She was glad for the sudden tightness in Death’s face. Glad when he wound himself around her and pulled her in close. “Whatever you are and whatever you can do, you are not who Fate expects you to be. You are still Signa Farrow, and I am not a good enough man to allow my brother to take you from me.”
Those were the words she wanted—that she needed—and she could only hope that Death meant them. Because Signa Farrow had another secret—one that she didn’t dare admit aloud. And it was that while the vines tore through the floor and the burn of Life’s powers lanced through her, Signa had heard the song that she and Fate had danced to.
She had heard the song he’d asked her to remember.
SIXTEEN
BLYTHE
SURELY, BLYTHE WAS BEING POISONED AGAIN, FOR WHAT ELSE COULD explain what she’d seen in her father’s study?
She had never run faster than she did the moment she was able to free herself from the ivy, and it had taken hours of pacing and fretting and convincing herself that she must be seeing things before she’d gathered enough nerve to return to the study, only to find that no plants waited inside. Every floorboard was unscathed, and the desk and its papers were free from even a bit of earth.
It was then that Blythe realized she was losing her mind.
She refused to linger in the study, sucking in thin breaths as she hurried not to her room but down the stairs and out of Thorn Grove altogether, trying not to scream and alert the entire manor to her ailment.
It’d been a long while since she’d left Thorn Grove in anything but a carriage. Worried about a relapse in her health, Elijah had kept a cautious eye on her, ensuring that Blythe had little physical exertion and that the staff doted on her. But her body was trembling too fiercely for her to hole up alone in her room, and so Blythe took to stomping around the yard for the good part of an hour, soaking up the springtime warmth into her bones as she debated whether she should tell Signa what had happened.
In the end Blythe decided she wanted more time. More time to see if this was only a temporary relapse. More time to feel at least a little normal, without everyone treating her like a fragile crystal heirloom. And so she ventured to the stables instead, where a groom she’d never seen crouched in the hay with a small foal curled beside him. The poor thing was quivering, its eyes unopened and its breaths heavy. A beautiful golden mare poked its head over from the next stall, watching. Blythe’s gut clenched as she realized that it was her mother’s horse, Mitra.
The groom sang as he stroked his fingers through the foal’s coat, and though it took a minute for her to recognize the tune, Blythe’s laugh was the softest breath when she realized he was singing an entirely inappropriate song about a bonny lass who worked on a farm, his voice tired and thick with a lilting brogue.
Blythe’s eyes trailed from him to the foal, and very quietly she asked, “Will it be all right?”
The groom bolted upright. “Miss Hawthorne! Oh, God. Forgive me, I’d no idea I was in the presence of a lady.” His eyes were round and wide, and he was failing spectacularly at not tripping over himself. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“The foal. Will it be all right?”
His face softened. “Only time will tell, miss. All there is to do now is make him comfortable and pray for the best.”
Blythe’s chest tightened to a point where she could barely breathe, and she hated that she followed her first instinct of turning away from the newborn. It was too difficult to look at the dead or the dying these days; the reminder of how much time she’d spent at that threshold was still too awful to bear.
She forced her attention back to the task at hand. Her father would rage if he knew she’d even made the trek to the stables in the first place, let alone that she wanted to ride horseback. Fortunately for her, the groom was new to the job, hired by Byron only a week prior.
“I’d like to take Mitra out.” Blythe folded her hands behind her back and tried to look confident. The groom glanced past her, the tiniest crease knitting between his brows when he saw she was alone.
“Will you be needing an escort?”
It was a sincere question. An honest and expected one that any proper groom would think to ask. Still, it had Blythe bristling, for there was a time when something like riding horseback had been so easy for her that his question would have been laughable. Now she was too unfamiliar with her new stamina to know when she might tire, and she wasn’t so foolish as to allow the possibility of getting stuck unaccompanied in the woods. And so Blythe bit her tongue and told him, “That would be much appreciated, Mr.…”