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The smell assaulted her first: dust, damp, and, worst of all…decomposition.
There was something dead in here.
Rats squeaked and scurried; she startled at them, as they ran over her boots and out the door, but Alpha sent her a reassurance that there were no humans in the manor – none alive, anyway.
She kept going, across once-pristine tile and parquet floors that creaked underfoot. Up the wide, double-curve staircase. The smell got stronger as she moved: past ransacked salons, a toppled library, linen cupboards with sheets and towels torn out onto the ground. She knew, after the first few minutes, where she would find the corpse, and who it must be: Connor’s wife, who’d plotted against him, and married his brother once Connor could be declared dead.
At the top of the second floor, in the master’s chambers, torchlight slid over rumpled carpets, torn-down drapes, and, finally, the ravaged, murdered corpse of Connor’s former bride, mummified in a sea of once-fine lace and disordered linen.
Amelia took a moment to regulate her breathing and swallow down her gag reflex. Then, turning her back on the body, she searched the room. There was evidence of the Sels, here: smashed ceramics, slashed paintings; dirty handprints on the fine, watered silk wallpaper.
It was a scene in which destruction had been rendered as a fear tactic. A place where a person had been violated not only physically, but emotionally and mentally, too.
She moved on, skin crawling. Walked through room after empty room, noticing not evidence of Sel violence, but of disuse and abandonment that had begun before. Half the furniture had been stacked and draped with old oilcloths. Connor’s brother hadn’t been wining and dining anyone once he’d taken on the mantle of duke. Dust had gathered, windows had been left unwashed; then the Sels had done their worst on what finery remained.
She paused in the ballroom, torchlight fluttering around her in a puddle that didn’t reach the darkest edges of the wide space. The only sounds were the hiss and crackle of the torch, and the echo of her own pulse in her ears. The place was cold in a way that only abandoned buildings could be.
Amelia turned, bootheels grinding over grit and dust on the once-fine floor, and went to see about starting some fires in the hearths.
~*~
Word of the war starting had arrived at Hope Hall last spring, during the first ball of the season: a glittering affair that had left the ballroom steaming with humidity, the doors thrown open to a cold night where torches and braziers glowed out on the slates of the patio. Reginald had just finished bowing to his latest dance partner, the lovely and flushed Miss Theodora Dover, and caught the wink of the rather dashing young footman handing out glasses of punch, when Reginald’s father, Lord Arthur, pushed through the crowd, face drained of all color.
“Come with me,” he’d said, taking Reginald’s elbow and steering him out onto the patio and down its wide steps until they stood at the edge of the garden, expression grim in the glow of lantern light.
He’d held a missive straight from the capital: the Selesee navy had blockaded Aquitaine Bay, and the enemy was landing all up and down the Crownlands. An invasion. A war.
The kingdom had been in a state of bucolic peacetime his whole life. Truth told, the first thought of riding into battle, in his flashing clean armor, on his prancing charger, had thrilled him. He was the finest jouster, most skilled horseman among the young lords in the east; he won every tournament with ease. What better than a chance to prove himself in real combat? He’d grown bored of balls, and dances, and coat closet trysts anyway.
But war, it turned out, was nothing like a tournament.
His mother had called it miraculous, his hanging gone wrong, but Reggie knew the truth: he’d died that day. At least for a little while. One second longer, and he would have stayed dead.
Sometimes, he wished he had.
Even now, with the occasional gust of wind from overhead, the little whirlwinds stirred by dragon wings, and the glow of dozens of pitch torches, Reggie’s skin crawled with dread.
The Inglewood was shadowy, dense, and indecipherable during the height of day; in the deep black of night, it was a horror.
Reggie led his men – what few remained after his disastrous campaign in the capital – as well as those of Drakewell and Norbury. Providing the all-important rearguard was Lord Edward and his Neden forces, the forbidding marshes of their home duchy having better-equipped them to handle the wildness trying to close in around them.
The woodland outlaws, the Strangers, were on point: most on foot, a few moving between the treetops in impossible fashion. The ones on the road held torches; Reggie had no idea how the ones in the trees were seeing anything…but every so often, there would be a rattle or a crash in the brush, in the trees, somewhere, and scouts would call back messages.
Only a wolf.
Just some birds.
A badger.
Reggie didn’t want to encounter any of those things.
Out in the night, something screamed.
Reggie drew his horse to a halt with a not-so-little jolt, hands tightening to fists on the reins, legs going to jelly. His horse snorted, and shied, and he reached woodenly to stroke his neck.
Beside him, Connor chuckled, even as the blood-curdling scream repeated. “It’s only a lion.”
Reggie sent him a nasty look, heart hammering – as nasty as he was capable; his face was probably pale and drawn after that scare. “Oh, ‘only a lion.’ That sounds perfectly safe.”
