Lady Hargreaves listened quietly as the young Lady Avon’s fingers skimmed over the keys, and she felt a fierce regret for this girl. There was nothing she could do. Nothing anyone coulddo.
Weavingshaw had already condemned them all.
—
A week had passed, and the new Lady Avon was nowhere to be found. No one dared utter her name.
Lady Hargreaves was unsurprised.
Nor was she surprised when she saw Lord Hargreaves ride out at dawn to meet Lord Avon, a sword at his hip.
She waited for him at the edge of the forest, away from the watchful eyes of the servants, and he came staggering back at noon, blood staining his shirt. His eyes were red-rimmed.
When he saw her, he let out a sob. “I’ve done it. He’s dead. Percy’s dead.” He reached for her, clinging to her neck, burying his face into her shoulder while she stood motionless. He babbled nonsense. “I had to…Percy has grown in power since the trade…the Limitless Vessel…he would’ve destroyed us all. You’ve seen him, Gemma, the way that paranoid ideas have begun to breach his mind? The Avon curse has rotted his brain. He could not have…I should not have…allowed him…such influence…” He continued to weep like a child. “Speak, my love. Please—say something to me. I cannot stand your anger anymore.”
“And Bram?” she asked quietly, her voice steady.
He did not look at her. His response came after a shuddering moment. “Gone. With Percy’s death, he is gone.”
Anger welled up in Lady Hargreaves’s throat, and she pouncedon her husband, clawing at his eyes.“I know you did it! You son of a bitch! You did something to him!”
Lord Hargreaves did nothing to defend himself. He merely placed his bloodstained hands over his head, repeating the words over and over again as if in a trance. “They are both gone. Can’t you understand? I had to do it.”
—
That night, Lady Hargreaves filled her pocket with rocks. She paid one final visit to the postbox she had used to hide small gifts for the child she had once loved fiercely. That she still loved fiercely. She left two letters—one addressed to her Bram, and one to her husband.
She would no longer tie her fate to that of a murderer.
Then, her eyes dry, Weavingshaw at her back, she walked into the ocean.
And eventhatdid not release her from this cursed land.
He is late.
Lord Hargreaves stood waiting beside Martin on the fringes of a flat meadow. The carriage was settled nearby, the horses’ wide nostrils venting puffs of steam into the crisp air. In the distance, he could hear the howling of wolves deep within the forest. It sounded much nearer today.
Hargreaves tried to shake away the feeling of disquiet he always experienced at the ever-present snarl of wolves, as if they sensed his thoughts and were ready to tear him limb from limb. Even ten years ago, when he’d stood rooted to this very spot, he’d heard them, his heart pounding with urgency, as if they smelled the blood that marked his betrayal of one of their own.
He looked over at the Al-Sayer boy now to distract his thoughts. He stood with one foot tied to the single shriveled tree that broke the landscape. Dispassionately, Hargreaves noted the bloody marks and bruises the boy carried; it was clear Martin had beaten him ruthlessly.
The boy’s injuries did not stop him from pacing in an arc inagitation, as far as his rope allowed him, marking footprints in the frost-covered ground.
The land around them was a barren wasteland, just outside Weavingshaw’s boundaries, the soil too hard to grow anything other than weedy grass.
Hargreaves’s thoughts could not contain themselves this morning. It was as if the landscape had refused to change in the ten years since he had last been here, when he had met Percy for the last time, sword in hand.
He’dhadto draw Percy out here, even with the dangers lurking near the edge of the forest, for he could not have touched him within Weavingshaw’s domain.
The irony was not lost on him. Hargreaves had chosen this very meadow once more to meet Percy’s son, as if the Saints wanted him to complete the cycle. He would not admit even to himself that he was afraid that Weavingshaw would still do everything in its power to protect its young master, even if he had yet to swear fealty to its walls, for it still recognized Avon blood.
It was a few minutes past dawn when he heard the horse’s hooves pounding on the frost-hardened ground. At moments like these, Hargreaves could see nothing except the similarities between father and son.
The way they both rode a horse masterfully, the roll of their shoulders, their height, even the eyes—glacial, hateful,cannibaleyes, despite their difference in color. For an instant, Hargreaves was not sure if it was Percy who had, after all, been resurrected from his grave.
If not for the dark coloring, which Bramwell had inherited from his beautiful, doomed mother, then Hargreaves would have bent his knees and prayed to the Saints for bringing back the dead.
And yet such prayers would never be accepted. He could never forget that it was he who had joined Percy when they took young Bramwell to the underworld on his twelfth birthday, one hand on each of his shoulders, steering him to sign his name on the contract.The boy had been shaking so hard his signature came out scrawled and illegible, and he’d been forced to repeatit.
