Magdala remembered Elegy Manor as austere, immaculate—a brick front sparkling with crystal-clear windows. But now, ivy covered its face like an untrimmed beard, the windows were smudged, opaque. Wisteria dripped over the doors, soffits, and eaves. An osprey nest capped one of the seven chimneys like a hat.
Still, as she stared at the house and the house stared back with its cataract window-eyes, dark beam brows, andwisteria bangs, she had the unsettling sensation that she was gazing into her father’s scowl.
But this was not his Elegy. This Elegy was an agrestal place—unkempt, untamed, wild as the woods. The grounds were alive with frog song.
The same spark that had lit in her chest when she first met Asherton, before she knew to hate him, flashed again. She stamped her foot as if to snuff it and said aloud, “It’s an abomination!” and then she trampled over the wildflowers to the front steps.
The little dragon in the fountain blew bubbles as she passed, and she wrinkled her nose and showed her teeth, snarling at him. With a squeak, he disappeared under his green carpet.
The carved mahogany door opened and Zephyr emerged. His dark hair was damp, but it had begun to rain, so Magdala assumed he’d just come from the garden. He had the air of a man who is perpetually holding in a shout, and Magdala wondered if he ever unclenched his jaw. A pair of small, round spectacles perched on his aquiline nose, and he glowered over them, reminding Magdala of a tutor silencing a naughty child. A baggy, threadbare pull-over hugged his muscular shoulders. It was blue, knitted with a design of a fat white duck over the chest. Under the sweater, he wore a green-and-blue plaid shirt, buttoned all the way to the collar, and a knitted green necktie. He was barefoot.
The outfit was so incongruous to his beauty and physique that Magdala fought back a laugh.
“You are quite late,” he said. His syntax was archaic, his accent strange.
Magdala bristled. She wanted to scream, ‘What have you done to my father’s house?’, but instead, she said, “I’m very sorry. There was rain.”
“I expected a man,” Zephyr grumbled.
“Do you think a man would do a better job?” Magdala asked, indignant.
Zephyr cast a condescending, almost disappointed look at her over his spectacles. “I think that the prince is a young man and you are a young woman, and you will be together a great deal.”
Magdala wrinkled her upper lip. “You’ve nothing to fear from me. I am a professional and I will do my duty.”
And humiliate the man who displaced my father. Avenge my birthright. Wrench this house from the Prince's grubby hands.
“Ah,” was all Zephyr said.
Magdala passed him into the front hall. She clenched her teeth when he left the door open to the bees and dragonflies. Her father would have had an aneurysm.
As Zephyr led the way across the hall, Magdala looked up at the carved paneling and the staircase curling along the wall to the upper stories. She remembered everything, though it all seemed smaller, faded by time. As she passed the door to the sitting room, she imagined she could hear the ghost of the housekeeper's voice humming “The Sunbird’s Last Lament,” as she arranged moss in a glass cloche. She thought her father’s footsteps rang in the corridoras he returned from the greenhouse, his arms laden with lilies.
Magdala moved to take a shortcut to the kitchen, but stopped, reminding herself that she was not supposed to know this house. She hoped Zephyr would take her breathless wonder as the natural reaction of a simple girl to a beautiful old country manor, not a disinherited duchess returning home.
Like old friends mocking her, Dragons peered at her from tapestries hung on the walls. When she was a child, their bared teeth were smiles; now, they were sneers.
“Look at the duchess, dressed all in black,” they seemed to scoff. “Guarding the man who stole her house.”
She wondered if the ghost still wandered the grounds and crept through the walls.
She was so busy absorbing the nostalgic horrors that she plowed into Zephyr’s back. He had stopped to open a door and he glowered at her, his glasses askew.
“I’m sorry,” Magdala said. “I’m distracted.”
Not a good explanation, she feared. Fortunately, Zephyr misread her and said, with a weary sigh, “I am seven hundred ninety-eight years old. I’ve long lost interest in romance of any kind, and certainly not with a child like you.” He shuddered.
Magdala was both relieved and a little offended. Perhaps she wasn’t a beauty, but she didn’t think she warranted a shudder.
“You look well for your age,” Magdala remarked.
Zephyr walked on, leading her down the hall. “Asherton is not a well-adjusted child, I fear. He’s odd and troubled, and you’ll have to get used to his moods. Also, he had a bereavement in the spring, and he’s taking it badly. If I can’t fix him in sixteen years, neither can you, so don’t get any ideas.”
Zephyr pushed open a door, and Magdala knew it would be the dining room before she stepped into it. It had not changed — except that the square cherry wood table at the center of the room and the eight straight-back chairs tucked around it were new, her father having taken the dining room set when he left. The curtains were open, and the sun had faded the mural of a dark forest scene—elkin bear and sparking beavers, antlered owls and sunbirds peering through the painted trees. Magdala glanced toward the far left corner of the room, and her eyes snagged on a cat painted under a peony bush, holding a dead sparrow in its mouth. Tears startled her, and she turned her back to Zephyr, pretending to look out the window.
“Is this island Allageshan or Ashkendoric?” she asked, steadying her voice and wiping her nose on her sleeve.
“Both,” Zephyr replied. “Shared. Not unlike Asherton.”
