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“The Wynter Palace, north of Tempeste,” Tavion explained, shrugging off his coat, briefly making eye contact before glancing away, his shoulders rigid. He, like me, was haunted by what happened in the tunnels, but to speak of it…No, I wasn’t ready for that yet.
Better to focus on why this place made my instincts go haywire.
“Who does this estate belong to?” I ran my finger through the thick layer of dust on the table, my eyes watering from the smoke clogging the air. The incense was too strong, probably set out by Raziel or Tristan to hide the musty, abandoned odor. I set the lids back onto the pots and snuffed out the fire, the pungent aroma slowly dissipating.
“Why do you care?”
“Because I do.” I turned slowly to face him, hefting my pack over my shoulder, the knot in my chest tightening. “I want to know who lives here.”
“Nobody.” Tavion guiltily shifted his feet as if he were an errant schoolboy. “The castledidbelong to Lord and Lady Alaric Wynter, before they were put to death ten years ago. Another traitorous aristocratic family brought to their knees by the Fae King.” His gaze filled with cold violence, while I tried to decipher why.
“So something terrible happened here?” I turned on my heel, taking in the grand room, that odd, comforting smell wrapping around me like a blanket. “Did this castle ever belong to anyone I…I know?”
“No one you ever met.” Tavion had gone eerily still. “Why? What’s wrong, Anaria?”
“Nothing. I’m just surprised, is all.” I rolled my arms, my shoulders stiff with dread. “I didn’t think anyone lived outside the city walls, given everything in this horrid realm has withered and died.”
We’d emerged from the end of those black, horrid tunnels into a broken, withered forest, the smell of death staining the air. I’d forgotten how utterly ruined Caladrius was, how deeply the putrid corruption of this realm affected everything, even the unnatural stillness of the air.
There were no birds, no animals…no sounds of nature except for the roaring wind and the thunder of the waterfalls pounding the rocks into sand.
But no life.
I’d never realized how much I missed such things until they weren’t there.
“You’d be surprised how many monsters lurk outside the safety of those walls,” Tavion murmured, his gaze still fixed on me with unsettling intensity. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” He studied the ceiling, the windows with unnerving slowness.
“Nothing’s wrong, and monsters aren’t going to drop out of the ceiling. I was just curious, that’s all.” For a moment Tavion studied me as closely as he did everything else, then he dipped his head.
I walked to the arched window, losing my breath at how high up we were. “The views must have been something before everything died.” Indeed, a veil of icy mountain streams plunged straight down into the gorge, and beyond that loomed the broken, spiky tops of a once-lush forest and a sweep of brown wasteland that had once been green fields.
“Yes,” Tavion murmured, his face troubled. “They were.”
This house smelled unsettlingly familiar, but I’d never been here before.
There was a phrase for that in Varitus.Memento domummeant you were coming home to a place you did not yet know was home.
That’s what this place felt like—familiar yet wrong.
Unless Ihadbeen here before, when I was very young…and the forgotten memory was still lodged somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind.
Now that the reek of incense was fading, my enhanced Fae sense of smell picked up the subtleties I would have never discerned as a human. Someone had been here recently. A female, not one of us. And Tavion had been here, too. Long enough ago his woodsy scent was little more than a faint trace.
I didn’t like that.
Didn’t like I could smell the past so easily. Didn’t like the pictures his still-musky scent put in my head, especially on the heels of what had happened down in the tunnels.
There was the coppery tang of old blood and urine, the sour sharpness of terror. I spotted the dark streaks on the tile of the foyer. Blood, from the rusty color. My mouth dried out as the last of the incense faded away.
Because beneath all those lay something worse. The female’s scent was one I recognized all too well. And maybe should have expected.
Torin’s scent overlaid this place like a blanket, the heavy aroma of lilies.
Intertwined with the cloying incense, the flowery scent grew stronger to my right, where a grand staircase curved up to the second-floor balcony, and I shivered, the pervading chill growing stronger. Something—everything—was so, so wrong about this place.
A beautiful trap meant to ensnare us.
“Why did the Oracle choose this place for us to meet?” I asked carefully, already knowing Tavion would evade the question.
