Page 19 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
Jove hated the painting. It was nothing but a pretty lie.
Harlan thundered up the stairs, Cerl pistol in one hand, sword in the other. Jove didn’t follow. He trudged down the corridor to the chamber where he and Clara had been staying since Samuel had been born. Hope bubbled in his chest when he realized the lower floor seemed untouched. The fire raging through the upper levels hadn’t spread here yet.
But the unnerving quiet scared him into a sprint.
They’re all right. They aren’t hurt. Clara probably took Samuel and hid down one of the servants’ passages.
She wouldn’t have known about the Catacombs beneath their feet—a maze of tunnels and hollowed-out caverns that had been Jayde’s answer and preparation for another conflict on the scale of the Great War. Jove had been sworn to secrecy about their existence. Now he wished he’d broken that vow.
For how badly he’d struggled to force himself in, now his feet couldn’t go fast enough. He nearly stumbled over himself as he rushed into the bed chamber, the door banging against the wall. “Clara!”
The room was tidy and undisturbed. The aged bassinet still sat next to the large four-poster bed, the drapes flung wide. The bed overflowed with tasseled and embroidered pillows. A sheaf of parchment lay on the bedside table.
With heavy footfalls, Jove trudged over to the bassinet, guilt and dread filling his chest.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. He wasn’t certain if it was another bomb drop or the dragon or merely an early spring thunderstorm on the horizon. He didn’t care which.
When he grasped the letter in his war-soiled fingers, crusted flakes of blood fell upon the script crafted in his wife’s careful handwriting.
Jove,
We’ve gone to Crystalfell. Don’t come until you’re ready.
Clara
Jove let his head fall in his hands, his brow brushing the parchment.
Relief struck him first: they weren’t here. They’d left, hopefully before the city erupted into chaos.
Fear came next: if they hadn’t left soon enough, they might’ve been caught up in the riots or incinerated by the dragon flying through the city skies. They could be dead after all, and he’d never know.
Jove crushed the note in his fist and chucked it at the wall.
“They’re not here.” His father’s voice was hard and echoed in the empty room. “We need to go.”
“No.” The word came out slightly mangled. Even if Clara wasn’t dead or injured, she’d taken their son with her and fled.
He’d left them, so she had left him. Because he was a cancer infecting those around him with his grief until they could no longer function.
Harlan stepped lightly into the room. “With the fire on the upper floors, the Manor isn’t stable. We’ll keep looking, but they aren’t here. There’s no reason to stay.”
Jove heard the words as if they were spoken from the opposite end of a tunnel, but he got up and followed anyway. Harlan already thought him weak. He wouldn’t give him an excuse to confirm it.
As they rejoined an armed and unnaturally pale Saldr outside, Jove looked back one last time on his childhood home.
It hadn’t really been home for some time now, but watching destruction close in on it still hurt. His mother’s librarywould be ash soon, as would the odd pairs of socks he’d not brought with him to the townhouse when he’d married. The countless family portraits wouldn’t survive. Odds and ends that had once belonged to Zeke, to Kase…even to Ana.
Yet, Jove’s soul was numb, and he couldn’t bring himself to care even as the first raindrops fell from the sky and soaked his bloodstained coat.
Don’t come until you’re ready.
Ready to…what? What could he do, what could he become that would make all of this right again?
The rain turned into a downpour. It might wash some of the ruin away, but it couldn’t cleanse what had been sullied in him.
His father led them back over the ruined wall and into the city of chaos.
Jove didn’t look back as the manor burned.
