K.J. Charles - The Magpie Lord (A Charm of Magpies #1).pdf

(679 KB) Pobierz
Dedication
For Charlie, of course
One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret never to be told
Eight for a letter over the sea
Nine for a lover as true as can be
One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a funeral
Four for a birth
Five for heaven
Six for hell
Seven’s the Devil his own self
Chapter One
The grey awful misery tangled round his heart and throat, choking him, sickening him with the
vileness of his own nature. The shame and self-loathing too deep for repentance, too deep for words.
Too deep for anything but the knife and the red flow and the longed-for emptiness of the end…
The voice seemed to come from a long distance away. “My lord? My lord! Oh, Jesus. My lord!
You stupid sod!”
A slap, hard, round his face. He registered it through the haze of grey misery, then felt strong
hands dragging him onto his feet and out of the room. His wrist hurt. He needed to finish the job.
He lunged clumsily back towards the knife, only to find his arm twisted up behind his back and a
hard tug pulling him off balance.
“Out. This way.” He was marched forward, pushed, dragged, the litany of doom pounding in his
mind. All he could think of was ending it, making the unbearable guilt and shame stop, removing the
foul stain of his soul from the world…
He vaguely noticed the hard grip on the back of his head, just before his face was plunged into icy,
greasy water and held there, ruthlessly hard, as he inhaled a lungful of dirty dishwater, and something
around his mind snapped.
Lord Crane jerked his head out of the suddenly relaxed grip, came up spluttering but entirely alert,
gasped for air, and kicked backwards viciously, aiming to cripple his attacker with a rake of his foot
across the kneecap. The grizzled man in black had already jumped out of the way, though, and was
standing back, holding up his hands in a gesture of nonaggression that Crane had no intention of
testing.
Crane held himself ready to fight for a second, registered that he had just been half-drowned in the
butler ’s sink by his manservant, let out a long breath and dropped his shoulders.
“It happened again,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Tsaena.” He shook his head, sending grey water flying from his hair, and blinked the liquid out of
his eyes.
Merrick threw him a dishtowel. He caught it in his left hand, sucked in a hiss at the pain as his wrist
moved, and mopped his face. He spat in the sink to get the taste of foul water and bitter leaves out of
his mouth. “Son of a bitch. It happened again.”
“Yes,” said Merrick, with some restraint. “I know. I found you sawing at your wrist with a fucking
table knife, my lord, which was what gave me the clue.”
“Yes, alright.” Crane pulled over a chair with a screech of wood on tile. “Can you…?” He gestured
at his left wrist. The shirt cuff was unfastened and rolled back. He didn’t remember doing that. He
didn’t remember the other times.
Merrick was already setting out lint and a roll of bandages, as well as a bottle of volatile-smelling
spirit.
“I’ll have some if you’re pouring. Ow.”
“I reckon that’s enough killing yourself for one evening.” Merrick dabbed the raw wound with the
raw alcohol. “Jesus, this is deep, you’d have done yourself for sure with anything sharper. My lord
—”
“I don’t know. I was reading a book, thinking about getting dressed. I didn’t…” He waved his right
hand vaguely, and slapped it down on the worn tabletop. “God damn it.”
There was silence in the kitchen. Merrick wound bandage carefully round the bloody wrist. Crane
leaned his right elbow on the table and propped his head on his hand.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Merrick gave him a steady look from under his thin brows, and returned to his work.
“I don’t know,” Crane repeated. “I can’t—I don’t think I can do this any more. I can’t…” I can’t
bear it. He’d never said the words in thirty-seven years, not even in the times of hunger and
degradation. He wanted to say them now.
Merrick frowned. “Got to fight it, my lord.”
“Fight what? Give me something to fight, and I’ll fight it—but how the hell do I fight my own
mind?”
“It ain’t your mind,” said Merrick levelly. “You ain’t mad.”
“Right. I can see how you reached that conclusion.” Crane made a sound that was a little, though
not very much, like a laugh. “After all these years, after he’s bloody dead, it looks like the old bastard
is finally getting rid of me.”
Merrick began rolling up the lint and bandages with care. “You’re thinking about that word again.”
“Hereditary,” enunciated Crane, staring at his narrow-fingered hands. “Hereditary insanity. We
might as well put the name to it, no?”
“No,” said Merrick. “Cos, I’ll tell you what word I’m thinking of.”
Crane’s brows drew together. “What?”
Merrick’s hazel eyes met Crane’s and held them. He put the bottle of spirits back down on the table
with a deliberate clink. “Shaman.”
There was a silence.
“We’re not in Shanghai now,” said Crane eventually.
“No, we ain’t. But if we was there, and yo started going mad all on a sudden and off again, you
wouldn’t be sat there whining, would you? You’d be right out—”
“To see Yu Len.”
Merrick cocked his head in agreement.
“But we’re not in Shanghai,” Crane repeated. “This is London. Yu Len is half the world away, and
at this rate I’m not going to make it to next quarter day.”
“So we find a shaman here,” said Merrick simply.
“But—”
“No buts!” The words rang off the stone floor and tiled walls. “You can go to some mad-doctor
and get thrown in the bedlam, or you can sit there and go mad for thinking you’re going mad, or we
find a fucking shaman and get this looked at like we would back home, because hereditary my arse.”
Merrick leaned forward, hands on the table, glaring in his master ’s face. “I know you, Lucien
Vaudrey. I seen you look death in the face plenty of times, and every time you either ran like hell or
you kicked him in the balls, so don’t you tell me you want to die. I never met anyone who didn’t want
to die as much as you don’t. So we are going to find a shaman and get this sorted, unless you got any
better ideas, which you don’t! Right?”
Merrick held his gaze for a few seconds, then straightened and began to tidy up. Crane cleared his
throat. “Are there English shamans?”
“Got to be, right? Witches. Whatever.”
“I suppose so,” said Crane, trying hard, knowing it was pointless, knowing he owed it to Merrick.
“I suppose so. Who’d know…” His fingers twitched, calling up memories. “Rackham. He’s back, isn’t

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin