Blood is Thicker Than Water

Alice glared up at the Duke as he led her cousin through the cavern.

Tilly was so clearly terrified, she was holding her hands in front of her chest as if she could use them as a shield, her shoulders were as stiff as the iron railings that encircled the townhouse they should have been in, and even in the odd green light that the cavern gave off, she looked too pale.

The Duke, completely enchanted by his own self-importance, was completely oblivious to this. Though the hulking henchmen he had following them looked like they might be a touch more aware. Not that they were exhibiting any sympathy for Tilly, of course, they weren’t paid to do that, but they were carefully blocking her exit in case she got up the courage to run.

They would pay too. His Grace was already doomed from the moment he had forced the two of them down here into this underground oubliette of a space, twice over when he had clubbed her over the head with his walking stick and ordered her to be thrown in the water, but the servants might have survived the day. Well no, she thought, using the sides of the river to push her against the current, given what she was going to have to do to rescue Tilly they weren’t going to have much of a chance.

One of them looked over at the river, instinct pushed her to duck beneath the surface but she fought it back and stayed where she was. It was too dark for him to make her out but if she hid he might catch sight of the movement. The human eye was tricky that way, it was so desperate to see what was not supposed to be there that if you merely allowed yourself to become part of the scenery you were next to invisible.

During the attack when she had tried to fight the men off and the Duke had caught her by surprise she had fallen to the ground. Her spells of illusion had dissipated as she was stunned. She might have revealed more to the men than she could have afforded to, but she had two strokes of luck. The first was that the green light of the cavern was dim but enough to see by so the Duke hadn’t bothered to bring a lantern. That meant that her green skin had gone unnoticed.

The second lucky break had been when they had dumped her apparently unconscious body in the underground river. She had both merrow and sea hag blood in her ancestry. She breathed underwater more easily than above it. The cold of the water had rejuvenated her. Giving her the strength to follow them deeper into the caverns. The blood on her scalp had washed away and with it, the wound had vanished as well.

Inside her sturdy walking boots, her feet were trying their damnedest to grow fins. She had to clench and curl her toes to force them back into the correct shape. At least her legs weren’t trying to turn into a tail, her merrow ancestry was far more sensible than the mermaids who were their distant cousins. It would make everything far more difficult.

Finally, they had reached whatever point in the tour of his villainous lair that the Duke had been looking forward to.

His gestures became more exaggerated, his voice bounced off the walls of the cavern, and the henchmen standing nearby had to duck when a wild flail with the hand holding his cane.

Alice pushed out of the river and began to visit her rage upon them.

Matilda had barely heard a thing about her uncle’s side of the family. She had known that he had married a woman that her parents and grandparents felt was beneath them, then he had had the temerity to marry again within months of the poor woman’s death.

She had been young when it happened, but even so, she remembered how her parents had swung from disdain for his first bride to pity. Mark and Prudence might have been snobbish and unpleasant to be around in large doses, but they had been a love match and were resolutely loyal to one another. To marry again would have been inconceivable to either of them if the other were to die. They had started to invite her cousin to visit them almost immediately. They were certain that the young girl would relish the chance to get out of the house so polluted with scandal.

It had taken over a decade for the girl to accept their invitation.

Matilda hadn’t been sure what to expect. Her mother had swithered between decrying the amorphous image of her cousin and pitying her extravagantly.

Miss Alice had arrived during a storm in a carriage with four horses out front. The animals had been black, their coats gleaming in the torchlight as they snorted and tossed their heads. The coachman had been the only servant to accompany her cousin on her journey, something that had made her mother shake her head in disapproval.

But the moue of distaste had been swept away before the girl had exited the carriage. Prudence wasn’t so rude as to visit her scorn on the victim rather than the perpetrator, after all. It wasn’t Miss Alice’s fault that her father was a rich scoundrel with little care for the rules of society.

But Alice continued to surprise them. Despite the heavy rain, she had not run from the carriage to the front door of the townhouse, instead, she had walked like a queen back straight, head held high and holding the gaze of everyone to her. Matilda had known she was going to be a beautiful woman before she had even pushed back the hood. She hadn’t been wrong. One of the footmen had even gasped at her face.

Hair of deepest black but with a shine that didn’t disappear even when she was out of the rain. Skin like ivory or marble that seemed too smooth to be real. Wide and deep doe eyes framed in thick lashes. She had smiled at Matilda’s parents and thanked them so sweetly for their kind invitation to visit that it had turned the tables on them. Making them thank her and nearly prostrate themselves before her in gratitude for her attention.

Matilda had been struck with the idea of just running back into the house, she was an awkward young woman with too much blonde hair who never knew what to say and so instead stayed silent most of the time. They were as different as chickens and swans, they might both have feathers but you could barely imagine they were related.

But then her cousin had turned to her and looped her arm through hers and declared herself thrilled to meet her. And in a sudden moment of understanding, Matilda knew Alice was desperately lonely.

The season had started, though now Matilda was standing next to an incomparable and so she was dragged higher than she had ever imagined it possible that she could go. Matilda was the daughter of a Baron, had a decent enough dowry, and didn’t break mirrors when she looked into them. But she had never had Dukes asking her to dance until Alice had arrived.

After today she would be happy to never dance with anyone at all, especially Dukes, if she just got to see the sun once more.

His Grace was still talking. Now he was going on about how these caverns were the ancestral seat of his family’s power, how in the dark days before Christianity they had sacrificed enemies to their gods here. It sounded, to her practised ear, a lot like the usual nonsense that nobility said to try and puff up their egos. Human sacrifice was a new element, but men talking about their great so-and-sos who had fought for William the Conqueror or against him had a similar tone.

If she wasn’t terrified, if she hadn’t seen her poor cousin knocked down in front of her and her body thrown into the underground river, then she might have laughed at him. She shivered, wrapping her arms around her middle. The cavern was so dark, instead of the white or yellow light she was used to it was instead a clammy green. It had made her cousin’s skin appear almost inhuman when she had lain across the rock floor.

Tears gathered at the corner of her eyes, oh Alice, she thought, I will be with you soon enough!

This turned out to be rather more accurate than she was expecting as Alice herself tore out of the water like an angry goddess and proceeded to rip the Duke and his henchmen apart.

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