The wind howled westward as though it fled screaming from the lands of the Manslayer, lashing the towers of Castle Fulcairn. In its wake, the shutters clanged open and shut again, and intermittent stripes of silver moonlight danced across the bed, large and draped luxuriously with wolfskins and linens, but empty, destined to be half empty forever now.
She sat on the edge of the bed and watched the moon through the clanging shutters. Nearly full now, it bathed the curves of the hillsides in pale light and turned the Bowstring into a gleaming ribbon winding through them. It was easier to look out than around, for everything in the room was just as he had left it. The battered boots he only wore when attending to the horses and hounds sat in a dried smear of mud by the door. The cairnhound he was attempting to whittle for her from a chunk of yew-wood lay in a pile of chips and shavings on his writing-desk; she had laughed at him as his attempts mostly consisted of nicking his fingers with the carving tools, and had produced a result that looked more like an ailing duck than a majestic warhound.
She thought about the events of the day, about the young man who had brashly stormed into the keep, secure in his claim to it despite being absent half his life, who looked enough like Corrac to rend her heart into quivering pieces, but acted nothing like him, was nothing like him.
She raised the letter to the moonlight in trembling hands. Part of her wished to cast it into the hearth, cast it from the window, tear it to pieces. For she had moved beyond grief, beyond the agonizing but ultimately human pain of loss, into an obliterated place, a void where there was nothing, merely a great emptiness from which she observed an automaton who vaguely resembled her, walking the castle halls, greeting guests, sending correspondences, giving orders. This piece of parchment, penned in his careful script, had the power to drag her back, back to the pain.
Was it not better, surely, to dwell in the void? She was no stranger to it. She had spent the first twenty-four years of her life there. No joy, no sorrow, no purpose, just emptiness, and the senseless, mindless instinct to keep going.
She reached across the bed and stroked the groove his body had worn in it. It was still there.
She sobbed, a ragged and hopeless sound, just once. Callum, who had been dozing by the fireplace, lifted his great black and tan head and trotted over to her.
Her belt knife glinted in the moonlight, and it sliced through the red wax seal on the letter, stamped with the crest of the Fulcairns.
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