had even bothered to dismount.
Judd took the tray back to the kitchen, where Mr. Pilchard was stirring a great stew of spring vegetables to go with the lamb on the spit.
“They didn’t stay?” he asked Judd with surprise. “My walnut cake put them off?”
“No.” Judd broke off a piece, tasted it with pleasure. “Your cake is wonderful. Mr. Dow, unfortunately, is feeling no better, and it was he whom they came to see.”
“Ah. And here I just made up a tray for him, thinking he was recovering. Some hot roast chicken, a salad dressed in herbs and oil, leeks braised in sherry.”
“Is that it?” Judd asked, eyeing dishes covered by a cloth on a tray. “I’ll add a mug of ale to it and take it up to my father.”
“Most likely he’d be disappointed by something so delicate,” Mr. Pilchard objected, moving the tray off the table and out of reach. “I have some peppered chops cooking for him, and the roast potatoes he likes. I’ll bring his supper up to him as soon as it’s ready.”
“You’re probably right, Mr. Pilchard. And Mr. Dow might like the chicken later,” he added, but dubiously, “after Hesper tends to him.”
“Hesper?” Mr. Pilchard queried, flipping a chop.
“Hesper Wood. He asked to see her. Our local version of a wood witch. She knows everything there is to know about both the dangerous and the healing properties of anything that grows out of the ground.”
“Ah.”
“Even Dr. Grantham consults her.” He took another bite of cake, then paid heed to the shouts and laughter rolling down the kitchen stairs. “I’d better go and help Mr. Quinn in the taproom.”
He spent the evening ensconced behind the bar, except to escort Hesper Wood upstairs when she came, and back out again, when Mrs. Quinn said she was leaving.
He met her at the door; she told him, “I think he’ll sleep peacefully now.”
“What was it?”
“He said it was a kind of family ailment,” she said only. “Something he inherited.” She shook her head when Judd offered payment. “He’ll pay me when he’s well, I’m sure. Don’t fret, Judd. He’ll be all right now, as long as he is careful about what he eats.”
“All right. Thank you, Hesper.”
The long evening finally drew to a close. Visitors called for their horses to ride back to Aislinn House by lantern light; guests drifted to their rooms, or were carried by their friends. Judd left the mess for Mrs. Quinn in the morning and locked the taproom, feeling the weight of the long day and the brief previous night. He went upstairs, berating himself for not having sent a note to Gwyneth, a wildflower, a book, anything to tell her he had thought about her. Tomorrow, he told himself. Without fail.
He saw the light under his father’s door and opened it, surprised. His father, put to bed by Mr. Quinn, rolled sleepily toward him.
“Judd?”
“Me. Your lamp is still burning. Mr. Quinn must have forgotten about it.”
Dugold grunted. He lifted his face off his pillow then, an odd expression on it, maybe left by a dispersing dream. “Who was that, then?”
“Who?”
“Who brought my supper?”
“The cook, I suppose.”
Dugold grunted again, dropped his face back onto his pillow. But his eyes stayed open, as though he saw something puzzling in the dark. “I couldn’t tell. He sounded human enough. But when the door opened, I couldn’t tell what was coming through. Something felt bright, burning maybe, and roiling like a wave, glittering yet full of shadows . . . Just beyond eyesight, so I could almost see it . . .”
“You were dreaming,” Judd said gently, and turned down the lamp. “It was only Mr. Pilchard.”
He remembered Dugold’s odd description early the next morning, when he found Mrs. Quinn in the kitchen, crossly scorching porridge for her hungry family, and discovered with stark horror that his cook had vanished.
So, he found later that morning, had Ridley Dow.
Nineteen
When Ysabo went to feed the crows that morning, she found the tower door locked.
She stared at the unmovable iron latch in her hand. She wrenched at it frantically a few times; the door, thick wood bound in iron, did not even rattle in its frame. She could hear the crows gathering on top of the tower behind the door, their faint, harsh cries, as though they were calling for her.
Terror weltered through her, turning her fingers icy; she nearly lost her grip on the scrap bowl. In all her life, the door to the tower stairs had never been locked. She had no idea where to find a key.
She had no idea whom to tell.
Maeve? Aveline? They were sitting tranquilly in Maeve’s chambers, shortening the dress for Ysabo’s wedding. When the moon was full. Whenever that was. To a man whose name she was not exactly sure she knew. Who barely spoke to her. With whom she was expected to beget a child.
Who could feed the crows every morning for the rest of her life.
A cold tear rolled down her cheek, dropped into the scrap bowl. She looked down at it, the shreds and bones of last night’s supper, bloody bits of meat, wilting salads, torn bread smeared with drippings and butter, fruit with the mark of someone’s teeth in it. She was trembling, frightened nearly witless by the broken ritual, the disastrous unknown looming in her life if she did not feed the crows.
Deep in her, a thought surfaced, colder than the terror riming her bones.
Somebody had locked the door. So she couldn’t feed the crows the unappealing leftovers of people’s suppers. They probably wouldn’t drop dead, if she didn’t feed them. They probably wouldn’t eat her instead. And even if they did, it was likely better than to be married to a knight whose heart, from what she could tell, was colder than her terror, and so tangled in the web of ritual he didn’t have a thought in his head that hadn’t been shaped by it.
Still shaking, she put the bowl down very quietly on the floor. The crows could find an open window if they were truly hungry. Anyway, they were birds. There was a great wood all around them. They wouldn’t starve.
They’d think of something.
She turned stiffly, her steps as nearly soundless as she could make them as she walked away from the scrap bowl into the unknown.
The door didn’t slam suddenly open behind her; the crows didn’t pursue her. She went down and around, down and around, making her way through empty walkways and inner halls, past the great hall with its noisy, clamoring, thoughtless knights. She couldn’t go back to Maeve and Aveline, not sit there quietly and embroider, not hiding such a monstrous deed from them while they hemmed her wedding dress.
Why should she marry this knight? She didn’t want to. Why not be condemned for two failed deeds as well as one? Or for three? Or five?
What if she didn’t lock this door, unlock that, light this candle, leave the sword across the chair? What if she did everything backward, and at the wrong time?
So what if the roof fell in?
She felt another tear roll down her face, warmer this time. Grief was mingling with fear now, kindled by the loss of the only life she knew. It burned her throat, her heart. What if she destroyed her world?
What if she didn’t?
She ignored the doors, the candles. She would leave the ancient sword in its scabbard. Let someone else take it out if it were truly needed. If not, let it gather dust. She went down, hours too early, as deeply as she could go, to the subterranean chambers where the water, if nothing else in the entire place, could at least find its way in and out of the house.
And so will I, she thought suddenly, fiercely. So will I.
She yielded to one point of the ritual: lighting a taper before she went underground. It was not the one she
