Page 51 of A Divided Duty

“Why are you asking me this now? Everything may be fine once we reach the keep,” he said sourly. “It may be nothing we can’t handle.”

“But it may also be bad, and if we don’t talk about this before it gets bad, we wind up trying to figure things out on the fly. We both know that never works out the way we think it will.” I shook my head. “I am not planning to take any unreasonable risks. If nothing else, I like this dress. I am planning to go in, find Raysel, and get out. But if this turns into a fight, I need to know that you’re safe, or I won’t be able to focus on protecting myself, or her. So please. If it looks like things aren’t going to go our way, you need to run.”

Tybalt sighed heavily, the sound seeming to travel all the way up from his toes. “This is a strange time to learn maturity, little fish. I could have done very well without it.”

“Yeah, well, I was going to have to get there eventually,” I said. “Might as well be when we’re sauntering into mortal peril.”

The moor had swallowed us whole by that point: the wood was as far behind us as the keep was ahead. Our conversation was bracketed by two locations, and our time to talk freely was coming steadily to an end.

“Yes, October. For you, for our child, I will run if the need arises. I will leave you to fight on alone, and I will go. But I will come back.”

“I don’t doubt that in the least,” I said. “You always come back for me, no matter how bad things get. I know it.”

“And if you make me leave you, I will remind you of it daily for the next year,” he said. “You will have to soothe me to sleep in the morning, for this is a cruelty such as you have very rarely forced upon me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sweetheart, I understand,” I said, barely managing not to laugh. He sounded serious enough that it wouldn’t have been received well. What I was asking made perfect sense: I could recover from just about any wound, including several that I was told on good authority had been fatal. I could get back up again after I was knocked down, and I would be able to get better. He wouldn’t. Much as I adored him, he healed like anyone else did, and the thought of seeing him die again made my chest hurt.

Yes, “again.” Tybalt was a King of Cats, and that came with some benefits, including a certain number of extra lives—times when he could die and come back again, either on his own or because someone else was willing to intervene. He’d died at least once in my presence, and he wasn’t sure how many lives he had left to go. Call me old-fashioned, but I wanted to have a little more time together before I had to figure out how to be a widow.

A century or two to start with. Anything less than that would be too cruel.

We had almost reached the keep. We slowed, and I reluctantly pulled my hand out of his. He responded by grabbing my wrist and tugging me sharply toward him. I collided with his chest, my candle pinned between us, and could only blink bemusedly up at him before he ducked his head and kissed me.

I was never going to get used to the fact that I lived in a world where I was just allowed to kiss him now, where we could do this any time we wanted, without needing to come up with excuses for our behavior or put on a show for hostile monarchs who might happen to be watching us. From the way he kissed me, he wasn’t used to it either. He kissed me like he was a forest fire and I was the last tree standing, like he needed to consume me or be extinguished. And after that brief moment of surprise, I kissed him back just as fiercely.

In that embrace, it was easy to forget that we might be being watched. If part of me still remembered, it was the part of me that was more than happy to let them watch. We could put on a show, for all I cared. This entire situation was their fault—well, Luna’s fault, really—and if they didn’t want to watch me reassure my husband that I still loved him enough to fight and stay alive for him, they shouldn’t have started all this in the first place.

Finally, reluctantly, he let me go and stepped away. I pressed my knuckles against my lips, smothering my smile, while he merely looked pleased with himself.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we go and remind the young Miss Torquill that she’s still expected to do her chores?”

“Let’s,” I said, and together, we approached the keep.

ELEVEN

THERE WERE NO GUARDS. The door was unlocked. I tested the latch, then nodded to Tybalt, who turned back into a cat and ran off to leap lightly onto the nearest window ledge, looking back at me and flicking his tail.

“Showoff,” I mouthed, wrinkling my nose at him. He looked, if anything, more smug as he turned to jump down from the ledge into the keep proper.

I opened the door and slipped through, stepping into a dimly lit stone antechamber with walls that had been left unwashed long enough to have acquired a faint patina of lichen. The walls were still sound, but this looked more like an abandoned ruin than an occupied stronghold. I sniffed the air, picking up lingering traces of Acacia’s blood, but that was all I found. Concentrate as I might, I didn’t hear anything, no voices or clanking of armor from deeper inside the structure.

The window Tybalt had entered through wasn’t in this room. There was a wall instead, shutting me off from anything else that might be in here with me. I guess it was too much to hope for us to have ended up in the same place. I composed myself, shunting aside my vague discontent, and started moving deeper, following the curve of the wall toward what I hoped would be a larger central chamber.

Most purebloods stopped updating their idea of how to build a home sometime in the medieval era, and as a consequence, you can generally predict what’s going to be where. There will be a poorly ventilated coatroom or antechamber just inside the door, and beyond that will be the main hallway. From there, you can find most of the relevant rooms, and at the end will be the central hall—which is not another word for hallway when you’re talking about impractically large houses. It’s sort of like a living room, if the living room had to double as a ballroom and occasionally host dinner parties where the guests were numbered in the dozens. Not a real fixture of the modern house, in other words.

Of course, all bets are off when it comes to knowes, which can be considerably more modern and, for all I know, read architectural digests in their spare time. Who’s to say what intelligent, opinionated residences do with themselves when they’re not being asked to produce six perfectly outfitted guest rooms at a moment’s notice?

But this wasn’t a knowe. I got none of the feeling of presence and awareness that I usually got when stepping into a knowe; this was a magical creation, yes, but it was just stone piled high and shaped to suit Michael’s needs at the moment of construction. He must have needed this place once, long before I met him. But it had been falling into disrepair for decades if not centuries, and was now barely more than a monument to what had long since been lost.

I crept along the hallway, following the scent of blood, tensely waiting for the moment when some sound or ambush would confirm that I wasn’t alone. I passed several doorways, and at the third I flinched, drawing my horn knife with my free hand, when I saw something move in the darkness beyond.

Tybalt stepped out of the room, back in bipedal form, one eyebrow raised in silent question. I relaxed and shook my head, sliding my knife back into its sheath. No point in wandering around with a weapon out when there was nothing in sight to stab.

Now side by side, we resumed the walk down the hallway. And still the keep was silent around us, silent as a tomb. Only the fact that the air smelled of dust and blood told me anyone had been here anytime in the last decade. The body can tell when something’s disturbed the air, and my skin was telling me that I hadn’t missed the last people to walk here by much longer than it took the air to settle.

Tybalt pressed close, closer than the confines of the hall demanded, and pulled a little bit ahead, so that he’d be the first to encounter any real danger. I rolled my eyes and gave his back a hard look. This wasn’t what we had discussed, but it wasn’t surprising, either. I believed that he would run if necessary. I also knew that he would defend me until he couldn’t do it anymore. That was just the kind of man he was, and there was no changing it.

Not that I was particularly invested in trying. We walked, and his footsteps were silent, while mine were quiet, marked only by the soft scuff of my shoes against the stone. I would never match his feline silence, no matter how hard I tried. At least our candles meant that the way ahead was lit, if only dimly, and I was able to see where we were going. Pureblood fae can see in the dark, with varying degrees of sharpness. As a Cait Sidhe, Tybalt barely needed any light at all. But my eyesight is still closer to the human side of my family than the fae, and without something to show me the way, I would be in serious trouble.