Chapter 3
three
The blood between my fingers runs like shadow.
Ransom Black towers over me, broad as an oak tree, his hair glinting honey-blond in the warming sun.
His coat hangs in heavy folds about his frame, brass buttons reflecting the light on the water.
His face reminds me of delicate porcelain: high cheekbones, an angled jaw, and full lips like a budding rose.
Beneath bold, dark brows, his expression lies somewhere between haughty amusement and self-importance.
My mouth gapes like a shored fish. There is specific etiquette one is supposed to follow in the presence of a lord, but I find my mind completely and utterly empty.
Damn the etiquette.
I shove the metal shard into the pocket of my sweater and stand shakily.
“You are Adelaide Thorn, are you not?” His voice drops softer, curling around the edges of my body like fog. There is a glint in his eye, something akin to hunger, while he studies the exposed ankles beneath my skirts.
I wince and adjust the ruined fabric over the toes of my boots. “I’m not sure it matters who I am, my lord,” I say, gritting the last words like iron between my teeth.
There is something on his hand, something like dirt, only darker. He wipes it on his trousers, smirks. “Oh, I think it does.”
We stand there in silence for a moment, no sound but the river whistling through ice, the wind in the trees, and dry grasses susurrating on the banks.
Wheels and hooves clack along the bridge—Farmer Whitley’s wagon loaded with straw.
He waves a hand to us, merely smudges in his poor eyesight, and Ransom gestures back.
I whet my lips. “Is there a reason you are walking alone along the river?”
He raises his brow and bends to collect a blade of tall grass, splitting the stem with a thumbnail. A small leather pouch swings from a belt around his waist. I wonder at its contents. Herbs, perhaps? A pencil and a small scrap of paper?
What does a lord do with his time?
“That’s rather an intimate question for someone to ask if they are not Adelaide Thorn, the vicar’s infamous daughter.”
I almost laugh at this. Infamous. But another shock of pain sears up my leg, and my knee buckles. Like a willow switch across my skin.
“Would it even matter if I were?” I clench my jaw and sit heavily on a fallen log, lifting my heel over one knee and inspecting the fresh black blood gathering at the edges of the cut.
Ransom steps closer, and annoyance sparks in my stomach. Doesn’t he have other places to be? Dying father and all that?
And then I freeze.
He’ll see my blood. The color all wrong. And there is so much of it. Yet, I dig at the cut with muddied fingers, wincing when the delicate layers of skin rip like lace. I need to stop the bleeding.
“Are you hurt?” Ransom drops beside me, reaching out his hand, but I pull away.
“I’m fine, thanks.” The words are taut on my lips.
He retreats, straightening the lapels on his coat, brushing hair from his eyes. “You remind me of your father.”
My skin flares white-hot, chin jerking up, and I peer at him. I should feel pity, but there is only anger between my lips. “How do you know what my father is like?” I spit.
His smirk sparkles when it widens, teeth so white they might be carved from ivory. He laughs, triumph in his throat. “I knew it! The vicar’s daughter, hardly seen outside her tower anymore these days, locked away—”
“It’s hardly a tower,” I grumble, turning back to my heel, the blood still beading midnight.
“I haven’t seen your father since the day my mother died.
He’s at the castle now, you know. I always leave when I find he’s coming.
” There is a sadness in his voice, and for a moment, I recognize myself in him.
In the way he holds his fists. Always ready for a fight, always ready to lose.
But I push it away. Just another soul with dead and dying parents.
“I assumed.” My fingers dig into the crevice on my skin, searching for more metal.
“If you would just let me help—” He extends his hand toward me, but I pull away, hissing like a cat.
“I said I was fine.”
His eyes connect with the color of my blood, and I steel myself for what is coming. A shriek. A sharp inhale. A stumbling backward while he stares at my cursed and gory skin.
But there’s nothing.
His gaze simply glides across the cut and up to meet my own. Something stirs in my chest. A knowing. I push it away.
There is more silence while I fish around in my foot, only finding more ichor. My hands are slick with mud, and my mind slips from the sight of shadow staining my fingertips. My heart clenches, but I take my own pumping viscera as a sign.
A-live, a-live, a-live.
Wrong. But alive. I swallow, throat raw and reedy.
“You’re going to make it worse.” Before I can stop him, Ransom is down on one knee in the mud beside me, pulling a silk handkerchief from a pocket and dabbing at the cut.
I grind my jaw, sucking air between my teeth. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Saving your damned life. You don’t want the blood fever, do you?”
Can’t he see it? The gods’ curse in my veins? But he only wipes away more of the syrupy liquid.
I catch the urge to scratch his eyes out if he gets even another inch closer to me, but all I picture are dark lines crawling up my skin, caged lungs, and death.
Just another body buried beneath the bitterbloom.
He drags the cloth over my skin, each movement sparking agony up my shin, and hurries to the river to rinse the staining blood.
Not a single word spoken over the unholiness of whatever lingers inside me. It sends shivers down my spine and heats my core in a way I cannot explain.
I loose a sigh when icy water passes along the cut and tilt my head up to the sky while the pain subsides. A flock of geese make an arrowhead shape against the clouds. Something sharp stings the sole of my foot. I flash my eyes to Ransom.
There is a needle between his fingers, black thread.
“Stop!” I scrabble at his hand and push him away, rising to unsteady feet. For a moment, it strikes me odd that someone privileged would know his way around a needle and thread.
His brows wrinkle, eyes glinting like polished steel. “What is it?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demand, a near echo of before.
He raises the needle, the sliver of metal catching the sun. “If you don’t close that cut, it could get infected.”
My knees shake, and I take a step deeper in the mud to steady myself, wincing when pain radiates up my leg. “Are you a healer, Lord Black?” My words drip with mockery.
His eyes go cold. “I’m trying to help you, Adelaide. I don’t understand what is so wrong with that.”
“This!” I grab the bloodied cloth from his hand and shake it. “Are you insane? I have already been caught out-of-doors with hardly a stitch on—”
Ransom flicks his eyes across the skin of my shoulder, where my sweater has slipped. “Yes, it’s rather nice, isn’t it?”
“Shut up.” I pull at the fabric, working to cover my exposed flesh. “Shut up. I’m not going to let you sew my foot back together. Do you even know what this town would do to me if they found us out here? The vicar’s wicked daughter and the lord of Blackbourne Castle?”
Ransom flicks grime out from beneath a fingernail. “I’m not the lord. Not yet anyway.”
I breathe a sigh, chest constricting. “That’s beside the point. You know—” Another streak of pain flares up my leg, and I lower my gaze to the ruined cloth in my hand. “Get up. Get. Up.”
His eyes widen, and for a moment, I wonder if this is the first time anyone has told Ransom Black what to do. He moves, slowly, and I sit, swinging my injured foot up onto the log, decorum tossed to the wind. I ball the soiled handkerchief and whip it at him.
With my fingers, I rip a stretch from my petticoat’s hem and bend to inspect my skin. It is cleaner than it was, I will give him that, and I work quickly to wrap the ripped cloth around the wound, trying to stem the bleeding.
“What did you step on anyway?” he asks, returning the needle and thread to the pouch at his side.
“Nothing.” I wrench a knot tightly across my foot. “Just a piece of rubbish.”
He turns to look at my discarded skirts, boots, and socks. There is no rubbish on the shoreline.
“Do you want your things?” He steps forward.
“Leave them. I can do it myself.”
Ransom holds up black-gloved palms. “You’re as stubborn as my horse.”
“And you,” I say, grinding a fist into my knees while I stand, “are as arrogant as Farmer Whitley’s barn cat.” I press past him toward my clothes, slipping back into them and welcoming the warmth of the wool.
Ransom wrinkles his nose. “Tell me, please, how am I either of those two things? From where I’m standing, that cut would have been—will be—a whole lot worse if I weren’t—”
“If you weren’t what, Lord Black? My knight in shining armor? Please, do us both the favor of leaving me alone.” I balance on my good foot, slip one sock over my injured heel, and plant it in my boot.
Ransom sniffs. “I take back what I said before, Ms. Thorn. You’re not as stubborn as my horse; you’re as bullheaded as my mule.”
He is lucky he is standing several feet away from me and my left leg is suffering from a bleeding wound. My knuckles sting with the need to sink into the taut flesh of his jaw.
I suck in air while I balance and fix him with the coldest glare I can muster.
“Thank you for your assistance, Lord Black, but I think you best be on your way.” I tilt my chin up toward the clouds. “Wouldn’t want the rain to ruin your expensive coat.”
His eyes bore holes into my chest, turning my bones to ash. He snaps his gloves tighter on his wrists and shakes his head.
“Have it your way then. Good day, Ms. Thorn.”
He moves up the bank quickly, black boots slurrying in mud and grass, becoming little more than dusky shadow when he reaches the edges of the trees. Their yellow-feathered leaves dust his coat, and then he disappears. Like a wisp of smoke.