The corridor stretched before me like the throat of some great beast, dim and swallowing.
I walked it slowly, boots finding the familiar grooves where centuries of footsteps had worn the stone smooth, my mind still tasting the afternoon — the salt of Elira's skin, the broken sound she had made, the way her fingers had drifted toward her own soaked thighs before I had even closed the door. That image would keep me warm for a good long while. But warmth was a luxury I could not afford to linger in. Not yet. Not with the pieces still moving on the board.
The manor groaned around me, as if the building itself resented being standing. A draft curled through a crack in the eastern wall, carrying the faint roar of the sea below the cliffs. I passed the gallery where my father's portrait had once hung — the frame remained, empty, the canvas having been sold years ago by the original Caelum to cover a gambling debt I was only now beginning to appreciate the full stupidity of. Every corner of this house was a monument to mismanagement. Every room, a tomb for money that had once existed.
My present situation, if I were being honest with myself — and I generally tried to be, since lying to oneself was the fastest route to dying in a novel you had already read — was this: I was a disgraced lord in a falling house, surrounded by enemies wearing the uniforms of allies, condescended to by my own maid, cuckolded into irrelevance by a knight who had commandeered my father's chambers for his breeding wife, and in possession of a body that the original novel's author had designed for one purpose: to fail spectacularly and die miserably in a ditch somewhere around chapter forty.
Caelum Veyne, the villain of 'Blooming Thorns', was not a mastermind. He was a cautionary tale with legs. The novel had used him as a punching bag for the protagonist's growth — someone to be humiliated, stripped of his remaining lands, betrayed by every person he trusted, and ultimately executed for a crime he was too pathetic to have actually committed. His maid robbed him. His knights abandoned him. His territory was carved up by neighboring houses like a pie at a funeral. And the women — the women who should have been his leverage, his tools, his weapons — walked through his story without ever knowing he existed.
I had read that plot with the detached amusement of a man watching someone else's house burn. Now I was standing inside the house with the matches already lit.
First, I needed to handle things here. The small problems. The rats in the walls. Then I could widen the lens.
I turned the final corner and found Martha waiting outside my study door, as though she had been planted there by the universe specifically to illustrate my point about rats.
"Young Master!" Her face broke into that warm, round, motherly smile — the one that made her look like a woman who would knit you socks and tuck you in and call you 'dearie' while she counted the silverware she planned to steal. "You were gone for quite some time. I was beginning to worry."
'Worry that you might have done something useful with yourself and ruined my plans,' her inner voice added, sour as old milk. 'Where did this idiot wander off to? If he trips on the cliffs and dies before I empty the treasury, I swear I will haunt him myself.'
I smiled. The soft, grateful, slightly lost smile of a young man who believed every kind word he was given because the alternative was believing that the world was as cold as it actually was.
"Forgive me, Martha. I was visiting Lady Elira. A pleasant conversation. She is doing well." I paused at the door of my study, running a hand through my ash-grey hair — the gesture I had calibrated to perfection, the one that said 'I am young and uncertain and desperately need someone to tell me what to do.' "But I have been thinking. About the household. About the future."
Martha perked up. Not visibly — her expression remained fixed in that soft mask of maternal concern — but I could see it in the way her weight shifted forward onto her toes, the way her fingers curled slightly against her apron. The word 'future' had triggered something greedy in her lizard brain.
'The future? Is he going to talk about selling the property? If he liquidates the estate, the treasury will be counted by the Magistrate's men. I need to move before that happens. I need to get those keys—'
"I have decided," I said, opening the study door and stepping inside, "to trust you, Martha. Fully."
I crossed to the desk, opened the lower drawer — the one with the false bottom I had discovered that morning — and produced a heavy iron key. Old, ornate, the Veyne serpent coiled around its bow. The treasury key. The single most important object in this crumbling house, because it opened the only room that still contained anything of material value: a modest collection of gold coins, a few pieces of inherited jewelry, and the silver candlesticks that the original Caelum had been too stupid to sell.
Martha's eyes locked onto the key with the intensity of a hawk spotting a field mouse. Her pupils dilated. Her lips parted. Then, with admirable speed, she reassembled her expression into something approaching humble gratitude.
'He is giving me — the treasury key? This fool. This absolute, drooling fool. He is handing me everything I need. I could kiss him. No — I could laugh. I could laugh until I cry. What is wrong with this boy? Has the sea air rotted his brain?'
"Young Master, I… I am not certain this is appropriate," she said, her voice trembling with what she intended to sound like humility but what I could hear, quite clearly, was barely suppressed glee. "The treasury is a great responsibility. Perhaps Lord Veyne should retain—"
"You are the only one I trust," I said, and placed the key in her palm. Her fingers closed around it with the speed of a trap snapping shut. "The others have all left. The knights serve the capital, not me. Lady Elira is a guest. You are the only one who has stayed. Who has been like…" I let my voice trail off, let the word 'mother' hang unspoken in the air between us like a perfume she could not resist inhaling.
'I am nothing like your mother, you gullible child. But if you want to believe that while I strip your house bare, who am I to argue?'