And he was right.
Searrach walked toward him slowly. “He already knows,” she whispered through a smile. The snow fell on her dark hair, turning it white in the flickering light. “He knew before you.And so did I.”
“What are you talking about?” Padraig managed to croak.
She walked closer to him, another pair of steps. “Your precious Beryl was supposed to have been a servant—a very special servant—of Lady Paget’s. Only,” she was just a hand’s breadth from him now—“Lord Paget didn’t know her. Wherever she’s come from, it’s nae from Elsmire Tower. He told his good friend, Lord Hargrave, just aftertheir arrival.”
Padraig was as still as the stone monoliths rising out of the earth around Darlyrede.
“Lord Hargrave told you this, did he?” Padraig asked at last. “It doesna seem like the sort of information he’d share with a servant.”
“He’s shared lots with me,” Searrach said. “I’ll nae forget any of it. And now neither will Beryl. Or whatever her name is. My lord was quite put out when he found out she’d been lying all this time, in such close quarters with his sickly,pathetic wife.”
Searrach reached out and grasped a fistful of his cloak. “There is naught you can do to save her now. You must believe me. She’s gone. Vanished, like all the others. We must leave this place.”
He pulled away from her with a jerk, and after a confused blink, her brows drew downward and she gave afurious shriek.
“You’ll naeleave me here!”
Padraig caught her wrists as she struck out at him, not feeling the pain from the pulling of his wound on his ribs, but the sensation of warmth took over his flank. He wrested her to the ground and then stepped away, leaving her in theflattened snow.
“I’m sorry, Searrach. I’ve no wish for harm to come to you. Take shelter here for the night,” he said as he retrieved his mount from where it was tied and led the animal in a circle away from the fire. “Then, in the morning, if you haven’t changed your mind, take the horse and gowhile you can.”
“You can’t save her! She’s already gone!” Searrach insisted in a hysterical screech. “Come back!”
But Padraig did what his young father hadn’t had the strength to do those thirty years past. He mounted and turned the horse sharply back in the direction of Darlyrede. It reared with an affronted scream and then bolted into the storm, carrying Padraig back to that house of the damned and the bigger storm that waitedfor him there.
Chapter 17
Iris first became aware of flickering light beyond her eyelids, and then cold seeping into her aching bones. She wondered if she had somehow managed to escape Lord Hargrave and wandered out of doors before she fainted, for she was lying on her back on what must be frozen ground. It was so very cold…
Her eyelids felt weighted as they fluttered open, and she saw what she thought was the black sky above her, sparkling with starlight and a nearby fire. Was she in the courtyard? But no, her vision began to clear, and she realized it was a ceiling she stared at, pulsating with dazzling torchlight. Her head ached so, she raised a hand to try to shield her eyes.
But her arm stopped not even halfway to its intended destination, the dull clang of a chain sounding out. She jerked her arm in an attempt to free it while her eyes sought out the reason for her impeded movement.
She was restrained.
Her other arm too was hampered by a cuff of iron about her wrist, attached to a clinking chain. She kicked her feet, digging in her heels in an attempt to gain a seated position, but they were clamped to whatever sort of slab on which she lay. Iris stilled, trying not to gasp for breath in the frigid air, the pain in her head like searing icicles through her brain with each strangled inhalation.
Where was she? What had happened to her?
The last thing she could recall was Vaughn Hargrave breeching the sanctity of Euphemia’s chamber.
What had happenedto Lady Caris?
“Hello?” she called out, the words scratching along her parched throat like a sledge through dry summer fields. “Can anyone hear me?” Her voice recalled back to her, indicating that the dark ceiling was not veryfar above her.
Iris turned her head to locate the source of the light, and saw oddly striped flickering on a faraway wall. Several blinks of her eyes revealed that it wasn’t the flame itself that was striped, but that she was viewing the torch through a set of iron bars.
Shewas in a cell.
“Help!” she cried out toward the door. “Help me! Is someone there? Help!”
The only answer was the crackle of the torch that didn’t so much as flutter. No breeze. The cold air around her smelled metallic, like sharpened steel or…orblood, somehow.
Where was she? How had she come to be here?
Iris turned her face back up to the ceiling with a strangled sob. She drew ina deep breath.
