Page 19

Chapter 15

Lotte

I am her heir.

This morning, Lotte hadn’t even been anyone’s daughter. Now she was someone’s heir.

The world exploded into light around her. Like it had on the road the moment the luster had gone off. She was blinded, a thousand voices crying out her new name, bodies jostling her frantically.

Lotte felt a hand close over hers. And with it came a powerful surge of protectiveness and purpose. She was being pulled through the crowd. And then a door slammed and Lotte was plunged away from the blinding flashbulbs and deafening shouts and into darkness and silence.

Like dropping through the surface of an icy lake.

She couldn’t see anything, the echoes of the lights still too bright in her eyes. She leaned against the wall, struggling to catch her breath, tugging the too-tight maid’s dress away from her chest. A pair of strong hands caught her clawing fingers, pulling them away before she could tear at the skin around her throat. His thumbs pressed into the palms of her hands, and his thoughts broke through the hindern. She was flooded with a profound sense of purpose.

“Breathe,” his voice said.

The dancing lights from the cameras finally cleared enough that she could see.

The knight’s sigil on his chest came into focus.

Her first thought was that death had finally caught up to her. She should run. Like Benedict had told her to outside in the rain. But there was nowhere left to run.

Her second thought was that death shouldn’t be so handsome.

No, handsome wasn’t the right word for the knight standing against her. He looked like something that had stepped out of the illustrations of the heroes in her prayer books. He was tall and broad, a crisp white shirt rolled up to his elbows under the gray doublet. His hair was the color of wheat, and just long enough that the locks at the front fell over his brow as he leaned forward. His nose was straight and strong, and his square jaw had just a bit of pale stubble, like he hadn’t shaved this morning.

He wasn’t handsome.

He was dashing.

He was heroic.

And suddenly he was bowing to her.

Releasing her hands, not reaching for a sword, but dropping to one knee, saying something Lotte didn’t hear.

Lotte couldn’t help it, she laughed.

It came from some deep hollow that had been carved out in her through the day. At the absurdity of this all. This time yesterday she had been sleeping in a pit, told that she was the most worthless creature to ever walk the earth. And now the most handsome boy she had ever seen was kneeling in front of her.

But the laughter didn’t last long. She slumped against the wall, feeling everything catching up to her. “You’re not here to kill me?”

“Given that I took an oath to protect the Holtzfalls with my life, killing you might be frowned upon.” He looked up from where he was kneeling, his voice low and sure.

It was a hard habit to break, reading someone’s mind, after sixteen years. Almost without meaning to, Lotte let her hand brush against his in the dark, feeling his calloused fingers under hers.

There it was again. That sense of purpose. Of sureness.

He had been born a knight. He had been born to protect the Holtzfalls. He would die protecting the Holtzfalls if needed. Like his brother had.

“Do you think the knights who tried to kill me on the way here took the same oath?”

He wanted to tell her that no Rydder knight would ever harm a Holtzfall.

She read that in his mind too.

But his eyes moved carefully over her face. Lotte wasn’t sure what he saw there. But he knew that she wasn’t lying. She was in danger. And that formidable sense of purpose reared its head in him as he got to his feet.

“I can’t speak for my fellow knights.” He extended his hand. “But I can take you somewhere safe.” And she found that she wanted to follow him. His hand was wrapped around hers, sure and firm.

But as they turned, a silhouette pierced the light at the end of the corridor, blocking their escape. A woman wearing a knight’s uniform, graying blonde hair pulled back from a grave face. Her hand rested on a sword at her waist.

The young knight moved on instinct to stand between the older knight and Lotte. To shield her, his spare hand dropping to his own sword.

The woman’s eyes followed the gesture. “Theo.” Her voice was formal. “You are dismissed.”

Lotte felt like a rabbit who had finally been run to a dead end.

She waited now for the knight, Theo, to drop her hand.

She understood it through the hand clasped around hers. He was a knight. He was trained to obey orders.

But.

By my oath, by my oath, by my oath.

Lotte was suddenly aware of a war waging inside him. Between his orders and his oath. Fighting against every piece of training in him that told him to obey this woman.

“By your leave, Commander.” Theo’s voice was just as formal. “I should like to ensure her safety.”

“Would you?” The commander’s voice was cold.

Memories of thousands of hours training darted through Theo’s mind and past the hindern on Lotte’s hand. Drawn blades and sweat and days and nights of drills. She had taught him everything he knew. Alaric had died trying to save a Holtzfall. Theo would do the same if he had to.

Before either could draw a blade, the door Theo had pulled Lotte through swung open. The blinding lights and cacophony of noises streamed in behind Grace Holtzfall as she threaded her slender body through the gap, quickly pressing it closed behind her.

“Well, that was a success!” Grace gushed, pushing a stray lock of hair off her brow, seemingly oblivious to the tension. “I think they got a few good pictures before you were whisked away. We’ll have to…” She trailed off, and for a second Lotte thought she had lost her train of thought. But her eyes had landed on the woman at the end of the corridor. “Commander Liselotte.” Grace sighed, and finally the other woman’s hand dropped away from her sword. “I suppose my mother would like a word?”

The Holtzfall mansion passed in flashes.

Gilded hallways turned into an empty ballroom, turned into a wrought iron staircase that wound upward to a star-spangled dome, turned into a room filled with books and armchairs. There were too many doorways to possibly guess where they all led.

In the convent, Lotte could reach out from her bed and touch the opposite wall with her palm. Now, as they passed another room, she glimpsed a fireplace larger than her sleeping cell.

They turned into another long hallway, but this one was bare of doors or windows. Instead, portrait after portrait stretched the entire length of the walls. Lotte passed under the age-faded gaze of a man on two warped wooden panels. A woman in a white ruff, paint flaking from her face, making her pale skin look pockmarked. A man holding an ax on a velvet cushion. His eyes were the same color as Lotte’s. The next showed a woman with Lotte’s nose.

And then the hallway came to a sudden end.

Everything in the Holtzfall mansion was sleek polished marble, gilt surfaces, and varnished wood. But the wall ahead of them was entirely out of place. Like they had passed far beyond the house to the deepest, most gnarled part of the forest. As though hundreds of trees had grown over centuries and generations, their branches and roots twisting together into an impenetrable knotted wall. The gray-haired knight, Liselotte, rapped against the wood, and the branches spread apart, unknotting themselves and retreating into the walls. Behind was a large room dominated by an imposing desk.

Mercy Holtzfall sat, hands folded. Behind her, bloodied and battered but still standing, was Benedict. Lotte felt her stomach twist at the sight of him. His lip was split open, and there was a bruise blooming on his jaw. But he was alive. He was standing.

Even as relief flooded her, Lotte wondered what Benedict’s survival meant for the other three knights. Wondered how many bodies had been made just to get her here.

Benedict’s eyes went instantly to Grace. Their gazes locked with the ease of a long-formed habit. Of two pieces that fit together so naturally that neither of them made sense until they were together. And in the barest fraction of a moment, a thousand things seemed to pass between them. Lotte saw her mother’s hand twitch, like she might reach for him.

Then Grace Holtzfall dropped her gaze and elegantly folded herself into a seat across from the desk. Liselotte took up position at Mercy Holtzfall’s back, next to Benedict. Arms locked behind her, gaze straight ahead. Theo took an identical stance by the door.

Lotte didn’t move. Everyone else seemed to know their place, but she had only just stumbled into this family.

“I don’t intend to strain my neck.” Mercy Holtzfall didn’t look at her. “You will sit.” The branches wove themselves tightly back together into a doorway behind them.

Lotte sat.

The desk was scattered with photo frames, pictures of children and grandchildren. One showed three blonde girls and a dark-haired girl wearing bathing costumes on the deck of a yacht. In another, five children, three girls and two boys, posed playing croquet, the youngest only as tall as the mallet he was holding. Another showed Grace and Verity Holtzfall as teenagers, both wearing ballgowns, leaning on each other with laughter. An army of Holtzfalls, past and present, surrounded Mercy in their silver frames, all staring out at Lotte from the life that had been taken from her.

“Well.” Mercy Holtzfall finally spoke, but not to Lotte. “Isn’t this familiar, Grace?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Grace was hunting in her emerald clutch, and she pulled out a cigarette, slinging one long leg over the other, baring it scandalously. “You have crow’s feet around your eyes now.” The insolent ease with which Grace spoke to her mother jarred. This woman had tried to kill her twice today. “And I’m a little harder to intimidate than I was when I was nineteen. I don’t suppose you have a light?” She held the cigarette toward Mercy, who frowned at her. “No?” Grace flicked her fingers, and a small flame sprang out of the diamond of one of her rings as she held it up to her cigarette.

The flame was licking the end of the cigarette when Mercy raised her little finger just a hair off the desk. Lotte felt it instantly. The snap in the air, a crackle of pure energy. The electrical bulbs that lined the walls flickered off for a moment before swelling up too brightly, until one of them splintered, shattering glass all over the floor.

And the flame of Grace’s ring snuffed out.

Lotte held herself perfectly still. Sure that if she wanted to, Mercy Holtzfall could break her apart just as easily.

“Older, but not smarter.” Mercy Holtzfall did not raise her voice as her little finger dropped back to the desk, her other fingers drumming out a quick sequence across the leather desktop. “Are you proud of what you’ve accomplished?” She raised one hand toward Benedict. “An injured knight, dozens more of them dead”— dozens? Lotte wanted to ask, but Mercy Holtzfall continued listing Grace’s crimes—“our family humiliated, all so you could jeopardize our legacy with your mistake?”

Mistake. Lotte had thought time with the Sisters had hardened her. But it was different hearing that refrain from her grandmother. And Lotte felt her old treacherous anger rise in her. Anger she had felt so often at the Sisters. At their injustices.

“If I was a mistake, why not kill me years ago?” Mercy Holtzfall’s eyes snapped to her, as if only just realizing that she could talk. “Why put me in a convent for sixteen years just to try to kill me now? You might as well have smothered me when I was born if I was such a mistake .”

Her grandmother sighed, leaning back. “You’ve clearly inherited your mother’s sense of the dramatic”—Mercy Holtzfall considered Lotte—“if you believe I would kill my own granddaughter.”

She was lying.

The wolves on the road.

The knights standing in her path.

She had held on to her life by the skin of her teeth to get here. And yet still, a flicker of doubt went through Lotte. She had only caught a brief glimpse of her cousins before everything turned to chaos. If anyone had a reason not to want her to compete…

“None of us would pretend to know how far you would go in the name of this family, Mother.” Grace ground down the singed tip of her cigarette against the desk. “But the papers have all seen her now. It’s too late to make her disappear again.”

Mercy Holtzfall ignored her daughter, her gaze staying on Lotte. “You do not yet know your mother, Ottoline, so let me explain her to you.” Her new name still jarred with unfamiliarity, but the condescension that dripped off it on her grandmother’s tongue, that was familiar. “Firstly, she is unvirtuous, too unvirtuous to win the heirship seventeen years ago when she had a fair chance.” Lotte couldn’t help it, her eyes moved to Grace. But if she was bothered by her mother’s harsh assessment of her she didn’t show it. “Secondly, she is greedy, which is why she is using you to try to gain access to the family fortune now. Finally, she is foolish, because you and I both know that you will not win the heirship.”

“You don’t know anything about me either.” Lotte tried to sound defiant, but her voice came out choked instead. “You don’t know I’m worth less than them.”

The words rang hollow. Lotte didn’t belong here. She could see that just from walking among them in the garden. But she didn’t belong anywhere else either. She glanced up at Benedict, the marks of the fight he had endured to get her here. She had told him she would fight to make them accept her and she would.

“Ottoline.” Her grandmother’s voice was needlingly gentle. “The good Sisters of the Briar have been reporting to me for years. I know all about you.”

Those words struck Lotte hard enough to send her reeling back to the convent. Standing in front of the Sisters again. Being told for the thousandth time that she was selfish and lazy and covetous and ungrateful and dishonest. She imagined them writing the same to her grandmother.

But there were forces at play greater than Mercy Holtzfall. She had seen the Huldrekall step out of the woods tonight. She didn’t need to convince her grandmother of anything.

The full truth of Benedict’s words revealed themselves to her now. The only way to belong to this family was through a force greater than Mercy Holtzfall. It was to win.

“I don’t care what you think of me.” Lotte was aware of Benedict’s gaze on her. He had risked his life to bring her this far. Mr.Brahm had died for it. She wouldn’t do them the disservice of backing down now. “I will prove you wrong in the trials.”

Mercy Holtzfall remained unreadable. And when she spoke again it wasn’t to contradict Lotte. “We had better get you a dress. I won’t have the papers saying my granddaughter works as a maid.”

“You can’t stop her from competing, if that’s what you’re planning.” Grace Holtzfall’s casualness sounded strained. “She’s as much your flesh and blood as I am.”

Finally, Mercy turned her attention to Grace. “Then I hope your flesh and blood doesn’t let this family down as badly as mine did.”