He stood slack-jawed and heartsick when they were within two hundred yards of the looming three-story castle. Old ramparts were crooked, rotting teeth. The portcullis offered a malicious grin. The grounds were sickly and abandoned. Where once splendorous grass had grown in blinding shades of green, the land was now infested with weeds and what appeared to be the creeping menace of mint vine. The topiary shrubs had reshaped themselves into warped, melted versions of the wolves and bears they’d once been. It was as if acid had rained down on the castle, stripping its skin and grandeur before leaving it to the elements—which, in the Highlands, were not much kinder.
Kavya stood beside him. She took his hand and said nothing.
“Let’s go, then,” he said roughly. “I’m cold.”
He trudged up the cracked asphalt, with every step heavier than the last. He’d done this.
Rill led the way around the back to where the servants used to enter. He assumed no servants remained. He wouldn’t have thought anyone still resided in the crippled old relic, but his sister did. It was shameful. Tallis’s stomach was a tight ball. He held Kavya’s hand like the lifeline it was.
He watched Rill fiddle with the rusted lock. If her key didn’t work, Tallis would need to resort to using his lock pick kit to break into his childhood home.
“Is it just you?”
She made a noise of satisfaction when the lock clicked open. “No. We’re all still here, plus one new. Honnas claimed a wife.”
Tallis shook his head to clear the booming dissonance between his ears, but that wasn’t going anywhere—not when he was choked by regrets that tasted of bile.
Just past a mudroom was the kitchen where he’d thrown compost scraps at his sisters. It was a shell of a kitchen now. Every cabinet and surface remained intact, but had aged with twenty years of hard use. His siblings seemed to have made the best of the situation, with what looked to be refinished wood and new hardware on the cabinets. The stove was old, and perhaps it didn’t work because a microwave sat atop the burners. A rattling sound came from the fridge. The faucet dripped one, two, three patterns into a sink scarred with rust from the untreated, mineral-rich water.
“This can’t be happening,” he whispered to himself.
But of course it was. What had he expected? A shiny paradise, when he’d abandoned his family to the aftermath of his crime?
“Through here,” Rill said.
She guided them through more dilapidated rooms. What was left of the grand furniture had been covered in sheets, as the servants of generations past would have draped before the family decamped to London during the harsh Highland winters.
Tallis and his family were creatures of the modern world. They’d never left according to the seasons. Radiators and electricity were boons his ancestors couldn’t have imagined. The ghostly, white-draped furniture only added to his sense of having traveled back in time, to a place beyond his memories. A place in time where everyone who’d lived in this place of heritage and pride was long dead. The castle was a tomb.
They emerged into the main parlor, which had been remade decades earlier into a regular living room. It could’ve been part of any large house. Couches and recliners. Coffee tables and a television that looked ready for a pop culture museum.
“Feena?” Rill called. “Where are you, girl?”
“You call me girl one more time and I’ll claw your hair out, you old crone.”
Rill was the eldest, with Feena only two years younger. Best friends and worst enemies for more than seventy years. Because the natural lifespan of Dragon Kings was nearly two hundred years, they should’ve been in the prime of early middle age. Instead they appeared as careworn as human women of the same years. Where was their vitality? They should’ve been radiant, with little more visible hardship than Kavya wore on her lovely face.
A damning mantra had taken up in Tallis’s head and wouldn’t stop. I did this.
Kavya leaned near. “I won’t argue the point, but I want you to stop thinking that. Please? Until we know the facts, at least?”
“Only if you stop prodding.”
“If you stop shouting,” she said with a pacifying smile.
Rill smirked at her sister’s barb, then tipped her head toward Tallis. “Come on, then. We have visitors, you mouthy thing. Find some manners.”
Only then did Feena turn. Her eyes widened to comical proportions. Her lips parted on a strangled sound of surprise. “No. You can’t be . . . Tallis?”
She didn’t wait for a reply before attacking him with a giant hug to match Rill’s. She cried, smacked his back, asked a thousand questions he couldn’t begin to answer. He only held on, taking in as much of the moment as possible. His sister in his arms. It was a dream come true set in the middle of a nightmare.
In the meantime, Rill must have rounded up the rest of the castle’s residents, because the living room filled with people. He wouldn’t have thought anyone lived in the shadowy mausoleum on a hill, but he was getting a lot of things wrong of late.
He wiped his face with his hands and found his touchstone. Kavya stood to one side wearing her unfamiliar clothing, knuckles in alignment, eyes darting across the chaotic assembly. But then he was standing before his older brother, Honnas. They embraced with fierce affection and hearty backslaps. Another brother, Serre, kept his distance, but Tallis was too overcome to reach out to his youngest, obviously bitter sibling.
One of their number was lost forever, but what remained of his family stood in the same room.
Unbelievable.
Honnas brought forward a petite redheaded Pendray he introduced as his wife. Tallis missed her name in the flurry of conversation. His four siblings and one sister-in-law inhabited a run-down castle—with no children to liven the dreary rooms and halls.
Kavya moved to stand beside him, composed in the way that said she was holding on to her calm by practiced means—for him. He couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.
Thinking . . .
Could she read his siblings’ minds? That would help him understand something of the strange barrier between him and Kavya. Was it just him, just his family, or an inability to read any Pendray?
“This is Kavya,” he said with a roughened voice. The lump in his throat wasn’t going anywhere. “She’s Northern Indranan, and we’ve come a long way to get here. I had to use the inlay from one of my seaxes to make the journey.”
That would speak volumes to his family. No one sold their inlays unless the situation was desperate. He had been that desperate.
“Why have you come back?” Serre asked. Ten years Tallis’s junior, he was the only one of the siblings to appear more wary than welcoming. His gift had only just been revealed when Tallis accepted his exile.
Accepted my exile.
What a farce. He’d run, pure and simple. He’d done murder for a higher purpose, but he’d run from the blood he was responsible for having spilled on a church altar.
“I’m here because of Kavya. She’s an Indranan triplet, and her brother has already killed her sister. He’s after Kavya now, and there’s no telling what creature he’d become if he takes her life, too. I’ve come back to retrieve our family’s Dragon-forged sword and make sure that doesn’t happen.”