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Chapter Twenty-Five
Dorian stumbled across an eerily vacant expanse of churned-up mud and scattered corpses, disturbing the oily-feathered crows who came to gorge upon the dead. A thunder of cannon fire boomed in the distance, but the battle had long since moved away from this barren wasteland. These soldiers would have no grave; it had been left to the Earth itself to decay them out to their final resting place.
Up ahead, he saw his quarry. A white stag running beside a white doe, so close he felt he could catch them if he only spurred his legs to run faster, and yet perpetually too far away. In his hand, he clutched the bone handle of a long blade, the edge glinting in the unsettling sepia light coming from a half-dead, dim sun that struggled to cast its glow.
“Rose!” he called out as he fought to run faster.
The doe came to an abrupt halt while the stag bounded on, and her gleaming white face turned slowly in Dorian’s direction, her big eyes blinking calmly. She could not have been more than twenty paces in front of him, but no matter how furiously he pumped his legs, it did not seem to close the gap between them.
“Rose! Keep running! Get away from here! Get away from me!” Dorian bellowed, but the doe would not move.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash, like a crack of distant lightning. Only, the light had not come from far away. Something skimmed past his cheek, swift and precise as an elite archer’s arrow, and headed straight for the white doe.
“Rose! Go!” Dorian screamed, but it was too late. The white doe crumpled to the ground, her glistening white body dropping into the filthy quagmire of the battlefield.
At last, the landscape allowed him to reach the downed creature, though he already knew what he would see. This nightmare had plagued him for nine nights, ever since Rose had been brought back from the meadow with the blade in her thigh.
“Rose… No…” He sank to his knees beside the doe and cradled her head in his hands, though her large eyes no longer held a spark of life. They stared vacantly into a distant place that he could not see, the bone handle of a dagger lodged in her skull. Vivid red blood matted her white fur, and when he looked at his own hand, the blade he had been holding was nowhere to be seen as though he had thrown the killing blow himself.
“Rose, wake up. I am sorry I was not faster. I am sorry I left your side. If you awaken, I swear I will never leave you again, not even for a moment,” he pleaded with the doe, but she was already gone.
Lifting his gaze, he saw her counterpart—the white stag—standing on the rise of a low, muddy hill. Beside the stag, a woman in a white dress sat astride a pearlescent horse, who wore a bittersweet, “I told you so” smile upon her face.
“Have I not paid my penance?” Dorian hissed through a torrent of hot tears. “Have I not yet been forgiven for my trespasses against you? How many more years do you want me to suffer? How many losses must I take before you cease to haunt me?”
The woman on her horse merely bowed her head and turned her horse around, riding away from him as she had done each time this nightmare had come to him. It was something she had never done in his previous nightmares of her, where she had been the sole focus.
“Until when must I pay?” Dorian howled as he watched the stag turn and stroll away with the rider. “Why do you not answer me?”
As his eyes opened and he found himself in his bed-chamber, he supposed he would never find out why they would not ease his pain or give him the response he desired.
Sitting up, he dragged himself out of bed and went to the washbasin, splashing the cool water on his face to take away the sheen of sweat that coated his skin. His hand fumbled for the bottle of whiskey that he had set there the previous night and took a long drink of the harsh liquor.
“That is better,” he whispered, as though speaking with a secret mistress. In the space of nine days, he had taken to relying on brandy and whiskey to see him to sleep in the hopes it might stave off the nightmares. Thus far, it had done nothing but ensure he awoke with a headache, though he supposed it did help him to drift off, to begin with. That was enough to make him continue to have a bottle on hand when darkness fell, and when the sun rose, to see him through the long day to come.
“What time is it?” he asked the silent room. Checking the clock on the mantelpiece through hazy vision, he saw it read three o’clock. Judging by the moonlight that crept through the drapes, it referred to the wee hours of the morning.
With the whiskey bottle clutched in his hand, he made his way out of his bed-chamber and down the hallway to where a footman stood guard outside Rose’s quarters.
“My Lord.” The footman bowed low.
“Has she stirred much?” Dorian replied, his anxiety on the rise.
The footman cast him a sad expression. “She has awoken now and again and has asked for you each time. I told her you were busy with the constables and the physician, just like you instructed.”
Dorian nodded. “Thank you.” He hesitated. “Do you know if she is presently sleeping?”
“She is, My Lord. Mrs. Whittaker gave her a sleeping tonic from the physician a few hours ago, and she’s been quiet since,” the footman replied.
“Very good.” Dorian stepped past the footman and entered Rose’s bed-chamber to find her curled up beneath layers of blankets, her knees tucked almost all the way to her chin.
I wonder if this is how you slept when you were a child.He walked toward her and sat down in the armchair beside her bed, reaching for her hand, which had escaped the suffocating heat of the blankets. Her palm felt warm to the touch, a stark contrast to the icy chill of her skin when he had thought she might die right there on Hudson’s chaise-longue.
“I am sorry you have been calling for me, and I have not come,” he said woefully. “I suppose I am ashamed of seeing you after the pain I have caused you. I know you will not blame me for it, but… that only makes it more difficult for me to bear. Until I have found the culprit of this injury, I do not think I can face you, for it means I have not been able to keep my promise.”
He touched the back of his free hand to her forehead, to see if the fever had receded. To his private delight, he found that she did not feel as ferociously hot as she had in the last few days.
While she had been languishing in her sickbed, he had not been resting on his laurels. With Hudson’s aid, they had searched the grounds of the estate and gone to the village to try and see if anyone could give them any information regarding the hooded rider. Dorian had even sent someone to try and find Rose’s father, but all of their searches had come to naught. The only vaguely promising thing they had found was a flattened patch of earth in the woodland, suggesting someone had made camp there, but the dogs had not been able to track the scent further than the stream that cut through the farthest reaches of the forest.
