The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,54
rinsed. I took the chance to do a little spying, and looked in at the bedroom. They had a futon and a cupboard. Little nooks and crannies were set into the mud walls, and they were full of books and bottles and crystals and shit. Except for the shelf where there was shampoo and toothpaste and a box of tampons. It hit me then: Edrard and Rosalinda lived there. They weren’t camping out. It was their home all the time.
“My lady,” Gentry said behind me. Even after all the times I’d snooped in other people’s homes, I was embarrassed to get caught. “Wilt thou walk with me?”
“Yeah. Let’s take a walk.”
We went up to our camp first, and he put a blanket, a jug of water, and a book into a basket, so I grabbed the book I’d borrowed from him. The one about the boy who runs away to become a knight.
Our walk was more like a hike. Across a meadow and up another hill. The path wasn’t clear-cut, and long skirts aren’t great for hiking, but Gentry did what he’d done the night before, and pulled me up the steepest parts of it. I thought there must be another hill, because I could see a limestone embankment through the trees, but it wasn’t a hill. It was a stone house.
Not a house. A castle. A castle in progress.
“Lady Zhorzha, I welcome thee to Bryn Carreg,” he said.
“This is yours? Your house?”
“Yea. ’Tis my keep. Tho I have many labors before me.”
“Wait. You’re building this? You are building it?”
“Yea. Stone by stone,” he said.
My mind was blown, because that was a lot of stones to be building one by one. The walls were taller than me, and on the end closest to where we had come up the hill, the tower was probably three stories high. There was a gate there, big enough to drive a car through, and that was where we went in.
The walls were probably three feet thick and made out of blocks of limestone. I laid my hand on it as we walked through, and it was warm from the sun shining on it. Inside the tower, there was a door that led out to the courtyard, and a bank of stone stairs that went up in a spiral around the outer wall. Where there would have been a roof, there were blue tarps stretched across big wooden beams. The whole thing was probably forty feet across.
I put my hand on the wall again, because it was so familiar.
“Have you been to Colorado?” I said. “There’s this guy. I don’t remember his name. It’s not that far from the Royal Gorge and—”
“Bishop Castle,” Gentry said. “My lady, yes, I have seen it. It—it—it—”
I got to laughing, because that’s how excited he was; he couldn’t get any words out. He had to set down the basket he was carrying, so he could scratch his shoulders with both hands.
“It’s amazing!” I said. “This is amazing! I can’t believe you’re building a castle.”
“I saw Bishop Castle when I was a boy of ten, no more. Thou hast the book I read in thy hand. I would not rest til I had seen a castle. My father took me thither. Us alone, for brother Trang was yet a babe and my mother stayed home and—wilt thou come up?”
Of course, I would. We went up the stairs, even though there was no railing, and I remembered that about Bishop Castle, too. How in some places you were going up stairs with nothing to stop you from falling off, or standing with your back against the castle wall with the wind whipping around you. This wasn’t anywhere near that tall, but it was closer to four stories than three. When we got to the top, Gentry pulled back the tarp so we could poke our heads out, and I could see why it was worth all the walking to have built up on the hill.
There was a long rolling slope down to a creek, and above the creek, three ponds stair-stepped down the hill. A big one and two small ones. Two of them were mossy-looking with lily pads and grass along the edges. The third one was lined with stones, so the water was clear.
Beyond that were hills and more hills, all the way to the interstate. From up there, it felt like I could see the whole state of Kansas.