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the earl was sitting in his study, sipping at a cup of mulled wine and lying to himself. Perhaps in the company of the duke, perhaps alone. Hart was working up a sweat in the practice yard. Rowena was still sobbing, or had sobbed herself into an exhausted sleep. Isla knew all this without knowing it, she knew her family so well.
    She always had.
    By the time she stood, cold down to the marrow of her bones and aching in every joint from having sat unmoving for so long, Isla had made a decision.

FIVE

    I sla sat at her seat on the bench, invisible as usual, waiting—needing—for dinner to be over. Now that her path was set, night couldn’t come fast enough.
    Her father was drinking heavily, more heavily than usual. Hart meanwhile was gazing at Mountbatten with open worship, as the two men discussed something to do with horses. Mountbatten wasn’t much older than Hart, in the great scheme of things, but Hart clearly regarded him as something more akin to a father or an uncle than a peer. Rowena wasn’t present; she’d absented herself from dinner in a fit of pique, or despair, and had demanded that food be sent to her in her room. Preferably sweets.
    If anyone remarked her absence, they gave no sign. Just as they gave no sign of noticing that His Grace the Duke of Darkling Reach was…different. Nobody mentioned his corpse-like pallor, or his hands. Mountbatten was second in power only to the king; even at the best of times, there was no suave means of drawing attention to the problem. But a lowly earl like Peregrine Cavendish wouldn’t dream of bringing down the king’s displeasure by insulting his own brother at table, a guest in his home.
    Moreover, there was simply no way for anyone, of
any
station, to observe that,
my dear Sir, you appear to have claws
. Isla was fairly certain that the duke could turn into a werewolf in front of them all and the earl’s only response would be to ask whether the wedding was still on. He’d either trained himself not to notice the duke’s peculiarities or convinced himself that they were of no import.
    Isla glanced over at the duke again and, indeed, she could hardly avoid doing so as he’d once again been seated directly across the table. He made a languid gesture, illustrating some point as he chatted with Hart, and his heavy signet ring winked in the firelight. She supposed it must bear his house crest, or perhaps his personal coat of arms; the light was too dim for her to get a good look. The stone in the center, some sort of ruby or garnet, perhaps, was the bright red of fresh blood.
    Dinner was the same interminable experience as the night before, only three times as long. The time dragged with each course: trout again, and boar. There wasn’t salmon this year; the salmon runs had been all but empty, for all that the weather had been chill and salmon notoriously preferred such conditions. Were Isla the sort of superstitious and ignorant peasant as Rose, she might be tempted to believe the rumors that the drought and cold and other poor conditions were the duke’s doing. But, man or beast, Isla doubted that he—or any single entity—had the ability to control the weather. How could such a thing be possible?
    And if somehow it
were
all true, and the duke was indeed a powerful sorcerer in a land that eschewed sorcery as superstition and an insult against the true gods, then all the more reason to give him what he wanted, and soon, so he’d leave them alone.
    Isla sipped her wine, grimacing at the taste. She wondered if people would think she was being self-serving; that maybe her supposed concern for her sister was an act and her high-minded motivations extended no further than seducing a rich man into her bed. She hoped not. This was the last thing she wanted in the world—if she was even capable of securing it. Which was a big
if
; she was slender, and her features were regular enough, but she was no man’s ideal of feminine beauty. And she had, she’d been informed,