Greythorne (Bloodleaf 2)

He passed it to me in the dark, and I clumsily accepted it with shaking hands. I put the bottle to my lips and let the rich liquid slide down my throat. Zan was right; I felt warmer immediately, as if a small candle had been lit in my core. I took a greedy second swallow before handing it back to him. “Jessamine said this stuff costs three times more than regular wine.”

I heard the slosh of the liquid as he took a sip. “It is better,” he said. “Not sure if it’s three times better, but still . . .”

“I hope you like hallucinations,” I said. At this point, I’d almost have welcomed them. Anything would have been a break from reality.

“It’s the demand for it,” he said. “If you can’t have it, you want it more.” I could hear him shift, leaning his head back against the table. “And then when you do have it, you realize you might not want it that much after all.”

“Zan,” I said, “I am not sufficiently drunk to have this conversation.”

“Fair enough,” he answered, and took another swig himself before passing it to me once again.

We were both quiet, but my wine-tinged feelings were spinning out wildly in all directions. I was nerving myself up to break the silence when there came a creak from one of the cellar stairs. Then another. Then another. And voices, though I could not yet make out what they were saying.

Panicked, I felt my breaths begin to quicken once more. Without a word, Zan crawled closer, pulling me into him so that my back was to his chest. He found my right hand with his and directed it to the floor so that I could feel the cool solidness of it. “Shhh,” I heard his voice by my ear, just the barest whisper. Now that we could not use words, he was helping me breathe by letting me feel the rise and fall of his chest, the break of his breath on my neck. One, in. Two, out. Three, in. Four, out.

I closed my eyes. I was so tired.

The voices grew nearer. One was Hicks. “I told you,” he said gruffly. “Nothin’ down here but barrels o’ ale and a few crates of vegetables and too many damned stairs to get to ’em. Not worth it, if you ask me.”

“I did not ask you,” a man’s voice replied, soft and scornful. A thin thread of light was showing through the bottom of the distillery door; I could see shadows shifting across it as they moved around the cellar.

“I assure you, Mr. Lyall,” Hicks said, “ain’t nobody hiding in the radishes.”

Lyall was moving bottles around on the shelf. “Is this all there is to the cellar?” he asked.

He was like the wolf we’d encountered on the moor, sensing somehow that we were nearby, but unsure of where. Instinctively, my left hand went to the pocket that held Conrad’s knife. If he opened the door, I could already be reciting the invisibility spell . . .

But Zan’s hand clamped on my arm and held it tight. I could feel the brush of his hair as he shook his head. No, Aurelia.

“No witches here,” Hicks huffed. “Just honest drunks and whores.”

As Lyall continued to stalk outside our hiding-place door, I closed my eyes helplessly, casting up an incoherent prayer to the Empyrea. Please make him go away. Please get us through this.

She didn’t answer, of course. She never did.

“If you’re all done inspectin’ those turnips, we still have a few other places for you to check. The chimney. The cesspits out back. There’s an old birdhouse, too, if you want to be really thorough, see if someone’s hidin’ in there . . .”

“Enough,” Lyall said sharply. “I’d like to look at your stable once again, if you don’t mind.”

Hicks grumbled all the way back up the cellar stairs. As soon as we heard the door open and shut, we leaped apart from each other once more, so that when Jessamine and Lorelai came to spring us from our dungeon several long minutes later, we were exactly where they had left us.

“Hello, darlings!” Lorelai said. “Our visitors have finally gone, thank the stars. Wait, where are you going?”

I’d already stumbled past her and was heaving myself up the stairs and out the door. The air was cold and crisp; I gulped greedy lungfuls, back pressed against the faded planks of the Canary’s wall, a single gas lantern flickering on the hook over my head.

I was not alone for long.

When Zan joined me on the back stoop, he waited a few seconds before finally venturing, “Lorelai said she’s not going to let us sleep in the cellar. She’s going to stay in Delphinia’s room tonight, to keep her company, and insists I use her room. Jessamine said she’d let you take hers, but she knew you’d say no. She said, ‘She actually likes that cramped little broom closet she sleeps in.’”

I nodded. I didn’t suggest we keep the same room; I preferred to take my chances out here, with the Tribunal and their wolves. They hadn’t left a sentry behind, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still nearby.

He rocked back on his feet. “Aurelia, about what happened, after Stiria—”

With a hard sigh, I left him at the door.

“Wait!” He chased me down the steps. “Aurelia. Just wait.” When I ignored him, he threw his hands in the air. “You know what? Fine. Let’s do this now. Go ahead and blame me for what happened at Stiria, but we both know there was a division between us long before that.”

“You think that excuses you from letting me believe that you were dead?”