The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter (Riyria Chronicles #4)

“No! That’s not possible. You don’t mean . . .”

Royce nodded. “Lady Martel’s dog. The one who sounded the alarm at Hemley Manor and nearly got poor Ralph the guard killed. How could that dog possibly be here?”

Hadrian looked around at the unkempt field filled with crooked posts. “This is a cemetery, a paupers’ graveyard. Maybe this is Lady Martel’s grave.”

“Lady Martel wouldn’t be buried in a pauper’s grave in Alburn. She’s the wife of a wealthy Melengar lord.”

“But didn’t Puck say something about the diary belonging to a monk named Falkirk?” Hadrian asked.

“No. He said the diary was written by someone named Falkirk, and that she got it from a monk.”

“Whoa, that’s really weird. Wonder what she’s doing here, and how she died.” Hadrian looked at the dog, sadly. “That’s one loyal pet. I’ve heard stories about things like this. The dog gets so attached that it waits on its owners’ grave for them to come back. Some end up dying because they just can’t leave.”

Royce didn’t say anything. He merely stared at the dog and the grave.

“Maybe we should take Mister Hipple with us,” Hadrian said, bending down and reaching out.

The little mongrel with the flat face and folded ears snapped at him. “Or not.”

They returned to their horses and climbed up.

“Perhaps Evelyn will adopt him,” Hadrian said hopefully.

“Or maybe he’ll be crushed under the wheels of a milk wagon. I’m not sure which would be the worse fate,” Royce added.

The streets were just as congested as on the day they had arrived, but this time the current was all in one direction, out. Like Royce and Hadrian, everyone was leaving the city, heading home. At the bottom of the hill, they found that the plaza had been cleaned. The sound of hammering announced that the door to the gallery was being worked on, and the bells of Grom Galimus were chiming on time, but no vendors had set up shop. In their place, flowers had been laid out in bunches around the empty pedestal where a seventeen-foot statue of Novron once stood. Wreaths, candles, and lovingly drawn portraits were mixed in with the bundles of recently gathered blossoms. The odd thing—no delineation existed between the memorials for servants and nobles. No line separated the privileged from the poor. Grief blended them all together, ignoring differences as readily as death had.

“Don’t understand how all this connects,” Hadrian said as they waited to cross the bridge to Governor’s Isle behind a trio of wagons filled with families. “How could reading the diary of a several-thousand-year-old monk get Lady Martel and Virgil Puck killed? Maybe some ancient ghost wants his book back. Which brings up another mystery.”

“What?”

“Who killed Erasmus Nym?”

Royce shrugged. “I suppose a golem got him.”

Hadrian shook his head. “Only Villar, Griswold, and Erasmus knew how to raise them. You were chasing Villar across rooftops when Erasmus died.”

“So, it must have been Griswold.”

“Nope. He’d run away from the cemetery. Besides, the two of them were friends. He’d have no reason to kill him.”

“I have a friend, and I think about killing him all the time.” Royce said with a straight face.

“Oh, so you admit it now. We’re friends?”

“I never said anything about you. Don’t be so presumptuous.”

The wagon ahead of them began moving, but slowly. They were at the edge of the bridge where the big gargoyle pediment Royce had perched on was still guarding the entrance to Governor’s Isle.

Hadrian looked around at the congested city of towers and grotesque statues dominated by the cathedrals and bridge spires. Even in the daylight, with the many shadows cast by the tall buildings, the old city felt dark. Who knew what other secrets it kept to itself.

Royce turned sharply around in his saddle and looked behind.

“What?” Hadrian asked, looking back as well, but he saw only the city and more throngs of people.

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

Royce gave a second glance back and sighed. “I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“Why Lady Martel might have been buried in an unmarked grave. It’s because her body wasn’t claimed. No one identified her.”

“I think that’s obvious. If they’d known who she was, her body would have been sent back to Hemley Manor.”

“And why do you think that was? I mean, why didn’t anyone identify her?”

Shock crossed Hadrian’s face. “You don’t mean . . .”

Royce nodded. “What if Lady Martel didn’t have a face?”

Hadrian grimaced and pulled his blue scarf tighter.

Crossing the river, they started up the far hills, heading west. When they reached the crest, they turned back for a final look. From that distance, the city, nestled in the valley surrounded by the mountains and the sea, appeared quaint, even romantic.

“What’s that up there?” Royce pointed to what appeared to be a fortress down the coast.

The castle was nothing but an outline on the top of a distant mountain, but even from that far away it appeared intimidating, dangerous, powerful.

“Blythin Castle,” Hadrian said. “I think that’s where they imprisoned Glenmorgan the Third, and it’s now headquarters to the Seret Knights. Creepy place. Wanna go look?”

Royce pulled up his hood. “No. Let’s get home. I’m never coming back here.”

Hadrian laughed. “Never say never on any endeavor . . .”

“Quit it.”

“It sounds like a dare to gods that don’t care . . .”

“I mean it.”

“If the likes of us prosper, fail, or falter . . .”

“You are seriously annoying me now.”

“It matters not while they roll with laughter on an altar . . .”

Royce kicked his horse and trotted off up the road.

Hadrian looked back once more at the city. He thought of Seton and the night he first met her amidst the smell of blood and the cries of widows. He remembered his father who’d made him butcher a chicken, the first life he took. And he thought back on his years of war and slaughters within the arenas of Calis. “At our miserable, sad little lives.”

Royce was right. They were never coming back here again.



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Afterword



Well, there you have it. Another adventure with Royce and Hadrian. I hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride and meeting some new characters along the way. If this was your first trip with the pair, I hope you’ll check out some of their other tales. Like the other Riyria Chronicles, this book was written to be a standalone . . . a self-contained story that doesn’t require any prior knowledge of Riyria and wraps up nicely so you don’t have to read the next book. I think I delivered on most of that intention, but I want to spend just a moment talking about a few things.