“Alone?”
“Not entirely.” He did not elaborate. The detail of the sword still rattled him in a way he did not yet understand. “She was in a coach. Traveling without her family. And she is afraid.”
Harrowe’s eyes narrowed. “Afraid of what?”
Darcy held his look. “Of herself.”
Harrowe reached for his satchel and shifted it higher on his shoulder. “Then she’ll trace the fault where it leads. She’ll follow it to you.”
Darcy turned toward the door. “I am waiting, and not tracing anything. I am going to her.”
Harrowe blinked. “Butshehas to comehere!Do you not understand?Thisis where the matter will be settled!”
When Darcy only pulled on his gloves and made for the door, Harrowe followed. “You do not even know where she is!”
Brutus was already bounding at the threshold, claws clicking against the boards, body angled eastward as if the direction were self-evident.
“I know enough.”
The frost had notlifted from the hedges along the lane, though the sun climbed clear and bright. Fields that had once borne winter grass lay scorched pale, the earth hardened into a brittle crust. Darcy recognised landmarks only by distance, not by shape; hedgerows had thickened in some places, thinned in others, and the track that led towards the southeast felt narrower than memory allowed.
The horse beneath him breathed hard in the cold, steam rising in quick bursts from its flanks. They had changed mounts once already at a posting inn where the stable boy asked no questions and took Darcy’s coin with wide eyes. Harrowe rode half a length behind, hunched forward, his satchel striking against his hip with each stride.
Brutus ran when he could, loping along the verge, falling back only when the frost cut too sharply at his pads. When he dropped behind, he did not wander. He kept the line of them, eyes bright, ears forward.
Where once there had been a sense—subtle but unmistakable—of held breath, of something watchful beneath the surface of field and hedgerow, there was now onlyabsence. The ground looked spent. A pasture they passed bore a stretch of blackened earth where frost had not merely settled but burned. A farmer stood at the gate of it, hat in hand, staring down as though uncertain what he was looking at.
Harrowe urged his horse closer after a time, peering past Darcy at the road ahead as though something visible might explain their direction. The hedges had grown higher since they left the broader turnpike, the ruts shallower, the lane bending more often than it ran straight.
They had left the main road an hour earlier, where the sign for Hatfield leaned crooked on its post. The track they followed now bore no marking beyond worn earth and the faint memory of cart-wheels. It curved eastward, avoiding the distant haze that marked London’s sprawl, keeping instead to open country and old boundaries.
Brutus ranged ahead, then slowed, circling once before pressing forward again, nose low to the ground. When the lane divided without warning between two hedged corridors of equal age and neglect, the dog did not pause. He veered left toward the narrower way, where the ground dipped slightly toward marshier air.
Darcy followed without hesitation.
Harrowe made a small, disbelieving sound. “Oughtn’t we go back to the turnpike?”
“No.”
“Then how—”
Darcy did not look at him. “She is this way.”
It was said without explanation. As one states the hour. Or the direction of the wind.
Harrowe fell back a half-length, shaking his head. “As you say.”
Ahead, the land lowered gradually, and the scent of water threaded faintly through the frost.
The frost thickened along the verges. At a bend where the road dipped toward a shallow rise, Brutus gave a low, sudden bark. He veered from the verge and crossed the road without waiting for command.
Darcy reined in sharply.
Brutus stood at the edge of a hedgerow that had not been there before.
Or rather—it had been there, but thin, disciplined, no more than a farmer’s boundary between two modest fields. Now it rose twice a man’s height, thick with hawthorn, the branches interlocked so tightly that the frost lay trapped within it like ash.
Darcy swung down. The horse tossed its head, uneasy.
