“And I want a palace and a handsome, young prince who has an unnatural lust for old women, and neither of us are going to get what we crave, so let’s concentrate on what we can do something about!” Granny said sharply.
Bella hung her head, feeling suitably rebuked. Really, she had just been told that she wasn’t going to become a monster, after all, and she should be hugging Granny in gratitude.
Granny seemed to see what she was looking for in Bella’s chastised expression. “How are your magic studies coming with Sebastian?”
Bella bit her lip. “It’s not unlike what you were teaching me. There are a lot of formulas and — well, I think of them as recipes. There is one thing, though. I think I can see magic power. He said I might start to be able to, and I think I can. It’s like dust motes in sunlight, only it flows in little trickles and streams.”
“Really! That is a good sign!” Granny nodded approvingly. “I thought you might have the talent buried in you, but it looked to me that you were going to be a late bloomer and I was afraid it was going to wait to wake up until you were old enough to be a Granny yourself.”
“Wait…that can happen?” she asked. Somehow she’d had the impression that magicians were magicians almost from birth.
“It’s complicated,” Granny demurred. “There are things I can’t talk to you about that you will have to hear from Elena. After I am gone, use the mirror to talk to her, tell her what we talked about, ask her questions. Now, about this curse. As I said, it is subtle, it is powerful, and it seems to be almost the only thing that the caster has ever done.” She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair while she thought. “Think of magic as being like water. It’s always about, but you have to work very hard to gather enough of it in one place to do anything with, under most circumstances. Now — you can spend your water in little dribbles at a time, and if you are clever about it, you can do quite impressive things with just a drop or two. Or, if you are patient and sufficiently motivated, you can save up your water for a very, very long time, and do something really big with it. If you are clever and crafty, part of that can be using the water to erase the signs of what you have done and who did it. And that, we think, is exactly what happened.”
“So…someone planned this for a very long time?” she hazarded.
“If it is not a god-curse, yes.” Granny nodded. “We think it took several years to plan, and at least one entire year to execute. Now, what does that say to you?”
Her mind leapt through a myriad of possibilities before immediately settling on two. “That either it was someone who was plotting a long and complicated revenge, or someone who stood to gain a very great deal by putting Sebastian out of the way without killing him.”
“Good. Now, the revenge could not possibly be on Sebastian himself, because he would have been a boy when it was first planned.” Granny waited.
“So it would have had to have been revenge on Sebastian’s father. If the man hadn’t already been dead, it would have killed him to see his heir become a werewolf, and it would have been worse if it had been the father that had to kill the son…” Even as Bella voiced that, she could see in her imagination what a perfect and horrible revenge it would be. If Sebastian had killed someone, the Old Duke would have had no choice. He would have had to exact justice on his own son. “Doesn’t that suggest a motive?” she asked. “Someone — maybe — who blamed the Old Duke for the death or loss of his own son?”
“Or hers,” Granny reminded her. “It’s a perfectly reasonable motive for a woman, too, and women are exceptionally good at hiding it when they come into power. Right now, that is the line of pursuit that Elena and I are taking. It means a lot of tedious work, but we are pursuing that line first, not only because it seems the most likely, but because it is the one sort of curse that would have an infection component to it — revenge-curses are always blood-curses. So if you do make the change in three days, we’ll be that much further along in finding the way to undo it all. And if you don’t become a wolf, it will mean it is less likely that it is a revenge-curse.”
She grasped at that. “So you can undo it!”
“Probably. We just have to know who set it and get an idea of how it was set.” Granny reached out and patted her hand. “It’s only the true werewolf infection that we can control, but not cure, and only a god-curse, or one set by a person now dead, that we can’t undo. So long as the mortal is still alive, anything a mortal has cast, a Godmother can undo, eventually.”
“What if it’s someone who stood to gain?” she asked. “The Godmother spoke to me about that — she speculated it was someone who was trying to work out how to do this on more prominent people, and Sebastian was the first experiment. Does that count?”
“I should think it would — but the fact that no one else has turned up with this cast on him argues against personal gain — as in, discovering a way to make someone a lycanthrope and profiting by it.” Granny shook her head. “To be honest, ‘personal gain’ out of Sebastian or his property does not seem in the least likely to us. There’s no one with a strong claim to the Dukedom, and nobody has suggested Sebastian is incompetent, as they surely would have, if they wanted this land. This is an insignificant Dukedom — and so far, no one actually has gained anything from incapacitating Sebastian. Still, it doesn’t pay to rule it out, and that is where you come in.”
“Me?” Bella wasn’t sure how to react to that. “But what can I do?”
“The ‘gain’ might not be the obvious thing. Considering the title and the lands, the next in line seems uninterested. It might be something as subtle as the curse itself. Perhaps Sebastian was a rival for some choice heiress. Perhaps someone considered him a magical threat. Perhaps his influence was rising at Court.” Granny shrugged. “You are here, with him, and in the best position to draw him out. Get him to talk about the past before he changed. What he can tell you might hold clues to both the ‘revenge’ motive and the ‘personal gain’ motive.” She sighed. “The lad is charming, but although he is very observant, when it comes to figuring out that someone might have a hidden agenda he is as dense as a stone. You, on the other hand, have been negotiating the dangerous waters your stepmother tries to swim in, and keeping her and the twins off the sharp rocks for some time now. I have great confidence that if there is anything there to be spotted, you will do so.”
Privately, Bella was far from certain of that. But that was when Granny gave her a little sign of warning, and switched to the discussion of the things she would be sending Bella, and the various tinctures and potions and essences that she expected Bella to make, and there was no chance to discuss it all further.
At Granny’s suggestion they moved the discussion out of the stillroom. “I promised to show you something,” Granny reminded her. “I don’t know how much relevance this is going to have, but — well, who knows. You might learn something.” With those enigmatic words, it was Granny who led the way into part of the Manor that Bella hadn’t been to before. Eventually she stopped at one of those dead-end antechambers that had two doors opening into it. Granny opened the right-hand one first.
The room was dark, curtains drawn, and it smelled as if it hadn’t been opened in a long time. Granny went to the window and pulled the curtains aside.
This was clearly the room — or suite — of a woman. It looked as if it was still lived in; there was not even any dust.
“This was the Duchess’s suite,” Granny announced. “Sebastian’s mother. She was only twenty-three when she died, and neither she nor the Old Duke were much interested in Court. The other suite was the Duke’s.”
“Sebastian didn’t take over his father’s rooms…” That was interesting.