POV: Verity
She had not gone to the east wing.
She wanted that to be clear — at least to herself — because she had been awake since before sunrise thinking about what Petra had said, and thinking about it had made her want to go there very badly, and wanting something badly was exactly when Verity had learned to make herself wait.
Wanting things too fast got you into carriages heading north. She knew that now.
So instead she explored everything else.
The kitchens first, because kitchens were safe and familiar and the cook gave her a bread roll without being asked, which was how she knew the staff here was different from what she had expected. Then the library, which was enormous and dusty and full of books she intended to come back to. Then the stables, where a brown horse put its nose against her shoulder immediately and she stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, just breathing.
She had not realized how much she needed one friendly thing.
She found the garden by accident — a small door in the back wall she almost walked past. She pushed it open and stopped.
Wild was the only word for it. Knee-high weeds, roses that had grown into tangled walls, a broken stone bench with a bird sitting on it that did not fly away when she stepped in. It was the most neglected, forgotten, quietly beautiful place she had ever seen.
She understood it immediately. She felt a little like it herself.
There was a boy sitting in the weeds.
He was small — maybe twelve — with knobby elbows and a book open across his knees and a look on his face like someone had interrupted something important. He stared at her with very large eyes.
She stared back.
"Are you the new wife?" he asked.
"I am not sure yet," she said.
He thought about this seriously, which she appreciated. Most adults did not take that kind of answer seriously. He nodded slowly, like it was a reasonable position, and then moved over on the broken bench — which was not really big enough for two people but he made room anyway.
"You can sit here if you want," he said. "I do not mind."
She sat.
His name was Emmett. He told her this the way children tell you things — directly, without waiting to be asked, like information was something you just handed over and expected back. He told her he had been at Ashenmoor for two years. He told her a border war had killed his parents and his older brother in the same week. He said it the way you say something that happened so long ago the pain has gone quiet — not gone, just quiet.
She told him she knew what it felt like to have no family.
He looked at her sideways. "How long?"
"Since I was four."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he tore his bread roll in half and held out the bigger piece without a word.
She took it.
They sat in the wild garden and ate bread and she thought that this was the most comfortable she had felt since the carriage left the city. There was something about Emmett — his straightforwardness, his complete lack of pretending — that made her shoulders drop for the first time in days.
"Does the duke know you come here?" she asked after a while.
"Probably." Emmett turned a page. "He knows most things."
"Do you like him?"
Emmett considered that. "He is not easy to like. But he came and got me himself. After the war. He did not send someone — he came. And he said I could stay as long as I wanted." He looked at his book. "He does not say things he does not mean. That is rarer than people think."
Verity thought about the note on the carriage. The warning. The four blankets.
A man who does not say things he does not mean.
She filed that away.
"Emmett," she said carefully. "The east wing. What is in there?"
His face changed. Not fear exactly. Something more complicated — like he knew something he had decided not to know.
"He goes there at night sometimes," Emmett said quietly. "I used to hear him when I first arrived. Walking. Just walking, back and forth, for hours." He paused. "I asked Petra once. She said it was where he went when things got too loud in his head."
Verity looked at the wild garden. At the roses that had grown with nobody watching them.
"Has he always worn the mask?" she asked.
Emmett shook his head. "There is a portrait in the upper hall. Before the mask." He hesitated. "Someone did that to him, Petra says. On purpose. Someone who was supposed to protect him."
The bread in her hand had gone cold.
She was about to ask who — she needed to ask who — when Emmett suddenly grabbed her arm.
"Do not turn around," he whispered.
His face had gone very pale.
"Someone is standing at the garden door," he said. "And it is not the duke."