After a moment she nodded again. “He thinks I’m dead.”
“You look as though you nearly are,” Constantine blurted out.
She neither agreed with nor disputed the observation as the night chill descended in the ward, as if someone had suddenly thrown a great, cold, wet blanket over the ruin.
“Glayer Felsteppe killed my wife and son.”
“I know,” she said, repeating his earlier answer.
“I’ve come to kill him.”
Theodora Rosemont shook her head slightly. “You can’t do that, Lord Gerard.”
And Constantine felt in that moment that he knew what Theodora had experienced when he’d said her pet name aloud. The sound of his title on her lips was a foreign thing, startling and bittersweet; that name belonged to another time, to another person in a different life.
She turned toward Benningsgate’s crumbled north wing and began walking away from him, her stooped posture returning. Constantine wondered that this was the woman who had, so recently, seemed more than capable of fighting him to the death.
She called up to the sky. “I hardly think it appropriate that I invite you in to your own home.”
Constantine didn’t know where she meant to go, approaching what appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rubble where once family apartments and garderobes spanned the curtain wall between the hall and the tall oratory tower. He suddenly found that his own feet would not move.
Theodora Rosemont looked over her shoulder, and when she saw him still standing in the ward, she stopped and turned to face him. She waited.
It took him several long moments before he found the courage, not knowing what devastating memories he would encounter on the other side of the rock. But eventually he lowered his head and commanded his boots to move forward, following Glayer Felsteppe’s wife into the corpse of his past.
Chapter 4
Dori’s face throbbed and her shoulder ached from her battle with Constantine Gerard as she led the man himself toward the pile of toppled battlements stretched out in the ward like a fallen dragon. She didn’t hesitate when she came to the barricade of rock but clambered over the summit and then moved to her bottom, ready to drop over the side. She paused, turning her head slightly to make sure he still followed.
He was right behind her and glanced up as he climbed. “The doorway still stands?” he said, speaking of the small entrance to the middle corridor, partially below ground.
“Yes. But the upper corridor has collapsed,” she warned and heard the rasp of disuse in her voice. She hadn’t spoken to another living soul in nearly two months. “Mind that you don’t disturb it further.” She slid in hitches and jerks down the fallen slab that deposited her into the shallow stairwell abutting the doorway, not caring if it sounded as though she was ordering him about; she was. If he caused the tunnel’s complete collapse, her refuge would be gone.
Theodora Rosemont hadn’t survived the past months only to be thwarted by his high-and-mighty Lord Gerard’s return.
Her feet touched down on the crumbled rock spilled out through the doorway from the corridor. She ducked through the arch and into pitch blackness, the gaping holes in the wall walk above too far away to let the moonlight through.
“This way,” she called over her shoulder as she began to duck walk over the rubble, one arm stretched out, her fingers skimming the soot-gummed rock for the telltale hole where a wooden beam had once rested.
Behind her, Constantine Gerard coughed, and Dori remembered that the corridor still stank of old fire. She had simply become accustomed to it.
Her fingers found the hole and she cupped her palm around the edge while moving to her bottom and turning her chin over her shoulder once more. “Careful,” she warned sharply, feeling the warmth of him come upon her suddenly, sending a little cascade of silt and debris before her. “The way ahead is collapsed. Give me time to go through before you follow.”
The only answer he gave was in his labored breaths. Dori didn’t think the journey arduous for a man of his strong appearance, so his efforts must have been of the emotional sort. She braced her right hand on the last crumbling edges of the upper corridor floor before lifting herself up and then into the black.
She tottered a bit when she scrambled to gain her feet from the pile and remove herself from the path of Constantine Gerard, who came through almost immediately after her. He tumbled to the lowest level of stone if what she heard was any evidence, little pebbles rattling across the floor around his muffled curse.
Dori sighed to herself. “Are you injured?” She couldn’t see him at all now, the lower corridor completely cut off from above.
“No,” he answered curtly. “Where are you?”
“Here,” she said, turning. “Follow my voice. We’ll have light in a moment.” She heard the closeness of her words in her own ears. “The floor is mostly clear at this end of the passage.” She heard his muffledoof. “Mostly.”
She found the handle with her outstretched hands and moved the latch. An instant later, what seemed to be golden rays of sunlight poured into the black corridor, although Dori knew it was nothing more than the meager light of a single candle.
“The oratory,” Lord Gerard said, although she was certain the words weren’t for her benefit.
She passed into the small, square room and closed the door after he entered, bending to drop the slender stake into the groove in the floor. It wouldn’t stop someone intent on entering, but it would give her enough warning to prepare to defend herself.
