Seraphina blinked and shot her husband a bewildered look.
What was he doing with one of the High Shepherd’s knights?
“Nothing, Dame Florence,” Aldric bit out, his voice strained, brittle. “Just my wife come for a visit.”
Dame Florence frowned and looked toward her instead, where she still knelt on the ground, stunned. “Sure didn’t sound like nothing,” the lady knight grumbled. “All that racket was scaring Reyla.”
Reyla.
Seraphina studied the Drakmori woman curiously. She didn’t look scared. She didn’t look much of anything. Her expression wasperfectly deadpan as she gazed off to the side, seemingly looking at nothing in particular. Beneath the weight of Dame Florence’s arm, Reyla even rocked from side to side and hummed a little tune to herself, seemingly content.
While Seraphina knelt there, trying to make sense of this strange situation, Olivia scrambled backward, clutching her right hand against her chest. Murder flashed in her friend’s eyes. “You broke my hand, Crow.”
Without missing a beat, Aldric snarled, “You stabbed my foot, Weasel.”
“You’re a mounted unit,” Olivia snapped back. “You don’t need your feet.”
“I need them towalk—”
“Aldric,” Seraphina softly interrupted, lifting her eyes to his shadowed face. “What’s going on?” None of this was making any sense. This couldn’t be what she and Olivia had first thought it was.
Could it?
Without a word, her Crow held out his hand to her. Cautiously, she accepted it and let him help her to her feet. She felt terribly out of place now, standing before these other women in the middle of the night, dressed in only one of Olivia’s simple shirts and a pair of men’s trousers.
Twitching her cloak tighter about herself, she did her best to stand perfectly still beneath Dame Florence’s sharp scrutiny and Reyla’s apparent disinterest.
“Dame Florence, Lady Reyla,” Aldric rumbled, gesturing toward her person as he made introductions, “this is Seraphina de la Croix, the Queen of Elmoria. And her attack weasel, Olivia.”
Using her cane, Olivia slowly eased herself back to her feet. “I’d prefer ‘Spymaster’ or ‘attack rat,’ if you don’t mind.”
But Aldric ignored her. Instead, he gestured toward the two women within the cottage while further introducing, “Wife, this is Dame Florence and Reyla Hargrave.”
All the air rushed from her lungs. ReylaHargrave? Did that mean…?
Softer still, he explained, almost reluctantly, “She’s my little sister.”
Chapter twenty-one
Seraphina
His little sister.
Seated at the small table that still housed Aldric and Reyla’s unfinished Sovereign game, her mind raced. Her thoughts swirled. That didn’t make sense. A female child born of King Warwick and Queen Rosa, Aldric’s mother, had never been recorded in the Hargrave lineage. Aldric had been an only child.
Until his half-brother, Edmund, came along. But that little worm had been birthed twenty years later by King Warwick’s second wife, Queen Charlotte.
Had Reyla been born…after Warwick divorced Rosa? Was she Aldric’s half-sister, sired by a different father? But that would mean she would have to be twenty years old or younger. And she looked to be in her thirties.
Seraphina frowned to herself and peeked through the doorway leading into the bedroom where Reyla and Dame Florence worked together to bind Olivia’s injured hand. The mystery was exceedingly puzzling. She supposed she could justaskher husband. He was sitting right there.
But his attention was all for trying to ease his boot off his injured foot. The silence between them was stifling—broken only by the soft, irritated rumble emanating from her Crow at odd intervals.
Guilt churned her stomach. This was all her fault.
“Here,” she blurted out, slipping to her knees in front of his chair before her rational mind could balk at the idea of handling his bleeding foot. She had never been any good with blood. But she had to dosomething. “Let me help.”
When she reached for his boot, he flinched away, a scowl on his lips. “Don’t.”
