Page 77 of Never Love a Lord
Edward shook his head, much in the same manner as the young Erik had only a half hour ago. “You’re in love with her. Of course. Half the men in England are, but I thought you would be impervious to her wiles.”
“She escaped your men to come to you herself,” Julian pointed out. “I believe she has every intention of honoring your trial.”
“She has no choice,” Edward hissed. “I will hold court this day, and her fate—as well as your own—will be cast. The law will no longer be denied, and neither will I!”
Julian dropped his head in deference. When he looked up again, he noticed the woman seated at the table was leafing through the parchments, discarding this one or that, murmuring softly to herself as she seemingly searched for something. Julian frowned at the woman’s back.
Edward chuckled darkly. “Worried that some information will get out to taint your beloved?” he taunted. “Have no fear, Julian—she’s already seen most of what you have compiled, long before even I had.”
Finally the woman turned slightly in her chair; delicate knuckles covered by papery, veined skin curved over the arm of the chair. Her kind and noble face regarded him.
“Good day, Lord Griffin,” she said in her lilting accent. “I cannot express my delight at our meeting again.”
Julian felt his mouth fall open as he stared at the wizened, gamine figure in the king’s own chair.
“Lady de Lairne?”
Sybilla’s cell was what she would have expected from a dungeon: dark, dank, smelling of old water, wet rock, and despair. The filthy pot in the corner was the only furnishing, and so she had seated herself on the rough stones against the wall directly across from the iron-barred door.
She assumed she was in the oldest part of the palace. The four walls of her prison were solid gray rock, as were the walls comprising the wide corridor beyond the bars. There had been no allowance for light into her cell, but as her eyes became adjusted to the darkness, she could see the flicker of wall torches down the corridor, causing the shadows cast by the crags of rock to dance and flutter like tiny, curious spirits peeking into her captivity. The doors of the other cells were staggered so that she could see only more unyielding rock through the bars.
She thought she could escape the cell easily enough. But she knew that she would never emerge from the corridor alive, much less make her way undetected to the king’s side somewhere far above her head. As it was, a guard came down the long passage every quarter of an hour, Sybilla guessed, and held his torch close to the bars to assure himself that she was still within. Sybilla would simply have to wait until she was summoned.
She went over her confession in her head once more, making certain she had recalled all that she would tell, and the manner in which she would tell it. Hopefully, it would absolve Julian of any wrongdoing and ensure that he and Lucy would still gain Fallstowe. Alys and Piers would be close by to them, as would Cee and Oliver. They could help him as he learned his way through the vast workings of the castle. They would smooth the way for him.
Her cell suddenly seemed lighter and Sybilla looked up from the dark floor that she had been staring at. The corner of her cell to the right of the door seemed to have been taken over by a small, iridescent blob of white mold. Sybilla stared at it as the edges seemed to ripple, the blob to elongate, form. Her ears popped and she opened her mouth to relieve the uncomfortable sensation.
Sybilla, her mother’s voice called.
She stared at the transparent mist for a moment, unsure as to whether she was actually seeing what she thought she was, or if it was only a trick of her fatigued mind, her frayed conscience. Regardless, she turned her head away and looked through the bars of the door. She had no desire to entertain her mother’s ghost, or even what her befuddled mind might imagine was her mother’s ghost.
Don’t confess, the voice said.Wait.
Sybilla stared hard through the bars, feeling her jaw set, her eyes water. It did sound remarkably like her mother, only it was the sound of Amicia before she had been stricken, her words refined, unslurred, melodic.
There is no need for it. You must continue to trust me. It’ s why I begged you and begged you to keep the secrets I shared with you.
Sybilla’s head whipped around without hesitation. “You wanted me to keep your secrets to save your own reputation,” she accused her in a whisper. “Even as you swore to me that the truth would come out.”
And it will come out. But it need not be through your own admission.
“I don’t trust you. I was a fool to have ever trusted you. I was nothing to you but your automaton. Your sacrificial lamb. Your illegitimate and expendable, if very capable, offspring. You used me.”
You will be saved.
“You named me after a woman you hated!” Sybilla said on a wretched breath.
No. You don’t know everything.
“I know that your entire life was a lie.Myentire life was a lie! And now it will be I who pays the price for your deceit. Are you happy now, Mother? Are you? Does it please you to know that you have lied to everyone you ever claimed to love? Who ever loved you?”
The white mist was silent.
“Just go away,” Sybilla sniffed, wiping roughly at her nose with the heel of her hand. “Leave me alone to do what I must do. You were always so good about that.”
You were never alone. And you are not alone now.
Sybilla felt her breath catch in her chest as a sob threatened to break free from her throat.
