The River of No Return

maybe even murderous.
    The envelope seemed to stare back at him. What the hell did they want? All his skills were obsolete. Slaughtering Frenchmen; ignoring the stench of open sewers; dressing in absurdly tight clothing; seducing the buxom, sleepy-eyed daughters of innkeepers. Useless talents in this slick and modern present. These days Frenchmen were nice and unavailable for slaughter. Pretty women were skinny and looked at a single man like Nick with starving intensity, as if he were a piece of low-fat cheese.
    Nick stood up, letting the throw fall away from his body. The fire was burning well now, and he could feel the heat increase as he stepped forward. He plucked the envelope from the mantel.
    With the letter heavy in his hand, he remembered the dream that had awoken him. His terrible intention to kill, and then the will to follow through. The boy dying. Perhaps the dream had been prophetic. Maybe the Guild needed a hit man. Well, they could look elsewhere. He was done with killing.
    He slipped his finger under the flap of the envelope and slowly ripped it open along its crease. The bright sound of tearing paper set his teeth on edge. He drew the single sheet out and unfolded it.
    The words were printed in big black letters across the top of the page, with the tulip seal of the Guild embossed over them: “Summons Direct.” Then below it, dashed off at a casual angle in Alice Gacoki’s hand: “Never mind the rules. Catch a flight. See you at Heathrow.”

CHAPTER THREE
    J ulia wandered aimlessly through Castle Dar, waiting for the men to return from the funeral. It was half castle, half house, and it had piled up over the centuries around a square Norman tower. The tower’s broken-toothed crenellations still crowned the rest, poking up in the midst of sloping roofs and mismatched gables. Julia knew every inch of the place, and before Grandfather’s death she would have said she loved it. But now she walked through the rooms as if she were a stranger and the house a ruin. It felt like a ruin without Grandfather’s voice filling it, without his long strides eating up the hallways as he charged from one end of the castle to the other. There used to be a thrumming energy here, a thrill in the air. But with every day that passed since Grandfather’s death, it grew less. Castle Dar was Eamon’s now, silent and unwelcoming.
    Julia hugged her arms around her ribs, noticing how dark the house was, how crumbling. The portraits that lined the hallways seemed to have receded further into black, greasy obscurity since last she looked at them, with Grandfather by her side. They didn’t recognize her, these painted ancestors. Even the one of her young father, Grandfather’s son. She stood and looked up at him now. The portrait had been completed the month before he went to Scotland, where he had met and married Julia’s mother in a whirlwind romance. He’d stayed there with his bride until she was brought to bed of a daughter, and then the three of them had set out for the south. A carriage accident in the borderlands had taken her parents’ lives; little Julia survived. Grandfather had never even met his daughter-in-law, and suddenly he was rushing north to bury her and to take her baby girl back south. Julia had no image of her mother, only a couple of trinkets that had been hers. But she used to love this portrait of her father. Now his eyes seemed as distant and cold as any of the others’. They all stared over her head, looking past her . . . they were looking for the earl. Looking for Eamon.
    The house wasn’t entirely Eamon’s yet, however. Grandfather’s collection of stones still cluttered every available surface. Julia picked one up from a windowsill as she passed. It had been his habit to return from journeys with his greatcoat pockets full of them. Stones with things in them. A fern. A fish. Or stones that were things. This one, for instance, was an enormous tooth, like a giant’s molar.
    “The world is old, Julia,” Grandfather had said once, when she was fifteen. “Older than old. Older than anyone guesses. Time is long. It stretches back and back and back. . . .”
    “Older than Eden?”
    “Much older than Eden.”
    “But God made the world in seven days.”
    “Perhaps. If each day was an eon of eons.”
    “How do you know?”
    At that he had patted her cheek, as if she were still little. “Questions, questions. Time enough for answers when you are older.”
    “I am fifteen.