Page 125 of The Hunted

She would wish after that he had done the same.

Stay.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Eryx

THE MAN WHO handled the stables had been right—unfortunately. There was definitely something wrong in the stables. Eryx knew it the very second he pushed open the doors, struggling against the wind that only seemed to blow harder now that he’d come outside.

It was too quiet.

Something that was incredibly unusual, considering the fifteen to twenty horses that typically boarded in the stables on any given day or night. Not to mention, they had added another twelve horses that belonged to the royal caravan that evening.

And it was storming.

That always had the animals acting up.

Not tonight, it seemed.

A dark silence greeted him when he finally managed to pull the door open. The smell of hay and hide smacked him fair square in the face. The musky heat of the stables caused him to shove back the cloak’s hood from his head. That way, he breathed a bit easier.

Shooting a look back at the main house, he let go of the heavy door. At the rear, south-west side of the estate, he couldn’t see very much. Certainly not the front of the house, the barns for the carriages, or anything else. Only a few oil lamps and candles remained flickering in windows, but it was hard to distinguish with the rain.

Something felt wrong.

The longer he stood there staring at the house, the worse the feeling became. He didn’t quite know what, but the dread wouldn’t leave, no matter how hard he tried. Instead of feeding into it, he simply let the stable doors close behind him, knowing that soon, he would be back in his bed with Arelle.

And everything would be fine.

At least, until the morning.

“I wish I could find it in me to apologize, but you know me, and I cannot, my lord.”

The familiar voice had Eryx’s head swinging back around to face the long corridor of the stables that was lined on either side with stalls for the horses. At the very far end, he found the source of the voice.

Mattue.

He waited there in a cloak trimmed with black fur—his favorite. Silver rings with black onyx stones rested on each of the man’s clasped fingers. Sitting on a stool under the only current source of light in the stables—a high hanging metal rack with fifteen thick candles sitting in a circle—Mattue smiled grimly.

Eryx took a step toward the man, and then another. All the while, his gaze darted back and forth in the stables when he passed stalls. He kept thinking … the horses are too quiet; even when they rest in their hay in the storms, they’re never this quiet.

It was hard to see the beasts in their stalls with the high doors keeping them blocked from his line of sight. Through the slate where the doors didn’t quite reach the floor, he could see the tips of hooves, and even a snout when he reached the middle of the stables.

“What is wrong with my horses?” Eryx demanded.

Mattue chuckled, tipping his head to the side. “Do you remember, Prince, when it was me who lived at this estate? You used to love visiting me when the weather was better … you spent more time on these horses than you did talking to me.”

Though it felt out of place in his current situation, Eryx’s mind drifted to the journal and how his mother must have watched him with Mattue, knowing what the man was like but helpless to stop it when it would mean her death. And which would have been better for him—an altogether dead mother, or one that reminded him without ever endangering her presence in his life that he was not entirely the same as the men around him?

A lump formed in Eryx’s throat as he realized the only thing he could hear in the stables was the sound of his own heartbeat, and his breathing alongside Mattue’s. The horses made no sound—not even a breath.

“Mattue—”

“And then when you came of age, your father had to just … give you anything. A gift for a prince. What was it you said you wanted, hmm?”

Eryx grinded his teeth as he came to a stop at one of the final stalls in the long corridor. This one belonged to two of the smallest horses—colts, actually. The door wasn’t as high, as he could plainly see inside the stall.

The two colts lay dead.