Page 24 of Down Comes the Night

Wren commanded her feet to move, but they were rooted to the spot. Why was he growing this? What use did common people have for the deadliest poison in the world? The questions died on her lips when she caught him looking past her, down at the patch of goddessblood.

“Please. Go inside.” His voice was so quiet, Wren almost didn’t hear him. His expression, however, would be burned into her mind. His eyes glassy, his skin ghostly pale, like he’d frozen to death in front of her.“Go.”

Wren sprinted back to the inn, where it felt like a thousand eyes watched her from the shadows. As far as she was concerned, the sooner they got to Lowry’s estate, the better.

CHAPTER EIGHT

By midafternoon, they continued their winding way up the mountain. With nothing but darkness and flurries outside the window, Wren had little to do but wonder what kind of man her patient would be. She was used to dealing with difficult charges—soldiers had a hard time allowing anyone, especially healers, close. It was understandable, on some level. Everyone had heard of healers in high-pressure situations cauterizing the wrong artery. But her patient was a common man in the employment of a nobleman, not a soldier. Maybe he’d be pleasant.

As the day wore on and the temperatures dropped, they passed through a holloway, where skeletal trees bent over the road, their branches clasped like gnarled fingers and their knotholes watching her like crusted eyes. Everything looked the same as what had come before. They could be driving in circles for all she knew, and it was too easy to imagine getting lost in this world of endless, drifting white and gray. She trusted Basil, but after her time at the inn, anxiety dogged her every thought.

Wren unlatched her window and asked, “How can you possibly know the way?”

Basil cast her a knowing look over his shoulder. “There’s only one viable way between Danu and Cernos this time of year, since they close down most of the mountain roads in winter. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. How else do you think our borders held for the past thousand years?”

By nightfall, the tree cover broke, and the lights of a town glowed in the distance. Far above it, the jagged lines of an estate loomed. The spire atop its cupola jutted from the eddying snow like broken bone.

“Is that where we’re headed?” Wren called to Basil over the wind.

“It is,” he said, his voice much grimmer than before. “We’ve a bit farther to go now.”

How could anything be lonelier and more isolated than this? Already, she longed for the smog and sprawl and noise of Knockaine. Wren wasn’t a girl made to be alone; solitude armed her with too much to worry about.

She pressed her face to the window, and the cold glass bit into her forehead as she searched for any signs of life. But this late, everyone in town was likely holed up in their homes and holding their loved ones close. Tonight, Wren would be trapped with a dying man and his employer. She only prayed Lowry would be as entertaining a proprietor as his reputation promised.

“What’s Lord Lowry like?”

Basil hesitated. “Eccentric.”

“In a good way?”

“I like a more ordinary sort of folk.” He cast his gaze to the snow-wreathed estate in the distance. “I think myself a sensible man, Ms. Southerland, but the stories one hears about that house…”

Wren frowned. “What kinds of stories?”

“No good ones,” Basil said. “Some call it foul luck. Some folk would tell you it’s haunted.”

Haunted.

It was absurd. Wren hadn’t believed in ghosts in years—hadn’teven thought of them since she was a child. Some of her Sisters believed a ghost lived in the abbey bell tower and would dare each other to creep inside on interminable winter nights. Most of the time, they only lasted a minute before they ran shrieking down the staircase. They were nothing but games. Silly exercises of bored and overactive imaginations, as Heloise often told them.The Goddess gives new life unto those who die,she would say.There is no such thing as ghosts.

To Wren, it was all nonsense. She knew well enough by now that no one ever came back from the dead.

“And what would you say as a sensible man?” Wren asked.

“I don’t know. All I know is there’s something not quite right about Colwick Hall.”

The carriage rattled its way onto a wooded road just as the snowfall grew thicker. Through the inky darkness, Wren looked up to see the trees’ limbs spread above her like the ever-branching vascular system of the lungs. Their trunks were bent at the waist, as if recoiling from something buried beneath the snowbanks. Watched by these grim mountains, Wren almost understood why people saw spirits in these storms.

As much as she wanted to scoff at Basil, old folklore whispered in the apprentice’s quarters drifted into her thoughts. Just like that, she was seven years old again, shivering beneath a duvet drawn up to her ears.To banish a ghost,Sister Bernadette would say, candlelight flickering wildly in her eyes,you tell it, “This place is of the living and yours no longer.”

They traveled by dim, swaying lantern light until they reached the end of the path. It was barred by a massive gate that stretched between two stone pedestals linked by a wrought-iron arch. Across it was a name punched out of metal:Colwick Hall.

Basil stopped to unlatch the gate. The hinge showered rust onto the snow and stained it red. As they neared Colwick Hall, something about it called her in. Maybe it was the inevitablesizeof it, or how at a distance, its silhouette was an absolute, perfect black. Against the stark, snow-covered grounds, Alistair Lowry’s estate was another mountain peak.

When Basil parked the carriage in the driveway, Wren eased herself onto the ground, relishing the pop of her joints. She hardly had a chance to take in her surroundings before Basil removed her luggage from the trunk and shoved it toward her. For such a courteous coachman, he now was hurried and distant, already climbing back into the driver’s seat.

“Do you want to come inside to warm up? Or to rest a little?” she asked.