“So anyway,” Gaz said, leaning in, “do you want to?—”
“I would love to,” Amelia said, “get a drink. I’ll be right back.”
She was not coming right back. She was a planner, and she had identified an exit.
Amelia left her champagne flute on the corner of a flower arrangement and walked with purpose, the way she walked through airports, and into rooms full of vendors who were about to tell her the linens hadn’t arrived. Past the quartet. Past Bree, mid-laugh, one hand on Deck’s lapel. Past her aunt, who was crying into a napkin and telling everyone she had always known Bree would marry nobility, which was apparently what they were calling midfielders now.
Across the wet grass that was eating her ridiculous skyscraper pale blue satin heels one careful inch at a time, all the way to the far tower, where the fairy lights blinked, the roses smelled heavenly, and there was, blessedly, no one at all.
The tower had a doorway but no door, an arch of cool dark stone, and a little brass plaque bolted to the wall beside it.
THE KEEP TOWER, it said. The oldest surviving structure on the site, c. 13th century.
Below that, a smaller line read: Please do not climb on the stonework.
“I’m in heels,” Amelia told the plaque. “Of course there will be no climbing.”
Inside, it was a single round room, open to the sky three floors up, the floor worn smooth and scattered with the kind of fine grit that gets everywhere. It smelled of stone and rain-about-to-happen and, faintly, of the centuries, which wasn’t a real smell, she knew that, but she’d have sworn to it anyway.
It was quiet in a way the lawn hadn’t been quiet all day.
No Gaz. No quartet sawing through Ed Sheeran for the fourth time. No well-meaning aunt asking whether Amelia was seeing anyone special, which was family code for please explain why you are nearly thirty and still arriving places alone.
Just her own breathing and the hush of old walls.
“Okay,” she said softly, to nobody. “Okay. This is better.”
That was when the sky made good on its promises.
One moment the doorway showed pale afternoon sunlight, and the next the rain came down like someone had upended a bath, fat and loud and instantly soaking the six feet of grass between her and any other shelter. The marquee was a hundred yards away. Her beautiful shoes would be ruined. Going out there meant arriving at dinner looking like a drowned cat in borrowed satin, and Gaz was probably wandering around out there, and frankly the tower was dry.
Amelia did the math and stayed put.
“Smart,” she said, to keep herself company. “Sensible. We wait it out.”
She turned a slow circle, hugging her elbows against the chill, and that was when she noticed the sword.
It lay along a waist-high ledge of stone that might once have been a window seat, on a bracket of black iron, behind a single loop of red cord that didn’t so much guard it as suggest, politely, that one might think about not touching it.
It was old. Not movie-old. Really old. The blade had gone the dark grey-brown of river mud, pitted and dull, nicked along one edge like a much-loved bread knife.
But the hilt. Set into the crosspiece, where the grip met the blade, was a stone. A blue stone, fat as a robin’s egg, and even inthe rain-dimmed light it caught what little there was and held it, deep and clean and strangely alive. A sapphire.
It had to be glass. Nobody left a real gemstone out behind a length of cord in an open tower at a wedding venue where half the guests had been drinking since ten. But it didn’t look like glass. It sparkled like a perfect afternoon sky.
There was a plaque for this too, smaller, foxed with damp.
THE ASHCOMBE SWORD.
Said to choose its bearer.
Per local legend, the lord who carried it could not be parted from what he loved.
Several attempts to remove the sword from Ashcombe ended in failure. The blade was said to return before dawn.
“That’s a terrible business model,” Amelia murmured.
She leaned in for a closer look at the stone, because it really was extraordinary, and because there was no one to tell her not to. Also because Bree would absolutely want a picture of it later, and Amelia’s phone was in the tiny satin clutch currently tucked under her arm, along with lipstick, tissues, and the emergency safety pins Bree had already needed twice.