Page 38

Chapter 38

Kat

Though I search Rahk’s chambers high and low, I find nothing to wear except my usual servant’s uniform. I pull on those clothes, complete with the chest binding because I have no other suitable undergarments besides what I wore beneath my wedding gown—which is nowhere to be found.

With a sigh, I rake a hand through my short hair, grown out to an awkward length, and emerge from the bedroom. I feel like a prison inmate rebelling against orders, despite knowing I am—theoretically—the lady of this house now.

Edvear is the first person to see me. He is in the storeroom with a ledger and a quill in his mouth as I return from visiting the outhouse. His ears turn sharply backward. “My lady—”

Rahk steps around the corner just then, the purpose of his stride indicating he is heading somewhere, but at the sight of me, he stops and does a double take. “Why are you wearing those clothes?”

He sounds angry, like I’ve defied him in the worst of ways.

Instinctively, I fall back a step. “Because there was nothing else . . .?”

Rahk’s ire whirls at once on his steward. “Edvear! Did no one think to get Lady Katherine’s clothes? Bring them at once.”

Edvear turns tail and disappears, his hooves clopping all the way down the hallway.

“Please pardon the oversight,” says Rahk, drawing my attention back up to him. His hair is tied back at the nape of his neck, and though he wears human styled trousers, his tunic is one of the long ones he brought from Faerieland. It’s probably more comfortable.

I shrug. “I don’t mind.”

I intend to walk past him, but he steps into the hallway, blocking my path so my only alternative is retreat. He frowns down at me. I cross my arms over my chest, and after delaying, I find I have no choice but to drag my gaze to his.

“If you’re so bothered by my clothes, give me one of those long tunics. It’ll look more like a dress on me. Albeit one at a very scandalous length, but if I kept my trousers on—”

He waves a hand. “You’re troubled by something.”

I chortle. “An astute observation, my lord.”

“Katherine—”

A flash of red hair at the end of the hallway immediately drags my attention away. Is that . . .? “Mary!”

She balances a basket of laundry on one hip, but when she sees me, a bright grin bursts across her face. She sets down the laundry just as I barrel into her arms.

“What are you doing here?” I cry. “Oh, I am so glad to see you!”

“Lord Rahk sent an offer of employment to me yesterday and paid off my contract with Lady Duxbury Vandermore. I am to be your handmaiden. Now what are you wearing?”

I turn around to find Rahk watching us. He stands there so severely, arms crossed over his chest, face utterly unreadable, and yet there almost seems to be a question in his gaze. I don’t know what to say to him. I want to thank him, though that itself feels too insufficient, but I also don’t want to bother him after all the trouble I’ve put him through.

I cannot bear the shift between blankness and slight emotion in his black eyes, so I whirl back to Mary. “Edvear is getting my other clothes, but I hope he’s slow about it. Trousers are very comfortable.” Though the chest binding isn’t so much.

Mary clears her throat and bobs a curtsy to Rahk. “I will return to my work, Master.”

He waves a hand again as if he doesn’t care and strides to his study. He shuts the door.

“That means you can worry about the laundry later,” I say, grabbing Mary’s forearm and dragging her back toward the bedroom. “There is something I must tell you.”

She yanks her arm out of my hold. “I will get your breakfast and bring some mending, lest Mrs. Banks think I am slothful at my work. Then we will talk.”

“Fine,” I say. “But hurry!”

We take breakfast outside on the patio, sitting on the steps that lead into the manicured lawn, me with a plate in my lap and Mary with her mending work.

“You’re going to have to pretend you discovered this and that you’re telling me it because I can’t have anyone knowing that I snuck into Agatha’s study last night.”

“Kat!” Mary hisses. “You did what ?”

“Never mind that. The important thing is—”

“Katherine Vandermore, you are going to get yourself in such trouble one of these days! And if it’s with the fae—”

“Just listen , alright? You can flog me later. But right now, let me tell you what I found.”

I go on to explain the letters, and I pull the one I stole from my pocket and slide it to her. She arranges her mending mostly on top of the note so she can read it. Her jaw clenches as she reads, her cheeks turning the color of a ripened summer tomato.

“If I get my hands on any of those women, or this worthless Boreham fellow, I will make them wish they’d never been born,” Mary seethes. She turns to me and her expression softens at once. “Oh Kat, I’m so sorry.”

I set down my plate and draw my knees up to my chest. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine! This is a serious deception! If you could prove it, they could be ostracized from society.”

“That isn’t even the worst part!” I fling my legs back down the steps, stretching them out as I gesture with my hands. “You see it, don’t you? She wanted to claim my fortune twice over ! Once, by deceiving me and forcing me into a marriage with her secret son—and then again by deceiving Rahk into marrying Bridget and paying that ungodly sum in a bride price! And she succeeded on one of those counts!”

“Kat,” Mary hisses suddenly.

I turn around to see Rahk standing next to the door, his arms crossed over his chest, and at first I think he’s too far away to have heard us, despite the two furrows between his eyes and his intense study of me. Then I remember fae hearing and bite the inside of my cheek.

“Mary,” says Rahk, pushing off the wall and striding toward us. “Kindly clear Lady Katherine’s dishes to the kitchen.”

“At once, Master.” She gathers up the mending but manages to slip the letter back to me as she collects my dishes on their tray and leaves me alone in the sunshine.

With Rahk.

I cast one last forlorn glance after her disappearing form.

Rahk lets out a sigh as he sits on the step next to me, where Mary was a moment ago. His long legs stretch out in front of him, his hands clasped together before he turns his black-eyed scrutiny upon me once more. “Explain to me what you were just discussing with Mary.”

My mouth goes dry. I sit there awkwardly, not knowing what to say. “How much did you hear?” I finally ask, so I can know how many lies I am obligated to tell.

“I came out as you were exclaiming about someone wanting your fortune. I assume you speak of your stepmother. Lady Duxbury Vandermore.”

I hand him the condemning letter. “Mary found this last night and brought it to me. Lord Malcolm Boreham was the man Agatha was determined to force me to wed.”

He reads the letter quietly and gives no indication of his thoughts as Mary did. Once he’s finished, he returns it to me. “What was the manner of her attempt at forcing you into this marriage?”

I rip at the grass growing between the crevices of bricked stairs. “She sold my horse.”

“A horse that meant something to you?”

“My father gave me that horse when he was still alive.” Already, a lump grows in my throat. Curse it all . I’m not going to let myself cry in front of Rahk. Especially not now that we’re married . I pull myself together, only to find that my voice still trembles. “She and I grew up together. She’s an old thing now, and the morning after a ball, while I was still asleep, she ordered our manservant to sell her. I found out several hours later after it was too late. Agatha promised that an effort would be made to recover the horse . . . but only if I married Lord Boreham. I’m not even sure she’s still alive at this point. She’s old enough that most people wouldn’t want to buy such a horse.”

The typical panic when I think of Bartholomew clenches my lungs tight, making it hard to breathe. I shove it away and shift my thoughts.

“Agatha also found my mother’s wedding slippers. They’re very unusual, made of glass, and the most exquisite glasswork you’ve ever seen. When she saw that I wanted them back, she threatened to sell them if I didn’t accept the proposal.”

“These slippers meant a great deal to you.”

I fidget with the lowest button on my shirt. “Yes. Mary managed to get them back to me, but not before . . .” I trail off, my mind returning to that moment when Rahk left, and Agatha tried to destroy the slippers. He looks at me expectantly, so I swallow and continue. “She was furious that I’d run away. She tried to destroy them.”

“She didn’t succeed?”

At that, I give a small laugh. “She tried to break them, but they didn’t even so much as crack. So she threw them in the fireplace. They’re all stained black now.”

“Where are they?”

I get up and beckon him to follow. We return to the bedroom—I cannot and will not think of it as ours— and I pull the box from my room.

I hand it to him. He takes it, shifting his weight to one leg as he opens the lid of worn, gray velvet. Inside, the tip of the slipper’s blackened toe is visible. My ribcage tightens.

He hands the box back to me and watches me replace the lid and set it beside the bed. Then he bids us return to where we were sitting outside on the steps. Birdsong and the distant gurgle of the creek surround us. He props his foot up on one of the higher steps and leans his forearm on it.

“Tell me about your stepfamily,” he says.

I shrug, scratching uncomfortably at my elbow through my starched shirt. “What do you wish to know? When they became part of our family?”

“Let’s start there.” His penetrating gaze shifts away from me, mercifully, and focuses on the rolling lawn that disappears into forest. I can finally breathe a little easier. “You told me that your mother was lost to the Long Lost Wood when you were nine. Your father died a year later. When did your stepfamily come into the mix?”

“Well . . . after Mother vanished, Father kept hoping she would come back.” I feel the compulsion to explain that, instead of just answering the question. It is the most important part of the story, after all. That Father didn’t want to marry again. “After a year, he’d given up hope. He kept telling me that I needed a mother. At first, I thought he meant Mama would come back, but then it became clear . . .” My throat clogs and the words don’t come out.

“That he had no hope of her return, but he didn’t want you to be without a mother.”

I nod. “He met Agatha in Commington. I think he thought it was fate that she was a widow with two daughters in need of a father, and he was a widower with a daughter in need of a mother.”

He nods once. “It is rational.”

“Rational,” I huff, “until you realize that he never would have married her otherwise. He was blinded to her faults because of the fortuitous nature of their meeting—and apparently caught up in her deception. I don’t know how she hid her son from him, but she rightly knew he wouldn’t have married her if she’d had a son to inherit.”

“Your mother returned after the wedding.”

I gnaw on my lip and shove away the trembling that tries to overtake my hands. “She did. Shortly after the wedding. She looked like a ghost when she came out of that forest.”

“You were there? When she came out of Caph—the Long Lost Wood?”

Yes, I was .

“I saw her when Father brought her back home,” I say truthfully, side-stepping around the condemning truths. A shudder manages to work its way through my body. “She was a shell of the person she once was.”

I remember sitting beside her rocking chair, holding her cold hands as she stared vacantly at the wall. Not speaking a word to me. Not acknowledging me—even when I wept and buried my face in her lap. The Wood had taken too much of her soul.

“And she didn’t survive long?”

I swallow back the emotion. “Eleven days.”

“Your father?”

“Followed her to the grave but a month later.”

“You’ve lived with Lady Duxbury Vandermore and her daughters since?”

“I have. It would have been vastly easier if Father had left me an orphan,” I spit bitterly.

“Was your stepmother often cruel to you?”

“She was rarely cruel . But she did have a way of forcing my hand to do things I didn’t want to do. She always made me seem the unruly, unreasonable child any time I didn’t immediately obey her.”

Rahk shrugs. “To be fair, you are unruly.”

“You’re not supposed to agree with her!” I cry, whacking him on the arm before my brain catches up to my actions, and I yank my hand back. I stuff both hands in my lap. “I know I am a difficult person to manage.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Rahk replies, shifting his gaze back out to the lawn. “From the letter, it seems your stepmother deserved every bit of your rebellion. This is a dark betrayal indeed.”

“She might have done it because I was rebellious. Maybe if I hadn’t tried so hard to make her life difficult—”

“You were a child mourning the shocking and unexpected loss of your parents, and placed in the care of a woman who did not love you,” Rahk cuts in, shaking his head. “I’ve seen a lot of black deeds in my time, but taking advantage of a someone under your protection to swindle them out of what is rightfully theirs might be one of the worst I’ve encountered.”

I don’t like Agatha, but I can think of plenty of things much worse than what she’s done. Murdering me in my sleep, for one. That would be worse. “I hardly doubt she could stand up to the faults of the fae,” I argue.

Rahk doesn’t reply at first. He runs his thumb along his jaw, considering. “If you don’t mind me asking . . . what were the circumstances of your mother’s disappearance?”

“Circumstances?”

“Yes. Why was she down at the Wood’s edge? Was anyone with her at the time?”

I rub my shoulder. I don’t like thinking about that day, but if I don’t answer him, he will think I’m hiding the truth from him. “Father took Mama and I to see the harvest. It was something we did every year. He would bring us to see the full fields and we would eat a picnic in the grass.”

Rahk nods slowly.

I force my voice to be steady. Careless. This happened ages ago—none of it matters anymore. “We were playing hide-and-seek among the stalks of wheat. Then . . . the border moved. It just came like a wave, swallowing up the wheat—and Mama.”

That haunting image of trees surging forward, of Mama’s smile suddenly turning to terror right before she vanished from my view, brings a need to retch. I keep myself controlled, however.

“What happened then?” asks Rahk.

I look away. I hate looking at him when I lie. “The Wood stopped. I screamed and tried to run in after Mama, but Father grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. He shouted her name for a long time. I don’t know what happened to her. I’ve heard there are many Fae Courts, but I don’t know which one she was imprisoned in.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” says Rahk.

He says it so simply, so gently. Suddenly, we’re not basically strangers in a sudden marriage, but friends on either side of a Fool’s Circle board. My barriers, so carefully erected to keep him out, are swept away before I can prevent it.

The next thing I know, I’m crying. I swivel my body away from Rahk’s, covering my face. Why did he have to say that? Why does he have to care? He doesn’t want to be married to me—he made that clear last night. So why does he show me kindness today and make me cry when I don’t want to cry ?

His large, warm hand lands between my shoulder blades. That touch breaks me even more, bringing the tears harder. He doesn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” I gasp between ugly sobs. “I will stop. I promise.”

His thumb moves slightly at my shoulder. “I hate crying in front of others too.”

That shocks me enough to stop the flow of tears and whip my attention toward him. “You cry?”

“It has been a few decades, but I never enjoyed it.”

A delirious chortle bursts from me. It seems to break the spell, and I draw a shaky breath of composure. “Crying is horrible.”

“A wretched experience, indeed.”

I truly laugh this time. A slight smile cracks his impenetrable facade.

He gathers his long legs and gets to his feet. “I will leave you to your day. Please be kind enough to join me for supper this evening.”

“I . . . well . . . of course,” I say, not able to come up with anything else as I watch him walk away.