Chapter 16

B aron tried to keep Huxley separated from Corvin as much as possible, but considering the purpose of his stewardship, it had been a doomed endeavor from the start. After finishing his examination of the estate buildings and grounds, Huxley turned his full attention to preparing its new titled lord.

"Stand up straight," he barked. "Like a lord ought."

Corvin snapped to attention. He was being fitted for a suit, since Huxley refused to repeat the embarrassment of greeting a royal visitor "in shambles." The tailor was one Huxley had summoned, and, unsurprisingly to Baron, the man carried the face of a sour lemon with a personality to match.

"You pricked me," Corvin said, the reason for his earlier flinch.

The tailor merely rolled his eyes and stabbed another pin through the jacket cuff.

"Rather than making excuses," Huxley said, "hold still."

Baron clenched his jaw. He stood at the far side of the room, arms folded over his chest, cane hooked at his elbow. If he stood like a bodyguard, it was purposeful.

"Hold this." The tailor slapped a piece of chalk into Corvin's palm, then continued pinning the cuff. After the second pin, Corvin gave another wince.

Even through gloves, Baron's nails pressed into his arms. "Corvin's thirteen. He's already been tested."

Corvin dropped the chalk as if it were a snake.

The traditional Caster test was done with a cup of water in one hand and a polished stone in the other. The king's tester made a small cut on the person's arm, because pain prompted reflexive magic. A Stone Caster would make the stone glow, and a Fluid Caster would do the same with the water.

Affiliate magic didn't trigger either response; there was only the danger of the Affiliate's panic triggering an uncontrolled transformation. Baron's father had coached both of the twins before their tests, ensuring they'd pass.

But Huxley was a new type of stress.

"I'm aware," said Huxley, shrugging the matter off as if he'd never conducted underhanded tests.

The rest of the fitting continued in tense silence, but at least Corvin was spared further jabs. He was not, however, spared further tests. After the fitting came a handwriting test, a reading test, and a quiz of his knowledge of court procedure. Baron watched with concern as his brother grew more frazzled.

"You have a rash, boy?" Huxley demanded.

Corvin stopped scratching his wrist. Though he sat straight as a rod at the study desk, his eyes darted with growing frequency toward the window.

"Corvin," Baron said softly.

Those brown eyes had never looked so tormented.

"That's enough for today. Mr. Shaw will be expecting you; don't be late."

The boy bolted for the door, gone before Huxley could voice his stunned protest. Then the man's brows pulled down, his expression pinching to reflect the same sourness as his tailor.

"In the future," he said, "I'll thank you not to interfere in his schedule."

"Corvin still has a duty to his apprenticeship. Surely you don't want a future lord baron neglecting duties. It sets a bad precedent."

"A future lord baron has no need of a common apprenticeship." Huxley stood from behind the desk—Baron's desk—and retrieved the estate ledger, leaning heavily into his cane. He opened the thick volume. "Actually, I'm glad we have this opportunity to speak in private, my lord. It seems your stint as estate manager, however limited, created an alarming number of concerns."

Baron's fingers dug into his arm again, but he said nothing.

"Increase in orchard spending—that would be the unnecessary second fertilizer." Huxley looked up; Baron remained silent. The man returned to the page, running his finger down the side. "Various expenses regarding the nearby hamlet, all extraneous. It seems you twice paid for a physician's visit. Such expenses aren't the duty of the estate lord."

"It seems our definitions of duty are in conflict," Baron said.

While he carefully considered how much to help in most financial matters, Baron couldn't restrain himself regarding illness. Health was not a plough horse; he would always bear the cost if those he cared for could not.

The memory of his father as the one in bed was still too fresh.

"Here's a perplexing one: You hired an investigator mid-summer. To investigate what, might I ask?"

His stepmother. After Sarah's abrupt departure four years earlier, Baron's father had closed off, refusing to speak about her though it strained his relationship with the twins. Baron couldn't bring their father back, but he felt the pain of being an orphan acutely enough; he would spare the twins if possible.

Unfortunately, the venture had been a dead end. Sarah hadn't been found. She'd hopped between relatives immediately after leaving her husband, but none professed any idea of her whereabouts within the last year.

There was nothing to be done for it. She'd given no indication she was leaving at all, and when she left, she'd given no indication where she might go.

Baron had been the first to see the smoke, to find his stepmother in the yard beside the smoldering spines of former books, their pages crumbled to ash, her eyes alive with the fire that had already burned out at her feet. It hadn't taken Baron's father more than a minute to catch up, and then there had been arguing, desperate pleas and struggles to understand met with a wall of refusal. The twins had arrived just as their mother swung into Ruby's saddle. Baron would always wish they hadn't heard her parting words: "This family is damned, and I will not stand idly to witness it."

The books she'd burned hadn't been from the shelves of the study but from the cubby beneath the floorboards of Baron's room.

Books on Casting, on Affiliation. On every known kind of magic. Books left to Baron by his real mother. Destroyed by his stepmother.

And no investigator could tell him why.

Huxley closed the ledger. "After careful review of the finances, I see a change must be made. Namely you, my lord. Rather than living off your brother's estate, I think it's time you find a sustainable living of your own. Perhaps, with your unique talents , you could desalinate water for farmers in Port Tynemon."

"A tempting offer, Mr. Huxley, but I think there's a more pressing calling for me closer to home."

"Surely you don't think the estate should pay you to hover around, hindering your brother's progress?"

Slowly, Baron lowered his cane to the ground, stacking his hands atop it. "The estate will pay me to lead the autumn harvest."

"We don't need—"

"Unless"—Baron raised his voice slightly—"you can find someone else in the next few days with the required knowledge and experience of how to handle the orchard. Harvesting is a delicate process, I'm sure you understand, and any loss of crops is a loss of revenue for the estate. I suppose you could oversee the process yourself, steward, but I wouldn't want to burden you with lemons and ladders."

With a pointed look at the man's weak leg, Baron gave a shallow nod and excused himself from the study. He found himself trembling as he walked.

It was a temporary solution. By the time spring harvest came, Huxley would realize Walter could lead. Losing Baron would mean hiring an extra worker or two, but cost was not Huxley's true motivation. Clearly, he wanted to push Baron out of the estate.

What do I do?

Baron wished he had someone to direct the question to.

After checking on Leon in the kitchen, more for his own peace of mind than anything, he made his way to the edge of the estate's land, just north of where it met the hamlet. There a small corner had been dedicated as a cemetery, since there was no churchyard until Stonewall. The Reeves family tomb stood in a copse of trees that had never been cleared, the stone structure pierced by sunlight only through the small windows in front and back.

His father's casket was there, encased in stone and marked by a plaque on the wall. So was his birth mother's, marked not only by plaque but also by a small statue of an angel mother with wings curled to protect her baby. Baron gently traced the feathers of one wing.

With a sigh, he leaned against the wall and spoke to parents who could no longer hear him.

"Huxley is worse than I'd feared."

The man had grown bolder faster than Baron had anticipated, and Baron couldn't see a clear path to spring harvest, much less to Corvin's seventeenth birthday. Perhaps the steward truly thought he was benefitting Corvin by distancing the estate from its Caster connection. Perhaps he simply feared for his own safety.

Something tapped at the window, startling Baron, and he heard a sharp caw just before a crow swooped into the narrow tomb enclosure. In a burst of black mist, the crow turned into a gangly boy. The transformation took barely a moment, and the mist dissipated at once, fading to imitate a puff of dust in the sunlight.

Baron forced himself to relax. This place was likely safer than his bedroom.

"You abandoned Mr. Shaw," he said disapprovingly.

"He's in Stonewall today, but I wasn't about to tell Huxley."

Corvin rested his hand on their father's plaque, shoulders drooping. Then he moved beside Baron, leaning his back against the stone wall, eyes on the floor.

"It's hopeless, isn't it?" he whispered at last.

Though Baron had been thinking along much the same lines, he wrapped an arm around Corvin's shoulders. "We won't let it be," he said.

Corvin smiled. From somewhere distant, a bird screeched, and the boy perked up.

"Another carriage?" It was foolish how quickly Baron spoke, more foolish still how that was his first hope.

"No, it's—hang on." Corvin weaseled out from under his arm, turning with a clever gleam in his eye. "Do you want it to be?"

"I want only to be prepared for any unexpected visitors. The last caught us all off guard." Baron pushed away from the wall and ducked into the fresh air.

Corvin scrambled to catch up. "Did she say she'd come back?"

"She said no such thing."

"Oh." The boy's steps slowed, then increased again. "Maybe we could go to the castle. Or to Sutton, at least. I'd like to talk to Jenny again. She hardly said anything with Huxley hovering, but I think she grew up near here."

Baron relaxed, coming to a stop beneath a tree, dappled with the shadow of leaves. "I suppose a trip to Sutton could be arranged."

Though Huxley would no doubt find an excuse to deny it.

Corvin nodded. "Great. Then you could talk to Aria, like you're dying to."

A leveled stare did nothing to wilt the boy's devious grin.

"What I said about Jenny's true. And what I said about Aria's true too."

" Princess Aria, and you're far ahead of yourself, Corvin."

"You could send her a letter, you know. You don't even have to leave for that. I happen to know the best delivery crow in the entire kingdom, one you never use for anything. Mr. Shaw told me he's worried you don't appreciate what an incredible rarity that trained crow is."

Baron snorted. "I appreciate that crow plenty, even if he sometimes pokes his beak where it doesn't belong." He sobered. "It isn't ... simple, Corvin. Not as simple as I might hope."

The boy's expression fell. "What do you mean?"

The matter was tangled up in words like royalty and Caster and Northglen . If that weren't enough, there was steward , harvest , twins . Baron could not risk dividing his attention. The cost for a failure at home was far too great.

Even if he thought of the princess's strange journal and remembered Leon's words about her voice at court. Even if he could not remove the memory of Aria in the orchard, looking up at the trees with the sun shining against her dark hair, reaching for a lemon and saying, It's breathtaking.

"Come on." Baron nodded toward the path to the hamlet. "If Mr. Shaw is gone, that means you're my assistant for the day, and last I heard, there was a concern about the central well."

Hopefully he could find a way to solve the problem without access to estate funds or resources.