Fear gnawed at her heart. She remembered Haventon, remembered the months of fog when her every waking hour was blurred by the poppy juice they fed her.
How helpless she had been then.
She would not go back to that. She was a Duchess now. ADuchess, she told herself fiercely. And she would act like one.
McKay, noting her defiance, gave a low chuckle.
“Do not comfort yourself with hopes of rescue. The Duke will not be pursuing. I prepared a drink for him this morning, laced with the same medicine he gave to you. It will be as though he drank half a bottle instead of the single glass he actually took. He will be lucky if he wakes by late afternoon, and he will have no notion which road we took.”
Her stomach clenched.
If true, Aaron would indeed be incapacitated.
She pressed her hands together until her knuckles whitened, forcing down panic. She must depend on herself.
The carriage finally turned into the drive of a modest country house. Catherine guessed they had gone perhaps ten miles. The garden had gone entirely to seed. Weeds had swallowed the paths whole, ivy crawled up the stone walls in great, strangling ropes, and the shutters hung at angles that spoke of years ofneglect. The paint on the door had peeled away in long, curling strips, revealing the dark wood beneath.
It was a house that had been forgotten.
She was ushered inside by a manservant who said nothing and met her eyes even less. The hall was dim, lit by a single window caked with grime. The floorboards creaked beneath her feet. The air smelled of damp and dust and something else, something faintly medicinal, like a sickroom.
A door stood open at the far end of the hall.
A man was standing in it.
Catherine stopped walking.
He was tall. Lean, in the way that men who had once been broad become lean after illness or grief has worn them down to the bone. His hair, which had once been the color of pale wheat, had gone almost entirely to gray, cropped close to his skull. Deep lines carved his face, scored into the skin around his mouth and eyes as though time had taken a blade to him.
But his eyes.
Catherine knew those eyes.
They were bright and steady and very, very blue, and they were fixed on her face with an expression of such quiet, wondering recognition that her legs very nearly gave way beneath her.
“Catherine…” he murmured softly, wonder in his tone.
The voice was different. Thinner. Rougher at the edges, worn down like sea glass.
But the warmth in it, the gentle, teasing undercurrent,thatshe would have known anywhere…
“Queen Kate,” he said, and smiled. “…Of the Woodland Realm.”
The name hit her like a fist to the sternum.
The woods rushed back. Summer light filtering green and gold through the canopy. Mud on her boots and leaves in her hair and a boy with a stick sword and a laugh too loud for the quiet.
Catherine's hand flew to her mouth.
“Sir Aaron…” she whispered. “Wolfheart.”
CHAPTER 31
The man smiled, and she knew that he was no impostor. This was Aaron Tarnley.
If this is Aaron, then who is the man I married?
Aaron extended a hand.
