Page 76

Chapter 70

Nora

The bright green-and-gold tulle of Grace’s gown swished across the polished wooden floors. Benedict followed Grace into the office, her eternal shadow. A shadow who was being given the slip more and more these days. But he couldn’t exactly do much about it except protect her when she would allow it. There were nights, though, when he would lie awake, tortured by the Rydder oath, which urged him to go and pull her back from the shadows between the blazing lights of a Walstad night.

But some part of him knew that it was better. That the truest, most immediate danger was the way every part of him was pulled toward her. Ached to protect her beyond the oath.

Grace flounced into her mother’s office, dropping into a chair across from her. Mercy was already sitting. Lis was at her shoulder, as always. She caught Benedict’s gaze as he entered, a silent signal passing between them as fellow knights. Something bad was happening.

“All right, Mother, let’s have it.” Grace puffed hair out of her face, apparently oblivious to the tension in the room. “What have I done that can’t wait until after the celebrations?”

Tonight’s ball was to close the Veritaz Trials. For the past three days, Benedict had stood, tense, at the edge of the woods, aware that Grace was enduring things he couldn’t protect her from. The trials of the woods had been known to go on for weeks in some generations, mere hours for others. Finally, just as the sunset was burnishing the tops of the ancient trees on the third day, Grace and Verity had stumbled out of the woods, side by side.

Verity’s hair, which had been in a long sweeping braid before she went into the woods, now fell to her shoulders, the ends of it slightly singed. Grace was soaked through and shivering, claw marks across her arms. But they were alive, and Benedict felt his heart leap with relief—and with another emotion he knew was too dangerous to admit to himself. That would drive him mad if he did.

There was a quiet moment as the assembled crowd watched the two Holtzfalls with bated breath. And then, a smile splashing across her face, Verity held the ax aloft.

She was the victor of the trials. The crowd cheered and clapped. And Grace embraced her. The winner of a very long race. One that had many casualties, including their own brother.

Benedict had taken off the jacket of his uniform, moving to drape it over Grace’s shoulders. He’d expected her to be devastated by her loss, but she was smiling as wide as her sister. Her real smile—the one from ear to ear that she never showed the cameras because she said it made her face look too wide.

By the time the Holtzfalls gathered that evening to celebrate their new Heiress, newspapers were lining the stands, showing two beaming heiresses. Several accused Grace of faking her joy to mask jealousy. Patience Holtzfall, their younger sister, was doing a delightfully bad job at hiding her own spite.

But Benedict knew Grace. He knew her joy was genuine, even if he didn’t understand it yet. There were moments where she had talked about leaving the family, fleeing her life to live wild on a mountain or anonymously in some foreign city. But those were empty words. There was no other life when you were born a Holtzfall. Like there was no other life when you were born a Rydder knight.

“You seem to be having a fine time at tonight’s celebration, considering you just lost everything I ever sought to give you.” Mercy echoed Benedict’s own thoughts, her fingers drumming on the table. She was in Holtzfall green. A few wisps of pale hair escaped her pompadour.

“I read that sulking gives you wrinkles. If you’d like to speak to someone contrite, I suggest you summon Patience. She’s so pinched with bitterness she’s going to look like a prune by next week.”

Mercy Holtzfall didn’t laugh. And she didn’t waste any more time with small talk before getting to the point. She pulled open a drawer of her desk to reveal a stack of photographs. She tossed the first one down on the desk in front of Grace.

Benedict only had to glimpse a corner of the image to know it wasn’t meant for his eyes. A glimpse of bare skin and blonde hair fanned out across a pillow. He averted his gaze, aware of the blush climbing up his neck as one image after the other was slapped down in the otherwise crushing silence.

He wouldn’t do Grace the disrespect of looking at her like this. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Mercy watching the mirth leech out of her daughter’s face.

“How did you get these?” she asked so quietly Benedict barely heard her. And then she seemed to remember herself. “Because whatever spy of yours stole them, Mother, it was just a bit of a laugh with a friend. I’m not planning on escalating it to the gentlemen’s clubs or—”

Mercy slid the pictures back together into a neat pile. “Well, the so-called friend you were ‘laughing’ with came to me while you were in the woods. He gave me the choice to pay him three million zaub, or The Walstad Herald would print these on the front page.”

“He wouldn’t do that.” Grace wanted to sound flippant, careless. She wanted to sound sure. She didn’t.

“It’s amazing how often people you love will surprise you,” said Mercy Holtzfall, a calm anger settling over her. “For instance, until your friend came to me yesterday, I would have thought any daughter of mine clever enough to win the Veritaz ring for intelligence wouldn’t be stupid enough to let a journalist, of all people, slip past their guard!” Holtzfalls were trained from a young age to only ever show journalists what they wanted seen by the entire world. Grace’s face turned red, and the beginnings of tears were in her eyes. “But no matter how foolish you’ve been, I’ve taken care of it. I understand his ambition was to report to our fine city’s paper from abroad. We agreed to three million zaub and a one-way passage out of Walstad. His ship left this morning, in case you have any illusions about going to find him.”

Grace’s head shot up, revealing she’d meant to do just that.

“Now.” Mercy’s anger slipped off as quickly as she had donned it, leaving her impassive again. “We’d best get back to the party. Let this be a warning to keep your future scandals from having a paper trail. Especially once I’m gone. Verity doesn’t share our guile, she won’t be able to cover things up for you this seamlessly. That’s why I wanted you as Heiress. But I suppose the Huldrekall sees all. He could tell you weren’t worthy.”

She moved to brush by her daughter. But Grace reached out suddenly, grabbing Mercy Holtzfall’s arm. “Mother,” she said in a low voice. “I—” The tears cut off her next words. The desperation of a girl who had gone from growing up far too quickly to desperately needing her mother. Benedict had never seen Grace look so needy before. Her hand dropped to her midsection. “I need your help.”

The memory ended there.

And Nora was slingshotted seventeen years forward again, sitting exactly where Grace had the moment her path had fallen out from under her feet.

Her thoughts pulled in every direction.

Lotte wasn’t Benedict’s daughter. Or the child of a Rydder knight at all. That was why their oath hadn’t been broken by Lotte’s blood. Her father was just some man—a journalist— who had manipulated and used her family for money. She could almost hear herself saying the words August wouldn’t do that . Echoing Aunt Grace in the memory.

But then—the bloodvenn.

Child O. If it wasn’t Ottoline, then was there another Holtzfall child out there with Rydder blood? The key to breaking the knights free of their oath?

“Lotte deserves to know who her father is,” Nora said. “Even if he’s…that.” Nora’s father had been dead for seven years. Some of the details were starting to fade, like whether his hair fell over his right eye when he laughed and what his laugh sounded like. But he was still a part of who Nora was. She saw him every time she looked at herself in the mirror. Lotte deserved to know that part of herself too.

“Ottoline is the least of our worries for once,” Mercy Holtzfall said dismissively. “I’ve already sent her back where she belongs.”

Nora jerked against the restraints. “You can’t do that! She’s one of us.”

“The trials say differently.” Mercy sighed. “I’m disappointed in you, Honora.”

“I’m devastated.” Nora’s eyes were just about the only thing left she could move. She rolled them back as far as possible, knowing it would irk her grandmother.

“I can see the road you are heading down more clearly than you possibly can, Honora, and it only leads away from your family,” Mercy said. “I already caught one of my would-be Heiresses too far down it to stop her”—she tapped at the mirror—“this time, you will not get any further. I intended for Grace to be my heir, and she let me down. And I don’t care for Modesty.” Mercy gazed out the window toward the woods. Through the darkness and rain, the towering trees were still visible. “She only performs well when she is on display. I thought she might serve a useful purpose as a competitor to make you rise to the occasion. Other than that, she is about as valuable as a show pony. What I have always admired about you, Honora, is that you are at your best when you’re not being watched.”

Nora hated that even now, shackled to a chair, the family’s lies unfolding, she still wanted her grandmother’s praise.

“And there will be things that you will need to do as head of this family that must be done…quietly. I have invested a great deal of time into you, Honora, and I don’t enjoy having my investments squandered. That’s not how you become rich.”

“We’re already rich.”

“And I intend for us to stay that way. It’s going to begin with some rules for you. These”—Mercy snapped her fingers, and the charms pulled Nora’s arms up like a puppet—“will stay on. And they will keep you from going anywhere without my permission. You will be confined to this house until the final trial in the woods in four days.”

“You can’t keep me here.” Her grandmother might be powerful, but no matter what their rings said, Nora knew she was smarter. And now her mind was ignited by bright, blooming rage. It would maybe take her a day to figure out the charm circuitry on her manacles and undo them.

“And once you’re Heiress,” Mercy said, seemingly ignoring her, “you’ll have the influence needed to save Leyla’s good name.”

Nora felt her body jerk forward almost involuntarily at the mention of her other grandmother. “She doesn’t care about her reputation.”

“But she might care about going to prison.” Nora understood the threat that was unfolding all at once. But just like with Oskar, she understood too late. “The Grims who attacked the Clandestine Court were using LAO weapons. Everyone saw them. It lends credence to that dreadful article saying that the break-in was set up by Leyla to allow them to plunder her factory in peace.” She had accused Modesty of planting that story in the paper about the break-in. She had never imagined it might have been Mercy. “Especially since they used those weapons to come after Modesty.”

“I almost died in the Clandestine Court,” Nora shot back.

“And what if they were to find out it was LAO magimek wolves that tried to kill Ottoline on the road here…” Mercy trailed off significantly. “All Leyla’s granddaughter’s competitors…targeted by LAO technology.”

The anger that rose through Nora was hard and cold. “You’ve been building a case against her in secret. Because if I’m not Heiress, then you needed an excuse to wrest LAO out of her grip.”

“We have to keep it in the family.”

“It belongs to my family .” Nora jerked against her constraints, her voice rising.

“And it will continue to—if you win.”

Nora didn’t like being threatened. “I am going to win.” The words tasted bitter. She wanted to win because she was better than Modesty. She knew she could be a better Heiress too, even if it wasn’t the sort of Heiress her grandmother wanted. She could be one who actually did something for this city. But the only thing that she could do to gain any power back from Mercy Holtzfall was exactly what she wanted her to do. The only way for her to win this war was to capitulate in this battle.

“Good.” Mercy Holtzfall’s smiles were rare, but a faint one played around her mouth now. One of real amusement, tinged with weariness. “You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do, Honora.” It was just enough that the lines in Mercy’s face were visible, making her look her age in spite of all the money she spent on looking younger. “Lucky for you, I still have decades left to teach you.”