Page 46 of The Curse of Penryth Hall
We all could be.
I took another step backward away from the cow. My own heart skittish in my chest. He needed to move. Get away from there. “Ruan, come back, you can’t save her!” I called out to him through the rain, but my voice was lost to the night.
I started to call again, but it was useless between the cow’s cries and the storm. I took a step forward.
Benedict reached out and tugged me to his side. His warm hand on my shoulder. “No, maid. Stay back. This is Pellar business.”
I shook my head angrily. This was the second time someone had said that to me. “You won’thavea Pellar if he goes and gets himself crushed to death. The cow is dying. Surely you can see that.”
Benedict shushed me and pointed to the scene before us. “Watch,” he whispered low in my ear.
I did. Unable to take my gaze away for fear that if I so much as blinked, Ruan would slip beneath the creature’s flanks and be crushed in a slow agonizing death.
He leaned his head low, murmuring something in a language I didn’t understand. His hands stroking the cow’s neck and snout, causing her to still instantly. The black tongue reaching out and wrapping around his offering.
Whatever he’d done had silenced her. Eased her passing. Of course he would. Tears filled my eyes at the senselessness of the loss. It wouldn’t be long now. She was dying. Any fool could see it, yet Benedict held me by my shoulders, forcing me to watch his favorite cow die. It was macabre. Cruel of him to make me witness such a thing.
Except she didn’t die.
I watched through the rain and my own tears as Ruan stood up and stepped back. Seconds later the cow followed suit. Struggling unsteadily onto her feet like a just-born calf. He rubbed her great snout with a rough pat. Her mouth was still frothing, but she nuzzled at his chest before beginning to walk away in the rain, back to the shelter of the barn. One slow step at a time, tail flicking.
What… what had he done?
I stared openmouthed as he fumbled in his bag and began dumping something from a flask over his hands. “We need to get the rest of the herd into the south field. Are any of the others sick?” Ruan ignored me, looking directly at Benedict.
“Not as I could tell. I saw this one out here making a great fuss. The others are all bedded down for the storm. But not her.”
Benedict set off across the waterlogged pasture, and Ruan followed suit. I stared after him for a moment, trying to reconcile what I’d seen with science—with reason—but coming up woefully short. So instead I turned and ran afterRuan, slipping in the mud with each step. My feet ice-cold and wet.
He was halfway to the house when I caught up with him. “What…” I gasped, catching my breath. “What did you do?!”
He shook his head. “I gave her some charcoal. She was too far gone for much else.”
“Charcoal?! Ruan Kivell, I’m no farm girl but evenIknow that you couldn’t give a cow in that state charcoal. You’d have never gotten her to eat it. Maybe if you had ground it up with some liquid to funnel it down her throat. The thing was hardly conscious when we arrived. You mean to tell me you gave the old girl a pet and she licked it out of your palm?”But she had.He’d murmured something to her, and she’d obeyed him. My hand shot out, grabbing him hard about the forearm and pulling him back to me.
His skin was warm beneath my touch, his eyes eerily bright. “I told you what I did. You saw me. What more do you want me to say?”
I snapped my mouth shut. I didn’t know. I was beginning to see why the villagers were afraid of him, of who he was—what he was. And if I allowed that Pellars could exist in this world, then maybe there was room for curses too.
Ruan and I followed Benedict in silence back to his farmstead. I traipsed along in my soaked-through boots. My toes now prunes in the woolen socks I’d thrown on earlier in the afternoon.
I’d offended him.
Again.
It was evident in the slant of his shoulders and the rather determined stride away from me. He didn’t care if I fell in the mud or cow shit. A sentiment I returned. Perhaps it was cruel to be angry with him after he’d done—whatever it was—but it only made me angrier. I wanted him to reassure me that therewasn’t a curse, that Sir Edward’s killer was flesh and bone, that together we’d figure out who had done the deed—but his uncertainty earlier this evening was like contagion, festering beneath my skin, growing and spreading until I too began to doubt my convictions.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONEHearth and Home
THEMartin homeplace was a small structure, rising up like the back of a tortoise from the surrounding land in stone and a slate roof. More squat than not. A warm light glowed from the window. And most important at the instant—it looked dry.
I shivered again, hugging myself in my flimsy gray-and-cream dress. I may as well have been in my underclothes, for the warmth it provided.
Ruan placed a hand on my shoulder. “Rest here. Warm up. Benedict and I will be back once we’ve moved the herd.”
“I can help.”
“You don’t know this country. You’re more likely to hurt yourself than be of any use. Stay with Alice. It shouldn’t take long.”
