Page 2 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

A placard on a gilt easel stood beside them, lettered in a bold hand.

THE REYNARD’S CHASE

Enter alone or in pairs.

Follow the clever fox to his den.

First to the heart of the maze claims the prize.

“A maze.” Rosaline peered out. Torches lined a path down to a wall of black hedge, taller than any man, its single opening lit like the mouth of a cave. “In the dark.”

“Not merely a maze.” A woman in a peacock mask leaned in, delighted to explain. “The hedges are laid with clues, my dear. Solve your way to the center before the rest, and the prize is yours.” She lowered her voice with relish. “A first edition. Cleland’s Memoirs. The unexpurgated one. The book no lady admits to owning and every lady has read.”

Abigail’s fingers dug into Rosaline’s arm. “I want it,” she whispered, the instant the peacock had swept on. “Rosaline. Dove. Whoever I am. I want that book more than I have ever wanted anything, and you are the cleverest person I know, and you are going to win it for me.”

Rosaline stared at the mouth of the maze. “I am going to win you a scandalous book.”

“For my birthday.” Abigail was already pulling her down the torchlit path. “You’ll be away from me for half a year. Give me a story to keep me warm through all of it.”

The hedges closed over them, and the noise of the house faded away.

Inside, the maze breathed cold and green. A small brass plaque had been set into the first junction, catching the torchlight, a line of verse cut into it:

Where the hound would turn to bay, the fox slips quiet, another way. Below it, two arrows, left and right.

“The hound turns to bay,” Rosaline murmured, running her thumb over the letters. “The fox does the opposite of the obvious. The bright path is the trap.” She looked left, where the torches burned brighter, then right, into the dimmer fork. “We go right.”

“How can you possibly⁠—”

“Because whoever built this wants us to feel clever, not to be given the answer.” Rosaline was already moving. “Come.”

They found the next plaque set low in the hedge, half swallowed by leaves. Rosaline crouched and brushed them aside.

“The straight road flatters,” she read. “The crooked road knows.”

She glanced up the two paths before them. One ran arrow-true toward a distant torch; the other bent almost at once out of sight.

“The straight one, surely.” Abigail was already leaning that way. “It goes toward the light.”

“It flatters.” Rosaline caught her sleeve and drew her toward the crooked fork. “That is the clue. The path that looks easiest is the one that deceives you.”

“You are frightening when you do that.” Abigail followed, delighted. “Do it again.”

They found the next plaque and the one after. Rosaline read each aloud, and Abigail read them back wrong on purpose, and they laughed too loudly, hushed each other, and pressed deeper into the green dark, their hands linked.

A hare cut into brass. A moon. A verse about counting the turns and trusting the odd ones over the even. For the length of the game, Rosaline forgot Samuel entirely, forgot Kent, and the dull baron waiting somewhere in her future. She was only a girl solving a puzzle in the dark with her dearest friend.

It was the freest she had felt in years.

“Left here,” she said, at a plaque marked with a third moon. “The pattern holds, every third turn we—Dove?”

Her hand had gone empty.

She turned. The path behind her stood dark and still, hedge on hedge, no white dove mask anywhere in it. Somewhere off to the right, a burst of laughter rose and faded, and she could not tell whether it was Abigail’s or not.

“Dove.” She kept her voice to a whisper. “Dove, where have you gone?”

Nothing answered but the hiss of the torches and the low music still playing for the house she had left behind.