Rowan recoiled. “Blackmail?”
He grimaced. “Oh, I know it was base of me, but man is base, Rowan, and I pretend to be nothing more than a man.”
“Tell me about the weapon,” she said quietly. “Did he tell you what it was?”
“You won’t believe it,” he said, his eyes wide. “Once he got here, he told me this weapon he claimed to have found was no weapon at all. It was a creature, he said—a great slumbering god that he said he could awaken through some magical nonsense. He intended to transport it in a massive wooden cart—that was the other sheet of paper you saw among my things—schematics for his ridiculous mobile prison. Of course, as soon as he told me this, I knew that he’d gone mad—dangerously mad, but it was too late by then. I went along with what he said because how could I not, but monsters and magic? It’s insanity. He arrived babbling about how his monster had been lost, and how he needed some coin—how if only he could find the coin, then he’d be able to set it all right again.”
Rowan cleared her throat, not yet ready to show her hand. “So he has no idea where the coin is? Has he … has he found the monster?”
“Rowan,” he laughed. “Use your head, my girl. There is no monster. Madness is the monster—the madness is driving the duke to kill.”
Rowan shook her head. “I think you might be wrong about that, Father.”
“Rowan, the blood fairly drips from his bejeweled fingers. I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out a way to stop him, but I come up with nothing. He is the queen’s brother. I cannot accuse him of murder. You know how this royal lot is. What is a handful of slaughtered villagers to them? So I have been trying to obtain proof. When he goes out at night, I follow him, but each time, I come up empty. I’ve even started looking for this coin myself, thinking that if I could find it, that I could send him on his way, but the task is impossible. It’s utter lunacy.”
“There is a coin,” Rowan said gravely.
“What did you say?” He looked up at her with a raised eyebrow.
“There is a monster as well.”
He stared at her a moment before laughing and shaking his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
She held his gaze. “I’ve seen it, Father. I’ve seen it in the woods. I’ve seen it as plainly as I’m seeing you.”
Her father stared at her, the blood slowly draining from his face. “You’re serious.”
“What the duke told you is true, and he’s far more dangerous than you know. He did summon a monster. It stalks these woods. It’s killed and killed again, and it will keep on killing.”
Her father laughed and shook his head. “No. You can’t be serious, child.”
“Father, when will you trust me? When will you listen to me? Maybe there are goblins and fairies. Maybe there are monsters. Maybe these simple village folk from whom you’ve always sought to separate yourself know more about the world than you do. Maybe their beliefs aren’t as backward as you think.”
Her father paused a moment, his face a muddle of emotions, and then he leaned in. “You say … you say you’ve seen it,” he said.
“I have. I swear to you that I have. It’s an ancient thing, a horrible thing—summoned from the bowels of the earth by a terrible magic. You say the duke is dangerous, but you don’t know the half of it. He’s a Greywitch, Father.”
Henry Rose sat there, stunned, and Rowan could see the enormity of it wash over his face, and color slowly began to trickle back into his cheeks, as if what he was hearing was on some level a relief.
“I can’t … I can’t believe it,” he said slowly.
“Then believe me. We are in danger. We are all in danger. The duke is a wicked man. He committed heinous acts to summon that monster. If he is able to get it under his control, the rivers will run with blood.”
Her father scratched his beard, his quick eyes focused, thinking. “You say you’ve seen the coin as well.”
She nodded.
“And the duke believes that the coin controls the beast. So it would seem we have only one option.” He met her eyes. “We need to get that coin.”
Rowan’s mind flashed to Fiona Eira’s pale chest, to the red ribbon around her neck, to her glittering incisors. “Listen, Father, I know who has it, but it’s not going to be easy to get, or for that matter, to explain.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is no simple way to say this.” He waited patiently for her to continue, and there in his eyes, she saw trust, and she knew she had to tell him. “Fiona … Fiona Eira has it.”
He looked at her with a mixture of surprise and fear. “Excuse me?”
She nodded. “Fiona Eira. She walks among us. She wears the coin around her neck like a bauble.”
He looked at her with a blank expression, as if trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, and then he shook his head. “My child … Fiona Eira is dead.”
“I know. But I’ve seen her. Out in the woods, I’ve seen her.”
“But that can’t be,” he said, astonished. “No,” he whispered. “That’s not possible. She was dead. We saw her in the casket.”
“Father, she wears the coin around her neck.”
A relentless knocking sounded at the door, jolting Rowan to her feet before her father could answer. She started from the room, her father at her heels, but was surprised to find Merrilee just outside the door, her face swollen from crying, her little body pressed against the opposite wall.
“Merrilee,” Rowan said, rushing to her. “Are you all right?”
The girl shook—clearly she wasn’t. “I’m afraid,” she said, trembling. “I think something bad is going to happen.”
Rowan reached out and stroked the child’s cheek. “Shhh, now. Don’t worry. I’m going to answer the door. You go sit with my father in his study, and I’ll be back in a moment.”
Rowan looked to her father, who nodded. “Careful now, Ro,” he said.
Rowan hurried to the front hall. Through the eyehole she saw Jude’s flushed face, and when she opened the door, something inside her surged with happiness. Without thinking, she threw herself into his arms, and hesitant at first, he seemed to freeze, but then he pulled her close. She pressed her face into the warmth of his chest, inhaling his scent, flooded with relief. She looked up at his shocked face, and laughing, she stepped away from him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said, his eyes still wide with surprise.
“Jude,” she said, grabbing his hands. “It’s the duke. The duke is the Greywitch. I should have seen it. I should have known. He’s the one who summoned the creature. He wants to use it as a weapon to depose the king. If he gets control over it, who knows how many will die. But the coin is the key. If we get the coin, we can take control. We can stop the bloodshed. We can get Tom back.”
“Tom’s leaving,” he said, and when he stepped closer, she could see heartbreak in his eyes. “He says he’s headed up north. I know he means to go with her, and I can’t let him. He can’t go off into the wilds with that monster. I have to stop him.”
“He told you this?”
“No,” he said softly. “I just missed him. He came to say farewell to my parents. My mother said she saw him slip some cinnamon into his pocket before he left. She wondered if he might be heading to Cairn Hill to pay his respects to our dead before he goes. I’m heading up there now to see if I can catch him. I have to stop him, Ro. He’ll die up there. He’ll die.”
Jude’s words surged through Rowan. Coin or no coin, they had to find Tom. He was her best friend. She couldn’t let anything happen to him. “I’ll … I’ll go with you,” she said, but he shook his head.