Chapter 230: Seek Shelter 1

BRADLEY

The Shelter House did not announce itself. It waited.

We drove the last mile along a narrow road, the car’s headlights cutting through a forest so old that some of its trees stood wider than the vehicle. Their branches knitted together overhead, swallowing what little moonlight reached the ground. The road was uneven beneath the tires, and the deeper we traveled, the thicker the fog became. Then, without warning, the trees ended.

A wall of dark stone rose out of the mist, forty feet high and veiled in moss that gave off a faint green luminescence. Set into it was a gate of black iron, its surface covered in a thousand tiny sigils that seemed to shift whenever the headlights passed over them. Above the gate, carved into the stone lintel, was a single line of writing in a language even I could not read.

The sentinels beside me had fallen silent. Even horses would have been quieter, had we brought any.

Bellowstand. The seat of the coven that had guarded the western marches since before the first Alpha King. I had visited once as a young man, following Cornelius through its gates, and remembered very little beyond the copper taste in the air and the fact that no one had offered us a chair.

I stepped out of the car and approached the gate. The cold had already begun to seep through my gloves when I struck the iron with the flat of my hand.

For a long while, nothing happened.

Then a narrow door, almost invisible within the larger gate, opened inward. Two young women in grey robes emerged, each carrying a lantern whose flame burned the color of milk.

Acolytes were what they were called.

Their heads were shaved at the temples, and their eyes possessed the unnerving clarity of people who had spent too long looking at things others preferred not to see.

They took in my companions, the car behind us, and finally the brooch pinned over my heart.

The royal sigil.

"High Beta." The elder bowed her head. "You honor this house. Please, come inside out of the cold. The Supreme will be informed of your arrival."

"Thank you." I glanced towards the gate but made no move to follow her. "One moment."

I turned to the two sentinels who had accompanied me. Both were good men, sworn and tested, and neither needed an explanation. I lowered my voice.

"Retrieve what we brought."

They returned to the car without a word. I heard the boot open, followed by the scrape of something being shifted inside. A moment later, they came back carrying it between them, wrapped from head to heel in white linen and bound at the throat and ankles with silver cord.

It hung between them with a terrible lightness.

Even from several feet away, I could feel the cold radiating from it. A thin vapor escaped through the folds of linen, spilling towards the ground and curling around their boots like breath. The flames in the acolytes’ lanterns bent toward it. The younger woman instinctively stepped back.

"Forgive me." Her voice had lost some of its composure. "Is that a gift for the master and mistress of the house?"

"Not exactly." I allowed the silence to linger between us. "Do lead us to them."

The two women exchanged a glance.

"I am very sorry, High Beta," the elder said, her courtesy becoming considerably more guarded. "But we must establish what is inside before it crosses our threshold."

I studied her. "Do you truly believe we have come here with ill intentions?"

"No." She held my gaze, though her fingers had tightened around the lantern handle. "But there have been attacks against the royal family. A Delicate murdered while still in her recovery. A king shot in his own hall. We would be failing in our duty if we allowed something into this house without first determining whether sinister magic had been worked into it. Our wards can recognize such things, but we must be permitted to examine what crosses them. I beg your understanding."

It was a reasonable precaution. More than reasonable, considering the circumstances. Had our positions been reversed, I would have demanded the same. It was funny, though, how news we tried to stifle seemed to reach everywhere all at once. The death of the delicate was relatively new after all. And that fact that they knew about it but did not know how her death came to be. This was the work of someone in our inner circle.

I stepped closer and reached for the edge of the linen.

The cold struck through my glove immediately, sharp enough to make my fingers ache. I caught the fabric and drew it back by a hand’s breadth.

Willow’s face emerged from beneath it.

Her skin had turned a lifeless shade of grey, and her eyes remained half open, clouded and vacant. Her neck had been twisted so violently that her chin rested against her shoulder, the skin pulled taut over the distorted bones. It was an ugly, unnatural thing, the sort of injury that made the mind recoil before it could properly comprehend what the eyes were seeing.

For a moment, neither woman moved.

Then the younger acolyte sucked in a breath. A small, broken sound escaped her throat, almost a keening, and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. The elder had gone the color of old wax. Her lantern trembled, and its pale flame flickered against the iron gate.

I let the linen fall back into place, covering Willow’s face once more.

"Now," I said, my voice quiet but leaving little room for further negotiation, "may I see the Supreme of this coven?"

***

They led us across a courtyard paved with black flagstones, past a fountain whose water climbed in a continuous stream rather than falling into its basin, and an orchard where pale fruit glowed between the branches. The entire estate had been designed to resemble something grown rather than built, though there was nothing natural about it. The doors had been carved from enormous slabs of root, their surfaces polished until the grain resembled the twisting veins beneath human skin. The windows were made of stone so thin that the lamplight passed through them, illuminating the delicate mineral veins trapped within.

Bone wind chimes hung beneath the arches. They swayed whenever the wind passed through the courtyard, yet not one of them made a sound.

Inside, we were taken down a corridor lined with portraits of men and women dressed in grey. Each figure held a different object. A key. A bowl. A child’s tooth. None of them smiled, and none of them appeared particularly pleased to have been immortalized. At the far end, a woman in a grey gown stood with her back against the wall, watching us pass. She did not turn her head, but I felt her gaze settle between my shoulder blades like an unwelcome hand.

A house at war with itself, I thought, that has never once admitted it.

The room they brought us into was intended for receiving guests, though it was larger than most banquet halls. A fire burned in the grate, its flames reaching nearly as high as a man’s chest, yet there was no smoke and no smell of burning wood. Pale wooden chairs had been arranged in a wide circle, while shelves crowded with books climbed towards a ceiling that disappeared into shadow. A clock without hands sat on the mantelpiece.

A man rose from the largest chair as we entered.

Folke Shelter was neither particularly tall nor broad, but the room seemed to have been arranged around him. He was perhaps seventy, with a neatly trimmed white beard and a grey gown embroidered with silver thread around the collar. His eyes were the palest blue I had ever seen on a living man. They crinkled when he smiled, and there was an almost disarming warmth to the expression.