Chapter 43 Ezra
Ihad to have fallen asleep. The liquor must have relaxed me enough.
I awoke to the table beside me clattering to the ground with a loud crash.
The glasses shattered against the hardwood floors, but the bottle remained intact and spun until it hit the wall.
The fog of sleep had hardly cleared before I saw Raf’s retreating form, running through the door and out into the courtyard.
The door swung behind him and from the window, the same one he had watched for hours, I could see the shadowed forms of four women on horses coming up the path.
I shot to my feet, dizzied from the headache that the liquor so kindly brought on.
I staggered through the door, wondering how Raf managed to move so quickly when he had a fair bit more than I had, just in time to see him come to a skidding halt before Helena’s horse.
He nearly caused the beast to throw her from the saddle in his haste.
“Were you ambushed?” he asked as he helped her from the horse.
“Are you hurt? What happened? Why…” A myriad of questions poured from his mouth before any of them could think long enough to answer.
It was only when I helped Lavinia down from Charm, that I noticed the state of them all.
Liv was covered in dirt. Her clothes were streaked in blood. Suddenly Rafael's concern made sense.
“Is this yours?” I asked, inspecting Liv for wounds.
“No, my love. I am fine.” She leaned in with a quiet tired sigh and placed a kiss on my cheek.
“Help Dinah and Johanna please.” I did not question her request.
I had seen the same look on her face after I killed the man in the barn that tried to take her.
She had seen death, and it would take her a while to recover.
Despite the coat wrapped tightly around her, Dinah was shaking when I pulled her down from her horse. Johanna hopped down from Sole with ease and made for the house. After I saw Dinah to the door, I turned back to Helena.
“What in the seven hells happened out there?” Rafael stood silently beside her looking dejected and pale.
“We were ambushed,” she said simply as she offloaded supplies and handed them to Rafael. He carried everything she handed him to the door, came back and continued to mule the supplies for her without a word. He looked almost ill.
“What do you mean you were ambushed?” I took a sack of fabrics from her. “Did they hear you by the wall? I knew we should not have chosen a path that ran so close to it.”
“Ezra. This is no one’s fault. It is not yours, and as much as the Blacksmith insists that this is his fault, it is not his either.”
We set the last of the supplies on the ground for Raf to pick up and then led the horses to the stables.
“They did not happen upon us. They were lying in wait. Just like with the sea.”
“What does this mean? Is nowhere safe any longer?” I brushed a hand through Charm’s mane and she whinnied happily.
“There are plenty of places that are safe. The sanctuary is safe. It is not places I am worried about.”
She took a bite of a carrot and offered the rest to Strega who happily accepted.
“It is the people I am worried about. It seems that cutting trade and trips within Forsgeth was not enough. Someone told them exactly where we would be.”
I followed her into the house and up to Liv’s and my chambers.
Liv sat at the foot of the bed, silently brushing her wet hair.
She had already bathed, likely to get any trace of carnage off of her as soon as possible.
“Where is Arabella? We need to talk to everyone that was involved in the rescues, the mission to the sea and the supply run. We must know who they have spoken to.”
Helena continued to pace. “We need to keep tabs on anyone coming and going, no more trips by themselves at all, not even to the woods.”
She chewed on her nails as she continued.
“Clearly it was not someone from Forsgeth since only Elsbeth was apprised as to our whereabouts. Unless…”
“Hell.” Liv grabbed her wrist. “I know that you feel responsible, but just as you told Ezra, this is not any one of our faults.”
She took Helena’s hands in hers and sighed.
“Tonight I am tired. We shall deal with this in the morning. Betrayal will still be there when we wake.”
Helena froze, her eyes softening from manic plotting to careful concern.
“I am sorry Liv, that you had to do that. None of us should have been in that situation. And I will do everything I can to make sure it does not happen again.” Helena pulled her in and hugged her tight. “Get some sleep.”
Helena left us with a quiet goodnight, closing the door softly behind her.
Liv crawled beneath the blankets without another word, exhaustion claiming her before I had even extinguished the lamp.
I could not follow her. Someone told them exactly where we would be.
The words would not leave me. No one in Forsgeth had known of Morietha.
None we did not trust, anyway. Not even Elsbeth had known the path we chose for our new trade route, only that we were going to trade in Morietha.
We had selected the route ourselves, around our own table, precisely because we feared someone outside the sanctuary was feeding Stanhope information.
I stared through the window into the darkened moon-soaked sky. We had been wrong to assume that someone in Forsgeth was trading information to Stanhope. The danger was not outside our walls.
It was already inside them. I rolled to my side and brushed a strand of hair from Liv’s face. She relaxed into my body when I pulled her closer. She was right, the betrayal would still be here when we woke.