Prologue
January 31, 1427
Northumberland, England
Thomas Annesley was a dead man running.
He felt rather than saw the large slabs of rock thrusting out of the frozen ground as he stumbled past them, the black winter night hiding scores of the treacherous obstacles that littered the land beyond the manicured gardens of Darlyrede House, his childhood home. Thomas staggered and gasped as his wounded shoulder caught the jagged edge of one such monolith, spinning him on his feet and throwing him backward onto another slanted boulder. He lay against it, shaking, his eyes squeezed shut but his mouth open wide with a silent scream of pain. Every reedy breath of frigid air sliced his parched, bruised throat.
Thomas opened his eyes with a whimper to look up at the sliver of moon, its image blurred by tears held behind the frozen crust along his lashes. It was little light, but the trail of blood would make him easy prey for an expert hunter such as Hargrave. Thomas couldn’t go on much farther any matter—he’d pulled two arrows from his own flesh, and the cold had stolen most of the feeling in his extremities. But the most distressing indicator of his rapidly declining state was each painful, whistling breath confirming that the ball from the arquebus had damaged his right lung when it had exited the front of his chest. Hargrave’s boasting of the expensive new weapon’s accuracy had been warranted, it seemed.
Hargrave would find Thomas and kill him, or he would bleed to death. Either way, Thomas Annesley, third Baron Annesley, Lord of Darlyrede, recognized that his life was already over even as he fled through the wild winter night.
He was eighteen years old.
Thomas tried to push himself aright and heard a soft riffle of sound; his clothing had begun freezing to the rock. He was wet from his bare head to his boots with sweat and blood, as though he’d been so full of fear and death that when he’d fallen onto the stone he’d burst like a dropped wineskin.
Cordelia. Cordelia’s blood. Rivers of it, the stone floor flooded so that his boots splashed…the walls around him gummy and black…
He wanted to scream and scream; the atrocity he’d seen burrowed in his chest and in his soul just as deeply and permanently as the stone he collapsed onto once more was sunk into the earth. There would never be any true escape for him—he was trapped in his own mind as surely as in the wide-open land of his own demesne.
Cordelia’s wide-open eyes, staring up at that dank, dripping ceiling, the once-blue irises now a thin gray ring around gaping pupils, her pale, perfect heart-shaped face unmarked save for the tiny prickling of purple around her eyes…but below her bare, graceful neck, her alabaster skin slashed, ripped into bright ribbons, the body he’d worshipped in secret now ruined and mauled, her abdomen…
Thomas shook so hard with fear and cold that his head nodded wildly. Cordelia was dead—horribly, violently dead.Dead.
The rocky scrape of hooves on frozen track elicited a pained whine from Thomas’s scorched throat, and he cringed into the rock, as if it might animate and enclose him in a stony, protective embrace. He stopped breathing to listen in the crystal-cold night, and indeed the horse—horses?—was drawing nearer, and he heard the rumble of a masculine voice.
But it wasn’thisvoice.It wasn’t Hargrave. It wasn’t any of Darlyrede’s men, Thomas was sure of it. Oh, God, please…
Thomas lurched from the stone and staggered toward the sound, toward the narrow track of road that wound past Darlyrede House and to which he hadn’t known he’d been so close. There should have been no one traveling so remote a path in the middle of the night, especially during the coldest January Northumberland country had endured in generations. But as Thomas pushed himself from stone to stone, the shadowy images of two mounted riders approaching became clearer.
Help,Thomas tried to call, but the wheezing from his mouth was barely audible even to his own ears. He staggered toward the road, stumbled over the toe of his boot, and clutched at his shoulder as he went down. He heard the men’s exclamations of surprise, but Thomas did not wait to see if they would dismount to come to him. He dragged himself to his feet once more, lurching into the road, starbursts appearing behind his eyes as he fought for breath.
He swayed to a stop in the middle of the track, flinging his left forearm in a pathetic arc.
Help…
He braced his hand on his thigh and let his head drop as the horses halted. Thomas willed his chest to expand, his lungs to fill with air. Dizzy…
“Great ghost, boy! What think you to be about on a night such as this, and frightening our—” a voice demanded near his ear, and then strong hands around his arm pulled him upright, and Thomas somehow found the breath to give a whistling scream before his vision went gray and a loud buzzing erupted in both his ears.
“My God, what’s happened?” the man amended, his tone now one wholly of alarm.
“Who is it, Kettering?” a second voice called out from a distance.
“It’s a young man—he’s injured. I don’t believe I know him. Come, Blake, bring my horse—I daresay I shall require your assistance.”
Thomas collapsed against the man, who took his weight easily.
“There now, lad—I say, you’re all but frozen. Fortunate we came along just now.” Thomas was jostled, and then this saint, Kettering, eased him away to lean against a solid, warm, breathing wall of horseflesh. “Hold there a moment. Blake, take under his hip—with care. I believe he’s suffered injury to his shoulder and side—perhaps elsewhere, also. All right, we’re going to lift you onto the saddle, lad. Here, bite down on this.” Thomas felt a thin wooden rod pushed between his lips to settle between his teeth. “Steady, now. All right, Blake.”
Thomas would have cried out again at the pain in his chest and shoulder, but he had no breath left in him, and so he merely tried to cling to consciousness as his teeth sank into the wood and the warm seat pressed his ribs into the muscles of his chest like blades. He lay limp across the beast, tears building up once more in his eyes, his stomach pushing into his throat.
“Fortunate we came along, indeed,” the second man—Blake?—was saying, his voice seeming to echo queerly in the wide expanse of the night. “And good thing we’re so near Darlyrede House.”
“Just so,” Kettering said. “I’ll lead him so as to disturb him as little as possible. Blake, you follow behind with vigilance—the criminal who beset this poor lad may yet lie in wait for us. Darlyrede shall be our haven.”
Darlyrede.
