Chapter 20
CHAPTER 20
WENDY
L araeth is a port town, just like Jolpa, except cleaner. Whereas Jolpa stinks of fish oil and the occasional plague, Laraeth smells of fresh salt air and a host of fragrances traded from around the world. There’s a headiness to the air—but that might just be the faerie wine in such abundance it scents the wind.
I have to breathe through my mouth as we dock, as we scale down the ramp and onto the pier. The captain shoots me an inquisitive look, but I shake my head. My loose lips have already shared too much with the captain. There’s no need to tell him about my mother pressing faerie wine to my lips when I was young. Of the night my father found me passed out in the wine cellar.
Estelle trades in common goods, but Laraeth trades in the exquisite. It’s the type of town even my wealthy parents would have aspired to own property in, though those hopes would have been futile. The only way to own property in a place like Laraeth is to inherit it. And that’s if you’re lucky enough not to have parents paranoid to the point of assuming you’ve been plotting to kill them for an early shot at your inheritance.
It’s a more reasonable fear than one might think, given the rate of patricide in Laraeth is the highest in the region. Granted, the rate of the inheritance ending up in the hands of the true offspring when murder is suspected is rather low. You’d think people would question whether the risk of a hanging is worth the potentially nonexistent reward, but the actuaries can tell you otherwise.
Marble houses line the coast, tucked into the mountainside. I can’t imagine what a pain they must be to keep looking as pristine as they do, but those who live here have more coin than they know what to do with. Hiring an army of workers to wash the exterior is probably a small price to pay for the beauty the coastline exhibits. It’s still midday, so the sun glares off both the waves and the manors’ facades, making the streets of Laraeth almost blinding to walk through.
The walk to the Carlisle manor isn’t far from the coast, but it’s set in the crag of one of the rolling seaside mountains, so we wait for a carriage at its base.
At his command, my arm hangs off the captain’s.
“Your gown is too tight,” he says, scanning the teal evening gown Charlie happened to have lying around. Considering most of Charlie’s possessions were burned when her family was slaughtered, I don’t want to think about who this gown belonged to originally. Whether that woman is still alive or is rotting at the bottom of the ocean.
“It’s not as if I chose it for that purpose,” I snap at him, conscious of how little of my bosom the clingy dress leaves to the imagination. If it weren’t for its high neckline, it would remind me of something my mother would have picked out for me. Well, picked out for my suitors.
Astor shakes his head, confused. “No. I mean, you’re hardly breathing.”
I blink, steadying myself on his arm.
“We should have had Charlie loosen the corset.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was scolding himself.
“It’s not the corset,” I say. “Believe me, I was wearing them long before I had the body structure for them.”
His eyebrow arches. “Then why are you struggling to breathe?”
I swallow, my fingers tightening on his forearm despite myself. My left hand dangles at my side, grazing the air rather than risk grazing my dress. I imagine the position does look rather stiff. “It’s the velvet,” I say, gesturing with my chin down to my gown.
When Charlie had first shown it to me, I’d come close to hyperventilating. But I’d found myself in that armchair in the parlor enough times to know how to defer my panic for later. The pocket in the back of my mind that I used to hide away in is still there, and I’ve been curling into it since Charlie helped me slip into this gown.
“Am I intended to take ‘it’s made of velvet’ as a sufficient explanation?”
I divert my attention toward a crab scuttling near my feet. “The armchair in my father’s smoking parlor was lined in velvet.”
When I peer up at the captain, anger has suffused his harsh features, his heightened pulse ticking against his set jaw. “You should have told me.”
I actually manage a laugh, which makes me feel a tad dizzy. “Why? So you could kill an innocent woman for her gown in order to replace this one?”
Annoyance ripples between the captain’s furrowed brows, but his lips quirk ever so slightly. “No. I’d have lifted it from a shop like a proper gentleman.”
It shouldn’t work, but his subtle joke loosens a bit of the tightness in my chest.
“I’m fine, I assure you,” I say, even though that’s a blatant lie. Anytime my fingers graze the velvet, I feel like crawling out of my skin. “Before I entered society, my brother John and I used to draw pictures in the velvet wallpaper lining the ballroom,” I say, though when I look at the captain, I add, “though I guess you’ve seen it.”
He swallows awkwardly, and for a moment, it’s almost as if he’s going to look away. He doesn’t, of course. The captain doesn’t apologize, doesn’t back down.
“For a while, he kept asking me why I’d stopped,” I say. “I could never bring myself to tell him. He always took such responsibility over my well-being when we were children. I imagine if he’d known, he would have blamed himself.”
“He would have,” says the captain, examining me with those sharp green eyes. “And he’d never forgive himself either.”
“You know,” I say, biting my lip, “it wasn’t his fault. There’s nothing he could have done to keep it from happening.”
The captain blinks. He opens his mouth, like he’s about to say something, but then thinks better of it. After a moment of deliberation, he says, “We’re early, you know. For the carriage.” When I shoot him a questioning look, he straightens his shoulders and jerks his head toward town. “No need to stand around twiddling our thumbs.”
By the time the carriage comes rattling around the bend of the mountain pass, there’s another layer of fabric between my hand and the captain’s arm—a pair of black satin gloves he purchased for me from the nearest tailor.
The carriage driver is a short, bulbous man with wiry gray hair and weathered skin that hangs in loose jowls around his neck. His name is Druisk, and he’s got the type of humor you laugh at out of pity, but find endearing anyway.
“I hear the two of ya are newlyweds,” he says as he opens the carriage door, which is the color of a robin’s egg. “No luggage?”
“We won’t be staying the night,” explains Captain Astor.
The elderly man chuckles. “Can’t blame me for asking. I never know if that’s the case or if the newlyweds just prefer to sleep in the nude.”
I hurry myself into the cab, avoiding Druisk’s outstretched hand offering assistance as I scamper in, cheeks heated.
The captain swoops in after me, scooping his arm around my waist and pulling me into his chest playfully as he turns over his shoulder and says to the driver, “That wasn’t the plan, but I’ll have to purposefully forget our luggage the next time we stay overnight somewhere.”
My belly instantly hollows out.
The elderly man’s face lights up as he chuckles and says, “Me and me wife are the same way.”
The moment Druisk slams the door shut, the captain extricates himself from my side and sidles as close as is physically possible to the door, leaving what might as well be a chasm between us.
I pretend not to notice.