Chapter 72: The Lodge's Welcome
The old cart, reclaimed from a terrified village headman with a blend of silver marks, Harold’s imposing seal, and Rook’s unblinking stare, finally gave up its groaning protest as they crossed the lodge’s threshold. One of the wheels shed its last iron band with a metallic sigh and rolled a few pathetic feet before clattering to a stop on the cracked marble.
No one cared. They were inside.
Thistlemere Lodge’s main hall swallowed the sound, and then their ragged breathing. It was a tomb of gilded excess. Faded tapestries depicting hunting scenes hung in tatters, the embroidered stags’ eyes moth-eaten and blank. The air was a thick cocktail of dust, mildew, and something sickly-sweet underneath—old wine, rotting velvet, the ghost of perfume. And underneath that, like a bass note, was the faint, coppery tang of old blood. The ceiling soared into darkness, a great ribcage of blackened beams. A monstrous chandelier, missing half its crystals, hung like a frozen waterfall of dust and cobwebs, its candles long since melted into grotesque, frozen drips on the floor below.
Seraphina swayed on her feet, her hand gripping the splintered cart edge. The journey had been a blur of jolting pain, hushed commands, and the constant, grinding fear of being seen. Every snap of a twig had been a soldier. Every distant birdcall, a warning horn. The twins felt like lead weights, low and restless.
“Clear the perimeter,” Rook murmured, and the Choir knights—Anya among them, a shadow with sharp eyes—melted into the hallway shadows, their boots silent on the grimy marble.
The children were hushed, wide-eyed. Mia buried her face in Seraphina’s skirts. Leo stared up at the chandelier, his ledger forgotten in his hands. Kya just closed her eyes, her small face pinched. “The trees are… loud here,” she whispered. “They’re angry. They remember the hunts.”
A massive fireplace dominated the far wall, a gaping maw filled with the ashes of a decade. The chill of the place was deepening, seeping through their threadbare clothes.
“We need heat,” Magda stated, dumping her satchel. “Or the little ones will catch their death, and she,” she jerked her head at Seraphina, “will seize up entirely.”
Vincent was already moving toward a pile of mildewed furniture stacked in a corner, looking for something dry enough to burn. Callum went to the huge, iron-barred main doors, sliding heavy bolts that screamed with rust. The sound echoed, too loud.
Seraphina watched them work, a useless weight. Her legs trembled from the effort of standing. The silence of the lodge pressed in, but it wasn’t silent at all. It was a muffled cacophony of whispers. The stones held echoes of laughter that had curdled into screams. The floorboards remembered the weight of running feet. The very air vibrated with a polished, cruel decadence that made her skin crawl. It was worse than Blackwood’s honest despair. This was evil that had dressed for dinner.
Vincent wrestled a worm-eaten chair leg free. Callum got the last bolt home and turned, his eyes scanning the shadowy galleries above. “Place is a nightmare to defend. Too many windows. Too many doors.”
“We’re not staying long,” Vincent said, his voice tight with strain as he carried the wood to the hearth. “Just long enough to breathe.”
He knelt, arranging the kindling with quick, efficient movements. He pulled his flint and steel from his belt. The sharp clack-clack-clack was the only sound in the vast hall. A spark flew, died on the damp wood. Another. And another. A tiny ember glowed, caught a strand of dry fungus, and then sputtered out. The wood was too wet.
A low groan of frustration escaped him. The cold was becoming a physical presence.
Seraphina stared at the dead hearth. A memory flashed: a different fireplace, smaller, in the rooms she’d been given at Silks. A client had wanted a fire. The maid was slow. He’d backhanded Seraphina for the delay. In her panic, staring at the logs, she’d just… wanted them to burn. A sudden, desperate pull in her gut. And the sap in the greenwood had sizzled. The bark had blackened. Flames had leapt, too fast, too hungry, singeing the rug.
She hadn’t understood it then. She’d been punished for the scorch marks.
Now, the cold was biting into Mia’s cheeks. Nessa began a soft, thin whimper, shaking in Liana’s arms. Magda shot a sharp look at the dead fireplace, then at Seraphina’s pale face.
Without conscious thought, Seraphina took a stumbling step forward, then another. Vincent looked up, about to speak, but she shook her head. She knelt awkwardly, heavily, beside him, ignoring the protest in her joints. She didn’t reach for the flint. She just placed her hands on the cold stone of the hearth, on either side of the pathetic pile of damp wood.
She closed her eyes. Blocked out the oppressive whispers of the lodge. She reached for the hum beneath, the older, deeper song. Not the angry trees Kya heard, but the slow, patient heart of the earth itself. The latent heat. The memory of fire.
It wasn’t a pull. It was a push. A gentle, firm exhale of will from the center of her exhaustion.
The air over the hearth wavered. A deep, resonant crack split the silence, coming from inside the largest log. A ribbon of steam hissed out. Then, from within the heart of the damp wood, a glow blossomed—not from the outside in, but from the inside out. It was the deep, secret red of embers buried in the earth. The fungus Vincent had tried to catch flared into a yellow flame. Then another. The fire didn’t lick at the wood; it unfolded from it, as if the logs were merely shedding their cold, wet skins to reveal the burning truth underneath.
In less than ten seconds, a robust, cheerful fire crackled in the giant hearth, beating back the shadows and pushing the chilling damp away.
Silence, again. But a different kind.
Vincent was frozen, his flint still in his hand, his eyes fixed on the flames that had just defied physics. Callum had gone perfectly still by the door, his hand resting on his sword hilt, his gaze locked on Seraphina’s profile, illuminated by the firelight.
Magda let out a long, slow breath. “Well,” she said, her voice dry. “That solves the firewood problem.” She turned and began herding the children. “Come on, you lot. Closer. Warm your bones. Let your mother breathe.”
The children shuffled forward, drawn by the primal promise of heat. Kya looked at her mother with a mixture of awe and understanding. Leo just nodded, as if filing the event away in his mental ledger: Mother. Makes fire. Useful.
Seraphina pulled her hands back, clasping them in her lap. They were trembling. That small act had drained her, a deep, spiritual siphon. She felt Vincent’s stare, then Callum’s.
“The dagger,” she said, her voice faint. “It… helps me control the noise. But the connection is still there. I can… ask. Sometimes.”
“You asked that wet rot to combust,” Vincent said, not a question.
“I reminded it what it was supposed to be,” she corrected softly, staring into the flames.
Callum pushed off from the door, the spell broken by practicalities. “Good. That’s good.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We have fire. We have walls. For now.” He strode to a large, map-strewn table thick with dust. “Vincent. The map.”
Vincent rose, dusting his knees. He pulled a rolled parchment from his inner coat—the one from Harold’s packet—and pinned it to the wall with a dagger over the crumbling remains of a tapestry stag. The firelight danced over the inked lines of the empire, the southern coastline, the marked safehouses.
Seraphina stayed by the hearth, letting the heat seep into her bones. Mia curled into her side, already half-asleep. Liana and Finn sat close, their eyes on the map, on the men.
“This lodge is here,” Vincent said, tapping a point in a dense forest region. “Harold’s main contact, the one he said was most secure, is Lady Yvette, at her estate near the port city of Verenth. Two weeks’ journey. On foot, with our… entourage…” He didn’t finish.
“Impossible,” Callum finished for him, his eyes scanning the routes. “We need horses. A covered wagon. More supplies than we can carry. And we can’t use the main roads. The Emperor’s Eyes will be on every southern route looking for us, for her.” He glanced back at Seraphina, the firelight carving the worry into his face. “My brother will have doubled the bounty. They’ll know we didn’t die at Blackwood.”
“Then we don’t go south yet,” Vincent said, thinking aloud. His finger traced a path north, skirting the edge of the Whispering Woods. “We loop around. Use the forest for cover. There’s a smattering of rebel sympathizers, trappers and the like, along the timber line. We can trade for what we need, piece by piece. It’s slower. Riskier in other ways. But it’s less patrolled.”
“The woods are deep,” Rook said, materializing from a side arch. “And things live there that don’t care about imperial decrees.”
“Things might be preferable to imperial soldiers right now,” Callum countered, but his tone lacked its usual bravado.
As they argued logistics in low, urgent tones, Seraphina watched them. The fire warmed her skin, but a cold certainty was crystallizing in her gut. She was the reason for every compromised route, for every extra burden, for every deadly risk. She was the cargo. The prize. The problem.
Her hand settled on her stomach. The twins were quiet, soothed by the warmth or her sudden, grim focus. She thought of the names on her father’s list. Of the obsidian dagger and the lion-heart necklace hidden within. Of her mother, Elara, who never got to run.
Magda approached with a bowl of broth, shooing Mia gently aside. “Drink. You’re feeding three, remember.”
Seraphina took the bowl. The warmth was real. The children safe, for this moment. The men—both of them—arguing not if they would protect her, but how. The fire she’d summoned from nothing crackled, defiant.
She looked from Callum’s animated, strategic intensity to Vincent’s brooding, analytical focus. Their eyes met over the map, then flicked to her, a synchronized check-in. That unspoken language again.
The promised talk hung between them, a third presence in the room. But the truth was, they were having it already. In every glance, every strategic concession made for her safety, in the fire she’d built and the doors they’d barred.
She sipped the broth. It was salty, thin. It was everything.
“We leave at first light,” Callum said finally.
“We should… go to the Halsten Castle… back to my father’s home… it’s defensible… surrounded by the sea… the imperial guards were pulled from there after the Archduke passed. I need… I need somewhere safe to give birth… and it’ll be here before you know it. I’m already four months along… we have maybe four more with the way things are… we need to settle… and if they try to invade we have every reason to fight back… it’s my rightful home…” She looked over her children, six of them now, soon to be eight. “I want to take back my family home… I can’t… I can’t run anymore…” She could feel it in her body, if she kept pushing herself there was no way she and the twins would survive this.
The quiet that followed was thick enough to feel. The crackle of the conjured fire was the only sound. All movement in the room had ceased. Even the children seemed to hold their breath.
Callum stared at her, his strategic mind visibly discarding the forest-loop plan and recalibrating around this new, immovable objective. Vincent’s eyes narrowed, not in disagreement, but in swift calculation, his gaze dropping to the map as he mentally measured the direct southern route against their current position.
“Halsten,” Vincent said, the word a flat statement. He found the spot on the coastline. “It’s a fortress. By sea and by land. Harold was confined there, but his guard was loyal. If the imperial forces have truly withdrawn…”
“It’s a target,” Callum finished, but his tone was shifting from doubt to assessment. “A gleaming one. My brother would see reclaiming it as a symbolic victory. But if we’re already inside its walls…” He looked at Seraphina, really looked at her: the pallor of her skin under the dirt, the way her hand cradled the distended curve of her abdomen not with tenderness, but with a grim, protective finality. She meant it. She would break before she bent again.
“The direct road is suicide,” Rook grunted from the shadows. “They’ll be watching for any movement from these woods toward the coast. It’s the first place they’d expect.”
“So we don’t take the road,” Seraphina said. Her voice gained a fraction of strength, forged in that simple, desperate decision. “We go cross-country. We move at night. We use the land.” She glanced at Kya, who gave a small, fierce nod. “The land will hide us if we ask it nicely.”
Magda let out a snort. “You can’t ask your body to walk cross-country for two weeks, girl. Not in your condition. You just learned to stand again.”
“Then I’ll learn to ride,” Seraphina shot back, a flicker of her old defiance cutting through the exhaustion. “Or I’ll be carried. But I am not spending the last months of this pregnancy in a cart, hiding in ditches, waiting for them to find us. I am going home.” The word cracked in her mouth, foreign and potent.
The force of her declaration left a new silence. Callum’s lips pressed into a thin line. He walked away from the map, toward the fire, and crouched before her. He didn’t touch her. “Sera. It’s a war zone. We don’t know what’s there. It could be occupied. It could be a ruin.”
“I don’t care if it’s a pile of rubble,” she whispered, holding his gaze, green eyes blazing in the firelight. “It’s my pile of rubble. My children should see the sea again. They should have walls that belong to them, even if they’re broken.” She swallowed. “I need to stop. If we keep running, I will lose these babies. You will lose me. I know it. I can feel it.”
That stark, physical truth hung in the air, undeniable. Vincent had gone very still by the map. His knuckles were white where they rested on the table. He was the one who always chose the practical route, the one who mitigated risk. This was the farthest thing from practical.
“Alright,” Vincent said, the word quiet but decisive. Both Callum and Seraphina turned to him. He pushed off the table. “Halsten it is. The direct path is a trap, so we don’t walk into it. We go southeast, through the Murkwood Fens.”
Callum stood up sharply. “The fens? Vincent, that’s a damned bog. It’s treacherous. We nearly died in the Fen months ago.”
“Exactly,” Vincent replied, a cold, tactical light in his eyes. “No imperial patrols will waste time there. The ground is too soft for cavalry. The paths change with the rain. It’s a week of pure misery, but it spits you out here,” he pointed to a spot on the coast north of Halsten, “where the coastal cliffs are rugged. We follow them south, using the caves. We’d be ghosts.”
“A week in a bog,” Magda muttered, folding her arms. “With a pregnant woman, six children, and a man with a recently stabbed shoulder. Brilliant.”
“Do you have a better idea that gets her to a defensible position before her body gives out?” Vincent’s question was blunt, aimed at the room.
No one spoke. The fire popped, sending a spiral of sparks upward. Leo, who had been listening intently, piped up. “Fens have hard reeds. You can make baskets. Traps.”
A faint, grim smile touched Vincent’s lips. “See? Practical.”
Callum looked from Vincent’s determined face to Seraphina’s resigned, hopeful one. The loyalty to his friend warred with the stark, terrified need to keep her safe. This path was a different kind of danger, a slow, sucking one. But it was a path toward a wall, a place to make a stand. He gave a single, curt nod. “We’ll need proper boots. Oiled leather. And a guide who doesn’t exist.”
“We have a guide,” Kya said softly. Everyone looked at her. She was staring into the fire, her head tilted as if listening. “The water in the ground talks. The roots know the solid paths. I can… I can hear it better than mother can. The dagger shields her. It doesn’t shield me.”
The admission left them wordless. Kya’s power, untrained and born of a quieter soul, was a deeper, more natural well than Seraphina’s trauma-sharpened connection. Seraphina felt a pang of fear for her daughter, followed by a crushing swell of pride.
“Then it’s settled,” Seraphina said, the decision solidifying into a plan, into a future. “We rest tonight. We find what supplies we can in this place at dawn. Then we go to the fens.”
The weight of the journey settled over the room, a tangible pressure. But it was a specific weight, with a direction. Halsten. Home.
Later, as the children were bedded down on musty tapestries near the hearth, Seraphina tried to rise to help Magda. A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through her lower back, so intense it stole her breath. She froze, a small gasp escaping her.
Both men were at her side in an instant. “What is it?” Callum’s voice was low, urgent.
“Nothing. Just a stitch,” she breathed, but the pain had been deep, structural. It echoed the ache in her hips, the unbearable pressure when she walked too long.
Vincent didn’t speak. He simply took her elbow and Callum took the other, and they guided her slowly to a moth-eaten chaise lounge away from the children. They helped her lie back, propping her head. Their hands were careful, impersonal, and yet their coordinated care felt more intimate than a kiss.
Magda appeared, pressing a hand to Seraphina’s forehead, then her belly. She felt the firm, high curve, noted the tightness. “You’re overdoing it. Your body is screaming at you. These babies are demanding a roof, a bed, and stillness. Soon.”
“I know,” Seraphina whispered, closing her eyes.
Callum ran a hand roughly through his hair. “We leave at first light. Every hour we delay is an hour less you have.”
Vincent stood looking down at her, his expression unreadable in the flickering light. “Rest. We’ll take watch. All of it.”
They moved away, speaking in hushed tones about watch rotations, about scavenging the lodge for oilskins and preserved food. Seraphina listened to their voices, a low, reassuring murmur against the lodge’s darker whispers.
She placed a hand on her stomach. Hold on, she thought, not to the twins, but to herself. Just a little longer.
From the shadows near the grand staircase, a single, dusty portrait watched the scene. The painted face of a long-dead noble, his smile too wide, his eyes vacant. As a draft from the newly-barred door snaked through the hall, the portrait’s corner lifted and fell back against the stone with a soft, final tap.
Like a lid closing.