by Renee Peters
That fact drew the shadows over his song again. It was hardly likely that any member of a recognized Aegean House would have dared to move against their King. Even Absalom would not be so careless of Eromerde’s cause as to risk his family.
It might mean that the tension that had always existed between the Freeborn Immortals and the Aegean Houses had finally found a reason to spill over. Though it made little sense that they would seek Delilah’s life.
“You will stay indoors, Joanna, until I return.” Dorian’s directive brokered no argument, and he turned toward his sister. “I will come at once.”
Whatever the implication, one thing was certain: someone or something, had interrupted the peace of Anowen’s reign.
It only remained to be determined why.
Chapter 32
Day passed into evening within the walls of Anowen Castle — the shadow of a sober heaviness creating an unnatural hush inside the fortress. Lian was not expected at Council until the sunset, but few members of the family remained unaware of the most obvious implication of what had occurred.
Dorian among them.
Delilah Graham was the wife of the warden of the House of Anowen — and directly under the Sovereign’s protection within his personal household. An assault on her person was as good as a challenge to the Crown of the Aegean Immortals.
Even the youngest members of their family knew it — and so did their High Council.
In the quiet solemnity that the affair deserved, they had discussed the matter when their Sovereign finally arrived. The thrall had been a known doorman at the Raven Manor, a den of vice owned by one of the more prominent of the Free Immortals — those Aegeans unbound and unprotected by the pacts that ruled the official Houses. Tensions often ran high between the Free and the Housed, but Anowen’s rise to power had secured more favorable relations of late.
To so openly challenge the throne would be tantamount to destroying all the bridges that had been built.
It made little sense, but it would have to be investigated, and their Sovereign would be the one to confront Philippe Denard — owner of the Manor — for answers after Council disbanded.
Betrayal by the Free would be unexpected and disappointing to discover, but it would be preferable to the other, more sinister and painful possibility that had arisen during their Council.
Angelica was known to frequent the Raven Manor — and a human thrall addicted to an Immortal’s kiss would have been all too susceptible to do anything to please one servicing his addiction.
Lian had not received the matter for consideration well.
If a daughter of Anowen had acted in such a matter as to defy the will of her Arch Lord and Sovereign in attempting to take Delilah’s life, she would have crossed the line beyond what was permissible without the heaviest of punishments.
Despite the suffering and grief that the volatile queen had caused to his household, the Conde sincerely hoped that in this instance his intuition about her involvement was wrong.
Lian had left a standing command that Angelica be detained upon her return to the castle that evening for questioning, but Dorian found himself increasingly restless to check upon Joanna’s welfare.
Such was his intent when he left the Castle and remaining Elders behind to step into his phaeton with a promise to return after he had seen to Joanna.
He had barely been on the rumbling trails for ten minutes before he heard the keening sound of a flute song. Not Joanna’s. Each note held at breve, quivering, before the next dropped lower.
The High Lord pulled back on the reins, and as the black stallion between the traces stamped impatiently, turned his head to listen. He was rewarded with a crash of tree limbs and underbrush and the sight of one of Anowen’s carriage horses flying along the trail without a rider.
She followed shortly after in a red dress that was the only patch of color in the darkness, weeping with frustration and grief both.
“Angelica,” he called out to her.
For a moment, it was as if the queen did not hear him, and he began to dismount before she turned her face his way.
“I did something terrible, Dori,” she whispered, and sounded, for a moment, more like the girl who had first been brought to Anowen’s doors; the daughter Lian had remembered adopting, for all the pain in his music at the idea of her betrayal.
Her demeanor made Dorian’s heart run cold as ice. He would almost rather the brash hardness for which the woman had come to be known. This brokenness could only mark something truly horrible. He clung to the hope that she was overreacting, as was her wont.
“Nothing is ever as terrible as it first appears. But you will come with me, now.” His voice was gentle and even spoken, but the words carried the weight of an Elder’s power of suggestion. “Come, and you can explain from the comfort of home what you have done.”
He kept is gaze fixed on her as she closed the distance to the phaeton and willed his mind to focus on the task it would be to get her safely to Anowen. He could not afford the distraction of imagining the worst.
She burst into tears again before they reached the castle courtyard where Ayla stood with her own blue roan and the runaway carriage horse in preparation for her departure for Redmond Manor. But they could get nothing from the younger queen amid the violence of her sobs.
Concern flickered briefly over his sister’s expression and Ayla swung herself into a mount. “I am going to collect Delilah and Samuel now,” she said.
Lian had ordered they be retrieved and made safe within the security of Anowen’s walls.
Angelica hid her face behind her hands.
Dorian roped an arm around the younger queen’s shoulders when she could not seem to walk straight on her own, and her cries shuddered into hiccuping breaths as she leaned into his weight.
“I think Sam is dead,” Angelica whispered as they crossed the foyer. “I did not mean to. I could not stop. I never can. I wanted to, Dori, please believe me.”
Dorian felt his heart stop and his feet hitched in their forward movement. The chill dread of a dawning horror laid hold of him. If Samuel had indeed fallen, it would only have been for protecting Delilah.
“You think?” He could not help some of the coldness that escaped into his words. “It will be something of which you might wish to be certain, Angelica. But you will present your case to the Council.” Those of them who remained in Anowen.
He did not dare to ask after Delilah.
But he knew.
Even as he led Angelica up the stairs to the floor that housed the Council Chambers, Lian’s song began to blast through their blood with all the rage of the beast that their Sovereign was.
Dorian’s hold tightened on Angelica.
Only five Council members remained in Anowen, and it had only been for the sake of Lian’s music swinging from rage to grief to something steadier across their bonds that more did not leave to join their Sovereign’s side as the hours ticked past.
As the moon rose higher, Angelica had been seated in the chair that had once belonged to Mercedes; a sister long lost to the Council and to Anowen. The queen’s head was bowed into her arms, but the tears had stopped with the touch of Celia’s hand to the girl’s shoulder and her will shrouding Angelica in a quiet peace.
When Ayla arrived, it was with the news that Samuel had survived a gunshot to the stomach — and that he had been shot by the son of another House. That alone would have been in breach of the Ancient pacts between the Aegean Houses, but Angelica had conspired with the lord for Delilah’s kidnapping to the Raven Manor.
And so, Philippe Denard of the Free Immortals had also violated the laws of their kind.
Ayla had seen both the wounded warden and his wife safely within Anowen’s walls. Delilah had suffered greatly at the hands of the Raven Manor, and it was only for the power of the Elder’s suggestion and her own exhaustion that she slept peacefully in the Wardens’ carriage house.
For the elegy playing in Lian’s song, they kn
ew what would come when he finally arrived to push open the Council door. The Sovereign had no other recourse.
Angelica’s pyre would be lit before the sun began to rise.
Chapter 33
Joanna had not been in attendance for Angelica’s pyre.
She had been home, listening to the Council’s symphony as it drifted between dread, anger and grief. Their music had fed into the rest of the coven; though none had mourned as deeply as Lian’s.
While Joanna laid in bed, listening, she had heard and felt the moment Angelica’s bond in the coven had snapped and vanished into silence.
It had been one week since her execution.
A week without the queen’s music.
Joanna still found herself listening through the depth of the coven’s music for the place where Angelica had been, and she felt herself growing colder when she did.
She and Angelica were not the same.
The queen forced herself back to the present moment, and carefully turned her attention to the paper she had been folding. He would not want it, she knew, for as much as it spoke of a love that had upended the comfort and peace they had built, but in five days it would be Christmas.
And she had nothing else to give that meant anything to her.
Sealing the poem in an envelope with red ribbon pressed beneath a wax seal, the queen bit her bottom lip. It trembled as she released it, and with an exhale, Joanna stood, tucking the envelope away in her copy of the Odyssey.
For a moment, she stood tapping against her desk in time with the ripple of anxiety that skittered through her music, and her foot bounced beneath the length of her skirt.
She should not have said anything.
With a frustrated groan, the woman ran her fingers through her hair and grabbed the book before turning down the hall. Down, toward the first floor and the light that had been let into the Manor. She could not fault him for wanting it; just as she could not have faulted him for finding that barrier to place between them.
“Mon cher,” she called before the sunlight was dampened by the draw of a curtain. “I need to speak with you. I will not steal your attention for long.”
“It is safe,” he called quietly. It had become part of their new ritual.
She stepped inside, abandoning the book on his desk as she rounded it to close the distance between them. Her fingers laced together before her and she felt as if her soul had been compressed into a small, tight knot behind the quickening beat of her heart. “I am going to Anowen for a while. To be with Delilah. She is not doing well.”
Her husband lifted his head from the spread of documents that littered the surface of his desk, and for a long moment his dark-eyed gaze held hers searching for some deeper truth beside the mere statement of her words.
“For what she has endured, that is hardly surprising.”
“Non. But it must be difficult to be uprooted too. It would not be for long.” Her head tilted and her expression softened. “The ton believes me ill enough that a month or two of retreat to take the mineral waters will not be suspect for my absence.”
“A month or two?” His brows stitched into a sudden frown for the words. “That is longer than I might expect for nursing at a bedside.”
“I do not know how much or little she will need,” Joanna admitted and her fingers squeezed tighter. “I know when I was brought to a House of Immortals, I might have taken comfort of a friend for a time.”
“Yet she has not been brought to a House of Immortals, but to the home of her mortal husband and his family. It is you who will return to Anowen.”
His music slurred beneath the words.
“I meant Raven Manor, mon cher. She may be entirely well with Samuel’s company.” Her head tilted. “I am sure she will wish to spend her first Christmas with her husband. I do not know if she will have me for such a length of time, but it is the most I expect.”
She could feel his struggle. For all that they were not what they once were, they were beginning to discover themselves anew, and he had not been fond of keeping his own company since she had moved into his home.
Yet, he would be too proud to ask her to stay. She knew it intuitively — even if a part of her hoped to be proven wrong.
“Very well,” he said finally. “There can be no safer place, even if the waters have been troubled for this business with Denard.” He found her eyes then, and held them with a flash of something close to warning in his own. “But my wife will return to my side as soon as she is able.” It was a quietly spoken statement.
“As soon as your wife is able,” she promised softly, and leaned forward to touch a kiss into the darkness of his crown. “Will you take me tonight?”
His music betrayed him on a wild swing a violin chords, and she lifted her head.
He was too proud to confess the thoughts she had heard in his song, too.
The Condesa continued quietly, “Or William can escort me to the castle. I….” She hesitated, before breathing a quieter laugh. “Your invitations are piling up. I know you have a party this evening.”
“The invitations can wait,” he said dismissively. “If I am to be deprived of your company, it is the least I can do to manage a farewell in person. What time will you leave?”
“When the sun sets.” She stepped back and dipped a curtsy. “I should pack. Desolèe. I interrupted you longer than I meant, mon cher.”
“I serve my Condesa’s pleasure,” he said evenly.
Her smile faded when she turned. It was not until hours later when she returned to his study that she discovered he had not opened the window again; nor had he seemed to finish much more of his work.
He commented on neither, and she held her tongue as he lifted an arm to encourage her to the door.
Chapter 34
The carriage house in which the wardens of Anowen lived smelled of acrid polish, hay, and illness. Joanna made no comment on the last on her arrival. She had not realized how ill Samuel’s mother had grown in the last year. If Frances Graham had slipped beyond even the reach of Efemina’s gift, love was all that remained for comfort. The French queen kissed the woman’s hands and cheek in greeting as she once did when the woman was young.
But she had come to attend Delilah, and in the early hours before the sun had risen, her friend had clawed her way out of bed in the grip of night terrors. Samuel’s face suffered scratches from it that he dismissed when he passed Joanna to fetch tea and start breakfast, and the queen knew that she had made the right decision to come. There were some wounds that only a woman — and an Immortal — might understand, given what Delilah had faced in the den of vice and horror that was Raven Manor.
Joanna slipped into Delilah’s room, trying to ignore the raised lights of the lanterns as she closed the distance to her friend’s bed. She plucked up a comb from the nightstand as she passed, and then crawled gingerly into the bed to settle in behind Delilah.
The woman’s flinch for her approach did not offend. Delilah Graham had known little of kindness from her race.
The Frenchwoman’s kiss found Delilah’s crown first, in the quiet comfort she remembered offering Marjolaine those years ago when the girl had nightmares of her own.
“If you ask him,” Joanna murmured, drawing the comb through Delilah’s sweat matted curls. “It is in Lian’s power to bury the nightmares where they cannot reach, Lilette.”
Beneath her touch, Delilah shuddered an exhale and her pale fingers curled into the bedding.
“I could endure them for myself,” she whispered huskily. “But each one rends Samuel anew. I cannot bear the weight of his guilt.”
Joanna did not need to see her face to know that Delilah’s tears were flowing freely.
“Ma petit Lilette,” the queen murmured, combing delicately at the woman’s curls. “There are things in this world we need not endure. That we were not meant to endure. Monsters in the dark need not terrorize your nights so.”
The softness of a sniffle broke the quiet between them.
“I think… I should like to forget. If it would please m’lord.”
“If it would please you, dear one.”
“You are too kind to me,” Delilah sniffed. “Your Conde did not fear to release you to my side again? It seems I am nothing but a series of tragedies for association.” Her misery echoed in her tone.
“My Conde will be occupied with the ton. He shall not miss me, and he will enjoy opening the manor to the sun, I think.” Joanna breathed a laugh, only for the sake of doing so, and leaned forward to rest her cheek on Delilah’s shoulder. “And you are well worth a tragedy or two for your dearness, Lilette.”
Delilah tilted her head into a lean that mingled dark waves with blonde. “Then I shall not question any more my good fortune. I am happy beyond words for your companionship. Apart from m’lord and Lady Ayla, I fear your family are entirely too much strangers for me to find comfort in their presence.”
“There are some whose kindness you might take to,” Joanna murmured. “But it need not be now. Only when you are ready. You shall have your first Christmas as a Graham, Lilette. Samuel will no doubt spoil you.”
It earned her a quiet laugh that held only a little humor, but Joanna was pleased enough by it to straighten and resume her combing. By the time Samuel returned with Delilah’s breakfast, some of the tension had faded from the woman’s form.
As the run rose, Joanna knew there would be more comfort for the pair in its light than she could provide. With a bow and a promise to join Delilah that evening, Joanna left the couple to return to the shadows of her room, and her thoughts.
Chapter 35
In the time since Joanna had been made, Christmas had never been more than another day in the castle. The varied seasons and holidays the coven had once celebrated as mortals had become mostly an excuse for the younger members of her family to dance and hold festivities of their own within Anowen’s walls.
