He is a fine man, the king. Strong shoulders and hair like the sun at Solstice. I see the women of court eye him. He’s a prized stallion and not just for his wealth and power. If they only knew the man was hung as well as the biggest stud in the royal stables.

“Honestly, Mother, was it necessary to write it down?” Imogen had muttered to herself and quickly skimmed the pages containing Niamh’s descriptions of bed play. Her sharp, no-nonsense words echoed in Imogen’s mind.

“The coupling between a man and a woman is as natural as it gets, Imogen. There’s no shame to it, nor should it be whispered of furtively in the dark. That way lies ignorance and stupidity.” She had blithely ignored Imogen’s red face and proceeded to tell her in detail the mating rituals of man and woman.

It was years since that conversation, and Imogen still squirmed in embarrassment. Her mother explaining in her blunt fashion the way a lover should treat his mate was one thing, reading about such very personal experiences something else entirely. She fluttered those pages through her fingers until she reached the section she’d stopped at a day earlier. This entry was different and far more intriguing.

There is a man in my house. Or half a man at least. Poor creature. I stumbled upon him behind the bailey, hidden by the old rowan near the eastern wall. I thought him a half-rotten corpse, dug up from a shallow grave by an opportunistic scavenger. Then it spoke. Sweet gods, I nearly pissed myself.

Imogen worried her lower lip with two fingers, eyes glued to the page.

I almost left him there. My magic is of earth and seasons and growing things. I don’t truck with the black mages of Westerwall, and this deathless horror facing me is surely the creation of one of these mages.

Imogen paused in her reading. The irony of Niamh’s statements struck home. She wondered if the woman had ever reread these passages in her later years and thought to herself how strange it was that Death in another form resided in her house and had been raised at her knee.

She returned to her reading and Niamh’s account of bringing the man into her house and placing him in one of the guest rooms where servants dared not visit. Planning and secrets and the need to keep down servant gossip made for good reading and Imogen was absorbed by her mother’s descriptions of her patient.

He rarely speaks. I think the suffering is so great, it’s too much effort to talk. I cannot help but watch as his body is slowly made whole by unseen hands. He must have been burned at some point, for it is ashes, still smelling of the fires, which swirl into the room and cast themselves upon him, becoming healthy flesh.

Imogen’s skin prickled at the imagery her descriptions evoked, and the hairs at her nape stood on end at the next entry.