Lady of the Crescent Moon
Page 1
Table of Contents
LADY OF THE CRESCENT MOON
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
LADY OF THE CRESCENT MOON
INGRID HAHN
SOUL MATE PUBLISHING
New York
LADY OF THE CRESCENT MOON
Copyright©2018
INGRID HAHN
Cover Design by Syneca Featherstone
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Published in the United States of America by
Soul Mate Publishing
P.O. Box 24
Macedon, New York, 14502
ISBN: 978-1-68291-738-1
www.SoulMatePublishing.com
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
To Jonathan,
for our shared life full of laughter, snark,
family walks, cat videos, and book binging.
To our dearest little one,
even though he’d rather play with Mommy
than the babysitter when I work.
And to our next little love, arriving September 2018.
Acknowledgments
This book began in 2013 when an editor on a panel at the New Jersey Romance Writers Conference announced a gothic line that would be soon taking submissions. All I heard was the word “gothic” and I knew I had to write a book. Love at first utterance.
But I had a long way to go.
To that editor, please accept my deepest apologies for sending you the story that would eventually become this book when it was a steaming pile of bat excrement, full of capital-I intrigue, inexplicable melodrama, and stuffed full of tokens the plot did not support. I cringe when I think I ever abused your inbox.
To Tiffany, Gytha, Magrat, Agnes, and to Esme most especially, who blew my mind and redefined everything I ever thought about witches. Esme, mind how you go.
To my critique group of 2013 when I was first attempting this story who slogged through pages of pretty writing with absolutely no tension and even less of a point because I had zero clue and still so much to learn. The biggest apology goes to Janet who beta read and probably hated everything she had suffer through but who was gracious anyway.
To all the teachers who’ve offered workshops and masterclasses in the intervening years that have helped me and continue to help me grow as a writer.
To Debby, for giving this book a home at Soul Mate all these years later. Thank you for being organized and informative, as well as giving stories with offbeat elements, such as the unique setting found in these pages, a chance.
Chapter 1
Normandy near Honfleur, the mouth of the Seine
November 1679
The candle in the window of the decrepit château went out. Darkness swaddled her like a blanket of ice. Sidonie shivered, the image so simple, yet so powerful. Because that could be her. Snuffed away, as easily as a pinch extinguishes a flame.
Fate was a mysterious beast. After so many years, to have been brought back here, to Château Bramville, the site of her greatest humiliation . . . and her heart’s greatest despair. The brisk air carried familiar smells that flung her back twelve—no—thirteen years. The river. The sea. The stone. The earth on the brink of winter.
Nothing from her old life mattered now.
Sidonie could not fail. Would not. For every one of her friends shackled and dragged into the dungeons of Paris, awaiting a sham trial in the Burning Courts, there must be three others of whom she knew nothing. Once accused of witchcraft, few, if any, were exonerated.
Staying still in the shadows, Sidonie closed her eyes. Maybe this time it would work. She silenced her internal landscape, cleared her thoughts, detached from emotion, and once again tried peering into the future.
Nothing. Not even the faintest shadow. It was the same darkness she’d been confronted with for weeks. Her sense of divination was lost. Perhaps forever. Leaving her utterly alone. She had no more than instinct to trust and not a second to lose to doubt. She had to work and work fast.
The damp November air hurried her forward, clutching her skirts against her as she darted over the path where the light from a waning crescent moon made hellish figures of the overgrown tangles, like demons frozen in twisted anguish. Once, the garden had been among the most beautiful the countryside over. Thirteen years might as well have been a lifetime ago.
Sidonie repeated to herself what she must do. First she’d slip in through the kitchens. Then find the secret passageway and go up into the château. All she needed was a brief conversation with Lady d’Ambroisin. An hour at most. Perhaps two. By dawn she would be on her way back to Paris, ready, God willing, to face her foe.
If she wasn’t ready . . .
Didn’t matter. She’d go anyway. There was nobody else who would stand and fight. She’d rather die on the side of right than live having hidden away, more concerned for her own safety than the imprisoned souls suffering bodily torture, soon to die slowly and horribly.
Behind the back wall, Sidonie felt her way along the cold stone. Her skirt caught on brambles. She ripped free and froze in the sound of swaying vines. Were her heart pumping any harder, she’d bleed from her ears.
The sound of movement behind her made her stiffen. She studied the shadows, not daring to so much as blink. There was one person at Château Bramville she needed to avoid at any cost. He could never know she’d returned, even briefly.
But instead of the figure of a man emerging into the silvery moonlight, a small creature crossed the path in a purposeful trot, its sleek black fur glistening. Nothing more than a cat. Sidonie’s shoulders sank as she expelled a pained breath.
She let her eyelids sink closed and focused her concentration on silently asking the feline to return from whence it had come. When she looked again, the path was empty
.
Let the cat be a lesson to her about keeping her senses opened. Or what was left of her senses, at any rate.
She crept onward and found the rough planks of the door. The latch took no more than a moment to unhook, intended more as a protection against a gust of strong wind than to keep out intruders.
The dedicated kitchens were a newer part of the château, built only about a hundred years ago when cooking fires moved out of the great hall. The lingering smell of recently roasted meat drew a piercing pang in her belly.
Enveloped in perfect blackness, Sidonie squeezed her eyes shut, focusing on inner senses to guide her. This was it. The belly of the whale. She needed find the secret passage that would carry her through the ancient structure. The passage would allow her to creep through the château without fear of waking one of the few remaining occupants.
At the far corner was a forgotten niche. She brushed away the sheet webs and pushed against the false panel. No movement. How had they done this as children?
Sidonie began pressing the wall at different points. But if they’d been small when they found the entrance . . . She crouched and felt along the ground. Yes, there it was. A loose stone easily removed and a simple handle within.
The open door met her with the stale scent of air left undisturbed for many years. The last person to climb the narrow steps inside the walls could easily have been her. She wrapped a scarf around her nose and mouth and crept inside.
This was an old section of the château, a keep more properly than a tower. The tightly spiraled narrow stairs coiled straight upward without a landing at each level. She climbed, brushing her hands over the wall, counting doors to keep track of her position.
In the end, the counting proved unnecessary. At the seventh door, something intruded into the hazy veil of her awareness. A presence. A powerful one. It didn’t call on her, not precisely. Just there, making itself known to those who knew what to expect.
There was a comforting familiarity to the sensation. She’d come to the place of her birth, but for the first time, she felt as if she’d come home. It would make leaving bittersweet, but she knew what she must do. And she would do it.
She should have expected this. Lady d’Ambroisin was imbued with such power. She would radiate constantly. A flame unable to burn itself out.
As Sidonie pushed the door, a stone-shattering scream ripped from the belly of the château all the way up to the top of the tower, piercing straight to her marrow. Sidonie froze, wrenched from the pinnacle of concentration and thrust into awareness, unwillingly, but necessarily, for safety’s sake.
Silence had fallen again, at least nominally. The agony of the sound reverberated through her skull. The wretched torture, the anguish.
It wasn’t the scream of a human.
But surely something capable of such a noise—something else, something unnamable—surely that thing wouldn’t have been cloaked. Not to her, even partially blinded as she now was.
She swallowed. It wasn’t her concern. Sidonie gathered her skirts to pass through the ancient doorway, tottering for one breathless moment on the narrow step. The scarf she’d been pressing against her face fell to the floor and her flailing arm hit upon a solid mass.
A hand had closed over her wrist, strong and sure. Her stomach flipped. And then she was flying the other way—forward—and collided with a large form.
Someone in the dark had reached out to her and saved her life.
~ ~ ~
Roland François Xavier, Marquis d’Ambroisin, almost tumbled backward.
When he’d grabbed for the off-balance figure, he’d been expecting the intruder to have more heft.
Because he’d been expecting a man. What sort of woman crept through—
An unexpected scent flashed a memory in his head, old but vivid and vibrant.
Merde.
Not simply a woman. Her. The woman. The one who should have been his wife.
And not one day in thirteen years had passed that he hadn’t tried to be grateful that she wasn’t. Keeping her as far away from him as possible was the only means of keeping her safe. Why had she returned? And in the middle of the night?
A part of himself he didn’t want to acknowledge jolted when his mind supplied an image of her as his wife in every earthly way. Her slipping nude between his bedcovers and waking him with her sweet body rocking over his. Hair loose. Skin bare. Her whispering how much she wanted him.
His stomach clenched with longing.
The scant moonlight glowing through the window’s wavy glass would have been enough to illuminate her face had her hood not kept it in shadow. He tried to will his arm to wrench the covering back, but the limb would not move. If he were wrong . . . If the woman was not her . . . “Who are you?”
“My lord?”
Yes. Her voice. He’d know that silvery clarity until the day he died. Sidonie. No mistake born of wishful longing. “What kind of cruel joke is this?”
“You’re crushing me.” She tugged against him.
Instantly, he loosened his grip on the narrow wrist.
“Unhand me at once.”
No. He couldn’t. Now that he had her, how could he ever be made to let go?
He had no rights, no rights at all. No doubt the woman was long the wife of another man.
The hot burn of envy sizzled in his blood.
If he had any sense, he would drag her to the port at Le Havre himself this moment and sell the last of his mother’s jewels to buy Sidonie passage. He’d send her as far away as the wind could carry her and her husband could be damned. Bramville wasn’t safe for her thirteen years ago. Time had only heightened the danger.
The gateway in the pit of the château linked the world of the living and the land of the dead, and the passage grew weaker every year. Roland knew he had a duty to stay. A duty to guard the living. It used to be that nothing crossed back. Now, though . . .
“Roland?”
He jerked her forward, nominally to tower over Sidonie in an effort to instill a hearty dose of fear in her heart.
She made an exasperated sound. “Say something, damn you.”
In truth, he couldn’t fill his lungs with the sweet perfume of her skin fast enough.
Neither could he have her. She was forbidden. But for these few stolen minutes that were granting him a blissful reprieve from the long and empty years . . .
He’d take it. And he’d lock her scent away in his bones forever.
Chapter 2
With her free hand, the figure drew her hood back and met him with a gaze of purest steel.
Roland’s breath caught. She was a vision from his dreams. A hope he hadn’t dared admit he held.
Her face had lost the roundness of youth. Features that had been only tolerably pretty all those years ago had aged into regal majesty. Outwardly beautiful she would never be, not to the objective eye. Her features were too pronounced. Too many angular lines.
Her beauty shone from within. It emanated from her strength, from her power.
Roland could have sworn he was staring into the eyes of the woman who would bring him to his knees.
Allowing her to see how she affected him was a mistake he wouldn’t dare make. “Explain yourself.”
“You were lying in wait for me. You knew I’d be here. How?” Even aware of the inner force of her being, her bold words took him aback.
“Unlucky for you, madame, I happened to be in the right place at the right time.” On a night like tonight, he could take no chances. It was his duty to protect Bramville. Protect his mother, who was growing weaker with each passing hour. And to protect Jacques. The dead were restless.
In the foolish certainty of his youth, he’d called such ideas outmoded superstitions. Now he knew better.
“Rel
ease me.” She tried to twist away.
“Not before you tell me why you’ve returned.” And why the gossip of her return hadn’t reached his ears.
“One of us owes the other an explanation. But make no mistake. That one is not me.”
She hadn’t returned for him, then. She was direct enough to say as much, if that was what the truth had been.
As to what she referred to, he did owe her an explanation. They’d been promised to one another. He’d liked her. She’d liked him. They’d been happy at the prospect, sharing secret smiles, her with her pretty blushes, him with warmth in his chest that only she could bestow.
It’d been him who’d rejected her. He’d known then it would be painful. What he hadn’t known, was just how painful it would be. Even enlightened as he now was, he’d do it again. The only way to keep her safe was to keep her away from this place. Château Bramville. The prison he could never leave.
With winter encroaching upon the land, Roland had spent the past few weeks draped in furs, but her proximity made them redundant. The air must have carried a chill to which he’d become impervious, for her cheeks and the tip of her nose were bitten with the red of one too long away from a fire.
Longing strangled his heart. If only she were his to warm.
“I would have remembered issuing you an invitation to a midnight supper, so I expect you to tell me why you’re doing me the honor of paying this call.”
At the mention of supper, her brows clenched together. His mind supplied a quick connection. The sharpness in her features could signal the need for a few hearty meals.
But a daughter of the great Cordumont? Hungry?
Her clothing—he should have noticed before. It was simple and utilitarian. Well worn. Of a class to which she’d most certainly not been born.
Roland should have learned long ago anything was possible. This seemed the most outrageous of all.