Page 44 of A Whisper in the Walls

Garth startled. “To dinner?”

“Gods. Please don’t tell me you waited here this whole time and still aren’t going to treat me to a proper meal. I’m famished.”

She started walking away from the back door of the theater. Garth trailed her. He was smiling to himself. In truth, Nevelyn didn’t know what else to do. She would have preferred to walk straight home, close the door to her apartment, and anxiously await the morning. Garth’s presence complicated things. Her best strategy was to keep him close. And what was closer than a date?

He was rattling off suggestions for where they might go. Nevelyn half listened but could not help glancing over her shoulder one final time. The playhouse door was shut. No sign of Edna. No hint of a stagehand who’d witnessed her dark deed. Nevelyn had always had quite an imagination, but she supposed real life was not like the stories she’d grown up reading. Full of spies and romance and foul magic.

Lost in thought, she almost failed to notice the way Garth kept letting his elbow bump into hers as they walked. It was so obvious that she finally slid her arm through his. He looked as if he’d been waiting for that. The arrangement felt comfortable, natural. The two of them settled into a rhythm as they walked through the streets.

Well, she thought. Maybe there is a little romance after all.

21 REN MONROE

Nostra had once been relevant.

Nearly a hundred years ago, before the Broods made their famous pact with the Graylantians. The dispossessed northern settlers were having a lot of success raiding Kathor. Their forces moved with a fluidity that baffled the Kathorian generals. The northerners had a habit of slipping behind enemy lines and brutally punishing any company that marched too far north.

Until the Broods intervened.

One of Theo’s ancestors was the first person to map out the entire area. There were two regions north of Kathor. On the coast, a sweeping valley full of rolling farmlands known as the Generous Valley. That was where the majority of the battles took place. Deeper inland, the Broods began scouting a narrower region known as the Hairbone Valley. Kathorian forces had practically ignored it to that point in time. The land was not fertile and the route scraped inward, up toward the mountains, which were still the rumored home of the last dragons. Too dangerous to bother with.

But when they charted the valley for the first time, they discovered a pass. The trail provided access to the northern shelf of the continent. Their enemy had been using the Hairbone Valley to maneuver around Kathorian advances, positioning soldiers and supplies behind them with ease. Gunner Brood built the fort that would eventually span the entire pass. Nostra bloomed in its shadow. A town to feed and entertain the soldiers who were assigned to defend the valley against northern incursions. Nostra became famous for turning around the war. It forced their enemy back onto the open plains to the west—where Kathor’s numbers and magic proved overwhelming.

After the peace treaties were signed, the Broods continued to man the fort. After a few decades, though, they realized no armies would ever march that way again. The northern tribes of old were just farmers. There was no practical route to any major city or population—at least at that time. The fort’s resources were redistributed until the castle became what it was now: a ghostly building watching over a corpse of a town.

Ren’s back thumped against her seat inside the packed carriage. There was no established waxway route to the town, which left her rag-dolling down a poorly built valley road. At least it afforded Ren time to settle her thoughts. The next few days would be the most important of her entire life. Theo had no idea she was coming. The visit was meant to be a surprise. She needed Theo in a pleasant mood. The time had come for him to choose. He had witnessed his father’s attempts to separate them. Now it was time for him to hear her story. All the sins his father had committed against her family. Ren would tell him what she’d told almost no one else. And once it was all out in the open—every secret laid bare—she hoped Theo would do the unthinkable.

Turn against his family. Choose her instead.

It was well past noon when Ren finally saw her destination. In the distance, the fort the Broods had built to watch over the Hairbone Valley all those years ago. The dueling spires looked like scabs growing up the side of that marbled mountain backdrop. She could just make out the two faded soldiers that stood as guardians on either side. There were still several hours left in her journey, but if Ren squinted, she thought she could see the famous beacon on the western tower. Historically, the watcher was charged with lighting that beacon if an enemy army approached the castle. There was a second beacon, back in the valley Ren had left behind, that could be seen from Kathor’s highest cathedral. The beacons were lit once a year—for ceremonial purposes—but no watcher had lit them to announce an enemy in the last century. Ren would ask Theo to keep that streak alive and well.

She arrived at Nostra just before sunset. The carriage drivers had traded out somewhere down in the valley, which meant an unfamiliar voice called for all riders to disembark. Ren and an elderly woman were the only two left. Everyone else had gotten out at the previous stops.

Her feet set down on a cobbled central square decorated by a light frosting of snow. It wasn’t winter yet, but Ren knew higher altitudes maintained colder temperatures far earlier in the season. Any precipitation would freeze, and rare were the days warm enough to fully melt that frost away. In a few months, the entire place would be locked in winter’s embrace and the carriages would no longer be able to traverse the established paths between towns. She remembered Landwin Brood’s promise that this would be her fate if she chose to stay with Theo—and she could not help shivering at the thought of living in this desolate place.

Ren tightened her cloak. The town of Nostra fanned out from the central square where she stood. There were dozens of rooftops running in every direction she looked. Once, the town might have boasted a thousand occupants. A thriving military base. Now most of the homes appeared to be abandoned. Ren turned back to find the carriage driver fussing over the horses.

“If I have the coin,” she said, “can you take me up to the fort?”

The woman shook her head. “It’s not a matter of money. There are no paths wide enough for a carriage. That’s a journey you can only make on foot—and a journey I wouldn’t make at night.”

“There’s no waxway station?”

“Only works if you’ve been there before. Have you?”

“No, but I can see the towers from here. Surely it’s safe.…”

“The buildings are warded. You can port to the courtyards outside, but again, only if you’ve seen them before. Besides, it looks like the young lord is on his way down.” The woman pointed to the shadowed hills. “See there?”

There were two slashes of color in the thicket of white and brown. She thought she was seeing the brightness of Theo’s cloak, perhaps, but it was hard to make out from here. There appeared to be two people coming down the mountain. Far faster than should have been possible.

“Are they using magic?”

“Sleds. The two of them practice a couple nights a week.”

Nearly everything about that sentence baffled Ren, but she asked about the part that concerned her the most. “The two of them?”

The carriage driver’s eyes swung back to Ren. She seemed to realize for the first time that she was speaking with a stranger—and offering up information with each breath. Her fingers tightened on the reins as she turned away.

---