“If you spill copper sulfate on my third-century folios again, Madame Botanist, I will feed your spectacles to the conservatory’s carnassial orchids.”
“The margin notes are completely illegible without an acidic wash to strip the grime, you impossible brute,” Gisela snapped, not looking up from the battered oak table. She dabbed a horsehair brush against parchment that smelled strongly of wet crypt. “And if you had properly climate-controlled this library two centuries ago, the mold wouldn't be eating the taxonomy charts for the genus *Argenta*.”
Across the slab of slate serving as a drafting desk, her host scowled. Shadows drifted off his flared shoulders like oil smoke, settling into the gouges of the ancient parquet floor. His claws—long, serrated, tipped with pearlescent black—tapped a sharp cadence against his knuckles. “The library survived five sieges and two inquisitions before you marched in here smelling of stagnant seawater and professional spite.”
“I smell of crushed elderberries and scientific rigor.”
Pip hung upside down from an iron chandelier directly over the horned beast, chewing thoughtfully on Gisela’s spare pair of wire-rimmed lenses. A brass telescope sat clamped beneath the creature’s mossy prehensile tail.
Then Pip chirped. A high, piping whistle that cut clean through Gisela’s retort.
The lemur let go of the spectacles—the Duke caught them without twitching a brow—and scrambled to the lancet window overlooking the southern cliffs. Pip chattered, tiny claws clicking against the salt-rimed glass, pointing outward toward the churning swells of the reef.
Gisela set down her brush. She reached the sill in two strides, pushing the heavy iron latch. Cold Atlantic salt air slapped her face, dampening the loose strands around her ears.
Cutting through the gray swell of the shoals was a caravel. Its mainsail bore a blindingly bright device: an azure swan clutching a golden turnip.
“No,” Gisela said, the word drying on her tongue. “Gods of the soil, absolutely not.”
“Pirates?” The cursed lord stepped behind her. The temperature plunged instantly, rime crusting across the stone jamb. His presence brought the bitter tang of ozone and old tombs. “Smugglers? If they have salt pork, I might consider letting them moor before I turn them to gravel.”
“Worse,” Gisela hissed, leaning out so far her knees pressed the stone parapet. “It’s Aldric.”
“A creditor?”
“Baron Aldric van der Meer. The man who campaigned to have my Lyceum tenure revoked because my treatise on nitrogen fixation proved his family’s prized tulip estates were built on top of an open cesspool.”
Her companion tilted his massive, horn-crowned head. “He sailed across the Roaring Shelf because of manure?”
“He sailed across the Roaring Shelf because he has convinced himself that my public humiliation was merely an eccentric mating ritual.” Gisela gripped the sill until her knuckles whitened. “He swore on the steps of the Royal Exchange that he would ‘tame my unseemly intellect’ and make me a respectable housewife in Middelburg.”
The caravel cast anchor just beyond the outer breakers. A cutter slapped into the chop, rowed by four red-faced men in livery that looked intensely miserable beneath their oilskins. Standing at the prow, buffeted by sea spray yet refusing to crouch, was a figure draped in ermine-trimmed velvet and a plumed cavalier hat that defied both marine sense and basic aerodynamics.
A brass speaking trumpet came up to the man's mouth. His voice rolled across the cliffs, reedy and thoroughly convinced of its own majesty.
“Fret not, my poor, soiled Gisela! Your champion has braved the howling wastes to drag you from this wretched rock!”
Her host made a low sound in the back of his throat. It sounded like millstones grinding flint. “He speaks of my island as though it were an untended cabbage patch.”
“Aldric!” Gisela shouted out the window, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Turn that barge around and go back to your drained bogs, you pompous parasite! I am conducting field research!”
The figure in the skiff adjusted his hat against the wind, completely impervious to reality. “Do not let terror muddle your delicate constitution! I know you are half-mad with feminine fright! Weep no longer over your ruined weeds and unladylike dried roots! I have already signed the betrothal contract with your uncle!”
Gisela picked up a heavy lead inkpot from the sill and measured the drop. “Your Grace. Can your magic reach two hundred yards down?”
“I can curdle the beer in their bilge,” the Duke offered softly. The shadows around his throat thickened, his pale eyes narrowing as he leaned out beside her. “Or I can rip the iron nails from their hull and watch them swim with the seals.”
Before Gisela could weigh the ethical merits of drowning, Aldric’s landing boat crunched against the shingle of the castle’s ruined water-gate. The Baron sprang ashore, his silver-buckled boots sinking instantly up to the calves in black, putrid kelp. He barely flinched, drawing a gilded rapier and pointing it directly up at the keep’s central tower.
Then he froze.
From the high embrasure, the beast stood in the noon glare. The midday light caught the sweeping curve of his obsidian horns, the unnatural hollows of his ash-gray cheeks, and the vortex of black vapor coiling about his fingers.
Aldric goggled, mouth slack. The plumed hat listed violently to port.
“By the Crown!” the Baron bellowed, his voice cracking into a high, hysterical screech. “A fiend! A blood-gorged abomination has taken her prisoner! Men, draw your sidearms! The lady’s honor is besieged by an infernal squatting gargoyle!”
The Duke's posture went rigid. “A squatting what?”
“He called you a gargoyle,” Gisela whispered, feeling an absurd burst of glee piercing her fury.
“I am the Grand Duke of the Shattered Isles,” he growled, the stone beneath their feet beginning to hum with suppressed malice. “My bloodline built the dykes that keep his ancestral mudbanks from drowning.”
“Well, he thinks you’re an oversized yard ornament. And now he’s storming the outer portcullis.”
Down on the causeway, Aldric was indeed charging. His four sailors remained firmly inside the boat, furiously pretending to adjust their oarlocks, but the Baron bounded up the weed-slick stairs with theatrical fury, rapier brandished high. “Yield, fiend! Yield her virtue to a son of the Republic!”
“Virtue?” Gisela’s voice rose. “I haven't thought about virtue since the Lyceum denied my funding for the nocturnal moss study! You arrogant popinjay!”
“Hold,” the master of the keep murmured. A sharp, predatory curl touched the edge of his fanged mouth. “The castle does not care for visitors who step on the lichen.”
Above the arched gateway, three stone chimeras—carved with the heads of bloated baboons and the wings of herons—suddenly snapped their limestone necks downward. A grinding shriek echoed off the cliffs as their hinged jaws unlatched.
Aldric reached the threshold, kicking the ancient iron-studded oak door with a polished boot. “Open, in the name of the Admiralty! In the name of—”
*SPLAT.*
A black, fermenting sphere the size of an infant's head struck Aldric square in the chest. It burst with the wet violence of a small mortar shell, showering his ermine trim in rotten, purple pulp.
Aldric staggered back, gagging. “What in the—what foul witchcraft—”
From their perches fifty feet above, the grotesque carvings reached into stone basins hidden behind their claws. Centuries of forgotten, putrefying fruit from the wild castle orchards had settled into those cisterns, reduced to a black, fermented sludge that smelled like pickled turnip and sewer gas. The middle sentry took aim and hurled a second projectile with the velocity of a catapult.
It took Aldric clean in the face, knocking the feathered hat into the kelp.
“Direct hit,” Gisela noted, leaning her forearms on the sill.
“A bit to the left on the third volley,” the Duke critiqued, crossing his massive arms over his chest. A rare, genuine rumble of laughter vibrated through his ribs, shaking the loose masonry around them. “The center chimera always pulls to the windward.”
Down below, Baron Aldric van der Meer was spinning in frantic circles on the slippery flagstones. His rapier swung blindly at the sky, slicing through clouds of pungent, rotting plum rind. “Unholy sorcery! Repent, foul shade! Gisela, avert your eyes from my tactical retreat!”
A volley of ancient, petrified quinces battered his shoulders, driving him to his knees in the slick mud. When he scrambled up, his satin breeches were soaked in black ooze, his wig askew, his face smeared with violet muck.
“I will return!” Aldric shrieked, skidding backward down the steps toward the boat while the stone monsters honked in unison, a sound like rusty hinges grinding together. “Do you hear me, beast? The Admiralty will hear of this! I shall bring ironclad frigates! Alchemical fire! The Grand Inquisitor’s battery! I will tear this pile of cursed rocks into the sea and drag you to the gallows!”
He tumbled headfirst into the cutter, nearly capsizing it. His sailors, without waiting for orders, dug their oars into the gray water with desperate speed, rowing hard for the safety of the caravel.
Gisela watched the ship’s wake carve a white scar across the dark water. The laughter died in her throat, replaced by a sudden, dry chill.
Ironclads. Frigates. Alchemical fire.
Beside her, her cursed partner went entirely still. The brief warmth of his amusement vanished, swallowed by the cold, heavy shadow that always returned to claim him. His claws bit deep into the stone ledge, leaving fresh scars in the granite.
“He will do it,” Gisela said quietly.
“Of course he will,” the Duke replied, his voice flat, hollowed out by centuries of inevitable ends. “Men like that do not suffer humiliation in silence. He will bring the mainland to our door.”