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We shan’t, he agreed.But we shallrunandrun.
Claws bit into the cold earth, and with head lowered and hind bunched, the bear leapt forward. Pounding through the wood, he brushed up against trees and shrubs, leaving his scent behind, a comfort for friends, a warning for foes. He ran and ensured Arcadia’s boundaries were secure. He sped to the house and lay his scent down there, in the gardens and the lawn, rolling with abandon and heedless of discovery. He wished his duchess—
Whose duchess?said the silly man.
Mine, the bear exulted as he brought them to a halt beneath her window. She was gabbing to that nightingale again.
He scented jasmine and mint and female and a very faint indication of a sweet thing, a salty thing, a season of the year, so elusive but more than was noticeable before, more than he detected in his manskin.
The man was distracted by her chatter with the bird in the tree. She was recounting her day and the plans she wished to embark upon the next.
Does she think we are that nightingale?the man scoffed.
Something is not right, the bear said.Her smell is wrong.
The man stopped to sniff.There’s the mint from the soap.
That is nother.Is she unwell?The bear shivered with apprehension.
She is robust, the man said,robust in her plans and her orders and her—
The bear sniffed in ever-increasing circles, his nose picking up earth and insects and small creatures and rocks and the rain and—
Hold.When the man took that tone, the bear heeded it. They sniffed a patch of earth too near to the duchess’s window for comfort.
That is wrong, the bear growled.A thing that is not a thing, a smell that is not a smell. Like my duchess.
They crept away from the window and followed the vagaries of the scent to the southern edge of the park where the glasshouse loomed like a specter, a skeleton of iron, its white struts and beams rent in the front as if a beast of strength akin to theirs had reached out and ripped them apart. Broken glass stuck out of the iron like thorns, and patches of windows were broken on each side as well as the roof, adhering to neither rhyme nor reason.
Even in the low light and from a distance he could see the wreckage within, plants and small trees flung about as if the destroyer had been thwarted in finding what it sought. The floor was torn apart, exposing the stoves beneath, connected to pipes for the distribution of heat to keep the plants alive. Most were dead but for a bed of weeds shored up against the only unbroken wall, a tangle of what appeared to be branches stripped from the trees around it, a variety neither man nor beast could identify.
A bad thing was here, said the bear as they slipped within.
They both scented the air; there was nothing but the soil and the greenery and the hint of a thunderstorm rolling in. It was impossible to discern whether the damage was recent or if it was a relic of the past or—
The work of Hallbjorn, they both mused.
A rustle sounded in the underbrush. For a creature its size, the bear slipped through a broken window sleek as a snake, and headed for the disturbance.
The scent of fox teased his nostrils and he made short work of flushing reynard from its hidey-hole. The sly creature crooked its neck, but it was insufficient to the raging man within. He drew down hisdominatumand forced the Change on the prince’s factotum.
The bear’s man was surprised it worked; it was a show of force he had never attempted before.
We had no duchess to save from danger before, snarled the bear.
Todd kept to his knees and crooked his neck. “That destruction is not my work, Your Grace. I sought only to gauge the damage before reporting to Her Grace, er, and to you.”
Arthur snorted, and the bear sniffed to spot a lie; there was none, as such. He shook his fur and rose to his fullest height; it was to Todd’s credit he did not flee in fear. Came from working for Georgie, the man reckoned.
The man would not let the bear roar and rouse his duchess and frighten her. Instead, he exposed his great maw of teeth and leaned in close to the fox’s face. Todd cricked his neck again, and the bear canted his head and indicated the house, to which the factotum fled with alacrity.
They watched him go; the man wanted to search, but the bear knew whoever had been here was long gone, for why else would there be no scent left behind? A drop of rain splashed on his nose; Alpha or no Alpha, he was not about to sleep in wet fur. Swift as a hare, they made for the cover of the wood.
Seven
After several days in Arcadia, a routine established itself. Meals were taken in the kitchen; Beatrice kept a running inventory of works required within the house; her nightly bath was fetched in by the duke. Peppered throughout were arguments between herself and His Grace regarding what he perceived to be her reckless foraying through the dilapidated interior and relentless carping about the funds she was disbursing as freely as Prinny raided the royal coffers.
Not that the latter was any concern of the duke’s. She had had the management of her mother’s pin money once she’d learned her sums; it was utterly satisfying to put her skills to work for her own ends. It took ready money up front to establish the confidence of the tradespeople she would soon employ in great numbers, and she refused to follow her father’s example of holding back payment until the magistrate was alerted. A steward was needed to attend to the books, a topic she would broach another day.
