Page 6 of The Unseen Hour (The Unseen Hour Duology #1)

N ormally at these sorts of events, I looked forward to the end of the evening. While I enjoyed seeing Charlotte, Thomas, and a select other few individuals, I enjoyed getting away from the pack of marriage-obsessed mothers and suitors even more.

I was also firmly of the belief that being able to get rid of a corset and constrictive dress was perhaps the best part of any evening.

In this instance, however, I’d put myself in the lion’s den.

My mother, Vinia, smiled at me from across the carriage, and I awaited her commentary on the evening.

She’d looked so pleasantly surprised when I requested we ride home together that I felt a tad guilty, until I saw her eyeing every gentleman I danced with before we left the ball.

“Lord Huberts was admiring you this evening,” she started.

I sighed.

“Mother, Thomas and I are friends. Just as Charlotte and I are friends.”

With a frown, my mother sat back in the carriage; but she rallied within seconds, leaning forward again .

“What about the Marquess of Umpert? I saw that he danced with you this evening. His properties are small but lovely. His estate to the northeast has that charming lake.”

I made a noncommittal noise in the back of my throat.

The estate my mother referenced was far outside the capital and near the coldest region of Emrys.

Worse, Bellamy Bonds was the Marquess, and I could only imagine being stuck on a dreary estate with nothing to do and no one but him and his staff for company.

Plus, his lands were just about as far from my family as I could be.

As annoying as Mother’s prodding sometimes was, I had fond memories of growing up at Scops.

Family walks through the woods. Riding together.

Lawn games, even though I rarely won, with laughter and joking.

Back before my mother had disappeared into her grief and then re-emerged with nothing to occupy her but high society.

My father’s disappearance had taken the spark from my mother, and if she got him back, the spark would return as well. I was sure of it.

“I have no interest in Bellamy Bonds either, Mother. He has all the personality of a wet blanket.”

Across the carriage, Mother frowned again, deeper this time.

Her whole face managed to turn downward.

For a moment it looked as if the pile of orange curls pinned atop her head might fall off like ice cream from a cone.

I had to bite back a laugh at the thought.

Her eyes seared into me. They were a saturated shade of blue that complemented her other features.

She had faint freckles across her cheeks—terribly out of fashion in her time, and still not the standard for beauty in mine, but one of her singular holdouts against the norm.

My father had always found them charming.

While the shades of our hair and eyes might be different, I did share the shape of my mother’s eyes, although I rather thought mine never bore the same severe look. We also had the same cheekbones, and the same straight nose. It was like watching an older, more serious version of myself.

My mother sighed, falling back against the seat again.

“You know, you could at least try to involve yourself a bit more, dear. It was one thing your first season or two out, but now people are beginning to talk.”

I just bet they were. Whispered barbs behind gloved hands.

Gossips feigning civility and concern. All young women and ladies made their society debuts during their twentieth year.

I’d be twenty-five in the fall, marking it as my fifth season.

Most women were married by their third. Tongues were wagging.

In the face of such scrutiny, it was foolish to think my mother’s desire to hold her children close would win out. I had been distracted while it had slowly been chipped away, carved and shaped into conformity.

“And what should we care for the gossip of a bunch of sodden-headed bores?” I grumped in my seat.

I suspected I’d gone more than a hair too far when Mother gasped, but instead of chastising me she sighed, reaching out to take my hands in hers.

“Do you know, when I was your age it was even worse. We didn’t refer to other nobility by even their last names, as we do now.

We had to refer to them by the title of their estates.

You would have been dancing all night with Marquess Umpert, not Bellamy or Lord Bonds, as you refer to him.

When your father and I were betrothed, I had to go around addressing him as Marquess, or Your Grace, if you can imagine. ”

I had heard this information from her dozens of times before, but accepted the gesture for the peacekeeping attempt it was. I smiled, letting myself be drawn into the story.

“And what changed everyone’s minds?” I asked, already aware of the answer .

Vinia looked around the carriage as though someone might overhear a secret before turning back to me, whispering conspiratorially.

“The queen. She loved the missing king, may Day and Death save him, and insisted that she would not spend her entire life referring to him by a title when she ought to have the right to call him Frederick .” The missing king’s name was whispered quieter than the rest. It might have been all right for the queen, but no one else was foolish enough to refer to the royal family by anything but their titles. That had not changed.

King Frederick had chosen to travel to the other continents, determined to repair relationships and attempt to work together with foreign emissaries on better defenses against the Unseen Hour.

Instead, his ship had disappeared during a fierce storm in the Talwin Sea, somewhere between Emrys and Mejje, during the hour.

Everyone agreed the king had either drowned, along with the rest of the crew, or been Taken and his body lost to the waves. But no one dared argue with the queen.

What I did have of Father’s writings included notes that appeared to relate his interest in the Unseen Hour to the missing royal.

Whatever the queen suspected, or whatever she hoped to find by enlisting my father’s help as a trusted noble, I wondered if she had a similar suspicion to my own: that being Taken was not necessarily the end—at least not when there was no body left behind.

At the moment, the queen ruled in place of her eldest son.

There was some law stating that if a monarch was indisposed due to health for more than twelve years, then the next ruler would be crowned.

The queen had a few years left in power before the officials of Emrys could legally declare the king deceased and place one of her sons on the throne instead.

While I was as far in power from her as she was from the gods themselves, our positions were oddly similar .

Both firmly stuck in our circumstances. Both of us running out of time to delay.

Father had disappeared during the Unseen Hour months after my first season.

I hadn’t been able to move on from it. It was as if going through each year in a repetitive pattern somehow preserved our lives, in case he came back.

Not that anyone else expected him to. Even before finding Holmes’s diary, such action had felt to me like a betrayal.

Moving on and settling for a mediocre and shallow life.

While the missing king might indeed be at the bottom of the sea, I had always felt I would know if my father were dead, and now I had every reason to suspect I’d been right from the get-go.

After all, the individuals who were Taken had to go somewhere. All of Emrys believed in Day and Death. It stood to reason, in my mind, that if Death was responsible for our plight, he had the souls safe.

And since my father’s body was gone as well, it made all the sense in the world that, wherever the souls were, there he was, still alive and waiting for rescue. The diary and his theories had only solidified my belief.

He’d only been out on the night in question to fetch the Fox Haven physician for one of my mother’s debilitating migraines.

When two weeks had passed with no news, we held a funeral for him and that was that. I was expected to go back to my life and the role I was meant to play.

But I couldn’t. I remained stuck between my life before, and whatever awaited after.

Then, I found R. Holmes and his diary, alongside my father’s writing.

Every night since October had been consumed with new purpose, the fire inside me finally stoked again.

And this night was no exception.

I just had to handle my mother first.

“Really, Celia, I bear some of the responsibility for this. I let you drag your feet these past few seasons. I wanted to give you time to grieve, and I needed the time as well. But your brothers are moving on, and so must we. Ambrose has already expressed interest in a proposal this season. You need a suitable match of your own. I’d feel better knowing you were cared for.

After all, with your … habit of running off …

I need to make sure you have someone to ensure your safety. ”

I huffed, working hard to keep a glare off my face. Mother would never tolerate both at once. I could hardly explain to her that my habit of sneaking off was to follow my father’s breadcrumbs, and those of R. Holmes’s diary, to try to find a way to follow them both wherever the Taken went.

I tackled the issue of suitors instead.

“How am I supposed to make a match when there is no one I would consider marrying? I have no interest in Thomas in a romantic way, and none to speak of for Bellamy whatsoever. That will not change.”

“Really, Celia! It does not matter if you feel that way. Your father and I married for love, but that isn’t the case for many young ladies.

If I had possessed a firmer hand the last few years, you’d already be settled and running a household of your own.

I admit that I should have pressed harder, sooner. ”