ES Chapter 5

By its position, the building was a roadside inn—the kind that served travelling merchants and coachmen looking for a few hours' sleep, the kind of place stranded strangers stopped when there was nothing else. She knew very well what such establishments were like: noisy, unreliable, not where she chose to bed down. At present she was not in a position to have preferences.

"Let me out in front of that inn!"

Appearing at Langfield Manor in her current state was out of the question regardless. One night in a room—dry herself, dry her clothes—and she could proceed in the morning once the rain had cleared, neat and presentable. She would arrive a day behind her promised date, but she had been caught in a downpour on the road; they would understand.

The carriage stopped in front of the inn. Ayesha was off it and moving before it had fully halted.

"Hello? Is anyone there?"

She crossed to the door in a few running strides.

Thunk-thunk.

"Please, open up!"

She called out. Nothing came back from inside. She called again. No light showed through the window or the gap at the door frame. Nothing stirred.

"Is there really no one in?"

Empty, and for some time. Looking more closely, she could see the door handle had gone solidly to rust. Whoever had once done business here had long since stopped coming.

"Of course. That's why there was no light."

A wrong choice.

Now what?

She needed to find another inn—quickly. But the rain was coming down with the kind of force that made stepping out from under any shelter feel physically impossible.

Bleak. She had never been stranded somewhere this completely empty before.

In theory she could move on, if she could find transport—but it was far too late to expect another shared carriage. In all likelihood, the one she had been riding was the last of the day.

There was nothing to be done. A breath went out of her.

'I might as well try to wait it out here.'

"Whether I'll make it to morning is another matter."

The eave barely covered her head. Staying dry would mean standing upright all night. Days of hard carriage seats and heavy luggage and roads going nowhere sensible had packed the exhaustion in deep. She felt it in all of her.

Her eyes kept trying to close. Her arms and legs were weighted. Ayesha leaned back against the door and let her head drop forward.

That was when it came.

Hoofbeats, arriving through the dark and the rain like a small miracle. And beneath them—squelch, squelch, squelch—the unmistakable rhythm of carriage wheels churning over the wet road.

She was alert at once. Pushed the hair from her forehead. Leaned the top half of herself outward. Looked in every direction.

Before long, through the rain, the outline of a carriage took shape in the dark.

'Thank heaven. There's still one coming.'

Ayesha seized both suitcases and ran out into the rain. She would ask to be taken only as far as the nearest town.

But as the carriage drew closer and the shape of it resolved, something stopped her.

It had been a moonless night and too dark to see before now. The carriage was drawn by four horses.

A four-in-hand.

This was no shared carriage. Inside sat someone of staggering importance—the kind of presence you didn’t dare disturb on a whim.

She shouldn't.

She couldn't.

She had already moved forward before thinking better of it; now she stood rooted in the rain with her suitcases, staring blankly at the carriage in a daze.

Cold, exhausted, full of a quiet self-pity and the sting of a chance lost—the right thing was to save herself the trouble.

She began to step back.

The carriage crossed the wet road and stopped directly in front of her.

It had been too dark, and the rain too heavy, to see it before. But on the hanging curtain of the carriage before her was a device she recognized. Four drops of water trailing their tails, spread to the four compass points—like something caught in the very act of falling.

She had spent weeks studying that emblem.

The Etheldore crest.

...What?

'But why is an Etheldore carriage—'

The question had barely formed. The carriage door opened, smoothly, and the lamp inside poured out with a brightness that, after hours in the dark, was immediate and absolute. Both hands occupied, she had no way to shield her face.

Her vision went. Her eyes closed on their own. She stood and waited for the sting to pass, then lifted her eyelids. The afterimage was still there, smearing across everything. She kept blinking.

"Lady Ayesha."

An unfamiliar man's voice called her name. Something about it made her pause—a precise, specific wrongness she couldn't quite place.

She turned it over.

Not Lady Ayesha?—a question. He had stated her name. He already knew who she was.

"Who are you...?"

Her vision was clearing. She could see now that the other person had moved the lamp back—having noticed, perhaps, that it was too much after she had been standing in the dark. With the glare out of her direct line, she was able to lift her face and look at the man who had called her name.

She stood completely still, making no sound at all.

'Is this what it feels like—to be captivated at a single glance?'

A man who looked as though a god had fashioned him—stitch by deliberate stitch, with particular care—was there.

'Or was it the night playing tricks on her?'

She stared at him without meaning to. The thought that arrived was not: who is this man? It came before that question could form. What arrived instead was: how does someone like this know who I am?

And that—that was the worse part. A man who, once seen, could never be forgotten—calling her name as if it were familiar—and she absolutely could not remember him.

He opened his mouth.

"It is a pleasure to meet you. I am Cyrix Etheldore."

This time the shock was genuine.

Her heart bolted. Her breathing went short. Ayesha barely swallowed what had nearly gotten out—high, involuntary, the kind of sound that would have made everything significantly worse.

Cyrix Etheldore.

This was the new lord of House Etheldore, whom she had heard of only by rumor.

The coachman took her suitcases and loaded them into the luggage compartment. Both her arms went light at once. Her heart settled heavier.

'Even making a neat first impression wouldn't have been good enough here. And look at me—a drowned rat. Forget trying to convince them I’m here to catch a ghost. They’d sooner believe I am the ghost.'

But Cyrix looked at her—hair dripping, everything about her soaked—and showed no sign of displeasure. He held out his hand and escorted her up into the carriage.

"Sit down."

"Ah—I'm completely soaked through—"

She had gotten in before she'd thought about it, and now the interior confronted her: seats padded deep and covered all over in velvet; a carpet on the floor hand-woven to patterns so careful and precise it was, properly speaking, an artifact.

Ayesha glanced sideways at the toe of her boot. Her shoe soles, blackened with rainwater and mud, were going to have to be set down on that carpet. The thought made her whole back crawl.

"The night has grown quite cold," Cyrix observed. He reached for his coat. "I left in rather a hurry and did not manage to prepare a blanket. Cover yourself with this for now. I will instruct the coachman to increase the pace—we will arrive at the estate shortly."

"Wait—just a moment—"

She moved to return the coat. She felt it first: the fabric against her fingertips, impossibly soft—yielding in a way that seemed almost to gather around them rather than simply touch them—and warm still from his body. Whatever this cloth cost was well beyond her rough estimate of expensive. Wet would ruin it.

"Keep it on." He took it back without taking it back—pressed it around her shoulders instead. Fastened the buttons. "Your lips are blue."

Wrapped in the coat, Ayesha blinked.

'What is this. We only just met. He considerably outranks me. Why is he being this kind?'

"But—how did you recognize me?"

That was the question, more than any other. Had they met somewhere before? There was no other way to account for him knowing her name on sight—and yet she had no memory of it.

"Your description was in the letter you sent. Other things aside, violet eyes are uncommon enough to identify."

Ah.

That settled it. Violet eyes were genuinely rare—she was the only one in her entire family, as far back as anyone could confirm. Some ancestor's legacy, she had always assumed—passed through however many generations and landing, in the end, in her alone.

The tension dropped a degree. Ayesha offered a small smile with her thanks.

"Thank you very much for the ride. You must be returning from a late inspection of the estate. I was very fortunate."

"Lady Ayesha."