Chapter 3
Challenging the Flames
It had taken every last bit of Jesstin’s self-discipline to suppress his bewildering enthrallment with Lady Elloven. The entire awkward carriage ride, he’d acted as aloof as he could manage, while concealing, hopefully, a mortifyingly swollen groin.
At least he knew he could still get hard.
The story went that when the late Fabrien Quinlanden had visited the Reliquary with his father, he’d taken one look at Elloven and decided then and there he had to have her, societal expectations be damned.
Jesstin had taken the story as embellishment, but maybe there’d been more to it after all.
She was undeniably beautiful, but he was around beautiful women so often in his line of work, he was immune.
It wasn’t that. It was something else. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.
He slipped through the back gate of the Hermitage to avoid his family.
Rhiain would see the color in his cheeks and ply him with questions he had no interest in answering.
Asterin’s stoic silence would be worse. The man was a translator of rare documents and languages by trade.
There wasn’t much he didn’t know how to read.
There was nothing to say anyway. They’d have heard by now of what had happened in the village, but he’d only done as the baroness had asked, and he had no further duty to perform.
Lady Elloven was safely tucked away at Nightwood with her mother.
That snake Considine’s intentions were none of his business.
“You’re home early,” Sesto said from nowhere. Jesstin nearly leaped out of his already-anxious skin.
“Stop sneaking about like a fucking cat, for Guardians’ sake,” Jesstin murmured.
He peeled off his jacket and vest and tossed them over the backs of the chairs in the small breakfast nook the family rarely used, since Rhiain and Asterin had grown their family.
“Did everything go... as planned tonight? No trouble?”
“Mostly. Twelve down, four to go.”
Jesstin nodded. They never talked about their side endeavor in the house unless the messages were vague. He’d only roped Sesto into the effort because he couldn’t manage it alone. “All right. Four isn’t bad. We’ll get them.”
“There will always be more, Jess.”
“As long as that’s true, we’ll be there to clean up after them.”
Sesto sat at the table with a piece of wadded vellum he’d smoothed. He cast his worried gaze upward at Jesstin. “Have you seen this?”
Jesstin leaned in. At first glance, it looked like a propaganda leaflet, but it was printed using the lavish new ink machine the Reliquary had invented. Printing anything on the press cost a fortune. That alone made the leaflet interesting, but it wasn’t why Sesto had asked.
“The blood-soaked strumpet returns. No husband or son is safe from the murderous vixen’s unslaked reign of rage and harlotry,” Jesstin read aloud. He whistled with a sharp laugh. The rest was more of the same, part warning, part call to arms. “I didn’t know you liked poetry, Sesto.”
Sesto didn’t seem even slightly amused. “This had to have come from within the Reliquary, Jess.”
“I know nothing about it.” Jesstin massaged his thumb between his brows.
He hadn’t felt so unbalanced in years. All he’d wanted was to get the night over with, so why was he fantasizing about Elloven’s golden-red hair, which had looked like she hadn’t put a comb to it in days?
He dug his nails against his palm to kill the image of smoothing it with his own hands.
Sesto’s troubled face was lit by a candle nearly spent. “I know you escorted Lady Elloven home this evening.”
Of course he did. Sesto knew everything. The man had spent most of his life as both eunuch and abbot, invisible and unimportant. “And?”
“What does Gennady think?” Sesto was the only person in the world who knew what Jesstin had done, and why. The only one who ever would.
Gennady had been quiet ever since he’d stormed out of the office at the Azure.
“He said I should do as Esmeray asked. So I did. Nightwood was quiet, and I sensed no danger to her daughter when I left.” Other than that twat Considine, he thought, but in the short time he’d spent with Elloven, he deduced it was Taven who should fear her.
Sesto’s knuckles rapped the paper. “You believe with incendiary words like this, it will stay so for long?”
I believe it’s none of our business,” Jesstin said, suppressing a yawn.
He usually turned up around three or four in the morning, but by then, he’d have hit his second wind.
Coming in closer to the midnight hour was throwing him off completely.
Other than Sesto, everyone assumed he was simply up to his elbows in cunt and dice every night, plundering through life’s indulgences with wild abandon.
No one else knew he’d invested all his gold into the Azure, or that, other than for the necessary show on his throne—which was getting harder and harder to pretend he enjoyed—he partook in none of it.
It had been over a year since he’d had anything but watered-down mead in his flask, but he preferred they all think of him as a drunken disappointment.
He couldn’t decide whether he was relieved or disappointed at how well the pretense had held up.
Sesto folded his hands with a soft, patient sigh. “Did you know Elloven was one of Castien’s victims when she was younger? It was that man, the stable hand, who first soiled her reputation, but then she was sent to the Reliquary, and Castien... She was precisely the type he pursued.”
Jesstin pulled out a chair and sank onto it.
His family tree was a quagmire. He was Skylark and Edevane, which made him half sibling to both Rhiain and her husband, Asterin.
Castien, Asterin’s twin, was the moral mirror of their soulless father, Sestinn, and had abused his power and authority to coerce young women for years, often without gaining their consent.
Those young women were shunned by their families, while Castien only moved his nefariousness elsewhere.
Asterin did as much as he could to support the women and their families financially, but the stain was not so easily scrubbed away.
Not one had made a good marriage, except Elloven, and he doubted she’d call being married to a twisted sadist “good,” lord or no.
The only thing worse than the sting of bastardry, for Jesstin, was sharing blood with monsters. “No,” he said after a beat.
“Everyone knew Lord Quinlanden’s youngest son was a letch, but no one had the power to stop the lunatic from taking Elloven to Whitechurch. Certainly not the baroness. Baron Hawthorne did his family no service, in life or death.” Sesto threw the paper down. “It never ends for some.”
Jesstin prepared himself for a diatribe.
“They found the baron’s body outside a tavern just like the Azure, Jess.”
“I already know this story. Everyone does. That was well over a decade ago.” And was another reason Rhiain and Asterin couldn’t find out the extent of Jesstin’s involvement in the village.
“Everyone also thinks the baroness lives off of the kindness of the Quinlandens, but the lord wouldn’t even respond to her pleas. It’s Asterin who pays her taxes so they don’t take Nightwood, Asterin who ensures she eats,” Sesto said. He watched Jesstin, waiting for it to sink in.
“All right, I did not know that,” he conceded, “but who feeds the Hawthornes has nothing to do with me, and I don’t know what you’re trying to say here or why you look so damned concerned. Or why you’re awake at all.” Jesstin scoffed. “It may be early for me, but it’s bloody late for you.”
Sesto craned back to check the door. He leaned in again. “I overhead Rhiain and As talking tonight. They’re worried about you.”
Jesstin flopped back with a drained laugh. “Is the sky also still blue?”
“I know how much the university placement meant to you, even if you didn’t want me, or others, to know that.”
“Then you know better than to bring it up,” Jesstin answered tersely.
His acceptance to the great universities of Oldcastle had been all but certain.
His birth father had been the steward of the town, and though that designation now belonged to Theocratin, the oldest Edevane son, Sestinn still had his hands deep in Oldcastle business.
His other father was the political face of the Reliquary.
They were two of the most powerful men in the entire realm.
It had been his one chance to leave and become something other than society’s punching bag.
“They’ve been light-handed with your inclinations because they thought you’d turn your life around when you had something productive to focus on. Now that you’re not leaving, I expect they’ll start looking deeper into what you’re doing in Mythgarde.”
“I’m old enough to own land, I’m old enough to take a wife, and I’m old enough to make my own fucking choices.”
“Your choice tonight made them proud, standing tall for Lady Elloven.” Sesto’s shoulders lifted with a long, deep breath.
He’d finally worked up to what he really wanted to say, wavering the way he did when he felt Jesstin was likely to ignore his advice.
“Darling boy, you are challenging the flames going anywhere near the Hawthornes. The baroness may be too deep in her cups to read you, but her daughter just dealt with five terrible men without even being in the same area. People are notoriously more vengeful about wrongs done to those they love than themselves, so what will she do to you, Jess, when she learns you’re the one who murdered her beloved brother? ”
The old cottage was ominously unchanged.
Dust lined the mantle, the tables. Moonlight lit the cobwebs trailing down from the ceiling beams. There was a mug, half full of something indiscernible beneath a layer of mold.
A mouse scampered from underneath a chair she bumped, disappearing into the murky corner.