Two hours later, they were summoned to a meal. They had been together in that bed by then for over thirteen hours, teasing each other the entire time. Ashcroft hadn’t forgotten how funny Charlotte was, but he did forget that he could make her laugh. She had a wonderful laugh, too, heady and fulfilling as a glass of wine.
“I suppose I should do the walk-of-shame out to my own rooms, or else I’ll be wearing the same dirty thing that I was yesterday,” Charlotte yawned, pulling on her stockings.
“I’ll escort you, just give me a moment,” Ashcroft said, pulling himself up from the mattress. He really didn’t want to let her out of his sight whatsoever. He was afraid that as soon as he stopped looking at her, she’d somehow disappear again, and then he’d spend the next two decades hunting her down.
“Master Ashcroft,” she said with her best theatrically lecturing voice. “We’re not married yet, you know. In fact, I’m afraid I’m still married to your brother, technically. Let’s not flaunt our relationship until everything’s cleared up with papa first. I don’t need to bring an unmarried man into my rooms.”
“I can’t believe you’d be the one to say something like that,” he admitted flatly, raising his brow as he watched her put on the dress she’d been wearing the night before, which was dirty only from hugging upon him when he was covered in mud. “I’m impressed. It’s a little silly to me, because surely everyone could see me kissing you right in the middle of the courtyard and hadn’t seen either of us since, but I’m still impressed. You’re making strides to care about how the world sees you, meaning you’re looking outside of yourself.”
“And you’re lackadaisical and easygoing now. It has been an interesting twenty years, hasn’t it?” Charlotte replied sing-songishly, but then she became more serious, lightened only by a slight grin. “I’ll meet you in the king’s dining hall, trying not to rub our indiscretions into our hosts’ faces.”
“And you’ll see me there with a grin that will cause everyone to assume that I’ve been copulating all evening, because it’s obvious enough, anyway.” He grinned at her, knowing that this back-and-forth would never get old and they’d still be doing it ages and ages from now if he had anything to do with it.
He watched her leave, mostly because he liked how her skirts swished around her nice round bottom as she made an exit, and then he decided he should actually get cleaned up and dressed himself. When he got to the king’s hall, however, he was surprised she wasn’t there. He thought he had been moving very slowly.
“Did you rest well?” the king grinned, looking absolutely beaming, especially for a father who wasn’t accompanied by his eighteen-year-old daughter or his daughter’s beau at the moment.
Yes, Cole was a reborn Moriarty, indeed. He would be an interesting lad to mold into a wizard in the next few years; it was high time to take him on as an apprentice… As long as a father didn’t kill the lad for dabbling with his daughters. “Quite well,” he lied in response.
“Honestly, I didn’t think Lady DeHoel would be able to do what she said. I was still trying to understand how she could be a witch at all, but then I suppose anything’s possible when you have two Godly sires…”
Ashcroft didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had been adopted as a young adult. “Yes, indeed. Anything’s possible.”
“I didn’t think there was anyone that could help us, and then you have come here to protect us, to help us get back on our feet. I cannot thank you enough,” the king told him, still not noticing the empty seat at his wife’s right side.
Ashcroft was beginning to get nervous for the lad, to be honest, and he was very happy at first when the boy himself ran into the room. And then, unfortunately, he realized the boy looked like he was in a state of utter disarray and his lips were swollen. Did he have to be so obvious? “Master Ashcroft!” he yelped, sounding completely out of breath.
Ashcroft immediately stood at the note of urgency in Cole’s voice, and so did both his parents, who were a few seats away from him. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“It’s Lady DeHoel! We heard her screaming, but nobody can get her bloody door open!”
Now Ashcroft found that he had a bad feeling. His heart felt like it was being wrung by an invisible hand that had sliced into his chest. He and Moriarty immediately trailed Cole as he ran back in the direction he’d come.
He helped them break down the heavy oak door to her chamber, but as they burst inside they found no one in the bedroom at all.
“Charlotte!” he yelled, and then he heard Cole scream behind him. He turned just fast enough to see Coleby get suddenly pulled outside the window by a large man’s hand. Moriarty moved from the door and Ashcroft, closest, jumped up and reached, trying to catch him before he fell—and Moriarty grabbed Ashcroft just before he fell along with him. In the end, Ashcroft had a firm hold of the boy’s boot and his ankle.
Ashcroft looked down from the window and Cole looked up, stunned. “Don’t let go,” Cole begged carefully in a whisper, as if the volume of his voice alone could make him fall from the height right onto the courtyard below.
Ashcroft hadn’t realized that there was a man looking straight down at him from the ledge above the window, aiming a sword at him, until he felt the prick on his neck. Ashcroft snapped his head around to look, and suddenly he was face to face with his brother’s unmistakable eyes that hid behind the mask of a different face. “Lachlan,” he rasped, his body feeling smothered by the windowsill as he was still holding onto the falling boy’s weight. Cole was full-grown and weighed more than twelve stone.
He looked and saw Charlotte, gagged with her arms bound behind her right behind Lachlan himself. Ashcroft could barely even see her face, but she was squirming enough that he knew she was alive.
Ashcroft looked down at the boy’s boot and then tilted his head back so that he was peering at Lachlan again. “So this is it,” he told his brother.
“I’m afraid so,” Lachlan sighed, as if they’d been playing a game he was loath to let finish.
“Charlotte—”
“Will be very well taken care of, I guarantee you,” Lachlan promised, pouting out his bottom lip. He wasn’t sad; he just loved more than anything to mock Ashcroft. Had ever since he was a boy.
Ashcroft couldn’t save her, he knew that. There was no way he could survive, since his body was being held in the window by Moriarty and his hands were busy holding up the dangling boy’s weight. There was no help that could possibly come, not with Lachlan in position.
“I think this is proper,” Lachlan said. “A fall for a fall. Only I don’t think you saw this one coming like I’d seen the last one, did you? Ah, well. Do give our parents my best, won’t you, brother dearest?”
Ashcroft suddenly felt a loss of weight in his hand and looked down, startled, only to find the boot in his hand to be completely empty. At first, Ashcroft startled to think that Cole had fallen, but a sharp-clawed animal scrambling up his coat made him realize that Cole had risked morphing into his fox form. Upon realizing this, Ashcroft immediately bent upwards just in time to see Lachlan nearly losing his balance as he cried out—he had been bitten by a fox and sliced his sword out, a gesture that made Ashcroft jerk, and caused Moriarty to let go of him entirely.
That was the last thing Ashcroft remembered seeing before he tumbled toward the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I have to see him,” Charlotte choked, running out to the courtyard. Lachlan would have fallen to his own death if he hadn’t barely grabbed onto the horn of a stone gargoyle that hung from the palace walls. Cole had leapt back into the window after Ashcroft had fallen and had nibbled her hand bindings off before morphing into a shoeless teenager. Now she was able to look down and see that Ashcroft’s body had fallen fifty feet toward the courtyard below, and blood already oozed from his neck.
She didn’t know how to react except to climb back through the window, with as much help from possible, and follow Moriarty’s example by racing
toward the courtyard. She couldn’t cry now; she was too panicked, her heart and blood racing and pounding in her head. She didn’t give two thoughts toward Lachlan, but she knew Alice was still up there, and she knew enough to figure out how to get him into the prison guard’s custody so that he couldn’t cause any more harm. Last she’d paid that wizard any mind, he was dangling his feet from the edge and crying for help.
Moriarty stood up, his face a stone etched with a deep frown. He stepped forward and put his hands out and intercepted her. “Charlotte—Charlotte,” he said as she tried to evade him, to break out of his arms that were trying to hold her tight. “Charlotte, he’s gone.”
He couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t be. It was impossible—she had just found him again. They were going to spend their lives together, they were going to have children and live happily.
She pushed until Moriarty let her go to Ashcroft’s body. She took a step and then stood there, and it felt like her heart was in her throat, trying to choke her to death.
Ashcroft was dead. He was broken, his body crushed and his neck cut by Lachlan’s sword. His eyes were closed, as if he’d been in pain before he completely faded away, but those eyes were lifeless behind the lids, his chest didn’t rise with breath, and when she knelt down, she immediately took his hand and found that his wrist didn’t hold a pulse.
She let out a sob. Perhaps she’d never really known real sadness before; she had never felt a hurt like she did right at this very moment. He was gone; lost. She had one night of rejoining with him, but that was all she was allotted.
She brought his cold palm up toward her, kissed it, and then rolled her cheek into it, letting her body just crumple to the ground next to him like she was a doll.
“He wouldn’t have regretted this, Charlotte,” Moriarty was telling her, though his own voice was choked up with sorrow. She imagined that it would take a long time for Moriarty to get over the loss of his best friend of seven centuries. The stars in the sky had looked different when he and Ashcroft had met; it was an indescribable amount of years. “He loved you so much. He would have given anything to have one more day with you—he would have happily paid this a million times over.”
She knew that he would have. Whenever Ashcroft even decided he liked something, he never let it go. Not a friend, not even a book. She imagined that once he loved something he would do anything not to sever that connection. The time spent apart must have been torture for him.
“Poor Ashcroft…” she breathed, mostly because it hurt to speak anything else.
Twenty minutes came and went, and Moriarty never stopped kneeling at her side. They were both dazed and unable to speak. She just sat there, holding the hand of her dead lover. There was nothing else to do, and she found she couldn’t move away.
She couldn’t even hear the crowd silence around them until she heard Anwen lightly bend down next to her. “Come here, my love,” she cooed, apparently seeing that Charlotte was feeling fragile.
Her head whipped up, searching for Hoel, and she saw him by the gate, talking to the king himself. The king was gesturing at their direction, seeming sad but detailing the story nonetheless.
She jumped up to her feet and ran toward Hoel, as fast as her legs could carry her, turning away from Anwen’s motherly embrace. Hoel looked at her, nearly startled, when Charlotte dove just to put her hands around his knees. “Please, my lord Hoel, please. Please!” she cried desperately. “Bring him back. Please bring him back.”
“Maili—what’s gotten into you?” Hoel grunted. “I liked him as well, but he’s just a wizard. No need to get all undone over it.”
“He’s not just a wizard!” she cried, unable to keep the anger out of her voice or the tears out of her eyes. “He’s my teacher. My guardian from long ago. He’s the love of my life! I’m the love of his! Please—he can’t be gone. Please help him. I’ll do anything you ask, anything at all, if you save him!”
“What are you talking about?” Hoel demanded. “I certainly never met him until recently! He’s not guardian of you!”
“Before you, papa,” was all she had to say before his eyes finally filled with comprehension. “Please help me,” she whimpered.
He bent down and easily took her into his arms like she was a tired child. He was so much larger than her that he could even brush her hair away from her tear-stained face.
In his gold eyes there was a sparkle of something she couldn’t understand. “Damn it all, Maili,” he grumbled, his tone acidic with exasperation. “What a right mess!” He marched over to Anwen and passed Charlotte over into Anwen’s outstretched arms. “Damn it, Anwen, we should have locked her windows.”
He batted Moriarty away, who was busy looking up at Hoel like he was a dinosaur, or a unicorn, or something else that he didn’t know quite how to react to seeing. Hoel was able to brush him aside like he was a wood shaving, leaving Moriarty shocked.
“What, my love?” Anwen asked him. “What are you doing?”
“Seeing how dead he is,” Hoel huffed. “And if he’s not dead enough, I’m going to wake him up and get him even more dead! I’m going to kill him until I bore of it, and then I’ll make him marry her! How dare he put a babe on her without even so much as a blink in my direction! I don’t care who he used to be or who he is. I’m Hoel, and she’s my goddamned daughter, after all!”
Anwen squeezed her protectively, but then put her on the ground and held her. “What does he mean, mama?” Charlotte asked, watching Hoel pry open Ashcroft’s eyes and put his hands over his heart.
“He means your scent has changed, my love,” she said, bending low to whisper those words in her ear. “How could you run from your husband and then just let another man take you into his bed? We’ll have to annul the whole arrangement, and you know how this will make Hoel look!”
Charlotte was so awed that Anwen’s extremely terse lecture breezed right over her head.
“I’m going to try,” Hoel told Anwen. “Don’t let her look at this, I don’t want her to get sick.”
Anwen pulled Charlotte so that her face was in Anwen’s bosoms, but Charlotte couldn’t resist looking—particularly after that sort of opening.
She caught sight of Moriarty who was literally turning green from watching, and then she was able to turn her head and look at the sight for herself.
Hoel was actually molding Ashcroft’s head like clay; he was trying to put it all back together the way it was, his hands glowing as hot as embers as he did so. She had seen him mend a broken bone and even reattach a villager’s arm once… but this was absolutely ghastly!
She found herself hiding her face once again for a few moments, trying to keep her stomach from rolling, but when she was able to turn around completely, Hoel had finished and had even mended the slice on Ashcroft’s neck.
Ashcroft looked exactly as he had before his fall, but he was still dead. The splinter of hope she’d had was quickly fading, and she wrapped her arms around herself.
Hoel looked up at her just before he put his hands on Ashcroft’s chest. Hoel was justifiably angry with her, but he looked suddenly surrendered right before he looked down at Ashcroft.
Ashcroft looked like he was suffused with a red light. His body was so bright that she and Moriarty had to look away, and then they only looked away when they heard Ashcroft make a startled cry.
She was so relieved she felt ill. She dived on the ground next to Ashcroft and grabbed his head between her two hands. She was kissing him all over and Ashcroft forgot long enough that Hoel was hovering right over him to wrap his arms around her and pull her onto his lap. “Charlotte, thank God you’re alright, I—”
They both looked at Hoel, who was still leaning over them both now, and Charlotte suddenly realized why others were probably afraid of Hoel on sight. He was tall, looked quite demonic, and right now he looked like he wanted to smash something with his big, red fists.
Ashcroft certainly seemed alarmed that he was going to do just that, but all Charlotte
could think of to do was jump up and wrap her arms around Hoel’s neck. “Thank you! Thank you!” she kissed his red skin all over, and hugged his neck as tightly as she could.
Hoel hugged her back finally, and stood up with her still wrapped around him like cellophane. “You,” he said, pointing down at Ashcroft. “You and I are going to have a long talk about what a rotten cad you are and how you in no way have earned my daughter!”
Moriarty was the one helping a very dazed Ashcroft to his knees, but he seemed quite careful to make sure he was still a good arm’s length away from Hoel. “What happened?” Ashcroft asked him. “What about Lachlan?”
Moriarty didn’t even answer. “I’ll go figure out once I’m done vomiting,” Moriarty said, slowly walking away as if he really was going to be ill at any moment. “I’m not used to this level of stress anymore…” he added distantly.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Charlotte’s day had just begun, and it made her want to chew her fingernails to pieces. At present, the king was talking with Anwen down the hallway, and Hoel was locked away with Ashcroft in the room next to her, and she was told to just sit there next to Lachlan, who the elf guards had bound and gagged—quite over excessively—into a chair across from where she sat.
Lachlan was bleeding from several bruises in his face that the guards had surely given to him He had a lot of enemies, she imagined, who wanted to kill him. She doubted it was possible that Lachlan could live through this, and by the looks of him, Lachlan doubted it as well. Lachlan was completely sedate for once, and had nothing clever to say for once in his life. There were no lies that could plausibly get Hoel not to investigate him.
She eyed the wooden door that closed her away from Hoel and Ashcroft, where Ash was desperately trying to argue that he didn’t feel he needed Hoel’s permission, since he had already taken Charlotte into his bed before Hoel had even met her.
Her Master's Hand Page 28
