Through the archway, the balcony continued, jutting away from the keep with a stone railing at its edge some ten paces off, catching the static moon’s light. It ran the length of the building and continued around a corner where she had to have gone. A guard stood just outside the arch he’d passed through, looking rather bored as he leaned against the wall. Damien stepped up to the man and politely greeted him with a hand on his shoulder. The arcana that had been begging to be used all night sank down into him easily. “Wouldn’t it be nice to go inside and have a little break?”
Without a word, he did exactly that, and Damien frowned after him. Maybe this would be easier than he thought.
The sounds of the ballroom all fell back into a gentle murmur of music and the occasional voice that rose above the others the farther he got from the archway. The balcony continued on around the corner, the stone wall overrun with a thick ivy that had climbed its way up the entire side of the keep. Jutting out of the wall was a fountain, a round pool of water at its bottom in a raised basin and a stone figure of a woman pouring a jug into it. The gentle trickle of water plunking off the body into the pool filled the quiet left behind in the absence of the gathering’s noise.
Amma sat on the pool’s edge staring out into the darkness of the night beyond the balcony’s railing. Moonlight on her face, tears glistened across her cheeks. There was that urge to kill again, and Damien clenched a fist around smoke in his palm, but it was easier to quell this time. And then he had a different urge, something confusing that he couldn’t quite identify, but that made his chest twinge again and his voice go soft. “Amma?”
She started, jumping to her feet, and then she wiped at her face. “Oh, gods, I’m sorry, I know you don’t like crying.”
He crossed the balcony to stand before her. “Don’t apologize, you don’t need to.”
She nodded, taking a deep breath. “I know. Sorry.”
“Amma, don’t—” It was Damien’s turn to sigh deeply. He wanted to hold her, to crush her to him, but that would have been wildly unacceptable in this strange world they’d been thrust into, the part he was suddenly playing of powerless stranger, and her standing as baroness. Though he supposed even in their previous roles as captor and abductee it would have been inappropriate too. If only there were no guises to don.
He tried to catch her eye as she stared down at what would have been her feet if not for all that tulle. “It’s not so bad,” he said quietly, and she glanced up from under a pinched brow. “The dress, I mean. It would be much worse if it were, you know, maybe yellow?”
Amma pressed her lips together, but a weak laugh came out anyway. “It is awful, isn’t it? I can barely move, and it’s so itchy, you wouldn’t believe.” She actually dug down into the neckline then, scratching at her chest. “But it makes my mother happy, and she asks so little. At least that’s what she always says when she’s convincing me of something.”
Damien raised his brows. “Your parents,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “they are as you described them.”
Amma bit her lip. “Are they? I sort of left out the part about them being nobles.”
“You did.”
“I should have told you before we got to Faebarrow.”
They stood for a moment in a chilling breeze, and then Damien swallowed. “I don’t think I’ve ever made telling me anything very easy for you, Amma.” He flexed a hand, wanting to take hers. “But, please, you can tell me now. Everything. What in the Abyss is going on here?”
There was still hesitation in her, but she eventually pointed out over the balcony. “It’s even worse now.”
Damien turned and stepped up to the stone railing. A courtyard with a manicured lawn and hedges was directly below, shrouded in the shadows of night. Just past that and beyond the wall of the keep, there was an open field, though it hadn’t always been that way, he could tell by the carnage left behind. There was still a swath of liathau, leaves changing and blood red even in the moonlight, ringing the edge of what was once an orchard, but the rest was simply rows and rows of hacked up stumps where liathau once stood.
“We wouldneverharvest so many in a season,” said Amma, voice turning to anger though still run through with sorrow. She gripped the railing, her delicate fingers pressing down hard. “They don’t grow at a quick enough rate to replenish something like this, and cutting them before their time yields chaotic magic anyway. It’s not healthy, it’s not even safe. And you should see the greenhouse. Liathau don’t grow anywhere else but here, but they’ll all be dead and gone if the crown keeps at it like this.”
“This has been ordered by that king of yours?”
Amma nodded. “Brineberth acts on his orders. It’s why they came here in the first place. Why Cedric is here.” When she said his name with a hatefulness Amma had never used before, Damien heard everything he needed to know.
“Then get rid of him,” he was quick to tell her. “I know you have a difficult time saying no, but you—”
“It’s not like that for me, Damien,” she snapped, hand going to her face again and wiping away another tear. “I’m not a lord with any power and the arcana to back it up; I’m a bargaining chip. And there’s no telling Cedric Caldor no anyway. He just takes whatever he wants—whatever he thinks he deserves.”
Damien knew Cedric’s actions were immoral, and he also knew they were meant to be admirable to a blood mage, but now they only made his stomach twist and his heart yearn for blood.
Amma sighed, blinking out at the orchard. “Brineberth March has stood between Faebarrow and the aggressors on the other side of the sea for centuries. They’ve always focused on military prowess, and we’ve relied on them for just as long, never bothering to grow our own forces. Even now, we’ve only got a small handful of city guards to keep the peace and an aging royal guard that drinks with my father more than it ever spars. We had an even trade with Brineberth though, we sell to them at cost an allotted amount of liathau, and we house and school their military officers. It has always been like this if you read about our history, but Cedric’s parents hated the way my parents ran things. They always thought the citizens of the barony should work for half what they do and produce twice as much.” This she said with a bite, snorting. “It doesn’t help that my family isn’t as old as the Caldors. We can’t map our heritage back to a blessed mage or a descendant of a dominion like so many other nobles. We just have Sestoth’s gift of the land fertile enough for liathau to grow and the trees. Well, had.”
Damien nodded, listening. Most of the nobles of the realm had some arcane lineage, but barons were at the bottom of the royal hierarchy.
“But the Caldors died a few years ago, suddenly in an accident, and their two sons took over. Cedric’s got an older brother, Roman, who should have inherited the march, but Roman’s always been a little dense. Cedric came here last year, and when he called himself a marquis, no one questioned it. He charmed everyone, especially my parents. When he asked to marry me, it felt like I had to say yes, but I knew something was wrong. And then more of his soldiers came, just for protection he said, but they were changing things, and I tried to stall, I tried to explain to him that we couldn’t harvest like he wanted—like he said the crown wanted. He pretended to listen at first, but I think he got sick of playing nice with me, especially once he realized he could just…” She released the railing of the balcony and stepped back, eyes searching the orchard but not really seeing it.
“This is why you wanted the scroll.”
Amma tipped her head down, something like embarrassment or guilt clouding her features in the dark. “He only wants to marry me to absorb the barony and make it his own. I understand my duty is to do what’s right for this place, and I don’t need him to love me, but I thought I could at least convince him to care for Faebarrow like I do, to understand how it needs to be tended to. I thought if I just gave him what he wanted…but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to use force—I didn’t even have a force to use, but I ran out of options.” She shook her head tightly, wrapping her arms around herself and looking so small, lost in the cloud of blue that was her dress. “He knows what I did. He knows I ran off on my own, that I staged the kidnapping. He’s not stupid enough to think it was a coincidence I disappeared right before we were meant to be married. When he said someone would pay for this, he meant me.”
Damien would never let that happen, he would cut Cedric’s throat before he could order her condemnation, slice off his limbs before he could raise a hand to her, behead him before he even thought to hurt her, but the resigned look on Amma’s face told him she wouldn’t believe him if he said any of that. And what did words alone mean anyway?
“I gave you bad directions,” he said, remembering when they’d met and he had deemed her too naive, too small, toogoodto take on the Ebon Sanctum Mallor. There was a pang in Damien’s stomach, a feeling he had once thought completely foreign so easily identifiable as guilt now that he wondered how he had never understood it before.
