We had received the news at three o’clock in the afternoon, shortly after the striking of the bell. My father was in his study upstairs, and Aspen and Juniper were picking up the day’s groceries as it was the housekeeper’s day off. With the housekeeper gone, it fell to me to answer the door. I knew as soon as I saw Henrik’s face that something terrible had happened. His white-blond mustache did not conceal the grim set of his lips, and he was out of breath and sweating.

“Your father,” he said, looking past me. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs,” I answered, but I blocked his way before he could push past. “What is wrong?”

Henrik gave me a long look, his ice-blue eyes fierce and pitying.

“Everything.”

A gust of wind whistled over the battlements, breaking through the shroud of memory. The wind must have sounded like that, I thought, out there on the water, shrieking as it ripped the sails from the masts, then the masts from the ships, and finally tore apart the ships themselves, timber by timber, leaving only a few broken casks and the half-drowned body of the cook’s boy, the sole survivor of the gale that sank my father’s three best galleons on their voyage home. All three were heavily laden with silks and spices destined for my father’s clients, and it was only ill fortune that had them returning to our city at the same time, wallowing low in the water with their holds full of uninsured goods.

Damned.

Damned, indebted, and condemned.

I had thought the worst had happened before, first when my mother died, and then again when those ships sank, and lastly in an exile that ended at the dirt road wending its way through the foothills, grass growing in the ruts that led to the small cottage at the edge of the village. I had been ready to accept my share of the burden, wed to Avery and shackled to a town I despised while I grew old and my fingers gnarled and knotted, and our children rolled in the dirt with the dogs and I nurtured hate for my husband like an old bitter seed.

I had thought I knew the shape of loss.

This, though.

This was different. This was a rent in the fabric of reason. People simply were not carried off into the night on the backs of bears by women without a shred of human decency.

“I am damned.”

If she was damned, what did that make me?

Cold, whispered the part of myself that paid attention to such things.

I left the ramparts, where I had come to brood, and headed for the hot spring. If there was any justice in the world I would be able to scrub away my grief in peace.