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“Oh, my sweet girl. You know well I can barely make it to my chamber pot,” she said with self-deprecating humor, a toothless grin lighting her features. Then she grabbed Blanchette’s arm with surprising strength and held her still, her eyes imploring, pleading, looking deep within. “Escape this place. Through the tunnels. Do it for me, Blanchette, and for your people, if not for yourself.”
My people have betrayed me. She shook her head stubbornly. “Don’t ask that of me. I won’t! I can’t. I cannot leave you here. I shall die first!”
Grandmother surrendered to a smile, smoothed her fingers over the red cloak, and absently meddled with its fabric. “You’re wearing the riding cloak I made for you three winters ago.” Blanchette weakly returned her smile as a dark, painful silence swelled between them. That silence spoke volumes, impossible truths, and things they dared not say. “You can, Blanchette, and you will. You are capable of more than you know. You are good, and you are strong. Much stronger than your father’s ever been, God forgive his soul,” she emphasized with a squeeze of her arm. “My time has come. But you are my blood, and you shall survive this. You shall grow old and weary like me, with grandchildren at the foot of your bed. Swear to me. Promise me, Blanchette. Promise me, and you shall leave me well.”
Blanchette studied every detail of her grandmother, tucking them in a secret and hidden corner of her heart—her white and neatly plaited hair, the back of her hands, swathed with a bluish web of veins, and the deep-set smile wrinkles framing her eyes.
Those blue eyes were fixed on her now.
Staring. Searching. Imploring.
“I promise.”
Blanchette stood with a last kiss from her grandmother and a playful pinch to her cheek. With a shaky inhale, she prepared to do the hardest thing she’d ever done.
But a voice stilled her.
“Princess Blanchette?”
Yes, yes, God is good.
Blanchette crossed herself in a clumsy movement as hope stirred anew.
She nearly wept at the sight of Thomas, a servant who’d stood by her crib twenty-one years ago while the bells of Winslowe Castle rang from dawn until dusk. He’d helped her collect kingswood from the forest and taught her how to fish from the nearby Rockbluff River that she’d adored so much. His neatly combed auburn hair and freckled face were a welcome sight indeed.
“My mother? My brother, Willem?” she asked, scrambling over to Thomas and grabbing his chainmail jerkin. Blood stained the metal and darkened her fingers and palms. He’d suffered injuries already.
“They are safe, Princess. Away from the jaws of the Black Wolf.”
She exhaled a sigh of relief, and then a weary smile formed on her lips. “Oh, thank God for you, Thomas. Are you sure? They are well?”
“Yes, they are safe, Princess,” he reaffirmed. He flashed a smile that didn’t fit right.
“Help me, then. Help me get her out quickly. Please, my grandmother?—”
Crash—
Winslow Castle rumbled and quaked. On the opposite side of the bed, Thomas crept beside Grandmother Sybil, where her head lay upon a throne of feather pillows. She shouted protests at them, begging them to use any spare moments to smuggle Blanchette away. Blanchette merely hushed her grandmother and implored her to remain calm.
Thomas stood over her and locked gazes with Blanchette. She saw something in his eyes that made her shudder.
Something she didn’t like.
Something that caused her hair to stand on end.
A sudden and deep hatred.
The sounds and smells of the battle raged on and closed in on the three of them like a shroud. The scent of death had already begun to take hold and waft down the corridors. Thomas’s gaze rose to the large viewing window, where the night appeared as black as ink.
Neither the moon nor a star was in sight.
“Thomas? What are you doing? We haven’t time for this!”
He stared at that blackness, apparently watching something unfold inside his mind. “I can’t recall a winter harsher than our last one,” he said slowly, speaking with the voice of a man drunk on grief. “My family… I visited them as often as I could. I tried to help them out as best I could. Watching them waste away, starve, freeze… before my very eyes. Well, that’s not something a man soon forgets, Princess. I believe I have your father to thank for that.”
It happened in a chaotic blur of movement.
Thomas seized Grandmother’s neckline and jerked her up and forward.
