Chapter 2
Two
Sorcha
Islouched in my father’s too-big chair at his too-big desk, head in my hands.
It’d only been six hours since my only remaining blood relative died, and already I was inundated with questions. There hadn’t been a second to mourn, to grieve, even to breathe. I was already dreading the wave that would come crashing in once I finally had a moment of peace.
But that seemed a long way off yet. I’d spent the better part of the last hour staring at his last journal entry. My vision was starting to swim from the prolonged focus in dim light, or maybe that was a concussion. Nobody had properly checked yet.
The afternoon was all a blur. I’d been out seeing if any of the bears were up for water during the false spring.
Then a sound like a thunderclap had fractured the air, and my mare Chuckles, the quietest and most docile creature, who’d never so much as flattened her ears in my fifteen years riding her, reared, bolted, and threw me down hard on the rocks.
There was a blank spot after that.
I’d come to on the settee in our study with Nokona pressing a peppermint-doused compress to my chest and murmuring in Comanche.
Behind her? Our new Steward, Neal. Glen’s boy.
Well, boy was the wrong word. He was older than me by at least half a century and better looking than he had any right to be.
I’d immediately tried to get to my feet, but Neal pushed me back gently.
“You promised,” he said. “I told you what happened out there on the sole condition that you would sit still and let us check on you.”
I had no recollection of any such conversation, but I’d grumbled and complied. They’d begun to check me for injuries, Nokona’s familiar touch ghosting over my scalp, neck, and shoulders as Neal’s bigger, rougher, distractingly warm hands felt the bones of my hands and feet for breaks.
But long before they’d finished, the sheriff, the local priest, and a half dozen others showed up, pounding on the door and demanding answers. Neal had protested at first but eventually gave in to the barrage of requests.
I spent the next three hours hearing complaints, calming nerves, and offering advice.
Nokona brought dinner I was too nauseated and distracted to eat.
Two hours after nightfall, Neal finally locked the door and insisted we turn anyone else away.
So I tried to eat as I pulled out a stack of my father’s notebooks and scrambled to make sense of anything.
The final journal entry, dated only two days prior—six weeks after Glen’s departure, during that dark night of the soul when my father, without the steadying influence of our Steward, had done little but take meetings about rogue monsters and lock himself in his office to write—was shocking, to put it mildly.
A monk came in from the desert yesterday, looking half starved and fully mad.
And he kept talking about portals opening and eldritch horrors coming through.
I wrote it off at first, but a talk with some of the local native elders and our own Padre Julio suggests other reports in the past few months, with related legends predating my arrival in New Mexico, perhaps even human habitation.
The last one, if our near-rabid hermit is to be believed, produced a massive slug belching hellfire.
It consumed a half acre of forest and a dozen head of cattle before it returned from whence it came.
I’ve sent word to Ansel, in hopes he can dredge up some proper history on the creatures, tell us just how much to worry, then set one of his best on it.
I’d read those words a dozen times now. But I couldn’t get my mind around it.
Portals? Eldritch demons? A hellfire slug?
Who the hell was Ansel? Where was the world I’d woken up in that morning?
A world where I tended the herb garden, played with my cats, rode out on my gentle mare to talk with the birds?
Had it all really been so profoundly disrupted so fast?
I fought back tears. This wasn’t my life. It couldn’t be.
I was supposed to be dyeing roving for a new blanket, not grieving a parent, surely not running the Outer Court.
The unreality hit harder than anything else.
Someone knocked at the door, and I wiped away the tears I didn’t even realize I’d shed, smoothed my skirt, and called them in.
Neal came into the office with a steaming mug in his hands.
“You still didn’t eat,” he noted before continuing. “Nokona said to bring this to you. She said you liked it—sagebrush and honey. She told me it would calm your nerves.”
“Thank you,” I said, accepting the tea. “Sit. Please.”
I was already warming up to him.
And I’d been a skeptic.
Glen had been with us since before I was born.
He’d been there when my mother’s pregnancy made her so ill that my father moved us from the traditional Outer Court posting in Edinburgh to New Mexico in hopes that dry air might ease her suffering.
He’d been there when she and my baby brother died, and my father retreated from reality so completely he’d stopped even caring for me.
It was Glen who’d hired Nokona to look after me in my father’s stead.
It was Glen who’d bought Chuckles when I outgrew my childhood pony.
He’d been there for everything. And while my father had been beaming with irrational confidence and encouraging Glen to go enjoy his retirement, I was summarily unconvinced that someone new could fill the gap.
“What can I do for you, Sorcha?” Neal asked, taking a seat across the desk.
“I’ve been fielding questions and complaints all evening,” I replied. “And then trying to make sense of this journal. You’re the qualified professional, tell me what I missed.”
“I sent word to Ansel O’Faelan,” Neal said, “your father’s . . . sorry . . . your Martial Envoy. He’s up at the dunes north of Taos right now. But he should be back in no more than a fortnight. I also got your father’s will and final instructions. He seems to have kept them at the cathedral.”
I snorted.
Since my mother died, my father attended Mass every morning and entrusted our priest with every bit of grief, confusion, and self-doubt he couldn’t bear to put on anyone else, couldn’t reconcile.
I’d gone with him daily as a child and hated it.
There were days he didn’t even check to see if I’d eaten, but he’d still dragged me to Mass at dawn.
That cathedral was tainted—the last place I’d seen my mother’s face, the only place I’d seen my stillborn brother.
But, once Glen and Nokona decided I’d sufficient sense of direction not to wander off, I started riding out into the woods to pray.
At first it was once or twice a week, eventually near daily.
A handful of years later, I started going to morning service again with my father, hating it less week by week as I slowly divorced my own spirituality from the crippling grief of seeing my mother in a casket in front of an altar, and as I slowly grew old enough that his distance and neglect became nuisances rather than existential threats.
The cathedral still gave me chills though.
“That sounds like him.” I held out a hand for the documents and Neal passed them across the desk. “What’s a Martial Envoy? O’Faelan doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Stewards ensure the security of the Court itself,” Neal explained.
“The Martial Envoy is, so to speak, the Outer Court’s Outer Court.
He handles diplomacy, espionage, and does, or at the very least coordinates, the dirty work if there’s any monsters that need tending to.
I’ve met Ansel a dozen times over the years.
He’s good at his work, but not the most civilized.
I don’t blame your father for keeping him at arm’s length. ”
“I see,” I replied absently, eyes scanning the document in front of me. “Neal, would you just read this section for me? I’m slightly worried I might be concussed and not understanding it properly.”
I beckoned him around the desk and spread the pages on the stained wooden surface. Neal bent over my shoulder and I tried to ignore the closeness. He was warm, his breath soft. He smelled like clean wool and gun smoke and pine. The candles caught on his dark hair and brought out hints of red.
I was not falling in love with my new Steward.
No. I wasn’t falling in love with him. I was just touch starved, scared, and desperate.
If I had been though? It’d certainly be convenient. Considering.
“Just here,” I said, gesturing at the page.
Upon my death full control of the Outer Court will pass directly to my daughter, Sorcha Veronica Wilson.
Any necessary details or instruction for her can be found in my journals or provided by my Martial Envoy Ansel O’Faelan.
Additionally: Should she be of marriageable age, please find attached the appropriate contracts for the union of Sorcha Wilson and Neal MacCairn, son of Outer Court Steward Glen MacCairn, to be completed as soon as possible upon my death.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” I asked, looking up at him.
Half my mind begged that I was misreading, that this couldn’t possibly be what my father intended.
I couldn’t quite accept that he’d ignore me for decades then marry me off the second he was gone.
The other half was ready to curl into Neal’s arms then and there if only to have someone to hold me when I cried the inevitable tears and spent nights choking on grief.
“Sorcha, how old are you?” Neal asked urgently.
“Twenty-seven,” I replied. “What does that mean?”
Neal stepped back, leaning against the whitewashed adobe wall of the office and rubbing his temples.
“That means that you’ve been of marriageable age for six years,” he said. “And that your father wanted us to wed—immediately.”
I looked down to hide the immediate flush in my cheeks and shuffled through the papers in my lap, looking anywhere except at him.
“And I believe that is a conversation best had in daylight,” I said, somehow composing myself. “So I’ll bid you good night.”