He was going to die.

Val knew it, and he cared not at all.

He didn’t care about the Aragon title, and not even because he was confident his brother would do right by the line, the estates, and the people and staff dependent upon him.

He didn’t even care about himself, or the certain pain that would come at the end.

Rather, it was her.

Myrtle.

Myrtle, with her bright rose cheeks and penchant for off-key singing and smiling and teasing and finding mischief and making mischief.

And she was going to die.

Snowflakes mixed with ice, and pinged against the window, punctuating that thought, taunting and terrifying Val with the threat.

She would die.

And there was absolutely nothing he would be able to do to bring her back.

A low moan stuck in his throat, and Horace, somehow squeezed onto the bench beside Myrtle, whined and sniffed in Val’s direction.

“Are you all right, Val?” Myrtle’s gentle query slashed through the fear that gripped him.

“Fine.”

Just then the carriage hit a patch of ice and slid forward, before his brother’s driver managed to regain complete control of the team.

“Just fine,” he gritted out as his churning stomach made a liar of him.

Myrtle took his hands in hers, and he gripped them hard, squeezing them more than he should. He forced himself to lighten his hold, and he clung to them and her as the lifeline they were.

“I find singing is a welcome distraction.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say it wasn’t—songs, particularly the familiar Christmas hymns always falling from her lips, recalled past terror and always present grief.

Only . . . he stopped.

Yes, initially, when he’d first heard her outside wassailing herself all the way back from her jaunt through London alone, he’d been transported back to that tragic moment years earlier.

The past few days with Myrtle, her chipper, off-key singing of those songs had chased away the sadness.

Now he fixed on the sound of her voice, the joyful sound of her singing, even when the tune contained a trace of solemnity.

It was her voice, and that song that kept him sane.

“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen,

aus einer Wurzel zart,

wie uns die Alten sungen,

von Jesse kam die Art

“A rose has sprung

tender from one root,

as the ancients sang to us,

from Jesse came the kind . . .

“Und hat ein Blümlein bracht

mitten im kalten Winter,

wohl zu der halben Nacht.

“And brought a flower

in the middle of the cold winter,

probably for half the night.”

Alas, God appeared determined to deny Val any and all peace this night. A violent gust battered against the carriage, and his stomach lurched left and right along with the sway of the conveyance.

Val cursed.

Myrtle promptly stopped singing. “You do not like my singing.”