“I feel many things right now.” His voice had dropped, rough-edged. “Most of them inappropriate for dinner conversation.”
Heat flooded my cheeks. “I meant the magical energy. The static.”
“Ah.” He didn’t sound disappointed, more... resigned. “Yes. It worsens when my control slips.”
“It’s not just worsening.” I leaned close enough to see the silver threads flickering beneath the skin of his throat. “It’s reaching out. Like a signal fire, but magical. Every creature bonded to this land, every familiar drawing power from the ley-line, they’re answering to whatever you’re sending them.”
Understanding dawned in his eyes. Horror followed close behind.
“The deaths,” he said. “The silver veins. They’re not just similar to my symptoms, they’re—“
“Echoes,” I finished. “You’re the source. And if Thorven’s right about what he saw...” I swallowed. “Lady Kelda isn’t trying to cure you, Fenrik. She’s tuning you. Like an instrument.”
Fenrik held my gaze. Had the man ever smiled in his life? “That is a mad explanation,” he said. “And an even wilder accusation.”
twelve
Lysa
Ididn’t sleep that night, with Fenrik’s dismissal echoing in my head.Mad explanation. Wilder accusation.As if I hadn’t spent eleven years learning to read the signs that other healers missed. As if I hadn’t held dying creatures in my arms and felt the wrongness threading through their magic. The wyrmling curled against my chest, its breathing steady for once. Small mercies.
By morning, my eyes burned and my patience had worn thin. I dressed quickly, yanked my hair back with a leather cord, and went looking for Lord Stormgarde.
He wasn’t in the dining room, wasn’t in the library, wasn’t in any of the corridors I’d learned to navigate. The manor seemed to sigh with each empty room I checked, floorboards creaking in what I’d begun to recognise as disapproval.
“Where is he?” I asked the walls.
No answer. Only the distant groan of wind against the stone.
By midday, I understood. Fenrik wasn’t always elsewhere, he was avoiding me. Every time I caught a glimpse of dark hair disappearing around a corner, every time I heard footsteps retreating in the opposite direction, the truth became clearer. The coward was running.
I was composing a truly scathing speech about aristocratic avoidance when the sky split open. Lightning forked across the clouds, so bright it burned afterimages into my vision. The manor shuddered. I felt the ley-line surge beneath my feet, that second heartbeat I’d noticed on arrival, now hammering like a war drum. Another bolt of lightning. The corridor flooded with light.
Then the floor tilted. I staggered, grabbing for the wall, but my fingers found only smooth plaster. The boards beneath me angled sharply, sending me stumbling forward. Behind me, an oak door slammed shut with enough force to shake dust from the ceiling.
“What—“
Another door.Slam. Closer now.
I ran. The bloody manor gave me no choice. Each door crashed closed at my heels, and the floorboards kept shifting, kept pushing, kept herding me down the corridor. A gust of wind caught me between the shoulder blades that shoved me forward, and I barely kept my feet as I careened around a cornerand—
The final door swung open. I tumbled through, then it slammed behind me, and the lock clicked. But the lightning flashes, the room was dark. I was currently in Fenrik’s study. The room smelled of cedar smoke and something warmer, almost spiced. It wrapped around me like an embrace I hadn’t asked for, intimate enough to make my skin flush.
I pressed my back against the locked door, breathing hard.
The next flash of lightning showed me his desk. Chaos reigned there, books stacked haphazardly, empty inkwells, quills with broken nibs. And scattered across every available surface were pages and pages of sheet music.
I shouldn’t have looked. This was his private space, his sanctuary from prying eyes, I wasn’t sure even Mrs. Crane entered the room often. But my feet carried me forward anyway, drawn by the slant of the handwriting, with tiny notes crowded together. So he wrote music. This cold, controlled, impossible man poured whatever he couldn’t say into compositions no one would hear. Then I thought of Kelda and her sarcastic smile. Well, he wrote music I wouldn’t hear.
A ragged, wet sound tore through the quiet. I spun toward the shadowed corner of the room, near the heavy velvet drapes. Fenrik was slumped against the wainscoting, one hand gripping the edge of a mahogany side table.
“Lysa.” His voice wasn’t his own, it was a scrape of gravel. I took a step forward, and the lightning flashed again, illuminating his form.
He had torn at his collar; his shirt hung open, buttons scattered across the floor. The skin of his chest was a map of agony, silver veins pulsed beneath the surface, branching up his throat and disappearing into his hairline. Sweat slicked his torso, making the unnatural light beneath his skin gleam. His fingers were elongated, the nails darkened into curved claws that were currently sunk deep into the wood of the table. He lifted his head. His eyes were no longer grey. They burned with a feral, silver luminescence that tracked my movement with predator focus.
I backed up, fumbling blindly for the doorknob. “I didn’t know—the house, it pushed me—“
My fingers found the brass handle. I twisted.
