Читаем Phoenix and Ashes полностью

But Locke shook his head. "She's protected," he said. "You can't make her deathly ill—you've tried today, haven't you? And as I warned you, she's got nothing worse than a bit of a headache. That proves that you can't touch her directly with magic, and if she had an—accident— so soon, there would be talk. It isn't the sort of thing that could be covered up."

"But I can bind her; when I am finished she will never be able to leave the house and grounds," Alison snarled, her beautiful face contorted with rage, and before Eleanor could make any sense of the words, "you can't touch her directly with magic" her stepmother had crossed the room and grabbed her by one wrist. "Hold her!" she barked, and in an instant, the solicitor was beside her, pinioning Eleanor's arms.

Eleanor screamed.

That is, she opened her mouth to scream, but quick as a ferret, and with an expression of great glee on her face, Carolyn darted across the room to stuff a rag in Eleanor's open mouth and bind it in place with another.

Terror flooded through her, and she struggled against Locke's grip, as he pulled her over to the hearth, then kicked her feet out from underneath her so that she fell to the floor beside the fire.

Beside a gap where one of the hearthstones had been rooted up and laid to one side—

Locke shoved her flat, face-down on the flagstone floor, and held her there with one hand between her shoulder blades, the other holding her right arm, while Alison made a grab for the left and caught it by the wrist. Eleanor's head was twisted to the left, so it was Alison she saw—Alison, with a butcher's cleaver and a terrible expression on her face. Alison who held her left hand flat on the floor and raised the cleaver over her head.

Eleanor began screaming again, through the gag. She was literally petrified with fear—

And the blade came down, severing the smallest finger of her left hand completely.

For a moment she felt nothing—then the pain struck.

It was like nothing she had ever felt before. She thrashed in agony, but Locke was kneeling on her other arm, with all his weight on her back and she couldn't move.

Blood was everywhere, black in the firelight, and through a red haze of pain she wondered if Alison was going to let her bleed to death. Alison seized the severed finger, and stood up. Lauralee took her place, holding a red-hot poker in hands incongruously swallowed up in oven-mitts. And a moment later she shoved that poker against the wound, and the pain that Eleanor had felt up until that moment was as nothing.

And mercifully, she fainted.

She woke again in the empty kitchen, her hand a throbbing sun of pain.

Like a dumb animal, she followed her instincts, which forced her to crawl to the kitchen door, open it on the darkness outside, on rain that had turned to snow, and plunge her hand into the barrel of rainwater that stood there, a thin skin of ice forming atop it. She gasped at the cold, then wept for the pain, and kept weeping as the icy-cold water cooled the hurt and numbed it.

How long she stood there, she could not have said. Only that at some point her hand was numb enough to take out of the water, that she found the strength to look for the medicine chest in the pantry and bandage it. Then she found the laudanum and drank down a recklessly large dose, and finally took the bottle of laudanum with her, stumbling back up the stairs to her room in the eerily silent house.

There she stayed, wracked with pain and fever, tormented by nightmare, and unable to muster a single coherent thought.

Except for one, which had more force for grief than all her own pain.

Papa was dead.

And she was alone.

2

March 10, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

THE SCRUB-BRUSH RASPED BACK AND forth against the cold flagstones. Eleanor's knees ached from kneeling on the hard flagstones. Her shoulders ached too, and the muscles of her neck and lower back. You would think that after three years of nothing but working like a charwoman, I would have gotten used to it.

The kitchen door and window stood open to the breeze, airing the empty kitchen out. Outside, it was a rare, warm March day, and the air full of tantalizing hints of spring. Tomorrow it might turn nasty again, but today had been lovely.

Not that Eleanor could get any further than the kitchen garden. But if she could leave her scrubbing, at least she could go outside, in the sun—

But Alison had ordered her to scrub, and scrub she must, until Alison came to give her a different order, or rang the servants' bell. And if Alison "forgot," as on occasion she did, then Eleanor would be scrubbing until she fainted from exhaustion, and when she woke, she would scrub again. . . .

Перейти на страницу:

Все книги серии the elemental masters

Phoenix and Ashes
Phoenix and Ashes

Elanor Robinson's life had shattered when Father volunteered for the Great War, leaving her alone with a woman he had just married. Then the letter had come that told of her father's death in the trenches and though Eleanor thought things couldn't get any worse, her life took an even more bizarre turn.Dragged to the hearth by her stepmother Alison, Eleanor was forced to endure a painful and frightening ritual during which the smallest finger of her left had was severed and buried beneath a hearthstone. For her stepmother was an Elemental Master of Earth who practiced the darker blood-fueled arts. Alison had bound Eleanor to the hearth with a spell that prevented her from leaving home, caused her to fade from people's memories, and made her into a virtual slave. Months faded into years for Eleanor, and still the war raged. There were times she felt she was losing her mind - times she seemed to see faces in the hearth fire.Reginald Fenyx was a pilot. He lived to fly, and whenever he returned home on break from Oxford, the youngsters of the town would turn out to see him lift his aeroplan - a frail ship of canvas and sticks - into the sky and soar through the clouds.During the war Reggie had become an acclaimed air ace, for he was an Elemental Master of Air. His Air Elementals had protected him until the fateful day when he had met another of his kind aloft, and nearly died. When he returned home, Reggie was a broken man plagued by shell shock, his Elemental powers vanished.Eleanor and Reginald were two souls scourged by war and evil magic. Could they find the strength to help one another rise from the ashes of their destruction?

Мерседес Лэки

Фэнтези

Похожие книги

Неудержимый. Книга I
Неудержимый. Книга I

Несколько часов назад я был одним из лучших убийц на планете. Мой рейтинг среди коллег был на недосягаемом для простых смертных уровне, а силы практически безграничны. Мировая элита стояла в очереди за моими услугами и замирала в страхе, когда я выбирал чужой заказ. Они правильно делали, ведь в этом заказе мог оказаться любой из них.Чёрт! Поверить не могу, что я так нелепо сдох! Что же случилось? В моей памяти не нашлось ничего, что бы могло объяснить мою смерть. Благо судьба подарила мне второй шанс в теле юного барона. Я должен восстановить свою силу и вернуться назад! Вот только есть одна небольшая проблемка… как это сделать? Если я самый слабый ученик в интернате для одарённых детей?Примечания автора:Друзья, ваши лайки и комментарии придают мне заряд бодрости на весь день. Спасибо!ОСТОРОЖНО! В КНИГЕ ПРИСУТСТВУЮТ АРТЫ!ВТОРАЯ КНИГА ЗДЕСЬ — https://author.today/reader/279048

Андрей Боярский

Попаданцы / Фэнтези / Бояръ-Аниме