Aw fucking fuck?—
“Baroness Esmeray.”
Jesstin pitched forward. Not Elloven. Her mother. “She left her bed... to come... here?”
“You see why she’d want to keep others from knowing.”
Esmeray was famously a recluse. A drunkard too, which started when her husband had died but had become an established trait after her son had followed him. “Why is she here?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“She knows,” Gennady whispered with a devious grin. “She knows, Jess.”
Of course Esmeray didn’t know. It had been two years, and that was plenty of time for the old woman to deal with him, but she still asked him over now and then for some of her suspiciously delicious tea.
But Esme and her children were rumored to be descended from the mountain witches of the Seven Sisters, who could... see things others couldn’t. Do things no ordinary magic could accomplish. He wasn’t sure he believed that, but he didn’t not believe it either. “You’re sure it’s the elder? Not the daughter?”
“Unless the daughter aged thirty years overnight.”
Jesstin finished buckling his trousers. There was nothing to do but handle it. “Take her to my office.”
“She’s already there.”
Jesstin shoved past Raegnar and wove through the thick crowd of men and women, the mingling of clove and tobacco drifting across the tavern. Nods greeted him all around, the respect he could find nowhere else so had purchased with his blood money. The same people would have avoided him in the streets of Riverchapel.
Esmeray Hawthorne, drowning in layers of vibrantly hued veils, turned at his arrival, but Jesstin urged her to stay seated. She suffered from terrible gout and physical maladies that made her trek to the village not only surprising but troubling.
“My dear Jesstin,” she said, gathering his hands in hers and pulling him to the seat beside her before he could take his own behind the mahogany desk. “How have you been?”
“Well enough, Baroness,” he said, nervous again. He’d closed the door behind him, but had he locked it? “You shouldn’t be traveling. I could have come to you.”
Gennady flopped into Jesstin’s tall desk chair with a pitiless scowl. His earlier drollness had darkened into unsettling loathing.
“I sent two ravens, but it seems neither reached you.” Esmeray coughed into her lace handkerchief before endeavoring a smile. He saw traces of it behind her mountain of fabric. She had once been an astonishingly gorgeous woman, but her beauty had been swallowed by the gnarling of her joints and the pruning around a mouth that inhaled all manner of herb for relief.
“Ravens can’t cross our boundaries, in either direction,” he said. Nothing could be put into writing in Mythgarde. All bets were burned once a game ended. Any ravens who came close were met with a redirection of scents, which sent them straight back to their source. “If you need to find me, sending one to the Hermitage is better.”
“Ah. Well, I will not waste your time, my dear boy. Have you heard what has befallen my Ellie?”
I’ve heard what has befallen the five men who pissed her off. “Whispers. Has she come home?”
“Taven has gone for her, and they’ll be arriving soon. Within the hour, I expect.”
Jesstin cleared his throat. “That must be a relief to you.”
“Mostly it strikes a great fear in my heart. The Quinlandens will have to abandon their claim against her eventually. Even if Riverchapel weren’t a sanctuary village, the crown would never sanction harm to come to a woman who once served in the Reliquary. Her right to haven is sacred. But our own people will not be so kind. You remember her reputation when she left here.”
Jesstin nodded, though he didn’t know the details of how or why she’d been sent to the Reliquary. Many young women were shipped there on the back of a scandal.
“They’re already branding her a murderous harlot.”
Isn’t she? “Uh-huh.”
“Ruffians are plotting to intercept her carriage, and with only Taven to protect her, I fear... No one respects him. His authority extends no further than Nightwood.”
Because he was a tack-and-feed boy before you elevated him to the head of a great household. Of course they don’t respect the piece of shit was what he wanted to say, but what came out was “a fair assumption.”
“Once she’s home, I can wrap her in...” Esmeray sighed. “I can keep her safe, but I’m not the woman I once was, before everything happened.”
