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Chapter 6

Nora

Nora’s cousins collected their coats on the way out of the Holtzfall mansion.

Nora collected her pile of newspapers.

Margarete had ironed and alphabetized them. The Bullhorn sat tauntingly at the top of the pile.

Spoiled Honora Holtzfall Gloats as Heirship Comes Within Reach

Nora rubbed at the nick on her thumb from the Holtzfall ax. The heirship was both closer and further away than ever now.

“Nora?” Constance’s voice made Nora realize she had not been paying attention. Her cousin repeated the question. “What are you wearing tonight?”

Ah. She probably should have thought of that. Now that the private family matters were dispensed with, tonight would be the spectacle for the masses. Or at least the invited masses. In front of the wealthy and the journalistically inclined of Walstad, the ax would be handed back to the Huldrekall for the duration of the trials, and the contenders would officially declare themselves. It was an occasion to dress for.

“You’ll just have to see.” Nora flashed a smile she hoped came across as knowing. As in knowing what she was going to wear. Which she didn’t.

Three large black automobiles were idling outside the mansion, drivers ready to whisk them all home to start preparing for this evening.

The crowd outside the mansion was twice the size it had been when Nora arrived, a mix of photographers and gawkers hoping to catch a glimpse of the would-be Holtzfall Heiresses. A few police officers kept the crowd in check.

The moment the mansion door opened, lenses started snapping like the mouths of hungry crocodiles. Modesty pasted on her movie-star smile, waving as she descended the steps. Constance and Clemency followed, doing a terrible job of pretending they were used to this kind of attention.

Nora let them have their moment, counting to five before she appeared at the top of the stairs.

Instantly, every camera turned toward her. Nora reached reflexively for the charm designed to shade her eyes from the onslaught of flashbulbs before remembering that it was pinned to the white stole she had discarded.

Journalists shouted questions as she descended the steps toward the idling cars. Nora caught the ones she could, lobbing back nonanswers with ease.

“Nora, who do you think is your greatest competition for the heirship?”

“Are you suggesting I’m not the paragon of virtue in my family? How rude!”

“Nora, why weren’t you at Modesty’s movie premiere last night?”

“That little picture about the shipwreck? Boats make me nauseous. I didn’t want to risk it, not even for the pleasure of seeing my cousin drown.”

Nora enjoyed the quickly concealed annoyance across Modesty’s face as the assembled journalists laughed. She couldn’t take offense at Nora’s little joke in public, or she would seem a bad sport in the papers.

She pressed through the crowd toward the waiting car, trying not to squint against the flashbulbs. Squinting would give her wrinkles, Aunt Grace had always said so.

And then to her right…something snagged at her attention. A flicker of something wrong as the throng ebbed and flowed, before the photographers crowded back around, obscuring her view. It took Nora’s tired mind a moment too long to identify what had caught her eye.

Stillness, she realized. An island of stillness in the middle of the cacophony of movement. As men with cameras jostled, there was one body that was immovable. The only person out there not drawn in by Honora Holtzfall.

The crowd split again, and just for a moment she saw the mask, shaped like a golden wolf’s face.

A shiver of warning ran down her spine.

And suddenly she was aware of them all around, the flashbulbs bouncing off half a dozen golden snarls in the crowd. Stalking her through the forest of people.

The Grims were here.

Wonderful, this was exactly what her day needed.

The Grims weren’t a new phenomenon, though the name was hot off the presses.

The Egalitarian People’s Party, they used to call themselves. It didn’t exactly trip off the tongue. And Nora never understood how they could call themselves a “party” when they were neither holding political office nor celebrations of any kind of success.

Back when Nora was younger, they were idealist fools in drab clothing, ranting about the corruption of wealth. They would stand outside factories calling for strikes, which only ever ended with them losing their jobs. If they didn’t want to work, there were plenty of others who did.

Each election, the Egalitarian People’s Party campaigned with grand vague promises of “Reform” and “Change” and slogans like “More Magic and Money for All!” which obviously made no sense. Even as a child, Nora had reasoned that “more magic and money for all” also meant more for the rich. The rich would just be richer, and the poor would still be poor in comparison.

And then, about a year ago, there came the whispers of a new name.

A man had come from the countryside, though no one seemed to know exactly where. One backwoods village was much like another to city people. He had once been an honest farmer with a wife and children. Until one day, the Holtzfalls raised the tariff on his land with no warning. And since he couldn’t pay, he and his family were turned out of their home in the dead of winter to be fed to the wolves. Literally. A hungry pack stalked them as they made their way to a neighboring village for shelter, finally killing the man’s wife, his infant daughter, and young son. Only he survived. A man with nothing to lose, who came to the city looking for a fight.

His name appeared for the first time printed in great bold letters on the front page of the Bullhorn . Isengrim’s Letter to the People of Walstad , it read self-righteously. In it, he told his tragic tale, how he’d come to the city and joined the Egalitarian People’s Party, hoping to help build a better world for others like him. As if the fact that the world wasn’t equal was somehow newsworthy.

The upper circles had scoffed. Isengrim’s story sounded much like Honor Holtzfall’s. Except where Isengrim had failed his family, Honor had proven his virtues and succeeded in saving them. If Isengrim were a good man, surely an all-powerful immortal being would have come to his rescue too. It just went to show, as Mercy Holtzfall said, life was fair to those who deserved it.

Isengrim offered an ultimatum at the end of his letter. The governor must pass a bill that allowed people other than the Holtzfalls to own land. The populace could not be eternally trapped, paying rent month after month, which could be raised on a whim, for the privilege of not being out on the streets. They should be given the chance to own their homes, just like the Holtzfalls owned theirs. And if the governor didn’t pass this reform, Isengrim’s letter warned, there would be consequences.

It was laughable. The Holtzfalls had carved the city out of the woods using Honor Holtzfall’s ax. The city existed because of them. The Holtzfalls owned every piece of land where a tree didn’t grow. No one was about to unmake the very laws that had built Walstad.

The newspapers had mocked the mysterious Isengrim ruthlessly. No one knew what he looked like, but that hadn’t stopped The Charmed City Times from printing a caricature of a man dressed as a large baby, threatening a tantrum. The Magic Mirror showed the city as a beautiful woman, swatting at an annoying buzzing fly labeled: Isengrim . The Walstad Herald was the cruelest, printing a cartoon of a toothless wolf growling at the governor’s door saying: I’ll huff and I’ll puff… With the governor safely behind his brick walls commenting in a little speech bubble: “He is a Grim fellow.”

Of course, no reform was made. And Nora had forgotten the vague threat of consequences until, three days later, a bomb went off at Rikhaus Department Store. Nora hadn’t been there herself. But Angelika Bamberg had held court at her birthday party on a yacht a few days later, telling all the details. A flash, a bang, screaming, and the glass cupola shattering and raining like diamonds around the shoppers.

No one was killed, but there were plenty of injuries. Angelika had a jagged scratch across her cheek, which, in Nora’s opinion, she was making a bit of a meal of displaying, when there were charms that could have healed it overnight. And eighty-year-old Ursula Loetze was blinded in her left eye. Fortunately Ursula was the rare sort of person who could pull off an emerald-encrusted eyepatch.

After that, Isengrim hadn’t seemed so toothless anymore.

Overnight, the Egalitarian People’s Party was gone. In their place, proudly donning the name the Herald had given them, were the Grims, taking the wolf as their emblem and wearing masks to protect their identities. The Grims did more in months than the Egalitarian People’s Party had in Nora’s lifetime. They didn’t call for factory strikes anymore; they shut them down completely, setting fires in the night or smashing machinery to pieces. Those who were arrested never gave up Isengrim to the police.

They’d set no more bombs since that first one, but the city had taken precautions, layering charms into the walls of any place meant for the wealthier members of Walstad society.

Nora had seen the Grims herself many a time since the Rikhaus bombing. Usually through car windows as they blocked off streets and chanted in their wolf masks, with cheap gold paint flaking off the tin surface. But they’d never dared come this close before. Not to her, nor to Walstad’s 1st circle.

Then again, they’d never had a chance like this before.

All four Heiress candidates in one place. Photographers everywhere to witness them.

And as Nora watched, the Grim approached the police officer nearest her. And the police officer…stepped aside.

For the first time in the presence of the Grims, Nora felt something other than annoyance. She felt danger.

Nora reached for the shielding charm she wore as a ring before remembering she had traded it for the newspapers this morning.

Everything happened too quickly. She didn’t even see where the attack came from. All she saw was a hand reeling back and something glinting before she was struck in the chest, the projectile exploding violently.

There was a cry from the photographers. Modesty paused, one foot inside the car, twisting back, hungry for Nora’s downfall. Constance’s and Clemency’s faces were writ with shock. The Rydder knights jumped into action, two of them pushing into the crowd while more moved toward Nora.

Nora looked down at her dress. The front had turned blood red. Distantly, logic told her that she must have been shot.

Except there was no pain. There really ought to be pain with a bullet through the sternum.

Nora reached down, touching the red mark. Her fingers came away stained with…wine, she realized. She pressed her discolored fingers to her lips. Cheap wine. And it was dripping down her body as cameras flashed at twice the speed, eagerly lapping up the scene of the humiliated Holtzfall Heiress.

Modesty could barely hide her glee.

Well, that wouldn’t do.

“I prefer champagne, for future reference,” Nora called after the Grims, who had no sooner attacked than vanished. She reached up, slipping the sleeves of the ruined dress from her shoulders, revealing the white slip she had on underneath. “Well, I have been wearing this all night, it was beginning to go out of style,” she announced to the photographers as she let the garment drop away from her body, pooling on the ground around her feet as the cameras went wild.

She could feel her skin tingling, alive with the thrill of controlling the situation to her advantage. With watching her cousins’ faces curdle.

“Much better,” Nora declared, shifting her pile of newspapers in her hand.

A heavy jacket dropped suddenly over her shoulders a second before Nora sensed the familiar presence coming to her rescue.

Theo was pushing down his shirtsleeves as his jacket engulfed her. He stood between her and the lenses of the cameras. Protecting her. The way he had since they were children. Since he had stood stubbornly between her and an immortal Brag horse that had wandered onto their country estate. She had been determined to ride it. Looking back, Theo was likely right, it would have been idiotic. But that rarely stopped Nora. What had stopped Nora was Alaric wrestling her to the ground and keeping her there until the horse disappeared back into the trees. While Alaric had held her down, both boys, only seven and eight at the time, had taken pains to explain that they were only doing their knightly duty. To protect her at all costs.

Now Alaric was gone. And Theo was left, still standing alone between Nora and her impulse to ride wild horses.

A silent conversation passed between them.

He wanted her to get in the car.

Nora didn’t want to get in the car. Getting bundled away would make her look frightened. Which she wasn’t.

But if she didn’t get in the car, they both knew that Theo could pick her up and put her in the car.

Finally, with the smallest nod only Theo would see, Nora conceded.

They walked through the photographers, Theo shielding her as much as he could even as Nora smiled at the journalists. Nora gave the cameras one last wave as the car door closed behind her, the charmed windows shielding her from sight.

And in a few seconds, they were leaving the chaos of cameras behind, into the traffic of the city.

Inside, the car was silent.

Alaric and Theo had seen more sides of Nora than most people ever would.

They had been like older brothers always keeping her out of trouble; she had stood between them and imperious demands from Modesty and Aunt Patience. They had played more games together as children than she ever had with her cousins.

They had even grieved together before.

Theo and Alaric’s father had been the knight driving Nora’s father when a milk van skidded off the road and struck them, killing both her father and theirs.

But for the first time Nora realized she had no idea what to say to Theo. It was impossible to see him without seeing Alaric.

Guilt twisted her stomach. Alaric had died defending her mother.

Then anger chased it away. Her mother had died because Theo’s brother had failed to defend her.

“Are you all right?” Theo’s tone was more formal than Nora had ever heard it.

“It was very cheap red wine,” Nora said. “But I’ve had worse.”

Theo didn’t rise to the joke. He kept his eyes straight ahead on the road.

“I’ve spent half the night looking for you.”

I didn’t ask you to. But Nora knew how foolish that sounded. He hadn’t been asked to. He had been ordered to. “Then it sounds like we both need some sleep.”

They were heading west toward Silver Street and the empty penthouse that awaited her there. Nora leaned her head against the window. The stack of newspapers sat next to her. Her eyes fell again on the picture of her mother printed in the Bullhorn . Lying in that pool of blood in the alley.

Tears sprang unexpectedly to Nora’s eyes. It was the champagne from last night, she told herself. Her mother always said that champagne made the women in their family emotional. And last night, Nora had drunk enough of it to drown every woman in her family in sorrow. She wiped angrily at her eyes with the neck of her slip. It came away black, and she wondered vaguely if mascara came out of silk. And then, in the blurred corner of her vision, something snagged Nora’s attention.

There, in the picture…on her mother’s throat. Light where the camera’s flash hit something that wasn’t dark blood. Nora snatched the paper up.

At her mother’s throat was a necklace. Barely visible, the emerald chain twisted around at an awkward angle. But it was there. And on her hand, if Nora squinted, there was her ring too, and a bracelet.

Nora’s heart beat faster. The police had barely needed any time to rule that her mother’s murder was a mugging gone wrong. She was found in a darkened alley in a neighborhood known to be unsafe, her body stripped of valuables…

Except, Nora would certainly qualify those bits of jewelry as “valuable.” And there they were, plain as day, still on her mother’s body.

Mugger Confesses When Jewels Found in His Possession!

Lukas Schuld Admits to Stabbing of Verity Holtzfall!

That was what the headlines had read.

Nora had seen the photographs. The mugger in handcuffs while a cop held up her mother’s necklace and bracelet for the reporters.

A necklace and bracelet. But no ring.

“Theo.” Her voice rose when he didn’t answer. “Theo, stop the car.”

“We’re in the middle of the road.” Theo sounded exasperated, and for just a second, they slipped back into their old habits of bickering siblings. “I can’t just stop the car, Nora.”

“Fine, don’t stop the car. Just don’t take me home.” Nora felt her heart racing.

“Where do you want me to take you?”

Good question.

Her eyes dashed down to the ink below the picture. Photo by A. Wolffe.

She was going on the hunt for A. Wolffe.