Scent of Midnight (Fairy Tales from the Pack #1)

1

Chapter

Under the Ash

Liora

The lye pot was boiling when the collar began to burn at the nape of my neck.

It wasn’t a real fire. It was worse: a low, dull burn buried beneath the skin, creeping with the patience of a needle.

I plunged the wooden paddle into the gray water and kept churning the wash.

Celene’s sheets rose and sank through the suds, heavy with soap and the sweet perfume she poured over her collars.

Steam plastered my hair to my temples. Outside, the first cart rattled over the courtyard cobbles.

I counted to twenty before looking toward the kitchen door. No one came in. There was only the scrape of a shovel across frozen ground and the small bell used to summon the hands from the stables.

I loosened the collar of my dress. The leather strap was damp. Beneath it, the brass capsule was supposed to hold two days’ worth of suppressant. I pressed my thumbnail against the groove and found the casing empty.

I stood still, the paddle in my hands.

The last time Maevra had emptied the capsule without warning, I’d ended up with a fever in the woodshed. She told me a healthy Beta didn’t weep over a migraine. After that, she made me haul buckets of water until the scent of bitter herbs vanished from my sweat.

The pot bubbled up, and a drop scalded my wrist. The sharp sting knocked the breath back into me.

I couldn’t go upstairs yet. If I left the sheets, Celene would find an excuse to make me wash them again. If I asked about the dose in front of the maids, Maevra would invent any reason to withhold it.

I kept moving the paddle. The lye gave off a stench so harsh it scorched my nostrils and deepened the chronic ache.

Beneath it, deep in the back of my throat, surfaced the scent I tried to crush every morning: rain on warm stone, a night-blooming flower, and something salty, alien to an estate surrounded by dry fields.

I swallowed it down.

“Liora.”

Maevra’s voice came from the threshold. She didn’t raise it. There was no need: I’d learned long ago that submission yielded better rewards.

I let go of the paddle and wiped my hands on my apron before turning around.

Maevra wore a dark blue wool cloak over a morning dress far too fine for the kitchen.

Black gloves covered her hands to the knuckles.

Behind her, Master Barel, the land steward for the neighboring estates, held his hat against his chest and stared at my bare feet as if they were part of the floor.

“My lady.”

“The mill cart arrives before noon. The yard must be cleared, and Master Barel’s shirts haven’t been pressed.” Maevra’s gaze drifted over the tub. “I understand your condition makes you sluggish on certain days.”

A well-turned phrase could cut deeper than an order.

“I’ll have them ready.”

“I didn’t ask for a promise.” She pointed a gloved finger at the laundry heap. “I asked for a result.”

Barel coughed into his fist. Maevra offered him the practiced smile of a hostess.

“My late husband insisted on keeping the girl. He had a fondness for her. Sometimes sentiment outweighs utility.”

It hadn’t been Maevra’s late husband who insisted.

My mother had written my name into every ledger on the estate, across the storeroom tags, along the spines of the books Maevra kept locked away.

Elayne, my mother, hadn’t foreseen that a signature could vanish behind an invented illness and a locked door.

Master Barel cleared his throat.

“The eastern parcel doesn’t depend on… domestic matters, I trust.”

Maevra didn’t look at me. Her Alpha scent, clean and dry like crushed rosemary, occupied the kitchen without effort.

“Nothing domestic will interfere. We will sign the appraisal tomorrow.”

The eastern parcel.

For an instant, the ground fell away beneath my feet.

I saw the stretch of land beyond the ditch, the crooked row of plum trees my mother had pruned without help, the stone shed where she kept seeds in blue jars.

Elayne had told me once that the land was mine, even if she’d never placed a deed in my hands.

She’d said it beside the oven, flour on her cheek and her voice so low she might have been speaking to the dough.

Maevra took a glass of tea from the sideboard—one I hadn’t poured—and set it in Barel’s hands.

“The estate needs order. My stepdaughter understands that we all contribute according to our abilities.”

Her eyes settled on the open collar of my dress. I felt the heat of the band as if a live coal were pressed against my spine.

“Yes, my lady,” I said.

“I expect so.”

When they left for the parlor, I let my breath out through my nose. It wasn’t relief. I simply didn’t want the scent they’d shed clinging to me.

Mina, the cook, walked in with a basket of turnips and found me with my back to the tub.

“They’re going to call you for the shirts.”

“I know.”

“You’re so pale you look like a ghost.”

“It’s the lye and the steam.”

Mina set the basket down beside the table.

She was a Beta, like nearly all the workers Maevra allowed to stay on the estate.

Her scent of flour and damp wool never raised questions, slipping past unnoticed unless you were paying attention.

She held my gaze a beat too long, then reached for the paring knife.

“Don’t go fainting over my vegetables,” she said. “Next thing I know, they’ll blame my broth.”

I would have liked to laugh. Instead, I hauled up another sheet.

Before noon, I pressed Barel’s shirts, swept the mud the mill hands had tracked in front of the door, and hauled two buckets of water from the pump because the young stable hand pretended not to hear Mina call.

My palms stung. With every trip, I felt a pull beneath my shoulder blades, as though my back were trying to settle into a shape it no longer remembered.

I didn’t look toward the stables until the fourth bucket emptied into the trough.

My mother’s mare was still there, old and reddish-coated, her muzzle buried in the hay.

She’d named her Ember. Maevra had spent six years threatening to sell her and six years discovering that no buyer would pay for a horse that bit horse copers.

Ember saw me step inside and struck a hoof against the timber.

“I don’t have any apples,” I told her.

The mare snorted against my sleeve. Her warm breath smelled of oats and weathered leather. I scratched behind her ear while pretending to check the rivets on a saddle. From the stable, I could see a corner of the office at the front of the house. The tall window was shut, its curtains drawn tight.

The panel was behind my mother’s portrait. I knew because she’d taught me how to press the lower molding with my index finger—not because she wanted me to open it, but because she wanted me to know where the way out was if I ever needed it. That day had arrived six years ago.

The first time I tried to open it after her death, Maevra caught me in the office.

She gripped the nape of my neck until my knees hit the floorboards and explained, in a voice of cold iron, that children who rummaged through other people’s papers ended up without a roof.

I was fifteen, but I understood all too well that the warning wasn’t empty.

From then on, Maevra never misplaced a key, watching closely whenever I went near the room or lingered too long in the hall.

The stable door creaked. I pulled my hand away from Ember.

Oria slipped in, her boots caked with mud and a green kerchief tied around her hair. She wasn’t wearing a cloak, even though the wind bit at her ears. At nineteen, she’d already learned how to look absentminded whenever her mother was watching—and how never to be absentminded at all.

“Mother’s looking for you,” she said.

“For what?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

“Then she isn’t looking for me. She’s looking for someone to blame.”

Oria pursed her lips. It was the closest she ever came to protesting aloud.

“Celene is with her.”

That explained the good coat and the tea poured in the kitchen. Celene only came downstairs when she needed an audience to witness her being gracious.

“Thank you.”

Oria followed me two steps into the yard.

“Liora…”

I stopped by the pump.

She opened her hand. Resting on her palm was a suppressant tablet, yellowed and split down the middle. Its bitter smell reached me before I could reach for it.

“I found this in the bandage drawer,” she whispered. “I don’t know how long it’s been there.”

Instinct made my fingers reach forward, but sense held me back.

“If a pill is missing, your mother will search your room.”

“That isn’t your problem.”

“Everything missing in this house ends up being my problem.”

Oria looked down at the mud on her boots.

“You can bear it, can’t you?”

The question hit harder than any sneer. I’d used those words so often they’d begun to sound like the surname Maevra had entered beside mine in the parish rolls: something small, manageable, trained to obey.

“I can bear it,” I said.

The lie left a metallic tang on my tongue.

Oria closed her fist around the half-tablet. She didn’t press. Her silence was its own quiet survival; I recognized it because my own looked so much like it.

In the kitchen, Maevra sat waiting at the worktable.

Celene sat to her right, inspecting ivory ribbons.

The winter light caught my stepsister’s blonde hair, washing her skin pale.

She smelled of dried flowers and fresh paper.

Unlike her mother, Celene never pretended not to see me.

She looked, calculated, and decided what she could wring from the encounter.

“There she is,” Celene said without looking up. “I thought she’d fallen asleep among the cows.”

“The cows don’t talk about me when they think I’m out of earshot,” I replied.

Celene laid the ribbons on the table. A thin smile dimpled her cheek.

“With a temper like that, it’s no wonder no one ever wanted to take you into the city.”

Maevra raised a hand. Celene went quiet.