He had to get away from the castle. Even dashing into the waist-high snow was preferable to being in that place. He turned on his heel, struggling as his boots were consumed by the thick snow. The icy depths reached just below his waist, making it impossible to run anywhere at all. He stumbled to his knees, with his hands outstretched in the snow. The ice dug in beneath his fingernails and scraped his palms. He gasped at the sheer extent of the cold that seemed to reach inside of him to his core, making him tremble.
“This… this cannot be happening. No.” He kept repeating the words as he managed to get to his feet again.
He hurried away, this time somehow managing a lumbering lope through the snow. He looked back at the castle over his shoulder every few seconds, as if it were a great beast that would follow him. The silhouette against the stars of the night was all too plain, the crenellations and the towers reaching high into the sky. It was foreboding with its motte and bailey structure, the great curtain wall domineering and surrounding him.
He ran for that wall, determined to find an escape. Perhaps if he kept running, he could escape this ice, and flee what he had just seen inside the west wing. Maybe if he ran far enough it would not be real. It would be some sort of mad dream.
He pushed through the giant gate at the side of the wall, pushing out onto a bridge that stretched out over the moat. The water was frozen solid, the ice like glass. He glanced at it with fear before he ran on, his boots slipping and sliding on the bridge.
“She can’t be gone. No. Please. Not again.”
When he reached the other side of the bridge, his boots skidded to a stop.
He hadn’t escaped her at all. The memory of her in that room had followed him, as if she were a ghost, now sent to torment him.
Stretched out in the snow in front of him was her figure. Her body clad in the thin gown didn’t move. The only thing that twitched at all was the white skirt as it was picked up by the wind. Her dark hair lay eerily flat on the ice, her eyes staring up at the sky above them. Her skin was as pale as the snow around her, unnaturally so.
She should have been full of life, laughter, joy, but as Rafe dared to near her, dared to get a better look, he saw, with horror, the tormented expression plastered across her face…
“Leave me alone!” The words roared from Rafe’s lips as he jerked up from his bed. He scrambled to be free of the sheets, falling to his knees beside the bed with a heavy thud.
“Rafe! Rafe?” a voice called from a distant doorway. There was heavy pounding on that door. “You are shouting in your sleep again.”
“…Simon?” Rafe Fitzroy blinked, trying to make sense of his surroundings. Slowly, he caught his bearings.
It was the same dream, the same one as always. He left the castle as he had done the night that his betrothed had died. He ran through the snow, but the dreams always tormented him further by recreating her deadly image in the snow somewhere on the outer lands of the castle. No matter where he ran or what path he took through the grounds, she continued to appear to torment him.
“I command the audience of the Duke of Ravensworth!” Simon shouted from a distance, banging on a door once again.
“I’m coming, man, hold your horse,” Rafe said weakly as he rubbed his sore head. The pounding had begun as he got up from the floor in the small apartments he rented and crossed into the nearest corridor.
There were but a few rooms in these apartments in Covent Garden. Expensive to rent for a space so small, but it suited him well enough, and the derelict exterior kept people and their prying eyes away.
Well, for the most part. Simon will always come.
“—well, it is hardly early morning, sir.” Rafe caught the last bit of Simon trying to assuage another tenant he’d awakened with his loud knocking.
He picked up a dressing gown from a nearby faulty pianoforte, and pulled it over his shirt and loose trousers on his way to the door, before opening it wide. He regretted it a moment later, for standing at the top of the staircase was Simon, backlit by the bright sun that filtered through the windows behind him.
“Argh,” Rafe complained, shielding his eyes.
“And a merry morning to you too,” Simon Linfield charmed with his usual buoyant tone as he stepped inside. “Let me take a guess. You havenotbecome a vampire overnight and this is in fact another headache, brought on to you by liquor, yes?”
“You do not need me to answer that.” Rafe backed up into the main sitting room of his accommodations as Simon followed him inside. Simon opened two vast sets of curtains, letting in the draught, as Rafe dropped down into the nearest chair, kicking away an empty bottle he’d discarded the night before.
“You’ve got to find a new way to live, old boy. You carry on at this rate and you’ll drink yourself into an early grave. And I—”
Rafe winced as Simon opened the last set of curtains.
“—have no wish to stand being a mourner at your graveside just yet. That should be saved for when we’re old and gray,” Simon added simply, turning his back to the sun. “Just how many spirits did you consume last night?” He nudged the empty bottle with his boot and set it rolling back to Rafe’s feet.
Rafe slowly picked it up along with a few others and returned them to a table nearby. In his obsessively neat way, he lined them up perfectly, so not a single one was out of place or at a jaunty angle.
“Too many. Strangely enough though,” he wheezed, “today, I find myself in agreement with you.”
“On what? That we’re not yet old and gray? You’ll get there before I.”
“Ha! I suppose I will.” Rafe laughed at his friend’s good humor. “No, I have been thinking something else. First, allow me a moment to get dressed, then let’s go for a walk.” He stood and hurried out of the room, heading back to his bedchamber.
