“I’m telling them about cans.”
“Aye. You are. Stop.”
He steered her into the relative dark at the side of the hall, near a cold stone wall hung with one faded, moth-chewed banner, and let go of her arm the instant she was out of the firelight, as though it had cost him something to hold it.
Up close he was even larger than she’d decided, and tired in a way that went past his face, a bone-tiredness, the kind you couldn’t sleep off. The scar along his jaw was pale against the dark stubble. His eyes were the grey of the sky outside.
“You are either mad,” he said, quietly enough that the table couldn’t hear, “or you are the worst liar I have met in my life, and I have met many liars. Which is it?”
And Amelia, drunk on a cup and a half of wine, was so tired, and so scared, that the truth came up before the planner in her could stop it, as she looked up at this enormous scowling stranger and said, “I genuinely have no idea. Both? It’s been a really weird day. I’m in the wrong place—” she gestured, a loose hopeless circle that took in the hall, the hole in the roof, the silence where the world should be, the entire impossible everything of it “—place. And the worst part, the actual worst part, is that I don’t even have my purse or my phone so I can call my cousin to come get me, if she hasn’t already left for herhoneymoon. Did you know he’s taking her to the Greek Islands? I’ve always wanted to go, but I work all the time.”
Thomas, Lord Ashcombe, stared down at her for a long moment.
Then he closed his eyes, the way a man does when the headache he’s been ignoring finally wins, and said, to the ceiling or to whoever was listening, “Merde.”
AMELIA
Amelia woke at dawn with a crick in her neck, a wool blanket that smelled of sheep, and the absolute certainty that she could fix everything if she approached the problem in the correct order.
It was, she thought, the first sensible thought she’d had since falling through the floor of the world.
For one breathless moment she lay very still in the dim room, listening to the castle wake beneath her. Someone was coughing near the hearth. A dog scratched, shook itself, and let out a sigh as dramatic as any bride’s mother after too much champagne.
Far below, a woman’s voice snapped at someone to stir the embers, and another voice answered in words Amelia understood only in pieces. Smoke threaded up through the rafters, thin and bitter, catching in her throat. The wool beneath her cheek prickled. Somewhere outside, something that sounded like a goose declared war on the morning.
None of it was normal.
But normal had apparently taken a sabbatical without submitting the proper paperwork, and Amelia had survived years of impossible schedules, drunk tech bros, three hundred corporate attendees with dietary restrictions, and one outdoorfundraiser where the ice sculpture had melted into the shrimp tower. She could do this. First she’d get up, then she’d gather facts. She could locate the point at which reality had wandered off the agenda and drag it back by the collar.
Step one: find the wedding.
Step two: find Bree.
Step three: find a phone, a car, a person with a laminated badge, a Marriott, a police officer, a single blessed electrical outlet. Anything normal would do.
The night before had been a smear of smoke, candlelight, and too many staring faces. There had been a cup of something that was not quite beer and not quite safe, a woman named Edith unzipping her ruined silk dress with the brisk practicality of someone field-dressing a deer, and Mr. Dark and Broody standing in the doorway like a wall that had learned to scowl.
Amelia remembered him sayingmerdeat the ceiling when one of the serving girls asked if she was faery-touched. She remembered laughing, which had been a mistake, because the little bit of drink had gone straight to her head and made the hall tilt at the edges.
Morning was different. Morning was for solutions.
She pushed herself upright and found that every part of her body objected. Her knees were sore. Her palms still carried the tender sting of the fall in the tower, and when she flexed her fingers, the tiny cut on her knuckle gave a sharp little throb, as if reminding her that the sword had been real.
“Nope,” she whispered. “Not starting there.”
She wrapped the wool blanket tighter around her borrowed kirtle, though it did little against the damp that seemed to have settled into the stone and into her bones. Someone had left a pair of battered slippers near the ladder, ugly things that looked as if they had been designed by a person who hated feet. Amelia slid her feet into them anyway, because her beautiful heels had beentossed in the fire unless one of the stableboys rescued them and then, most likely, they were currently being worshipped as faery relics.
She went down the narrow steep stairs, stepped over a sleeping dog the size of a coffee table, and paused at the edge of the hall.
The place looked different in daylight, though not better. The rushes on the floor were flattened and sour beneath her borrowed shoes. Smoke curled up from the hearth, where two women were prodding life back into a sulky bed of coals. Men slept on benches and against walls, wrapped in cloaks, boots still on, as if falling asleep wherever one stopped moving was a perfectly reasonable household arrangement. A boy carried an armload of wood past her, blinked at the sight of her and her hastily braided hair, and nearly walked into a post.
Amelia gave him a weak smile.
He crossed himself.
“Super,” she muttered, and let herself out into the gray.
The morning smelled of wet earth, horse, and some kind of soap that made her eyes sting. Rain had left the yard a churned mess of mud and puddles, hoofprints filled with cloudy water, cart tracks cut deep enough to swallow the slippers if she wasn’t careful. The air held the soft warmth of a summer day after rain, damp pressing against her skin, while geese picked their way along a wall. She ignored them and headed for the gate.