The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Seventeen: The Lord of Ashenveil

Caelum Vance

The roses in the south gallery had been replaced sometime in the afternoon.

I noticed this the way I noticed everything in Ashenveil Keep — with complete and total indifference. They were perfect, as always. Deep crimson, not a petal out of place, their fragrance precisely calibrated to the dimensions of the gallery. Maren had chosen that variety forty years ago because I had mentioned, once, that I found the smell of roses tolerable.

I had not mentioned it since.

I stood at the tall south window and watched the last of the sun bleed out of the sky. The courtyard below was settling into the blue-grey of early dusk, the fountain still running, the gravel still raked into precise lines, the two day guards finally retreating as the light failed. Everything in Ashenveil was always exactly as it should be.

In my hand was a glass of wine I had been holding for the better part of an hour. At some point in the distant past I had made a habit of pouring it, of holding it, of bringing it occasionally to my lips. The smell of it still reached me — dark fruit, oak, the ghost of something that had once meant pleasure. The taste was another matter. I had learned that particular lesson only once, two centuries ago, and had not repeated it.

I held the glass and watched the sky darken and waited for Thomas.

He arrived as the last grey light left the courtyard, appearing at the gallery entrance with the particular stillness he had cultivated over thirty years in my service — present without intruding, close enough to speak, far enough to retreat. He was sixty-three now. I had watched him arrive as a young man of thirty-two with brown hair and an earnest expression, watched the hair go grey, then white, watched the lines settle into his face with the patient industry of time.

He was, as humans went, exceptionally useful.

“My lord,” he said.

“Thomas.” I did not turn from the window. The last color was leaving the sky. “Tell me.”

He relayed it without editorializing, which was one of the reasons I had kept him so long. Kaida Hawkins, Alpha’s daughter, had been taken two days ago in Greymore Forest. Her carriage had been stopped, her guards bound and left on the roadside where her brother had subsequently found them. The girl and her maid had been taken by a rogue mercenary and his company. Identity unknown. Trail already cold by the time Thomas reached the scene — the brother’s search party had been through before them, churning the ground, muddying the scent.

He finished speaking.

The gallery was very quiet.

I looked at the wine glass in my hand. The deep still red of it, going black in the failing light.

“Direction,” I said.

“North, my lord. Possibly east. The trail was unclear.”

North. Away from me, through forests I could not follow her into until dark, moving further with every hour my men had spent waiting for the sun to set before they could bring me word.

I set the wine glass down on the narrow stone ledge beside the window. I set it down very carefully, with great precision, making sure it was perfectly level.

Something moved in the room. Not physically. Thomas took a small step backward.

I became aware of my own stillness in a way I rarely was. The particular quality of it. I clasped my hands behind my back and looked out at the darkened courtyard and let the silence run for a moment before I trusted myself to continue.

She had come to me three months ago. Slipped through the membrane of sleep like smoke through a keyhole — uncertain, unguided, entirely unaware of where she had arrived or what she had wandered into. I had watched her move through the dreamscape with the stunned attention of a man encountering color after a very long grey time. She had no framework for what she was doing. No language for it, no control. Just that warm, luminous presence moving through my dreams with a curiosity that should have been irritating.

It was not irritating.

I stopped that thought precisely where it was.

“Assemble a party,” I said. “Discreet. Four men, no more. Trackers, not soldiers.”

“Yes, my lord.” A pause, carefully placed. “And their instructions?”

“Find her.” I turned from the window. Thomas was watching me with those careful weathered eyes that had spent thirty years learning to read every variation of my silences. I watched him search his catalogue and find nothing that matched this one. “Don’t touch her. Don’t speak to her. Don’t let her know she’s been found.” I moved past him toward the door. “And Thomas.”

“My lord.”

“When they find the mercenary — his associates are to be dealt with. Quietly.” I paused at the gallery entrance. “Leave the mercenary himself until I can be present.”

I left him standing among the perfect roses and walked back through the perfect corridors of my perfect keep and felt, for the first time in longer than I cared to calculate, something that was almost like urgency.

It was, all things considered, deeply inconvenient.