Chapter 5
“Her Grace sends her apologies. I will be showing you the rooms today.”
Hedgefort’s words barely reached Will as he sat before his soft-boiled egg, trying to suppress the urge to gag. With a sigh, he pushed it aside and turned to the grapefruit, served with a pinch of salt and caramelized sugar.
Even the bath the servants had drawn for him had failed to rinse away the clammy feeling the dream had left behind. The echo of foreign organs remained. Will put his hand to his heart and listened to its steady rhythm, reassuring himself that no second heartbeat answered.
For a second he thought about packing his things and taking the next train back to the Capitol, but brushed it off immediately.
There was no going back without finishing this ballroom.
So he put on a smile and dug into the breakfast. He refused to give the butler the satisfaction of knowing that he would sleep with the curtains closed that night.
Equipped with a sketchpad, notebook, and pencil, Will waited patiently while Hedgefort unlocked the doors to the ballroom. Someone had threaded a chain through the curved handles.
“Where is the duchess?” Will asked.
“She is resting.”
Will had expected more dust, like a wing that had stood abandoned for decades and was ruled by spiders. Instead, his shoes slid across only a thin layer, barely visible against the parquet. As with the duchess yesterday, the room was pitch-black, its walls scarcely discernible.
Will headed straight for the narrow strip of light and tore open the curtains. Without hesitation, he moved from one window to the next until the entire front of the room lay exposed and hazy daylight streamed inside.
“Gods, what is that stench?” He groaned and turned toward the butler, who had remained in the doorway. He froze, his gaze falling across the vast length of the hall.
Once, it must have been magnificent, built in Bloodgrove’s heavy, imposing style.
Mirrors and lanterns alternated along the rear wall, while every inch of it was papered in wild, interwoven patterns.
Chandeliers as tall as a man hung at regular intervals throughout the room, dripping with dust-coated crystals.
But what made him stare were the heavy chains hanging everywhere from the ceiling, sometimes a pair, sometimes two, each ending in iron manacles. Beneath them, the parquet was darkened with large, reddish-brown stains.
Will turned, threw open the glass door, and retched his breakfast over the balcony.
He had always dismissed the rumors as old wives’ tales meant to frighten children out of running away.
Bloodgrove, the city where mages used the blood of their victims to commit unspeakable acts.
Sacrificial rites beneath a red full moon.
Forces that drove its inhabitants mad. Bloodgrove was not freedom, the stories warned, but a curse.
But Will was a modern man. He had immediately recognized the tales as Capitol propaganda, intended to cast the free city-state in a sinister light so no one else would be tempted to follow its example.
Perhaps those stories were also why his rational mind leaped at once to images of human sacrifice, why for a second reality gave way to visions of naked bodies hanging from the chains, blood running down their emaciated limbs, while beneath them the beautiful and wealthy danced in the blue-green glow of faerie lights.
The screams faded, leaving behind only the stench of decay.
“Hedgefort! What happened here?” he called across the ballroom, dabbing the corner of his mouth with his pocket square. Stomach acid and grapefruit juice mingled bitterly on his tongue.
Slowly, the butler stepped onto the stained wood. “The old master succumbed to the bloodlust.”
“Bloodlust?”
“He drank too much blood and summoned too much of it. His will was not strong enough, and he broke.”
Will wanted to push him further, but his mouth merely opened in silence before he turned away with a frown. What was one supposed to say to something like that? The man appeared entirely serious.
Will decided to ignore it and paced the length of the ballroom in long strides, then its width.
“Her Grace has prepared the floor plan for you.”
He counted twenty yards in one direction and eight across.
Eight glass doors opened onto a narrow balcony.
There were three other doors: one to the stairwell and two to a parlor where guests could take refreshments or rest. Balancing the small notebook on his forearm, he wrote down the measurements.
Though rain clouds were gathering outside, he could already imagine the ballroom glowing during the New Year’s celebration, its lights shining through the windows onto the street below, guests waving down from the balcony to new arrivals and watching the fireworks.
The ballroom should be the shining heart within this dark shell.
He forced his mind to remain with the familiar and locked magic and dreams inside a forgotten chamber in his chest. He would finish what he had lost in the queen’s cousin’s ballroom, facing whatever it takes.
“Does Her Grace wish to keep the chains?” he asked, his expression carefully controlled.
“I do not believe she has any further use for them.”
Will raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he had misinterpreted the devices, and they had served a far more pleasurable purpose, though he doubted it. That would, at least, explain the grotesque mask.
“When was the last celebration held here?”
“Last winter.”
He found it difficult to imagine what kind of woman the duchess was.
His gaze kept catching on new details, and each time the image he had formed of her began to waver.
Her seemingly frail body and the empty expanses of the house told the story of a lonely woman.
The chains in the ballroom—whether intended for fetish or cruel ritual—contradicted it.
The missing furniture and scarcity of valuables suggested financial trouble, but the scale of the renovations and the salary she had offered him argued otherwise.
Even so, he made a mental note to contact the bank.
He was on the verge of forming a harsh judgment when his eyes caught on a pale mark where a cabinet had once stood. On the bare stone wall behind it, a child had drawn stick figures of a family, along with a horse and several birds.
Smiling, he crouched before it and made another note. Perhaps the duchess had drawn it as a child. The dust along the baseboard showed that the chest had not been moved in years.
“Does the duchess have any siblings?” he asked, glancing back at the butler. The drawing showed a mother, a father, and four children.
“She had two sisters. One died with a dead child in her womb. The other took her own life.”
Will gasped, inhaled a mouthful of dust, and dissolved into a fit of coughing.
“Who is the fourth child?” he finally managed as he rose again.
“There was no fourth child.”
Will was beginning to hate the butler’s neutral expression. Whether he was warning him against moonlight, recounting the tragic deaths of two women, or speaking of blood magic, he never so much as blinked.
“How old is she now?” Will prodded, since the butler seemed unusually willing to answer.
“She is twenty-six.”
“Oh.” Will stopped, clutching the notebook to his chest. “The same age as me.”
“If you say so…” Hedgefort looked bored.
Over the days that followed, the duchess’s presence followed him through the grand townhouse.
To his surprise, the conservatory was the most inviting room among all the townhouse’s cryptlike chambers.
Ribs of granite curved over half the room, the spaces between them filled with slender steel bars and glass.
Perhaps large tropical plants had once crowded the space, but now only a handful of orange, grapefruit, and lemon trees remained.
Here, too, most of the furniture was gone; only a large table had been placed in the center of the room.
Rolls of paper and books waited there, along with rulers and pencils.
The duchess had thought of everything, and her presence seemed to linger in the two empty chairs.
Tradespeople came to introduce themselves. Carpenters, upholsterers, painters, and glassblowers were led one after another into the conservatory by Hedgefort, where tea and sandwiches were served.
Every one of them seemed startled by Will’s requests. Their eyes moved nervously, while they perched on the edges of their chairs as though prepared to flee at any moment. Seasoned men and women with callused hands sat with their shoulders drawn high until he dismissed them.
“Hedgefort!” Between two introductions, Will finally lost his patience.
“Yes, sir?”
“Why is every tradesperson who comes in here trembling?”
“I remind them whose house they are entering, sir.”
Will stared at the butler in disbelief. “And why would you think that necessary? I cannot work like this!”
The man drew himself even straighter, something Will had not thought possible.
“Mr. Frank, you are an outsider. You do things differently from the way they are done here. You have no respect for this family or for the power of this house. Until Her Grace takes personal charge of the work, that responsibility falls to me.”
Will was on his feet at once. He was a tall man, though slender, and stood a full handspan above Hedgefort.
“Did the duchess instruct you to do this?” he hissed. Few things made him lose his composure, but someone interfering with his work was one of them.
“No. But I serve this house.”
“And I am rebuilding it!” Will thundered.
Gods, he hated these walls, the pale patches where paintings had once hung, the empty suits of armor and the dead eyes of taxidermied beasts.
The suffocating curtains and soot-blackened alcoves.
The monstrous gargoyles and the wrought-iron gate that was never opened.
The bars across the windows on the first and second floors. The stench of decay and dust.
The butler stiffened. “Sir, this city does not welcome change. You will see soon enough.”
Will turned away. “Send in the next one.”
And the butler obeyed. The tradespeople remained cautious, but they were no longer afraid. It was Will himself they seemed to distrust.