Love-in-a-Mist Read online

  Love-in-a-Mist

  Greenwing & Dart, Volume 5

  Victoria Goddard

  Published by Victoria Goddard, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  LOVE-IN-A-MIST

  First edition. October 5, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Victoria Goddard.

  ISBN: 978-1988908274

  Written by Victoria Goddard.

  Also by Victoria Goddard

  Greenwing & Dart

  Stargazy Pie

  Stone Speaks to Stone

  Bee Sting Cake

  Whiskeyjack

  Blackcurrant Fool

  Love-in-a-Mist

  Plum Duff

  The Sisters Avramapul

  The Bride of the Blue Wind

  The Warrior of the Third Veil

  Standalone

  In the Company of Gentlemen

  The Hands of the Emperor

  Not Far From the Tree

  Till Human Voices Wake Us

  The Connoisseur

  In the Realms of Gold: Five Tales of Ysthar

  The Return of Fitzroy Angursell

  Petty Treasons

  The Tower at the Edge of the World

  Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.

  Love-in-a-Mist

  Greenwing & Dart Book 5

  Victoria Goddard

  Underhill Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Also by Victoria Goddard

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  It is perhaps emblematic of my life that breakfast, the morning after I died and returned to life, was not the most awkward meal I had ever attended; though it was, I admit, within the top five. Possibly even the top three.

  There was that supper, the evening my father had returned from the (twice-reported) dead, three years afterwards, to find his wife remarried and his reputation besmirched.

  There was that breakfast, the morning after I had successfully argued that my ex-paramour Lark had written a final paper unbecoming of a Morrowlea student (and because of which she should therefore fail her final exams), and Lark had egged all the students (save for Hal alone, who had stood by me) to throw literal stones at me until I fled to the hospital wing in an access of bruised bones and broken heart.

  There was that dinner party interrupted by the cult—that meal after I found I had spent years under a curse—that lunch after my father came back again—

  And then, yes, there was this breakfast. Top five, then.

  I was glad withal that my father was safely on the other side of the Linder mountains and did not have to participate. The conversations to come, when we got home and I had to explain what happened on Mr. Dart’s and my excursion to Orio City, would be difficult enough without him actually being present through the aftermath.

  It was not an early breakfast, all things considered. I had gone to bed after my midnight resurrection, and fallen asleep with unexpected (but appreciated) ease. I woke again just after dawn, to one of those glorious early-winter mornings where hoarfrost rimed every blade of grass and holly leaf. The window had been left uncurtained, and the thin, golden light poured in, unobscured save by a high, feathery haze of clouds coming in from the west.

  The view was southerly. I took in what I could see of my surroundings curiously. I knew that we had managed to escape the prison-palace of Orio City by means of a faery islet outside the world’s bounds, and subsequently arrived at the hunting lodge of the King of Lind.

  We were therefore now somewhere in the western Linder mountains. I had never been to this part of Lind before. Hal and Marcan and I had come across the southeastern march of the country on our walking tour in the summer, and Mr. Dart and I had crossed to the north of the Crook of Lind as we travelled to Orio City—by the Lady!—less than a week ago.

  The Linder mountains, which are usually called the Crosslains on the Fiellanese side, form the border between South Fiellan, Chare, and Lind. On our side they were steep, bald-topped, and with a limited area of wooded foothills. When I was a little boy I always thought they looked like old men getting up and dropping their lap-blankets in folds around their feet.

  This side the mountains were much more relaxed in their demeanour, with long sloping flanks thickly forested. The forests seemed different from our side, lighter and yet more luxuriant. I contemplated the interplay of light and frost and shadow. On our side most of the trees had lost their leaves, except for a few lingering oaks and the semi-evergreen Tillarny limes in the Woods Noirell. Here the mountains had stretches of dark green conifers and soft brownish-grey deciduous trees interspersed with great splashes of brilliant yellow larches.

  After the gloom and grime of fog-bound Orio City, the sunlight and the bright blue sky overhead was altogether marvellous. I fiddled with the stiff latch of my window until I could open it and breathe in the crisp air. Someone in the distance was making charcoal; I could see the smoke rising in a steady leftward twist from the fold of two hills. Closer-to was sweet-smelling woodsmoke.

  Wood doves cooed to each other, drawing my eye down from the white-tipped mountains to the forecourt below me. Three or four birds, soft grey and fawn, moved and murmured in the gravelly space below me, pecking at lumps of horse manure. They moved like the prayer-birds in the dead space between this life and the entry-way to the world to come.

  Would I ever be able to look at this world again and not see that other place? I watched the birds, content in the moment, in the thought that surely I could not.

  In that place beyond, I had met Ariadne nev Lingarel, the disgraced governor and great poet. She had found salvation in the architecture of the prison in which she was incarcerated, and grace (such a great mystery!) in the response of those who read, and loved, her poem in the years since. Even me. Especially me, she had said; she had waited to greet me on that side of the passageway.

  My thoughts touched on that, then lifted away again, embarrassed in a way I had not been there. It was excruciatingly difficult even to imagine meeting soul to soul, here and now on this side. There it had been—not easy, precisely, but there had been time and patience enough to wait until the soul was ready and able to face itself, and others, clearly.

  Those Mountains were the home of the soul, and in the Wood of Spiritual Refreshment between our lives here and the Mountains there lay all that was necessary for us to be able to reach them. For someone who had not felt at home in himself, let alone in any particular place, since childhood, this was truly a grace unfathomable. I wished I knew what I was to do with it.

  I glanced around the room, but could not see my copy of On Being Incarcerated in Orio Prison. I hoped Violet or Mr. Dart had claimed it, during our tumble-down exit from the fey island linking prison and hunting lodge.

  I considered the Linder mountains again. The air was thin and cold and splendid.

  It was actually Violet’s copy I had been using to decipher our path. Mi
ne would be with my other belongings in our coach, wherever that was at the moment.

  Eyes on the wood doves, I prayed to the Lady, Her face unclear in my mind but my heart singing with the memory of Her, that when I forgot, as I inevitably would forget, that I would be reminded of the Mountains and the true home of the soul.

  Down below me a thickset middle-aged man dressed in well-worn leathers came around a corner with two shaggy-haired deerhounds beside him. The tall dogs were scenting the air, taking delight in scattering the wood pigeons, one taking a moment to mark his territory. I smiled at them, their unconscious beauty of movement, their elegant lines. One turned its head up to look at me, ears pricked forward in eager interest.

  The handler called from the next corner, and the dogs left off their investigations to trot obediently away. I let out a deep breath and realized I was hungry.

  My room was not large, nor excessively luxurious, but it was well-appointed in a rusticating-lord sort of way. The bed was a sturdy four-poster with heavy damask curtains in green and brown, a down quilt and a well-sprung mattress underneath. An ewer and washbasin to one side had lukewarm water in it, evidence that a servant had entered and exited my room before I had woken. The fire was newly-lit as well.

  I poked around and discovered my clothing on a chair, cleaned and neatly folded. I considered this even as I found the materials for shaving in a drawer on the washbasin stand and meditatively worked to lather the soap. I was wearing a plain linen nightshirt, loose and large on me, undoubtedly borrowed from the household. I felt surprisingly clean given all the dust and grime of our adventure in the palace-prison.

  It was only when I was nearly finished shaving, with the assistance of a small and somewhat warped hand-mirror, that I realized that someone must have washed my body as part of the laying-out rites.

  It was a … disconcerting thought.

  I finished my ablutions and changed into my clothes: dun breeches and white shirt, dark blue waistcoat and medium-blue coat. A cravat, tied in the Mathematical style at my neck and a pair of newly-polished if very well-worn boots on my feet completed the outfit. I gathered my hair back into a queue with a black ribbon I found next to the hairbrush in the drawer, wished for a toothbrush of some form, and folded the borrowed nightshirt over the back of the room’s chair.

  There was nothing else belonging to me in sight. This included, alas, a distinct lack of my hat, which had probably fallen off at some point in our journey. My boot-knife was in my boot, and everything else had been with the coach we had been preventing from reaching by our capture.

  My stomach rumbled, and I tentatively opened the door. The warm water and the lit fire suggested that the servants, at least, anticipated the unexpected guests might arise soon, and that led me to hope for breakfast.

  I had never been in this sort of place before. I wandered down the hall, admiring details of the interior architecture and trying to piece together how it fit with the palace-prison. It was not so elaborately decorated, but there were hints, here and there, of repeated motifs in the carved wooden doorways and in the subtle changes of stone walls and floor.

  I doubted I would ever have thought to look for such patterns if I had not had Ariadne nev Lingarel’s poem to guide me through the ones in the palace-prison, and the new knowledge that the hunting lodge was connected magically as well as architecturally to that building.

  The hall took me down two sides of a square gallery to the head of a staircase, whose bannisters were beautifully shaped and had richly carved finials displaying a series of gargoyle and goblin-like forms. I examined them for a few minutes, tracing out the underlying spiral snake, wondering how Irany had persuaded the workmen to build what she needed without revealing what she was doing.

  “The breakfast room is downstairs and three doors to the left, sir,” a voice said.

  I looked up to see a middle-aged woman in an apron. She was regarding me with polite deference, no awe or distrust in sight. She didn’t seem surprised to find me there, so presumably she knew of the strange arrival of half-a-dozen mostly-strangers, but perhaps not the odd miracle in the middle of the night.

  “Thank you,” I said, sketching a bow. “And good morning.”

  She shook her head and turned away, but she was smiling at my foolishness as she did so, so I counted that a small victory.

  I found the breakfast room, which relieved me by being laid out quite similarly to the Darts’. I might of late have become the Viscount St-Noire, and I had learned appropriate manners from my mother and at Morrowlea, but I was not yet accustomed to moving in these sorts of circles.

  Still, I was glad it was only the hunting lodge of the king of Lind, and that said King of Lind did not appear to be in residence. (I expected our reception the night before would have gone rather differently had he been so.) No one else was there, as it happened, when I entered, but I was quickly followed by a young maid-servant in a starched cap and clean white pinny.

  “Good morning, sorr,” she said with a rolling burr of an accent. “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “There’s porridge and toast and kippers and sauces to come,” she added, moving around to a sideboard where cups and saucers were laid out. “His highness likes a good breakfast of a morning, he does, when he’s hunting.”

  It took me a moment to remember that Marcan—studious, religious, heartily athletic Marcan—was the second son of the King of Lind, and therefore his highness. When he wasn’t the Count of Westmoor. I confess I didn’t quite understand the titling conventions at work here.

  “He does like a good breakfast,” I agreed, remembering many such meals at Morrowlea. His sporting demeanour—Marcan was partial to the javelin and other field sports, as well as rowing and rugger—and corresponding appetite were legendary among our cohort. “We were at university together, he and I.”

  She bobbed an agreeable curtsey. “It was a sore surprise for you to arrive so unexpectedly in the night! And no carriage neither?”

  “We did go a little astray of our intended route,” I said to this indirect question. “Cream, if you please. Are you from around her, miss?”

  She blushed. “Aye, sorr. Born and bred down in the village.”

  “I’m from Ragnor Bella, over the mountains. Are we far from the pass over to the Coombe, do you know?”

  She held the cream jug, which was surprisingly enough a whimsical piece in the shape of a sheepish-looking cow, and considered this carefully. “I think the road goes there, aye, sorr. Perhaps fifteen miles? Twenty? I’ve never been that far, sorry, sorr.”

  Until I had gone to Morrowlea, I had never been farther than fifteen miles from home, either. Except that one trip across the Leap with my father. I smiled at her. “Thank you. Has there been snow up in the mountains, do you know?”

  “Aye sorr, but not so much to bring the game down yet,” she said, more confident at this question. “The master huntsman said there’s weather coming, but. His highness is most eager for the mountain goats.”

  It seemed strange to me that Marcan would so relish hunting. But then again he was sporting, in all senses of the word, and the Lady of the Green and White had her Huntsman at her side.

  (Though … not when I saw Her. Which did nothing to put to rest the question of whether the Hunter in Green traipsing around the hills and forests surrounding Ragnor Bella was the divinity, or someone mumming the part. I was inclined to think it wholly a disguise, but I didn’t know that for certain and it seemed prudent to behave circumspectly.)

  I thanked the maid for the coffee, when she eventually surrendered the cream jug to my use, and asked for toast as a safe thing to start with. I disliked kippers and wasn’t at all sure what sauces meant when it came to breakfast foods in Lind.

  Before I had even begun adding sugar to the tar-thick brew I had been given the rest of my party began to straggle in. First was Mr. Dart, who stopped in the doorway to regard me with a somewhat resigned expression. “I half-hoped, this morning,
that the whole sequence of events of the past two days was a dream.”

  Mr. Dart is not a morning person. He looked so awake that I guessed he hadn’t slept at all. I pushed my cup over to him. “You seem as if you might need this more than me.”

  “You do look disgustingly awake for someone who was dead most of yesterday.” But he accepted the cup and took a long draught, shuddering as he did so. “Vile stuff. They should add chocolate and sugar as they did at that coffeeshop in Tara.”

  “It’s a style I’m sure Mrs. Jarnem the Sweet would take much delight in you bringing to fashion.”

  He sat down opposite me. He was wearing his plum and grey suit, and clearly the hunting lodge servants had been busy through the night with their laundering, for it, too, was freshly clean and pressed. Even the grey sling cradling his petrified arm had neat creases down its centre line.

  The pensive look suddenly cleared, and he gave me a penetrating glance, eyes a sharp, bright, blue. “I am glad to see you, Jemis, notwithstanding the spiritual upheaval you have thrown us into.”

  “The Lady was—” but the door opened on Marcan, and I stood to greet my friend and involuntary host properly. “Good morning, Marcan—your highness, that is.”

  He scowled at me and flung himself down into the hefty seat at the head of the table. He didn’t look like he had slept, either. “None of that nonsense, Jemis. If you are Jemis.”