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“My boy,” she wept. “My boy! They wrote to us. The colonel wrote. Struck down at the guns, he said, and I knew. I told everyone I knew it could not be true. Oh, but you are wet through. You are frozen.”

Her hands went over him. Shoulders. Sleeves. The scarlet coatee buttoned to the chin. He endured it rigid as a fence post, in terror of what she might feel through the wool. The left shoulder seam pulled when she gripped him there. He did not let his breath change.

“Mother.”

He had rehearsed things to say to her across the whole width of France. None of them came.

“Where is Edward?”

It was as though he had put a candle out.

The joy did not leave her face so much as break against something behind it. Her hands went still on his sleeves. Across the room, the strange lady looked down at the table.

“He …” His mother’s mouth worked. “Edward is … He has been ill, dearest. A fall. His horse came down with him, and he … But he was better this evening. He took some broth. He insisted we come down and dine. He insisted. And Miss Clarke is sitting with him.” Her fingers closed hard on his forearm. Her voice dropped. “Go up to him. Go up to him now, Damian. God has sent you home tonight of all nights, and you must go up.”

Damian knew that voice. He had heard better this evening in Spanish farmhouses and Belgian ones, over soldiers who rallied at sundown just long enough to take broth and make their mothers laugh.

He was moving before his head caught up.

His mother came after him and stopped at the foot of the stairs as though she had reached the end of a tether. One hand on the newel post. The other pressed to her mouth. The strange lady was there at once, an arm about her shoulders.

“Go,” his mother said, pushing the air at him with both hands. “Go. Go.”

She did not follow. Stroud went up before him with a branch of candles, saying nothing. His mother’s weeping followed them both up the stairwell like something rising through water.

The corridor to the baron’s chamber had been his father’s once. It was Edward’s now. It was as long as it had been when he was a boy. Longer. His body knew every board. The smell reached him halfway down it and put a stop to the joy still ringing in the hall.

Vinegar. Laudanum. Candle smoke. And underneath them, faint and patient, a sweetness he knew from the hospital tents at Brussels, which no vinegar in the world has ever scrubbed out of a room.

Everything in him went cold and orderly, the way it did before an engagement. He could not feel the rain in his collar anymore.

Stroud scratched at the door, opened it, and stood aside.

The room was kept dim. A low fire. A single branch of candles by the great bed. The curtains drawn back against the dark, and the soft rain on the glass. The sweetness was stronger here. It sat at the back of his throat.

And rising from the chair drawn close against the bed was a young lady.

Gold hair was the first thing he noticed. Not flaxen. Not pale. Gold, truly gold, taking the candlelight and giving it back. A heart-shaped face above a modest muslin gown. Color in her cheeks that owed nothing to the fire. Eyes of deep-water blue. She was slight, and young, and so entirely, unreasonably alive in that room that, for a moment, when his ruined left eye split the candle flame beside her into two flames, he could not have said which of the three burned brightest.

She had gone still. The color left her face. Her lips parted, and she was staring. She examined the scarred side of his face, the wrongness of his eyes, and the sheer graceless size of him, and she did not flinch, and she did not look away. She just stared at him, assessing.

Then his eyes went to the bed. Everything else in the room dropped away, the gold hair and the two flames with it.

“Ned.”

It came out rusted, the same as it had in the kitchen, and cracked on the one syllable.

Edward’s eyes were already on him. Fever-bright. Blue. He was confused, then ecstatic.

“You are dead,” Edward said. “They printed your name. I read it. The lists. Damian, I read your name. I have been lying here dying while thinking of you dead!”

His hand came up off the covers, trembling, reaching.

Damian made himself cross the room. He had seen every way there is for a man to die, quickly on the field, slowly in the tents, and he had believed nothing behind that door could show him anything new. He had been wrong. The men in the tents had been strangers; the man in this bed was his beloved brother. The man he had hoped to find and tell of his disturbing secret.

Edward lay propped high. The fever had been eating him and had not been dainty about it. His brother. His fine-made, easy, elder brother, who had never in his life been anything but comfortable. Gone to bone and candle wax. Lips cracked. Hair dark with sweat. Hands on the counterpane as if someone else had set them there.

Damian took the ruined hand in both of his and went down on one knee beside the bed. The hand was too light and too hot.