Page 48 of Tales of a Monstrous Heart
‘I’m Devin Jacob.’ He smiled over his shoulder, stopping to give a little bow in greeting.
‘Pleasure to meet you, Devin.’ I smiled as he continued to guide us, Emrys giving me a pointed look that I ignored. ‘It doesn’t seem busy.’
‘There aren’t enough people left here to heal. They’ve left for the next village over.’ He continued, taking us around another corner and past the open main doors of the building. ‘The crops began to fail a few months ago and the winter was too harsh for them to survive.’
I stopped at the main door, looking out at a dirt road, vacant of beings who should have been working there. Empty market stalls stood in disrepair, rotten fruit still in their baskets.
Small, wooden houses leant drunkenly against each other, their windows boarded up. A forest surrounded the remains of the village, but there was something else here, a coldness on the wind that had nothing to do with the weather, mocking in its intensity unsettling the magic in my veins..
‘Lord Fairfax has jurisdiction here, doesn’t he?’ Emrys called, considering the same thing I was, worry creasing his brow.
‘His control has changed to his nephew, Lord Percy, with his ill health. The records are here.’ Devin waved us into one of the side rooms, only it was mostly empty, the floor covered in loose scraps of paper. One lone ledger sat on a table, too thin to hold any vital records. The shelves barren.
‘I want to see the logs for the past three months,’ Emrys asked, unconvinced, pausing for a moment before he seemed to remember something. ‘… Please.’
I couldn’t help my small victorious smile.
‘Sorry, sir, the investigating inquisitors told me to keep the doors locked.’ The boy practically winced, indicating a door down the hall with a large ominous magical lock in place. ‘They said it needs to be burned to stop any further contamination.’
‘Of course they did,’ Emrys drawled, clearly unconcerned by the mention of the Council inquisitors being present. ‘Mr Jacob, the village warden, isn’t still around, is he?’
The boy nodded. ‘Yes sir, just at the outskirts.’
Emrys smiled, a sudden charm radiating from him that startled me. ‘You couldn’t get him for me, could you? I think it’d be best to speak to him myself.’
‘Of course,’ the boy stuttered, bowing before rushing from the abandoned healing house. Emrys waited for the footsteps to vanish before he moved swiftly for the locked door down the hall.
‘What are you doing? That’s a double charmed lock,’ I hissed in worry, glancing over my shoulder down the corridor in case the boy suddenly returned. Or he wasn’t working alone.
Emrys paid me no attention, dropping to one knee as he took from his pocket a silver tool that he inserted into the lock, turning it slowly. White light illuminated his fingers as he laid them on the handle.
The locking latches sprung free easily as he quickly stood, pocketing his tool once more.
‘How did you do that?’ I whispered, watching as he opened the door, turning to let me enter first like a gentleman would.
‘I wouldn’t get far in a war if I couldn’t open a lock, Kat,’ he observed wryly.
I ignored the strange, pleasant sensation that rushed through me at the softness of my name on his lips.
I shook my head, refusing to be distracted by my own stupidity.
‘I thought war heroes’ skills were exaggerated to make Council dinners more entertaining, to make the old lords jealous and their young wives swoon?’ I teased.
The room was tiny, appearing to be stuffed to the ceiling with every piece of paper the village had ever used. Crates that once held vegetables and eggs were now bursting with files and ledgers.
‘Let’s keep my skills off the topic of conversation or we’ll both soon be in trouble,’ he replied sardonically, making the file almost slip from my fingers as he moved to another box and pulled out a pile to examine.
Looking at his profile and the serious concentration on his face, I couldn’t see him like that. As one of the King’s performers, lethal and seductive. Crippling resistance with threats and the lies they could extract so effortlessly.
Maybe I didn’t know him at all. Worried, I turned to the crates closest to the door, rooting through the papers unsure what I was looking for. I trained my eye on anything that could relate to magical sickness, or corrupted earth.
I was deep in my second box when I froze on a pile of sketches and the papers that accompanied them. Breath unsteady in my lungs.
‘What is it?’ Emrys asked at my side, somehow sensing my distress.
‘These are missing beings.’ I frowned, turning over another report. Seeing how they were all similar. ‘Why would they need to burn missing being reports to stem an illness?’
‘Maybe Lord Percy’s lies are catching up with him.’ He sighed, making me turn to see the tension in his jaw as he considered the mess before us.
