AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Soon, the tapered stone walls widened, and that empty darkness gave way to tombs and ancient stone statues. Many of those statues were as old as Winslowe Castle itself. They lurked far back in the crypt, the silent guardians of her family’s legacy. The recently deceased Winslowes and their esteemed household members stood by the opening.
Blanchette paused as the eyes of her kin seemed to track her every move.
I have betrayed them all, she thought as she glanced up at Rowan Dietrich. What am I doing? I had promised…
“The crypt goes back almost a mile,” She waved her hand, gesturing at the line of stone statues.
“A mile?”
“Well, it felt like that when I was a girl. A thousand years of my family’s dynasty lies here, written in eternal stone.” She hesitated, then ran her fingers over a statue. She savored the feel of it, the coarse stone plucked straight from Norland’s soil. “And now we have returned to the dust… as if we had never lived at all.”
Rowan stepped in front of her and blocked her view of King Bartholomew II’s statue and tomb. “No. You still stand, Blanchette Winslowe.” He grazed a curl that’d come loose from beneath her hood. “You are here to carry out the best of your family. Do you understand me?”
The power of words escaped her. Dumbly, she nodded, watching as the firelight played off Rowan’s expression. He looked regal. Beautiful. And darkly imposing.
He walked forward, then stepped to the side, urging the lantern to illuminate a dark crevice along the wall. Gradually, the light revealed everything. Two large chests sat before her, their dark wood oiled to a sleek shine. Their hinges of gold glinted like stars within the crypt. A smaller one of the same design sat beside it. Behind the three gilded chests stood her brother’s, mother’s, and grandmother’s likenesses. Smoke sat beside the chests, as still as the statues themselves.
“I made them myself,” he said, gesturing to the chests. “Your brother, mother, and grandmother belong here with the rest of their family.” Rowan paused, the lantern’s light brightening his gaze. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring you here sooner, Blanchette. And I’m sorry I must bring you here at all. Finding a stonemason who knew your brother’s likeness took a while. He deserved to be carved by someone who cared for him and knew his face.”
Indeed. Willem was supposed to have much more time.
Blanchette’s chest tightened as she stepped before her mother’s statue. “God. Willem, Mother…” she said, her voice choked with emotion. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her stomach. Her cries came softly. Deeply. Smoke leaned forward and sniffed her hair. He licked away her tears with his rough tongue.
She tilted her head back to stare up at Rowan. He stood before her, over six feet of uncompromising male, the hard lines of his face accented in the light. He moved toward the parallel wall and slipped the lantern onto a mounted peg. Then he reached down to Blanchette and offered his large hand. “Thank you, Rowan. Thank you… I…”
“Shh.”
She placed her hand on his and came to her feet. Blanchette inhaled, then ran her fingers over the chest’s beautiful engraving. Her house’s sigil was etched in wood so dark that it was almost black, along with her family’s words in elegant script.
She traced her brother’s name, feeling connected to her family in a way she hadn’t experienced since the siege. Her trembling fingers joggled the latch as she opened the small chest. Inside lay her brother’s ashes. She realized it’d been a kindness to her, remembering how Willem had looked that terrible night.
“What they did to him… it was an evil too great for me to fathom,” he murmured as if reading her mind. “It was never my intention.”
Blanchette nodded and swiped away tears with the back of her hand. “I know. I know it wasn’t.”
Yet if you hadn’t come, if you hadn’t stormed my home, he’d still be here.
Her tears turned cold. They dried on her cheeks as a much darker emotion flew through her. Smoke bristled past them and toward the crypt’s entrance, the shadows swallowing him up.
“I was never a good child,” Rowan murmured, his gaze fixed on where the lantern blazed. “I killed my mother coming into this world. I respected my father, honored him even… yet never forgave him for leaving me year after year, season after season, battle after battle.” He ran his fingers across the dusty stone floor, idly fidgeting with loose rocks and coarse stones. “The number of days and nights… the number of hours I sat at my window, waiting for my father to return… incalculable. Those days and hours are nothing but dust in the wind now,” he said, brushing dust from his hands. He picked up a stone and turned it absently between his thumb and forefinger. Blanchette watched his large, powerful hands move with fascination. “And when my heart’s desire came true—when he returned home—I felt only resentment. Even hatred. Whatever love I’d felt had been extinguished within that darkness. My father… well, he hated me too. He never could forgive me for taking away the one person he’d ever loved.”
“Your mother?” She looked up at him, watching as he wistfully stared forward.
“My mother,” he repeated. “And I hated her. Because she’d died. I knew that’s what had driven him away. After that, I was never a son again. Just another soldier under his command… under his Gray Wolf banner.”
Blanchette stared at the stone statue. “It’s no easy thing, feeling their absence when their ghosts always linger in the shadows. Nor is it easy to feel that anger. Their passing leaves an emptiness… and sometimes it’s less painful to fill that emptiness, even if it’s with something ugly.” She felt his stare riveted on her. The tears came back to her eyes. She furiously blinked them away. “How do you sleep, Rowan?” She rose and brushed the dirt from her skirts and cloak. “After all you have seen? How?”
Rowan’s firm hand was on her shoulder. He placed two fingertips underneath her chin and carefully tilted her head back. His eyes shone in the lantern’s light, touching something deep inside her.
“I sleep because there’s still beauty in the world, Blanchette. And when I close my eyes, I see that.”
* * *
Rowan gazed across the desolate moors of Norland, where only shadows walked. He had a toy wolf in his restless hands. It was made of dark wood and had movable limbs, a tail, and a snarling mouth.
Rowan sat until darkness covered Norland, and then he watched nothing at all.
Time warped and wavered. Rowan glanced down at his hands—where a toy wolf once prowled now lay a sword. His eyes fixed on the horizon, he ran an oiled cloth down the cool metal until it shimmered. His hands were large, callused—no longer the soft hands of a boy but those of a man grown.
