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Chapter 41

Theo

The last place Theo had called home was the apartment on White Hart Lane.

Three small rooms that had always seemed flooded with daylight through the huge window that faced the woods. On a clear day, you could just see the tops of the trees. That apartment was where Alaric and Theo were born. Where they had both learned to walk and read and hold a sword.

It was where their mother had died.

She had been a kitchen maid at the Holtzfall mansion, wooed by a charming knight. And when they were wed, they had received permission from Mercy Holtzfall to move out of the barracks.

Their mother was gone long before Theo’s memories started. An illness that swept her away in the space of a few days. Alaric had some memories of her, but Theo only had what was left of her afterward. The blue she had painted the walls in the small living room. A velvet chair with a large wine stain that she had dragged up six flights of stairs when Mercy Holtzfall had told her to discard it from the mansion. Against the blue wall, they had a single shelf of books from which his father taught them to read in the rare free time he had.

There were the classics. Battered copies of the various morality lessons. A few religious texts. But the rest of them were books about knights and their great exploits. Gyrard the Bold who slew the beast at Milstadt, Heward the Faithful who saved the maiden Clara from the witch’s tower, Godfrey of the Many Deeds. And of course, the two they were named for: Alaric the Guard and Theodric the Trusted.

Theo and Alaric had pored over them as boys. Imagining themselves climbing towers and riding over cliffs. Even though their father warned both his sons that these days being a knight mostly meant keeping Holtzfall secrets and driving them around the city. The days of true knights were gone. They were confined to the covers of those old books. To the imaginations of boys in the apartment with blue walls. Before they had moved out to the barracks.

Driving a Holtzfall was what his father had been doing when he was killed. Nora’s father, a Holtzfall by marriage. When their automobile was struck on a slick city road by a milk truck that had spiraled out of control. Both men were killed, as well as the truck driver.

His father had been buried among the other fallen knights. It was only when Theo had turned away from his father’s grave that he had noticed Honora standing behind them. She was ten, wearing clothes that smelled of smoke. Her grandmother, Leyla, had insisted that her son receive a funeral pyre, as was traditional in her country, instead of a Gamanix burial. No matter who he was married to, he was desert born.

Even then, Theo had understood she had come to be with them in their grief. All three of them were grieving lost fathers. They grieved together.

Theodric the Trusted.

The Holtzfalls were supposed to put their trust in him, not the other way around.

Theo waited by the gleaming black door with the 13 on it. The day of the riots, Nora hadn’t even hesitated in revealing this secret entrance. Why would she? Knights did not betray Holtzfalls.

Theo wasn’t betraying her, he reminded himself. Nora might be deep in her grief, but she had never failed him when it mattered. When they were children and Modesty had tried to blame her injuries on Alaric, Nora had been the one to tell Mercy Holtzfall it was a lie. When whispers were going around, wondering how their father could have driven so carelessly, she had been the one to put a stop to them. Nora could be trusted.

Lotte would find her at Hugo Arndt’s victory party this afternoon. She would tell her everything. And Nora and Leyla Al-Oman would end this. They could save Theo from breaking his oath.

The streets were quiet. Every worker in the city had been given the day off to vote in the governor’s election. And the downpour wasn’t helping. Headlights suddenly spilled out onto the wide avenue that led toward the LAO factory, briefly setting the rain alight as the truck trundled to a stop. Bright white letters on the side read Woolfin Steam Laundry Co . And not for the first time, Theo felt unsettled. Woolfin provided laundry services to half the high-end establishments of Walstad. There were Grims hiding in every hotel, every shop, every restaurant. That ancestral instinct rose in him again. Like he was surrounded by beasts in the woods.

The fox girl slid out of the passenger side of the truck. She wasn’t dressed as a maid anymore. “We’re a little far from the factory.” Her voice carried a warning. There were two other men and a woman piling out of the truck. All were plain faced and wearing worker’s coveralls. He doubted that he could pick them out of a crowd later. “Remember, we can slit your brother’s throat like a pig.”

Theo kept his voice steady. “You don’t need a truck to transport plans for charms.”

“You’re right.” Rain streaked down her wolfish grin. “We figured as long as we were here, we’d help ourselves to a few other things. The weapons the police are so intent on always using against us, for instance.”

Their father had taught them to lay their lives down for the Holtzfalls. For their oath. Theo had always thought he would be able to do that. But laying down Alaric’s life was different.

Theodric the Trusted.

His namesake belonged to stories from an era that was long gone now.

Everything had seemed simpler to a boy practicing at being a knight in an apartment with blue walls and a worn-out armchair.

Wordlessly, Theo turned toward the door, entering the code that he’d seen Nora put in just a handful of days before. Pushing the door open, he turned to the four Grims waiting behind him hunched against the rain.

Theo glanced down the road for some sign of Nora. For some sign she was there to stop him. But there was nothing.

“Waiting for something, knightling?”

Nora and Lotte would come.

He trusted that they would come before he became a traitor.