Page 39 of Cursed Shadows 5

I snatch the bag from the floor and hoist it over my shoulder. “I never belonged.”

Eamon tosses a coin onto the table.

It clatters for a beat, and in that moment, Eamon takes great care to shove past Ronan hard enough to knock shoulders.

Ronan’s answer is a throaty snarl, one that doesn’t touch his face. But he doesn’t stop us.

None of them do, because they cannot.

This is Kithe, the Midlands, free lands.

Here, they have no power beyond influence.

I don’t doubt that they assumed their uniforms and officiality would be enough to intimidate me, and I would go with them willingly, my head hung in shame.

That is how it would have been, once.

Just two months ago I came to the Midlands. I arrived naïve, silly and hopeful; afraid,a darling…

That is not who I am anymore.

So I leave the teashop without a backwards glance—and no comfort, because I doubt this is the last I will hear of it.

8

††††††

My leather boot flattens on the rotten floorboard.

Beneath my weight, a groan shudders through the entire kitchen floor. Mutely, I watch the brown wooden boards as though I can track every creak and moan splintering over them.

Behind me, a bone-chilling moan comes.

I whirl around—and the panic fades, quick.

Eamon wrenches open the door to an old cupboard. A door whose hinges haven’t been oiled in some time.

It’s a narrow cupboard, barely wide enough for more than a broom, bucket and mop.

Eamon inspects it for a moment before he grunts a sound I place as acceptance, then he shuts the door.

My teeth bare against the assault of its obnoxious moan.

If we do take this dwelling, those hinges will be the first thing I tend to. The floorboards, however, are a lost cause. Far beyond my capabilities of mending.

I turn my back on Eamon as he reaches for the sheer curtains separating the kitchen-entryway from the rest of the dwelling.

I walk the small kitchen; my steps slow and careful around the scratched butcherblock in the centre. As I wander the crammedspace, I eye the cooktop, the cooler, the scratches and dents on the wooden countertops.

And in a blink, I am back to where I started, where the floorboards sprout off in two directions. To the left is the front door, battered and dented, clanging with swaying locks and chains; and to my right is a wall that gives way to fastened curtains.

I peek around them to the parlour.

Parlour, I decide, is too grand a word for such a small, dewy room crammed with distressed armchairs and rickety tea-tables at odd angles that make me a tad uncomfortable.

I follow the path of wooden floorboards, dark oak with rotted holes, to the narrow door by the dusty bookshelf.

With a glance around the edge, I make out the two slender beds pushed together in the middle of the room and a single wardrobe with mould reaching up its arch.

---