“Aye.” Thorven’s voice went even lower. “She wasn’t visiting for tea, miss. She wasn’t knocking on doors or making social calls. She was sitting there in the carriage, watching the house.”
The cats in their cage had gone silent.
“What are you saying, Thorven?”
“I’m not saying anything.” He stepped back, putting distance between us. “Just saying what I saw. Could be nothing. Could be she was waiting for someone. Could be she likes the smell of fresh bread.”
“At dusk? In the rain?”
Thorven shrugged, but his eyes were hard. “I’m not a man for implications, Miss Emberlin. I work with beasts. I know what I see, and I know what I don’t. What I saw was Lady Kelda Morvain watching a house where a bonded dragon lived.” He rubbed his arm again. “What I don’t see is that dragon alive this morning.”
The storm rolled in around four o’clock, rattling the windows hard enough to make the cats yowl in their cage. I’d finished examining Duchess’s eggs, still glowing silver, still deeply concerning, and decided to retreat to the library to consult the manor’s collection on parasitic magic.
Fenrik was in the corridor when I stepped out of the sanctuary. He froze. I froze. The house, apparently delighted by this development, swung open a door between us that had definitely been closed a moment before.
“Lady Stormgarde,” he said, in the tone of a man who had just discovered a spider in his bathwater.
“Fenrik.” I clutched my notes to my chest like a shield. “I was just—“
“The library. Yes.” He turned on his heel and vanished around the corner so quickly his coat flared behind him.
I stared at the empty space where he’d been. “Lovely chatting with you,” I said to myself. “Always a pleasure.”
The library was blissfully empty when I arrived. I settled into a leather armchair near the fire, which the house had thoughtfully lit in anticipation of my arrival, or perhaps in apology for the corridor ambush, and spread my notes across my lap.
The notes were a mess, crammed onto whatever paper I could find: margins of my notebook, free papers, and one entry scrawled on a napkin from the kitchen.A few patterns had begun to emerge. I’d documented seventeen creatures so far, ranging from Duchess and her luminescent eggs to a pair of storm-hawks whose feathers now conducted electricity rather than merely predicting weather. Every single one showed some variation of the same symptoms: silver threading beneath the skin, erratic magical discharge, and a peculiar sensitivity to the manor’s ward fluctuations.
I’d barely read a few pages when I heard footsteps in the adjacent study. Someone was pacing back and forth. The steady rhythm of boots was muffled by the wall between us, but it remained unmistakably present.
The connection to the ley-line seemed obvious. In healthy environments, ley-lines fed ambient magic into the land above them, a slow, steady pulse that creatures absorbed naturallyover time. Bonded familiars drew more deeply from this well, their magical cores shaped by proximity to their human partners, but something was poisoning the flow here. The energy moving through these creatures felt wrong, tainted with that same discordant rhythm I’d sensed in Fenrik’s chest. Instead of nourishing their magic, the ley-line was flooding them with something corrupted.
I turned a page. The footsteps continued.
The dead dragons in town had been bonded creatures, deeply connected to their humans, deeply connected to the magical current flowing beneath Abberwyn. Who knew how far this ley-line stretched even further, and how much of Lumenvale it crossed.
I turned another page. Still pacing.
I looked up at the wall. “Are you planning to wear a groove in the floor, or is this some sort of exercise regimen?”
The footsteps stopped.
Then, muffled but distinct: “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ve been pacing a lot.”
“I pace when I think.”
“You must think a great deal, then.”
More silence. Then the footsteps resumed, slower this time, as if he was trying to be quiet about it.
I snorted and returned to my reading.
An hour later, I moved to the parlour to examine a map of our realm of Lumenvale that Thorven had mentioned seeingsomewhere in the east wing. The moment I settled onto the settee, I heard a door close in the room behind me.
Then footsteps pacing the length of what sounded like a dining room.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
