They’d left the library untouched. As Sabela stepped over the rotten, splintered wood of a doorway hacked to pieces, she wondered how it had survived. The rest of the manor was gutted. Below, walking the grass between its scorched and crumbling walls, she could make out fireplaces in the stone, stories up—rooms where the timber ceilings and floors had burned away. The whole of the North Wing gaped towards the open sky. Elsewhere, though, she’d found pockets intact.
The floor was stone, for some reason. She wondered if that had provided some insulation from the inferno, but it did not explain why the looters had hacked through the door, saw what was inside, and left.
She was careful passing the doorframe. Bare, iron hinges embedded into the stone wall had rusted to the color of coral. Somewhere scattered in the debris was a handle that matched, maybe a lock. Locks could not keep out axes, though, and their wielders had refused to be barred.
She kicked away the debris and took in her surroundings. It was not a grand space. The ceiling was as low as the other upper rooms, but it was long. Bookshelves, high and staggered perpendicular to the western wall filtered the light like jail bars. Cast through dirtied panes, the ash-sullied sunlight fell like fallen beams between them and dropped dusty puddles of dull color on the stone.
She walked the long corridor, gaze trailing over books still sitting after twenty years’ neglect. There was an eccentric aunt, it was said. A Blackthorne who’d suffered some trauma in the womb, who was sired by an outsider, or perhaps had caught a fever as a child and never recovered in the mind. Whatever the cause, she was in a unique position at the time to amass what Bree-landers might consider an impressive collection of tomes. A lavish expense, unruly, unjustified, the Blackthornes murmured. Money better spent on the defenses or on the cousins’ sorties to the crest of Nan Wathren. Even on the town itself when pockets were in need of greasing and good will from the townsfolk needed to be bought.
What would they say, Sabela thought, if they knew this was all that was left?
One window in the southeast wall had shattered from the heat of the fire in the room next door. Soot-stains patterned the walls, ghosts of the flames that had snaked across the stone.
She passed by a book left open on an old iron lectern and ran her hand over the brittle vellum. A hole in the hide had been stitched up with brightly hued silk thread. She ran her finger over the embroidered knotwork, feeling the care that delicate fingers had woven into the treated lamb skin, hundreds of years before.
Was there a fortune under her fingers? Did the pillagers of her family’s estate bypass the library because books had so little value in the brutal North Downs, or did they simply not understand that value could be bartered in the south?
A fortune she needed. Nevermind besides the library the rest of Bittermoor Manor was a stone skeleton, colonized by creeping vines. She’d known she’d have to sink wealth into the ruined estate. Now she had...new expenses. There were enemies, she’d come to learn...enemies who’d not forgotten her family and the old hurts she’d conjured by bearing their name. Enemies who had already sent someone after her.
Her hand went to the bruises on her neck. Four on one side, a fifth on the other. They no longer felt raw, but they still felt tender.
She searched the shelves, but she found nothing useful in the books themselves: poetry, mostly; some histories; a peculiar retelling of the kin-strife by a scholar from the Mark on an apparent visit to Gondor; a catalog of etchings.
Nothing about the house, her family, their history, or anything that might hint at the wealth they’d hidden away. Not a single ledger, almanac, or deed.
She looked up and through the murky glass of the few windows still intact. The closed wound in her side ached, but now and then she pressed it, picked at the skin, as if with prodding she could ensure the bruise would never fade. It was all she had left of him...that, and his signature on the contract he’d drawn.
Where was she going to find 800 silver? Her dogs were thirty-five, maybe forty each. A stud could fetch 80 at the most. She only had the five, and she needed them to bring life to the kennels again. The rest had not survived the journey from Rhûn. Few of their caravan had. She was lucky to have even that handful left.
He could have killed Rosary, but he’d spared the mastiff. She was still puzzling as to why. She’d have offered no such mercy, if their roles had been flipped. Whatever he’d done to her, whatever hurt she could point to was somehow...corrupted by that kindness. She could not hold hostility in her heart, not wholly.
Was that why she’d agreed to the terms? 800 silver wasn’t all she had, but she’d counted on that coin to hire draftsmen and builders, to purchase enough head of cattle and hire the ranchmen to tend them. Now, she needed that money to protect herself from those who’d already set out to do her harm.
She needed investments, and soon. She’d need allies. She’d need friends.
