by Renee Peters
Dorian stepped aside in a silent invitation for her to enter. “Joanna will be pleased for its return. She has been grieved for its loss.”
And what it had once represented.
Ayla lingered just within the doorway as he closed it, studying Dorian.
“I might have found her,” she said. “But she is hiding, and you have not taken her into the ton as you were.” Her fingers lifted, and a knuckle brushed through one of Dorian’s waves. “And you are not as you were.” Her hands found the cover of her coat again. “If it needs to stay lost, I can keep it in my pocket, Marido.”
“She is still my Condesa,” he murmured. “My wife.” Until she was not. “I am pleased to have it again.” His brow furrowed slightly. “She cannot hide so deeply in Anowen that she cannot be found.”
“Unfortunately, it appears if a child does not wish to be where I might find them, the task is more daunting.” She said evenly. “I thought besides, that perhaps you would be the one who needed to keep the ring for now.”
He managed a weary twist of his lips for her insight. “You might only imagine how fitting.”
“I have little of an imagination these days,” she confessed and lifted her broad shoulders. “But I know you well enough to know when you are not… I think you must sometimes still be the younger man you once were. You tackle your demons by pulling inside of yourself and charging ahead as if you cannot be hurt for becoming a shell. It would be endearing if it did not wear on you or your wife so.”
She did not say which wife.
Dorian settled his attention on her steady gaze, but only managed a grunt for a response to the words that had dissected him with all the precision of a surgeon's knife.
Ayla tilted her head, flashing him a small smile. “You are not going to get drunk, Dorian. You haven’t enough alcohol in the house for it. But if you take your bath, I shall bear your company long enough to steal a cup of coffee.”
No, he would not get drunk. He knew that as well as he knew that he did not want to spend the day alone in a dark tomb with his thoughts.
“It shall take longer than I would like to wash off this stink,” he advised. “But I would be happy for the company.”
Dorian did not ask her if she would wait. If there was one thing he had ever been able to count on in his eternity it was the woman’s implacable patience.
If only he could cling to his own.
Chapter 38
Kent, England
Close.
Joanna had not expected to be so close and so soon.
She had left Anowen on the night of Boxing Day, and four nights later, even for having stopped to find shelter from the sun, the queen had run her way to Kent. It had cost her a pair of boots and had shredded her traveling gown and cloak, but there had been a certain, childish freedom she had found in running as far and as fast as she could.
There, in the valley of the Nailbourne River, the sound of the coven was far, far away, and the thread that held her fast to her Conde stretched so thin, that he seemed hardly an echo.
It was perhaps the clearest her head had been since she had first crossed into her Immortal life — since the last time she had crossed into this valley.
There were dips in the earth she thought she remembered, trees she swore she had known when she was mortal; grown now so that their peaks were beyond sight.
That had been centuries ago when she and Jakob, barely sixteen and seventeen, had crossed an ocean and then the land. There had not been snow then as there was now, but the crossing had been no less difficult. She had been heavy with child, and every hard step through the woods had threatened to burst her.
Little had changed, she supposed, about her willingness to follow senseless men.
The woman huffed a breath of laughter in the twilight chill and felt nothing but a whisper of her music laughing with her.
“Je suis stupide….” she murmured and dragged her valise more securely over her shoulder. “Stupide et amourex.”
But her journey had not been for her Conde or for Jakob, and she let herself release her thoughts into the cold air around her before squinting up toward the sky. It would be —
“ — dawn soon.”
A woman’s voice called out, echoing the thoughts Joanna had not completed.
The queen frowned, glancing back toward the treeline and listening.
“Who can help that?” A male’s voice replied curtly. “You were the one who wanted to keep going.”
“That isn’t how I remember the conversation,” another male interjected wearily.
“It means we should stop, Eddie. We’ll be lucky enough to find a hole this late.” The woman pressed.
“We should be living it up like the Sovereign,” the male, Eddie perhaps, said. “In a warm bed, by a warm fire…”
The first of the bodies that belonged to the voices came into view. His face was young and beautiful as only a new Immortal could be, with a mop of curls that whirled wildly around his face in the wind. “Surrounded by warm women?” He offered, his lips twitching into a knowing smile.
“Pigs, both of you —” the woman’s voice said, a moment before she emerged. Her curls were wild and loose, of a brown that was a match to the first, and Joanna could see the similarity of siblings between them.
“I didn’t say it —” Eddie said, finally bringing up the rear of the party. He was dark-haired and silver-eyed, with a bundle of what appeared to be briars in his front coat pocket that he stroked absently.
He was as young in his Immortal and mortal lifetime as the other two appeared.
Joanna froze, watching them pass through the darkness. They were children. It was in the way they carried themselves and spoke, and their obliviousness to her presence. Freeborn children. None of them dressed for the winter air and all as dirty and layered in old clothes as the next.
“You were thinking about it,” the woman, the girl continued, lifting her nose primly. “We need to find a place to stay. I’m not rubbing salve on your blisters again — either of you.”
“But you will,” the unnamed boy offered, scuffing a pat through her hair. “There’s a town nearby. We can stop there.”
“With what money?”
“Who needs money,” Eddie sighed. “We’re Immortal.”
The girl turned her head, her mouth opened as if to reply.
Joanna locked eyes with the child, and in that instant, the girl’s eyes flashed golden in the lightening gloom.
It brought a spark of peridot to Joanna’s gaze and as if a fire had been lit between them, an answering silver and second set of gold lit up the night like stars from the Freeborn.
“Passing through?” The boy without a name called. “It’s going to be dawn soon, you know. You have a place to bed down that you aren’t hurrying?”
“Non,” Joanna replied, just loudly enough to be heard. “Barham is close. Only a mile or two down the river from here. Better, perhaps, than a hole.”
Eddie scoffed, and the silver glow of his eyes winked out. “We knew that.”
“I have the money for a room at the inn,” Joanna continued.
“As if they’d let us a room looking as we do,” the girl answered, but there was a wistful note in her voice. “We’d have better luck knocking on the gates of an Aegean estate.”
“And there’s no knowing whose territory is claimed there,” the nameless boy said with a shrug. “Not looking to lose our heads today.”
“They do not claim the inns.” Joanna lifted her hands, and stepped nearer. “I can get you a room for the day, oui?”
“What are you, then, Housed?” Eddie asked evenly.
For a moment, a prickle of wariness skittered down Joanna’s back. The tensions between the Free and the Housed had never been a secret. Here, alone and outnumbered, the queen hesitated.
They had been young when they had been turned, these children, and in their beauty was the perfection of those recently cursed.
Children.
/> The queen tilted her head, and her expression softened. Only children; though she still answered with care.
“Do the Housed often travel alone? I might have asked you the same. The sun creeps closer to the horizon while we speak. You are welcome to come to Barham with me if you like.”
The nameless boy squinted a harder look at her, his gaze taking in the worn condition of her travel wear before a grin flashed white in the gloom.
“Sorry. Can’t be too careful, you know, now that the King’s taken to claiming Freeborn heads.” He nodded his head. “Name’s Benjamin. This is my sister Gracie, and Eddie — he’s traveling with us.”
“More like you two are traveling with me. I’m the one that knew about Raven Manor.”
“Not that what you know particularly matters anymore.” Gracie interjected. “Now that the Sovereign has closed your little play House.”
They seemed to have forgotten Joanna amid their conversation, and she approached the trio slowly.
The thistles in Eddie’s pocket quivered before the nose of a hedgehog twitched free from the fabric. The youth swept the crook of a finger across the rodent’s nose, and finally, it seemed, he noticed how close Joanna had become.
It was Benjamin who extended his hand for Joanna to shake, and she dipped into a slighter bow. “I am Joanna Vaughn,” she said, studying their faces.
Children. Freeborn children who knew little of what mattered most, and too much about half the tale.
That word of Lian’s discipline of Philippe Denard and his family had become the fodder of Freeborn rumor was not unexpected — not given how the Free had been scattered from their chosen nest. But she could not be pleased for the role her sire had assumed in the telling.
“Easthaven is a long walk from here,” she offered and turned back to the path she had been following. The crunch of snow and dry plants indicated the moment the children fell into step. “Were you at the manor, Eddie?”
The dark-haired youth glanced her way, his thumb still stroking the hedgehog’s spikes.
“Me? Naw,” he answered. “Ran into a couple fellows a few months back who were though. The stories. Said there wasn’t anything you couldn’t get there. Can you imagine? Mortals paying good gold for a nibble?” He snorted. “We’d never have had to worry for paying our way again, had we gotten in on that.”
“Well we won’t, now.” Benjamin grunted. “So, I believe we need a new plan.”
The queen looked between the three as if she might catch the sound of their hearts and their music just for proximity. Here, far from her family, there was only quiet, and the increasing sense that the life she had been stolen into was not quite the curse it might have been.
She had never been Free — exiled or without rights among Immortals. And she had only known the privileges of the House of the Sovereign. Even if she hadn’t had money of her own to pay for new boots and a new dress, the family did. There was no question of where her meals would come from, no worry beyond the occasional ghoul or threat of hunters.
Even the last few nights spent alone had been traveled with the knowledge that she needed only to drop the name of her House for a sanctuary.
A mortal life and memories of a mortal heart lived in similar hardship was all that Joanna had for empathizing with the lives of the children who walked with her now.
“The Raven Manor charged its clients entry, mortal or not,” she said, and smoothed her hands over her dress front. “And Philippe Denard sired children of his own. There would be no space to adopt orphans, mes chéries.”
“You know a lot about it then?” The first shade of wariness colored Benjamin’s tone, and Joanna felt a prickle of her own unease.
Children.
They were children.
And rumors were deadlier for the Free than the Free could be to her — especially for naive children. It was the stuff from which chaos was sewn.
“Oui. I live in Easthaven. My mortal home was in Canterbury, I am only traveling there for business. But I never went into Raven Manor myself.”
“So you’ve seen the King then, up close?” Gracie’s voice held the curiosity that any girl might hold for a Royal. “Does he have all the airs of the Housed now that he’s no longer one of us?’
“I wonder if he always did anyway,” Joanna offered, and she was not making a jest. “The King is beautiful — as blond as a Saint and blue-eyed like a storm. He speaks softly and holds himself like a noble, but I have heard he was always thus. Then again, I have also heard he was a barbarian in his mortal years.”
“No surprise then, if he’s taken to acting like one,” Eddie grunted.
Joanna smiled faintly. “You would not suspect barbarism from him. Nor would one expect rumors that he took a head without cause. It is only part of the truth you have heard.”
“Isn’t that how it goes, anyway,” Benjamin said and laughed, but there was not much humor to the sound.
“So, you know, then? What happened?” Eddie asked.
“I know that the King likewise gave a daughter of his House and a son of Eromerde’s. Phillipe Denard of Raven Manor paid nothing for the affair that the King did not pay alongside him for his own House’s involvement. What would you wish the King did otherwise in the wake of plotting and treachery between two Houses and Monsieur Denard?”
“I suppose there was nothing for it,” Gracie admitted. “But he’ll not find as friendly an audience among us for closing the Manor besides.”
Joanna nodded her own agreement “Non. I am happy I am not a King. Memories are shorter for love than they are for spites.” She flashed a smaller smile. “But it is enough to speak the truth where it can be spoken. I think those who have the liberty of spinning tales of that which no longer exists can weave as much gold in with the straw as they like.”
“Exaggerating for a better story, then?” Gracie murmured. “Sounds like the sort of fellows Eddie might keep company with.”
“Well, we’ve no way of knowing, anyway,” Eddie said, flatly. “So, what does it matter? Anything is better than this.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.” Benjamin’s voice lost some of its patience, but he managed a laugh that sounded hollow. “So, it's enough talking about what was and more of what’s going to be?”
“Beginning with the next best step?” The Frenchwoman exhaled. “Finding shelter from the sun. At the rate we are walking we will have the need to dig a hole, yet.”
Not that they had anything to fear. Despite the chatter of the children, they kept a fair pace and before the sun rose on the dawn of New Year’s Eve, the queen had secured a room for the trio and another for herself at a small inn in Barham.
For all that she wished to leave them with more, Joanna could only bid them good day and safe travels, before retreating into the shadows of her own nest until the sun set once more.
Chapter 39
Lady Wycliff’s New Year’s Eve Celebration
The Estate of Lady Diana Wycliff smelled of the lilies she favored for a perfume. Even her choice of decor was a match; one could not walk a step through her estate without encountering the flowers. The paper hangings on the walls of her salons were of expensive French silk and painted in a landscape of white lilies, that spread out toward a shining sun.
Cast bronze vases and sculptures took up every nook of the widow’s home, and if they were not gilded with gold and silver florals, they were adorned with dry lilies. Beyond the sculptures, there were silks and artworks hanging from the walls — a few of which were of nudes of herself draped across silks as the goddess Aphrodite.
Gifts from admirers, she had told Dorian one night, laughing over the rim of her wine glass. Or for them.
It was clear just from looking at Lady Diana’s home that she was either in possession of many admirers or had enough of an allowance from her dead husband’s fortune that she could spend it on what she pleased. That appeared to include no less than three black cats with long hair that swept through the rooms as if th
ey were royalty with only different colored collars and bells to tell them apart.
Only twelve others had been invited to her New Year’s Celebration, though she had hired a musician to play softly on a cello in the corner of the dining room. Her guests sat at a long table beneath the glitter of a large chandelier, with Diana at the head and Dorian to her right.
That he was her favored to be guest of honor this year was of little surprise to him or to their companions who smiled knowingly.
The meal was large enough to feed a small kingdom comfortably and had been arranged in large platters just so amid the table decorations. It seemed to the Conde that a first course of roasted pike and smelt, young fowls, rabbit, lamb, and humble pies had hardly been touched before the controlled chaos of the servants shuffling the platters away to replace them with a second course began. It scarcely interrupted the gathering’s lively conversation.
Then had come the fried eels and young pheasants, potato pies, cheese cakes, tarts and bowls of fruit. It was a repast intended as no less than an assault of pleasure on the senses, and Dorian gave their hostess credit for having learned precisely how to satisfy the appetite.
As the hours crept onward toward midnight, dinner was traded for desserts and a tiered cake that everyone was too full to touch. But by then, the wine and brandy had flowed so freely that it was unlikely anyone knew what they had or hadn’t eaten.
Diana still had a sharpness to her gaze and tongue, and despite how she laughed along with her guests, Dorian did not think she was nearly so lost to the wind as she let herself appear.
A fact confirmed when she cut him a wry look and a smile.
He answered it with a twitch of his lips and a lift of his glass in a silent salute, allowing his gaze to linger. She was comfortable in her matured beauty, and confident in a way that reminded him more of the nature of his kind than her own. It was no wonder mortal men found her irresistible.
