But, to his surprise, the lady tilted her head and gave Glayer a sympathetic smile, and her lord husband nodded approvingly as he led his wife around the blubbering pile of rags that was Glayer’s mother.
Glayer pulled himself together and gave the couple a short bow. “My apologies.”
“Not at all, my good man,” the lord said heartily. “Refreshing to see her sort put in her place.”
“They grow more insolent each year if you don’t arrest it right away,” the woman said. “Well done, I say.”
Glayer bowed again as the couple continued on their way and then kicked out at the talons that clutched his bare ankle. He backed into his apartments and shut the door.
* * *
Eseld inched her hand up the solid thickness of the door that had been closed to her, her son and her grandson on the other side. She knocked lightly.
“Glayer?” she whispered in a small voice, and even that breathy word caused daggers of pain. “My lord? Please . . .”
She looked for his shadow approaching beneath the door, but it did not come. He meant to leave her there alone in her humiliation.
She lay the sharp edge of her temple against the wood to roll her forehead along the door with a low moan and then paused with her eyes closed.
“You’re just like him,” she accused in a soundless whisper.
* * *
There were only three of them on the road, Adrian recognized, and it was no thoroughfare of stone and packed sand. The sun that shone down did so almost lovingly, the verdant air around him soft as a caress. And yet his mind was thrown back to another road, years earlier, a road that had seen him on the verge of death, walking to a place that should have been his tomb. The sun had been white, blinding fire, the earth an open oven powered by the fires of hell presumably just below the surface of the never-ending sand. Whips and scourges, maggots and chains . . .
The black markings on his skin seemed to tingle.
“He’ll be there,” Maisie said lightly, drawing his attention back to the lush greenness of the day surrounding the road to Clifty Wood.
Adrian looked over the neck of Christian’s small mount to his wife, who rode on the far side of Constantine’s boy. He could never hide anything from her.
Adrian nodded. It was rare that Maisie was mistaken in matters she chose to speak of deliberately, but he also knew she wished for this as much or more than Adrian himself.
“Adrian, look,” Christian said and nodded up the road.
He could just see the dark gray outline of the roof of Clifty Wood manor, the house set beyond the little valley where he knew a lake lay hidden. A stacked timber fence bordered the rise, interrupted by a wide pass through on the road and although Adrian could never remember there being one before, he could clearly see the light, freshly hewn timbers of a gate that—at least in the present moment—stood open.
Open to allow another trio of riders though, being seen off by the two rough-dressed men on foot standing between the mounts.
Guards and a gate across the road to Clifty Woods?
Adrian wasn’t spurring his horse on any longer. In fact, the reins had gone limp in his hands as they rested on the fore of the saddle, and he watched the rider in the middle, the rider with the long gray beard....
The old man looked up, then, and all his company turned to regard the approaching visitors. But the bearded man didn’t raise an arm in welcome, didn’t ride out to meet them. He seemed to freeze, his gaze likely not able to make out the distinct features of Adrian’s face, shadowed by his hood, and yet he dismounted slowly, pushing his reins into the hands of the man standing nearest his horse, and began walking with halting strides.
Adrian’s own mount stopped and, somewhere far away it seemed, Maisie called her and Christian’s horses to stand. Adrian swung down from the saddle and heard his boots crunching the gravel of the road he hadn’t walked in ten years. Faster and faster, his hood fell back...
“Adrian!” Herne Hailsworth choked as he opened his arms wide.
“Da.”
His father seemed so much smaller than Adrian remembered as he embraced him; gone were the barrel chest and stout appendages, leaving a man who while not quite frail was physically diminished and showed that the years had rolled across the meadows of Clifty Wood just the same as they had floated past Melk on the Danube, or blasted across the burning sands of Syria.
Herne drew away but kept a tight grip on Adrian’s biceps, his beard split by his smile while his eyes glistened.
“I knew you’d come back,” he said emphatically and then turned his head to look over his shoulder at the man approaching them.
Adrian raised his own gaze and saw Alastair. And it seemed that for every hand by which Herne Hailsworth had been diminished, Adrian’s older brother had increased. Alastair Hailsworth was even larger, more solid, the ends of his now long dark hair plaited and pulled back at his nape.
