ALDRIC
The mole surrenders at half past four.
I hold the wretched creature by the scruff and consider execution—I have executed for far less—but Clara’s voice lives in my head now, so I carry it to the far edge of the orchard and release it with a warning it does not deserve.
“You live because of a woman,” I tell it. “Reflect on that.”
Schmetterling watches from the fence post, tail curled around his paws, unimpressed by my mercy.
He follows me back through the garden where I wash my arms at the well pump.
Then he follows me into the kitchen where I build the fire, stationing himself on the flour barrel with his pale eyes fixed on my every movement.
“The first trout is not yours tonight,” I inform him, laying the fish on the cutting board. “You had yours yesterday. Even feudal taxes had limits.”
He blinks at me slowly. He doesn’t care about my limits. He has never once cared about my limits, and in three hundred years, I have never once enforced them, and we both know how this ends.
I fillet the fish the way I demonstrated for Clara, one long draw along the spine, and I catch myself thinking about the moment she walks in.
About how she’ll lean in the doorway, and say she’s supervising.
She thinks I don’t know that she has a fixation with my forearms. I have known since the first week.
I roll my sleeves higher on purpose now.
A strategist uses the weapons available to him.
I butter the pan, add wild chives, then crisp the new potatoes she likes, the small ones, in the fat. I set the table in the great hall myself tonight, and I light the candles even though the electric bulb hangs right there.
Finally, I plate the trout, pour the water, and sit.
The chair beside mine stays empty.
I check the tall windows. The shadows of the firs stretch long across the courtyard. Two hours, I told her. It has been closer to three.
“She is photographing insects,” I tell Schmetterling, who has abandoned the flour barrel to sit on her chair, which he usually never does.
“She found a butterfly, and then another butterfly, and now she is lying in the lavender making that device take pictures. She loses all sense of time when the little screen is involved. You have seen her. Four hundred photographs of you sleeping. You, sleeping, from nine angles.”
Schmetterling stares at me.
“She is fine.”
He doesn’t blink.
The trout is going cold. I stand, and the chair scrapes back louder than I intend.
I’m already moving through the kitchen, then through the garden door, telling myself I’m walking to meet her on the path because dinner is ready.
That is all. If I meet her halfway, I will carry her back on my shoulder, and she will call me a gothic something-or-other, and all will be fine.
The path through the forest is empty.
“Clara!”
My voice startles birds resting in the canopies. Nothing answers but their wings.
I lengthen my stride. The forest I have walked for seven centuries suddenly feels foreign. The trees spit me out at the lake gleaming gold in the late afternoon sun. The lavender at the water’s edge is thick with butterflies, orange and blue, exactly where she would be. Where she should be.
She is not there.
“Clara!”
She must be at the far shore. She circled the lake before, that first week, pretending to admire the flora, and again later, walking the full loop, lost the light. I’ll find her there, and she will laugh at herself for getting distracted.
I run.
I have not run in decades. There was never anywhere to run to. Now my boots tear through the reeds as I round the northern point calling her name. Then I call for her at the eastern shallows, and at the old fallen oak where the herons nest, but all I hear is the echo of my own voice.
I stop where the old forest meets the waterline, my chest heaving, and make myself think like a soldier instead of a drowning man. Tracks. There will be tracks—the ground here is soft.
I spot boot prints. Hers, small and dainty, pacing around the lavender, deeper where she must have crouched low to take her pictures. But then…
More prints. Larger. Three sets, coming down out of the trees, spreading wide along the shore like a fisherman’s net before it closes over its prey.
“CLARA!”
A yowl answers me.
Schmetterling stands twenty paces up the shoreline, where the boot prints converge. He followed me, and now he stands rigid with his tail lashing, staring down at something in the dirt. He yowls again, a low, awful sound I haven’t heard since the night Greta didn’t wake.
I cross the distance and stop breathing altogether.
Her phone.
It’s lying face-up in the pine needles, the screen alive and glowing in the dusk, filled with a picture of a butterfly. There are furrows gouged through the needles beside it. Drag marks. Heels, dragged toward the treeline.
I pick the device up with a shaking hand. A hand that has held a sword through the deaths of ten thousand men and it has never once shaken. I feel like I’m standing on a ship’s deck, the ground tilting under me.
I teased her once that she has legs like a newborn foal.
She laughed, saying that her legs outran the Italian mafia.
She laughs at everything, my Clara. And she was standing here alone, and he took her.
Because I said he will not come here. Because I, the great strategist, the siege-master, calculated that a man’s pride would exhaust itself in town, and he would not search the forests.
Marco has her. The knowledge hits my chest much like the mace that took my ear hit the side of my head.
Schmetterling presses against my boot and looks up at me. For once, he’s not looking at me with judgement.
I narrow my eyes at the drag marks. At the darkening forest they vanish into. At the phone in my fist.
Seven hundred years, I could not leave this land.
Now nothing on this earth will keep me on it.
“I will need my greatsword,” I tell the cat, then turn on my heels and march back toward Blackthorn Keep.
Marco wanted a warlord’s bride.
He will meet the warlord.