When Selena saw the familiar spires of Castle Nelesti up ahead, she smiled in spite of herself. She sometimes thought of her home as a prison but supposed a convict might miss the familiarity of captivity.
And an actual jail cell would have been an improvement over the close confines of the carriage—not to mention her raucous brothers’ company.
Although her eyes were heavy with fatigue, Selena decided that she would stay up as late as she could manage, reading her new book. Never mind that it had come from that witch of a woman, Lydia Spade.
Selena caught Lucas’s eye as her father helped her down from the carriage. The boy looked away, busying himself with the buckles and straps that bound the team of horses to the carriage. Before she had the opportunity to sneak another glance at him, a young page approached her father.
“It’s your mother, milord.” The page twisted the hem of his shirt with his twitching fingers as he spoke. “She took a fall while you were gone.”
Godfrey jerked as though physically struck. “Is she all right?”
“The physician said she should recover in time, milord,” the page answered, looking like he would rather be anywhere else in Altaerra. “She broke her wrist and her hip…milord.”
Godfrey shared a worried look with Alger White. The old Knight rested a gloved hand on the Duke’s shoulder and assured him he would see to the unloading of their luggage. Selena did not have time to wonder why that was necessary because at that moment, her father turned back to the page, ordering the lad to follow him and tell him exactly what had happened.
The twins had left the stable before the carriage had come to a complete stop. No doubt they were already halfway to the kitchen. Selena had lost her appetite, and by the looks of Riley, who lingered near the egress, watching their father with wide eyes, he too was worried about their grandmother.
But Riley did not follow Selena, who sped after Godfrey and the page. As they rushed down one corridor after another, she listened to the page’s breathless explanation of what had happened.
“They found her in the north wing of the castle, milord. ’Twas three nights ago…before the sun was near to rising…”
The boy took great gulps of air between phrases. Godfrey was walking so fast it was all Selena—laden in a dress only slightly less puffy than the one she had worn to her birthday party—could do to keep up.
“She didn’t have no candle,” the page continued, “and no one knows how long she might have lied there. Lucky it was that one of the scullery maids came across her on the way to the privy.”
“What was my mother doing?” Godfrey asked. Though she could not see him, Selena was certain his countenance betrayed no emotion whatsoever.
“No one knows, milord…not even milord’s mother,” the page replied.
They walked—or in Selena’s case, scuttled—the rest of the way in silence. When they reached Celeste’s room, the door was already open. Inside, Charlotte and the physician, a squat fellow named Thom Mello, stood beside Celeste’s bed. The patient appeared to be sleeping.
“Welcome home, husband,” Charlotte said in an irreverently loud voice. She greeted Godfrey with a half-hearted hug, acknowledged Selena’s presence with an empty glance before adding, “I am sorry you could not have returned to better circumstances.”
“Has she been awake since the incident?” Godfrey asked, slipping away from his wife to stand at mother’s bedside.
“Oh, yes,” Thom Mello said. “But she has been sleeping a lot these past few days, which is good for her.”
“But she cannot say why she was roaming the castle in the dead of the night?” Godfrey pressed.
“She doesn’t seem to remember, milord.” Thom Mello cast a pitying glance down at Celeste, who looked older than ever to Selena. “She might have knocked the memory from her mind during the spill, though she doesn’t appear to have hit her head at all.”
“Still,” Charlotte said, “it was a traumatic experience. Little wonder she remembers none of it.”
Selena waited in the doorway for several minutes, listening to the physician’s prognosis. It would take many months before Celeste would be allowed to leave her bed.
As if her rheumatism were not debilitating enough, Selena though sadly. She wanted to stay the night with her grandmother, but Thom Mello ushered them all from the room, claiming that she would be fine on her own and that she needed rest more than anything.
Her parents followed the physician down the hall—probably Godfrey would have a pipe with Thom Mello and extract as much information from the short, round man as he could before going to bed—but Selena headed in the opposite direction.
She remembered nothing of the short walk to her bedroom. The next thing she realized, she was lying on her back, staring up at the canopy that hovered above her four-poster bed.
Selena felt sorry and frightened for her grandmother. At the same time, she was grateful Celeste had not lost her balance somewhere more treacherous, like a stairway. Selena did not want to consider life without her grandmother around. If Celeste had perished while she was gone…
She sat up and wiped away a tear creeping down her cheek. Exhaustion had stolen over her as she lay there, and now she wanted nothing more than to sleep. She undressed quickly, pulling out some of the harder to reach buttons in her efforts to free herself from the dress.
The shapeless nightgown she pulled over her head was shorter than it once had been, dangling only a few inches past her knees. She knew she would be better off wearing something made from heavier material, but the nightgown reminded her of her grandmother, though she could not say why exactly.
Had she worn the thing while listening to Celeste’s stories about Sinner the Saint and the Sisters of the Moon?
Selena walked over to the candelabrum on her bedside table and noticed for the first time that her trunk had already been delivered to her room. She remembered the bundled-up book at the bottom of it but was too tired, too worried to read.
She pushed the heavy piece of luggage into a corner of the room and hastened back to bed.
Selena lay there, shivering, beneath the heavy blankets for some time. Once she had warmed up—it would feel like winter inside the castle until almost mid-summer—she blew out the candles, turned onto her side, and drifted off to a troubled sleep.