“Get away from my son!” Constantine screamed and shook the bars, feeling the muscles in his neck at the verge of tearing. “Get away from my son!”
* * *
Constantine sat straight up in bed, gasping as though he hadn’t drawn breath for an hour. He was covered in perspiration—even the thin, prickly ticking beneath him was soaked with it. He pushed himself to his feet, staggered into the front room of the cottage, and made his way to the door by the faint glow of the fire dying in the hearth. He tore the door open and charged through, then stood swaying in the street and turning ’round as the spring night air slipped into the hot crevices of his body like icy blades.
He gasped a final time and then leaned over with his hands on his knees, fighting the sob in his chest as he accepted the nightmare. His inhalation was a shuddering sniff.
God, he was going mad.
He stood aright and looked up the black path to the outline of Nell’s cottage, where Theodora had likely gone, and then his gaze rose farther to the skeletal stone finger of Benningsgate Castle.
If Felsteppe had possession of Christian, what would Constantine not do to get him back? He would rally armies, defy kings, fight his way through ranks of armed men in order to pull his precious, innocent boy away from that monster.
He looked back at Nell’s cottage.
The same monster who now held Dori’s infant son in his very real clutches. Dori, who hadn’t the power to challenge king or steel, but had persevered within a life linked with Glayer Felsteppe’s, seeing him in her home; in her beloved father’s place, with his title. She had withstood God only knew what sort of hellish existence before defying death itself in hopes of one day returning for that little helpless child.
That precious, innocent boy. Only a baby.
Constantine looked back toward Benningsgate with a pain in his chest so deep it nearly brought him to his knees in the street. Christian was gone. Gone to heaven with his mother years ago. He was safe and loved and happy, and although Constantine accepted that the guilt of his own failings would haunt him for the rest of his life, he knew Christian didn’t need him anymore.
But Theodora Rosemont’s son did.
He began walking toward Nell’s cottage.
* * *
Dori walked for hours without lagging, fueled by her anger and hurt. She couldn’t remember much of the other journeys she’d undertaken from Benningsgate, save for that she was now very thankful for the balmy weather and her sturdy, borrowed peasant’s shoes.
The moon was barely a sliver overhead, coyly skittering from cloud to wispy cloud in the starry sky, and didn’t seem to give forth much light until Dori walked through the patches of woods, whose branches before had been early spring bare and like walking beneath a web of thin shadows. Now in full leaf, entering the wooded sections of road was like traversing caves through a forbidding mountain range, where every woodland sound was magnified off the walls of thick greenery, and the nocturnal animals were long out of their hibernation and more than willing to investigate the presence of a trespasser in their domain.
She heard the crack of a stick and glanced with wide eyes over her shoulder at the black nothing behind her before facing forward once more and half-running the remainder of the forest path. Her breath only began to slow when she emerged from the wood between open fields. She fumbled with the blade in her hand and had to stop in order to properly return it beneath the ties of her apron lest she stumble and fall upon it, doing Glayer Felsteppe a great service by dying a second time.
She looked up and began walking again, but slowly now as she saw the blocky outline of Thurston Hold on the rise, the tall, black rectangles of the keep and inner buildings like a keep-shaped hole in the sparkling night sky.
If Glayer Felsteppe was keeping as close of a watch as he had before he’d thought to have her killed, the portcullis would be closed at the barbican, and she’d have to wait for the morning until the town was about its day. That would be many times more dangerous, for she would almost certainly be recognized, even with her chopped hair and peasant’s garb. Should she manage to gain the keep without detection, she would certainly be stopped as soon as she attempted to breach the family wing.
“Good evening, milady.”
Dori couldn’t help her strangled shriek as she spun around, pulling her blade from her apron once more and wielding it at the black shadow now standing before her on the road.
“Stay away from me!” she ordered, backing down the road.
The shadow seemed to grow an arm. “Don’t be frightened—”
“Drop your weapon,” she demanded.
“I don’t have one!”
“Show me your other hand!” Dori insisted.
“It’s fixed in me belt!”
Dori paused and lowered the blade, but only slightly. “Leland?”
“Great gods, I thought you’d know it was me,” the man said in exasperation. “Glad I am I thought better of calling out to you in the wood!”
“You’d have at least one hole in you by now had you,” Dori said with a sigh, standing aright and returning the blade. “Why are you following me?”
