years seep into one's bones.
Unable to bear it any longer, he resolved to go outside. The massive front door was crafted of fine walnut, and only then did he realize that the weighty handle and knocker were made of genuine gold. Though Dravenmoor sat on quiet land at the western edge, it offered a faint glimpse of the power and wealth the House of Drasken possessed.
Stepping out of the mansion, the first thing to meet his eye was the broad garden. Once, no doubt, it had been lush with trees, shrubs, and flowers, but just as he had first found it, now only brambles, stinging nettles, and nameless weeds had risen up in a ragged palisade. Among them, surely, were poisonous plants that would swell the skin painfully at the mere brush of a leaf.
He walked toward the center along what was barely a path, half-buried in the grass. A round fountain came into view. The water had long since dried up, filthy black residue clinging to the basin, and for some reason much of the grass around it had withered and gone limp. The spout that had once sent up clear water was rusted through, and the pump that must have drawn up groundwater now served as nothing more than a trellis for the vines. He tried moving its handle a few times as an experiment, but it seemed broken; all he got was a wheezing squeak and the feel of it turning uselessly.
Turning his head toward the left side of the garden, he saw a tall curved expanse of glass glinting, catching the pale sunlight. A greenhouse? Both its location and its shape suggested as much, though the structure did not appear to have been properly preserved.
As he drew near, before the roof even rose above his head, shards of old glass crunched and cracked beneath his boots, shrieking as if to curse him—after all these years of quiet, who are you to trample me? Ignoring every one of those protests, Kasvren came right up to the glass structure. His guess had been right. It had once been a greenhouse. As if to prove it, a few plants still lingered inside—though nearly all of them were weeds now. There remained the traces of rows where flowers or seedlings had once been planted. Half the ceiling stretching from the entrance had collapsed, leaving a monstrosity that could no longer serve any function as a greenhouse. Why had it never been torn down?
Was it not as if a corpse had been left stuffed and mounted?
Yet one thing was certain: this Dravenmoor Mansion must once have been the most beautiful estate in the entire grand duchy. The stately weight of the main facade, the triangular tower rising gracefully above it—complete with a semicircular window. Good heavens, might it not be an attic straight out of a boy's or girl's dreams?—that caught the sunlight now and then and glittered, and the pristine white fountain, and the fragrant, clean water it had once sent singing into the air. The elms and the evergreen maples and the other beautiful flowers Kasvren had never even heard the names of... Irises and narcissus must have bloomed there too.
The dark ash-grey bricks dominated the walls, but the relatively pale dove-colored bricks set between them must once have lent the whole a cheerful air, and the greenhouse, holding its warm air through every season, would have soothed its mistress's heart. The ballroom on the opposite side—now nothing more than what looked like a ruined chapel—would surely have drawn every eye with its roses and arches wreathed in wisteria blossoms.
"But now it is all gone to ash. The fire called time burns all things without mercy."
Kasvren murmured the lines of a poem he remembered reading once, gazing up at the greenhouse's shattered roof.
He had never cared for melancholy verse. The literature that had captured his attention as a boy had been, without exception, of the romantic sort—hymns to divine grace and beauty, to great nature, to the free life of the wanderer. Even while receiving the rigorous education of a marquisate's heir, he had always been imagining, somewhere in his heart, a life of drifting. He would walk the winding paths along the mountains until at last he crossed a high summit. Below would spread a harbor he had never seen; fishing boats would set out with the light of the dawn star and come home hauling nets brimming with sunset...
He had never dreamed that all of it would come to nothing—that he would cross, never to return, into the realm of fantasies that could never again be realized.
"Vipers come out here from time to time."
At the sudden voice he turned to find Rad Dat standing there. The old man was impossible to predict, appearing and vanishing without a trace. The word vipers caught in his ear, and Kasvren stepped back; Rad Dat, using a blunt-nosed hoe as a walking staff, began leisurely parting the thick undergrowth as he moved into the greenhouse.
"One must stir the weeds up like this every so often. That way the snakes sense a human presence and flee."
"It's winter. And you're telling me vipers still come out?"
"In Dravenmoor, they do. So do be careful at all times, young master."
Kasvren, who had been about to turn away with a careless nod, looked back at Rad Dat.
"What did you just call me?"
"Young master, my lord."
He was taken aback. Only yesterday the man had been calling him nothing but you, treating him as an unwelcome guest—and now suddenly young master? What change of heart was this?
"I didn't expect you to call me that."
The moment the words left his mouth, Kasvren regretted them. It sounded as though he were venting his bitterness at having spent the whole morning as lonely and abandoned as a stray. But Rad Dat, a wise steward and an old man besides, answered calmly, as though a young man's lashing out were nothing worth minding.
"The young lady commanded that I address you so, and I am merely following her orders. You have proven yourself not only the young master of House Selvain, but also the godson of His Grace the Grand Duke."
"That my godfather is Grand Duke Drasken is a fact no one can deny."
"Indeed, I know it well."
But— Kasvren stopped himself from saying what came next, merely giving a nod before slowly backing away, his eyes never leaving Rad Dat. The old man probably understood perfectly what he had meant to say.
Young master of House Selvain. That dream died a long time ago.
Sneering inwardly, Kasvren returned to the mansion. After the talk of vipers, he had lost all desire to go tramping through the overgrown wilds. Venomous serpents in this bitter season—it was an unbelievable tale, and yet he couldn't shake the feeling that in this place, anything was possible.
When the heavy thud of the closing door echoed behind him, Kasvren found himself secretly hoping that Isolde would appear, but there was no sign of her. Left with no alternative, he took his time exploring the ground floor he hadn't yet seen.
The drawing room, with its arched entrance and its furniture arranged at elegant angles, bore the air of long disuse. The black cloth draped over the sofas and stools conjured the image of a funeral hall. Suddenly a nervous laugh burst out of Kasvren from deep inside, like a sneeze. Of course. This was a funeral hall. Every last soul in this family would be buried somewhere not far from here.
Then what was Isolde? What was she?