Page 25 of Down Comes the Night

“No.” It was clearly sharper than he intended, because he forced a smile. “Thank you, Ms. Southerland. That’s very kind, but I need to get home before the weather worsens.”

Don’t leave me here alone,she wanted to say. He was eyeing the house as if it were cursed. Even the horses swiveled their ears, pawing at the ground and kicking up plumes of snow.

Wren swallowed her reflexive, childish protest and instead waved limply. “Safe travels.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And good luck to you.”

He snapped the reins, the horses took off, and Wren was left alone.

She stood in the ankle-deep snow covering the garden, if it could be called a garden at all. It was little but a snarl of leafless branches encased in ice like strange laboratory specimens. Wren turned toward her new home with its frowning pediments and eaves that dripped with wicked icicles. The house seemed to stare back at her from the belvedere squatting on its scaled roof. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Someone wasthere,watching her. She could feel it. But the empty windows all gleamed black as a beetle’s wing in the moonlight.

How foolish,she scolded herself,to be afraid of a house.It was only the melted snow seeping into her boots. Nothing more than Basil’s strange behavior worming its way under her skin.

As the snowfall intensified, blotting out her vision and tangling in her hair, Wren carried her bags to the porch. A vaulted arch made of iron hooded the entryway to the imposing double doors, and knotted up in the metalwork ivy were anguished faces and snarlinggargoyles. Gathering her nerve, she grabbed the iron knocker. It burned her bare hand with the bitter chill of it. She lifted it and let it fall with a dullbangdeadened by the thick snow. Here, no sound traveled. She could scream if she wanted.

No one would hear her.

After a minute, the doors opened to reveal a woman of about twenty, cast in the glow of a candelabra. Four columns of flame burned steadily, barely quivering in the wind that pulled at Wren’s cloak. The woman’s eyes were concealed by the shadows pouring off her brow bone, but her gaze seared, hot as the waxdrip, drip, dripping onto the worn floorboards in the rhythm of an intravenous infusion.

“Lord Lowry was expecting you hours ago.”

Such hospitality.“My apologies. The weather delayed us.”

The woman kept her gaze trained over Wren’s shoulder. Without another word, she took Wren’s bags from her hands and went inside. There was nothing to do but follow. Stepping over the threshold and into the fold of darkness felt something like being swallowed alive.

Inside, it was hardly warmer—or lighter. In the flickering orb of candlelight, Wren could make out the enormity of the hall, its startling emptiness. From where she stood, the ceiling towered three stories above her. If she craned her neck, the moon, as narrow and hooked as a suture needle, peered in through three bar-shaped windows lining the back wall. The grand staircase snaked its way along the somber blue walls, girded with a polished wood banister the color of wet soil. Everything outside the candelabra’s unsteady reach swam indistinctly, as if the house itself breathed and stirred the shadows like wind over still water.

It was nothing like she imagined, so echoing and lonely. Where were the grand parties and gossiping courtiers? Where were the armies of servants carrying platters of cakes and pots of tea? There was no beauty here, no life.

Straight ahead, a fireplace burned red with low-banked coals. To the east, the mouth of a corridor was covered with a massivethreadbare tapestry. The draft emanating from it was bitter cold, carrying with it drifts of snow that stole into the main hall like smoke. No wonder everyone here fell ill. The wisp of her breath curled in front of her nose.

“Follow me,” the woman said. “I’ll take you to him.”

She led Wren up the staircase and veered into a hallway on the first floor. As they walked, candlelight traced the ragged edges of peeling floral wallpaper and rows of framed portraits. In the shifting light, the painted subjects’ grins twisted into sneers and watchful eyes faded until they looked like the sunken orbital cavities of a skull. Shuddering, she focused her attention on her companion. The woman’s unbound brown hair fell in loose, shining waves and was offset by the simple frock dress she wore. Firelight bathed her russet-brown skin in a glow like dawn. She seemed far too young to be the head of the household, but then again, Lowry had said most of his staff had perished from fever.

“I’m Wren Southerland, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Hannah,” was her only response. They stopped in front of a door. “Lord Lowry will receive you here. When you’re finished, your room is upstairs. The last door on the right.”

“And the sickroom?”

“Directly across from yours.”

“Thank you. I—”

Hannah was already slipping away and rounding the corner. Her absence plunged Wren into near darkness, the corridor lit only by the frame of light around the door. Another time, Hannah’s rudeness might have bothered her, but Wren couldn’t feel much beyond her jittery nerves.

She knocked softly before entering. It was a library, but it had the closed-up, solemn air of a museum. Wall sconces burned with an eerie electrical glow, but the room was still dim, the air thick with dust. The ceiling had been dissected to expose the joists, its wooden beams veined with copper wire and studded with ceramic knobs.Tubes and wires,Basil had told her when she asked abouthow electricity worked. That must have been what fed the lights their strange power.

Heavy red curtains covered every window, and taxidermied specimens covered the back wall. Between stuffed and mounted rodents and birds were insects pinned by their wings like grim mosaic tiles. At the center, in the place of honor, was a twelve-point stag. It was unfinished; without its glass eyes, it watched her through gaping sockets.

The other two sides of the room were walled in by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, each shelf crammed with books about magic, medical textbooks, secular anthologies of essays, philosophical treatises, histories of ancient Danubian saints. Whatever she expected to find in a Cernosian library, it wasn’t this. She could spend an eternity reading everything here. The abbey never had the funding to purchase expensive volumes like these. Her pleasant surprise, however, melted away to perplexity when she noticedThe Science of Magic: A Theory of Surgical Technique,an early medical textbook, among the collection. What use would a socialite from a country with no magic have for something like this? Wren pulled the book out and brushed the dust from its spine.

“Goddess’s tits! I didn’t see you there. You scared me half to death.”

Wren whirled around to find Lord Alistair Lowry leaning in the doorframe, his eyes widened and one hand pressed to his heart. The man was red, red, red from his sanguine cheeks to his garish waistcoat to the ruby-studded rings catching the light on his fingers. At the end of a chain around his neck was a gleaming golden key stamped with the symbol of Cernos: stag horns. No older than his late twenties, he had dark curling hair and a cleft in his square chin.

Wren bowed her head to hide the humiliated blush surely blooming across her nose. Not only had he caught her going through his things, but she was so… bedraggled. While she was still in her traveling clothes, he was fit for a royal audience. She stumbled over a curtsy. “I’m sorry for frightening you, my lord.”