Red Heir - Lisa Henry Page 0,42
approached the dark facade of the house.
“What is this place?” Dave asked wonderingly.
Cue didn’t answer him. He seemed a shade paler in the moonlight that he should have been as he stepped up to the front doors of the house. He pushed them open.
“Not even locked.” His voice was shaky, and Loth sent him a worried look.
They stepped inside the house.
It smelled of damp and decay, but it wasn’t as dark as Loth had feared it would be. And then he realised that most of the window shutters were broken; moonlight streamed inside. There was an elegant chair sitting under the window closest the door, in the entry hall. It was speckled with mould and smelled terrible.
Loth glanced around the entry hall. The antlered heads of what must have been an entire herd of stags stared down at him from the wall opposite the main doors. Below them, wooden shields and crossed spears adorned the wall. Loth squinted at the crest on the shields.
“Holy shit,” he said. “That’s the royal crest!”
Cue shot him a look.
“Which I knew, of course,” Loth said, recovering fast, “because I am the lost prince.”
“Welp,” Calarian said. “I’m gonna go loot some stuff, I guess.”
Cue’s face was pinched, and he threw Calarian a look of disgust before he strode further into the house.
Calarian and Ada descended on the place like a plague of locusts. Dave dropped Scott and followed them. Loth, although he was tempted to join them, followed Cue instead. He found him in a room at the top of a creaking staircase. It was a library, perhaps, although it stank so badly of decay that Loth was sure that the weather, and mice and insects, had destroyed all the books years ago.
Loth approached him. “Cue, we are absolutely going to be arrested and hanged if anyone finds us here.”
“Does it look like anyone’s been here in years?” Cue asked. He reached out and trailed his finger down the sagging spine of a book. Then he pushed, and his finger punctured the spine. Cue’s mouth twisted bitterly.
“How did you even know it was here?” Loth asked.
Cue shrugged. “It’s a hunting lodge. A holiday home. They came here sometimes. My—” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes, if you were important enough, the royal family would invite you to stay as well.”
“And your father was important enough?”
“I came here sometimes,” Cue agreed. “When I was a kid.”
“That’s how you knew the way from the inn.”
“Sometimes we used to walk there,” Cue said. “Me and the other kids who were staying. The cook at the inn used to make toffee apples when there were children staying at the hunting lodge. Our parents would let us go to get us out of their hair, I think.”
Even in the moonlight, Loth could see Cue’s eyes shining with unshed tears.
“Cue...” He reached out.
Cue shook his head and stepped back. “It was a long time ago.”
A reminder of happier times, Loth thought, before Cue was made a prisoner to ensure his father’s compliance.
“Anyway,” Cue said, “it’s at least somewhere to shelter for a little while, isn’t it? There might even be preserved food in the kitchen cellar. There used to be jars of onions down there, and pickled herring, and salted beef. How many years does pickled herring keep?”
“Pickled herring should be destroyed the moment it’s pickled,” Loth said and warmed when he saw the twitch of Cue’s smile. “But I’m sure if there’s anything edible, Dave will sniff it out. Come on. Let’s go and see what they’ve found.”
He reached out again, and this time Cue took his hand and allowed himself to be led from the library.
At the top of the stairs was a portrait. It was covered in mould, like so much else in the house. It was a man and a woman. A girl stood beside them, and a younger boy sat on the woman’s lap.
“Is that them?” Loth asked. He pulled his sleeve over the heel of his hand and swiped the fabric over the man’s face. “Is that the old king?”
“No.” Cue copied the sleeve thing. His touch was a lot more careful than Loth’s when he wiped the girl’s face clean. “This house used to belong to the queen’s family, the Dumesnys. This is her when she was a child.”
The girl was solemn-faced. Golden curls framed her face.
“Oh,” said Loth. He squinted at the mould-speckled boy on the man’s lap. “So that’s...”
“Lord Doom,” Cue said quietly.
Loth blinked at the boy. How strange that even men like