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Or was it all a horrific nightmare?
The traitors. The attack on the castle, the violent assault on her home. All of those faces she had recognized. Grandmother’s blood staining her hands.
She remembered that most of all.
Darkness came again to the Rockbluff River. And this time, she welcomed it like an old friend.
* * *
She awoke.
“Mother?” Her voice was a whisper, drowned out by the thundering river and her exhaustion. The rain had momentarily stopped. Pain spiked through her cheek and leg as she squinted against the blanket of the night. The darkness pressed down as hard as the cold. Moonlight battled to shine through the trees—just enough filtered through to illuminate the limp figure lying next to her.
Blanchette crawled over to the body. Fear mounted inside her, the horror of everything sucking breaths from her burning lungs.
I should just close my eyes and fall asleep.
Perhaps she’d wake from this nightmare when she opened them again, safe and warm and inside her solar with her governess.
I shall not die like this—alone and cold and frightened of the dark.
Vomit running down her throat, she shifted and fought to pull herself out of the river’s bank, grasping, grasping for purchase, grasping for anything. Her fingers curled into the wet earth, and mud sloshed below her cut and bleeding leg. Despite the numbing coldness of the river, pain jackknifed through her with each movement. God, that ice cold paralyzed her body and soul.
She strained forward and fought to climb out of the shallow bank. That simple exertion purged the breath from her lungs. She moved a few inches, then slid backward in vain as the current wrestled for her. Her county, her very soil, betrayed her. The river itself wanted to spirit her away, and those protruding tree limbs reached for her like arms.
She laid her head on its side and fixed her gaze on her mother’s drowned body. She’d smashed against the rocks several times. The impact had burst open her arms and chest. Her blood ran thick and black in the grim darkness.
“Oh, Mother…”
Blanchette wished for death at that moment.
Darkness swept her away again, but she never woke from the nightmare.
* * *
Some men called him a conqueror, others a liberator. Some whispered murderer.
But most men were sheep, and he was a wolf.
Rowan Dietrich, the Black Wolf of Norland, removed his helm and set it on the chair’s massive curved armrest. He was neither a lord nor a nobleman by any stretch of the imagination, yet he sat on a throne fit for a king all the same.
He even sat on it with grace.
He’d been born into a great house, he supposed, but that house was long gone—only dust in the pages of history.
And now the dust had finally settled.
Rowan adjusted his body with a tired groan, the sound emerging from his bones. Gnarled tree limbs snaked together to form the chair’s arms, and a slab of rough-hewn stone served as the backrest. It was an imposing seat to look upon and a pain in the arse to sit.
No king or man should sit on a throne comfortably. Not while the burden of the realm lays upon his shoulders.
Rowan reflected that King Bartholomew had hardly sat on the throne at all. He watched as light from a torch caught in his helm’s crude metal.
His wolf, Smoke, sat beside the chair—an extension of himself. His flinty dark coat resembled his namesake, and his yellow eyes shone like lanterns. Rowan kneaded the scruff of his neck. Silent and still, Rowan and Smoke studied the legendary throne room of Winslowe Castle.
It was a vast, shadowy space, lit only by the hearth and flickering torch set in a sconce along the wall. The stone floor was cold and hard underfoot, and the ceiling loomed forty feet above, lost in darkness. Tapestries adorned the walls and depicted scenes of battles and hunts. Their rich colors were muted in the dim light.
The throne itself was draped in a velvet cloak and adorned with gold filigree, and its high back was carved with the kingdom’s crest.
