Worlds Unseen by Rachel Starr Thomson (best classic novels TXT) 📕

Nicolas appeared in the firelight and collapsed into a cross-legged heap. The firelight glinted on the gold in his ear and traced strange shadows on his face.

Maggie rolled over and lifted herself onto her elbows so she could look across the fire at her half-wild friend.

“Why did you come back?” she asked.

“You were in danger,” Nicolas said.

“How did you know?” Maggie pressed. “You said you were going to the forest. You should have been halfway across the city by the time the hound reached the inn. What brought you back?”

Nicolas sighed, as though he was going to regret opening his mouth. “I heard someone talking… I heard the hound coming after you.”

“What do you mean you heard it?” Maggie asked.

Nicolas shrugged, a strange little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I heard voices, and I knew you were in danger. So I went back.”

“I don’t know anything about voices,” Maggie said, questioningly. “All I saw was the hound. But you couldn’t have… I mean, it’s not possible to…”

“My ears often hear things that no one else can,” Nicolas said. “It’s a gift.”

Curiosity rose up in Maggie. The guardedness had gone out of Nicolas’s voice, as though he had let out his secret and didn’t care now how much she knew.

“What else do you hear?” Maggie asked. “Besides dangerous voices in the dark.”

“I hear the grass grow,” Nicolas said slowly, “and I hear the stars singing.”

“They sing?” Maggie asked.

Nicolas nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I hear other things, too… sometimes I can hear what Bear is saying.”

Maggie looked up at the hulking form just beyond the glow of the campfire. “Bear talks,” she said flatly.

“Well, not exactly talks,” Nicolas said. “He feels things, and thinks things, and sometimes I hear what he means.”

“Does he speak the language of the Empire?” Maggie asked, feeling ridiculous but unable to stop herself from asking.

“No, of course not,” Nicolas said. “He just feels things, and sometimes I understand them.” Nicolas laughed a little nervously. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”

Maggie ignored the question and asked another of her own. “Have you always been able to understand him?”

“No,” he told her. “When I was a child I would listen to rabbits and squirrels and birds, and it was hard to understand them, too. But I kept listening, and trying to understand, and one day I did. I still don’t understand everything.”

Maggie felt herself drawn to the strange young man across from her. It was fascinating, what he was saying, perhaps absurd. Yet she believed him.

“What else can you hear?” she asked, leaning forward with her chin resting in her hand.

Nicolas’s eyes met hers. How many people had he ever spoken to like this? Who, in all his life, would ever have believed him? Even the Gypsies thought he was mad when he spoke of hearing, although they were not so quick to dismiss it the way others did. They wondered sometimes, if madness was not a gift.

“When babies cry,” Nicolas said, “I know what they want before their own mothers do. Sometimes I can hear a baby talking while it’s still in its mother’s womb.”

“What do they say?” Maggie asked, a smile of wonder beginning to tug at her own face.

“It’s hard to understand them,” Nicolas said. “But not so hard as with the animals. Mostly they dream about the world out here. And they wonder why so many of the voices they hear are angry and worried. They dream, and they wonder, and then they go back to sleep. And when they wake up they wonder all the same things over again.”

Maggie laughed. Nicolas chuckled, but his laugh ended in the creases of a frown. “Sometimes I wish I could tell them to stay in there. If they come out here they’ll just join the voices of anger, and worry… and fear.

“And once in a while,” Nicolas continued, “I hear voices talking, from all over the place. I don’t know who they belong to, I can’t always tell where they’re from. But I can hear them.”

His voice trailed off and he looked away. “I haven’t told anyone about my hearing for years. Not since I was a child.”

Maggie wished he would continue, but she sensed he had already said a great deal more than he’d meant to.

“Where were you going?” he asked, changing the subject abruptly. “Before the hound came, I mean.”

“To Pravik,” Maggie said. Her expression changed suddenly, and she jumped to her feet. Nicolas was up in an instant, alert as a cat. But only the faint sounds of the night reached his ears as Maggie rushed to the tree where her coat was drying. She reached inside and pulled out a piece of parchment, unrolling it frantically. Nicolas watched curiously. The paper was amazingly strong-the scroll was unharmed, and Maggie breathed a sigh of relief. She realized suddenly that Nicolas was watching her, and that she had cut off their conversation rather rudely. She held up the scroll in explanation.

“I was going to deliver this to someone,” she said. “It belonged to an old friend. He would have taken it himself, but he died before he could.” Her face clouded over.

Nicolas nodded. He cleared his throat. “I just want to say that I’d be happy to accompany you back to Bryllan… as far as the boat, I mean. So you won’t have to go alone.”

Maggie played with the paper in her hands, and she didn’t meet Nicolas’s eyes.

“I’m not going back to Bryllan,” she said. “Not until I take this where it belongs.”

“Maggie,” Nicolas began, his voice quiet, “I told you I heard voices before the hound was let loose. Someone sent it after you. They might try again. It can’t be safe for you here.”

Maggie bowed her head and walked back to the fire. Just as she reached the rim of light, she turned and faced her friend again.

“I have to take this to Pravik,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain everything, but I can’t turn back now. Especially not now.”

She sat down and he joined her. When she looked up at him, her face was apologetic. “Anyway,” she said, “suppose I did go back to Londren, and they came after me there. I wouldn’t be any safer.”

“You know your way around Londren,” Nicolas protested, miserably. “You could hide there.”

They fell silent. Bear nudged up behind them, hanging his massive head over Nicolas’s shoulder.

“Will you help me find the road to Pravik?” Maggie asked after a long silence.

“I’ll go with you,” Nicolas said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No,” he said, looking intensely at her, “I mean I’ll go with you. To Pravik.”

“But-” she protested, “you can’t just…”

“Do you think I have a life here in Galce to hold me back?” he asked. “Bear’s my only family; these forests and the Gypsy caravans are my only home. It’s time we see more of the world anyway. We’ll come with you.”

Her eyes filled with unexpected tears. “I don’t know what to say,” she started.

He reached out a hand and touched her shoulder lightly. “Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be here in the morning.”

*

Lord Robert Sinclair, the Laird of Angslie, could not sleep. He had retired to his room on the pretense of a headache. A maid had drawn the bedroom curtains and lit a warm fire, and now he lay stretched out on his bed in his stocking feet. The bed was an unusually long one, to accommodate all six feet, seven inches of the laird’s stature. His sixty years had depleted little of his strength of presence. His muscles were still strong, thanks to long days of wandering in the mountains. His mind was as strong as his body: it was quick, and sharp, and it burned with ideas, and old passions, and longings.

Yet, for all of that, the laird was a man on whom life dragged wearingly. The things he longed for were beyond his reach, and he had only memories to keep him alive. Memories, and the strange help of a girl who lived on a mountainside nearby.

It had been nearly a week since he had last seen Virginia Ramsey, and he would go to her soon. He had just spent six days in Cranburgh with people he could hardly tolerate, smiling and simpering until he thought hypocrisy would cause him to explode; vowing every night in his room that he would never go back there, business or no business. He arrived home tense and ready to snap, and then his housekeeper had made her deplorable announcement, looking insufferably proud of herself all the while.

“You wouldn’t have liked to see him, sir,” she had said with a sniff of disapproval. “He wasn’t one of your station. He was bent so you couldn’t know his height, and dirty so you couldn’t know his age. He was very insistent that he wanted to see you. Said he had something for you. But I put him in his place, I can assure you. I have no use for such peddlers.”

“Did he give his name?” Lord Robert had asked.

“Aye, I think he did. Let’s see… Daniel Seaton, it was.”

The terrible words spoken, the laird’s anger had drained out of him and he had gone to bed, where he could lay in the old familiarity of his room and let the musty magic of his house calm and console him. He forgot even about going to see Virginia. All he knew was that the longed-for past had come to call, and he had not been home.

In hindsight, it often seemed to him that the only time in his life worth living had been the days of the council. For three short months Angslie had been home to seven self-styled scholars, Daniel Seaton among them, in pursuit of a glorious dream. In the forty years since the abandonment of that dream, those memories had taunted him with what would never be again. Fate was a cruel thing, Lord Robert felt, that it could send Dan Seaton to his very door while he was away enduring the company of men and women who didn’t have soul enough to feel the lure of the mysteries that had drawn the council.

Lord Robert abruptly left his bed and began pacing the halls of Angslie. Up stairs and down corridors he stalked, passing long rows of windows that looked out on a brown, mountainous highland wilderness, until at last he had reached the double doors of a long-closed room. It was a room that made the servants whisper when they passed it; a forbidden domain with many a wild story shut behind its doors.

Impulsively, Lord Robert reached out and touched the brass door handle. It turned easily under his hand, and the doors swung open.

The room had not been dusted in forty years. Lord Robert strode to the end of the room and dashed the curtains open. Sunlight poured in as it would pour into an opened tomb, illuminating the clouds of dust that danced in the stale air. He turned from the tall, wide window with its view of the hills to face the room where his dreams had once taken flight over the mountains and far into the past; where the obsession of his life had been birthed.

The sunlight glinted off the gold and red bindings of the books that lined one wall and attempted to sparkle on the brass candlesticks that sat covered with dust and grey wax, arrested in its dripping. The candles sat in the center of the room on a long wooden table that had once served as a meeting place for the Council