Eiren Adair stared at the book of stories and shivered. The sun had not quite set, but threw dramatic shadows over everything as it fell lower through the clouds. After a few minutes of staring at the book, the shadows slithered over the cover, hiding the words from view.

Few things bothered Eiren like not knowing. He supposed it was the implied foolishness, or the appearance of stupidity that he really hated, but regardless of its root, the feeling ate at his core. In his school days, knowledge had been everything. Knowledge was the key to remaining at the top of his class. It was the stupid child who was sent home, banished from the haven that school provided, and Eiren did not want to go home. In a sense, knowing made him safe. Knowing kept him away from his father and the cold, loveless Abbey they called home.

He did not know why the priest had given him this story.

There was nothing to take comfort in. There were no words of encouragement, no lines of solution on any of the pages. The priest had said it helped him through a similar time, but Eiren did not know what the priest had ever experienced, that he would press upon another soul the burden of horror and disgust the story provided. Eiren did not know.

He stood up and backed away from the book. He could not return the story to the priest. His only ally had revealed herself to be a heartless, selfish creature, and Eiren could not live for another moment in this Castle without someone sympathetic to his plight. Lord Van Wyk was the cause for his distress; no amount of notebooks in the world could convince Eiren that the Lord was concerned about his discomfort. No, only the priest remained a possibility for support. His only viable ally in this hostile environment would not appreciate being told how utterly useless, unhelpful, and maddening his aid had been.

I won't have to read anything else, he thought, grasping for a sliver of hope. He only recommended the one story, and now that I shall never look upon foxes or wolves or beasts of the forest again without experiencing some degree of disgust and fear, I won't have any need for the thing. He threw a foul look at the book and turned to his bed.

The sight of the bed, so neat and cleanly, compared to the memory of Lord Van Wyk's, gave him pause. Was there dirt and death lurking here, as well? He sank to the floor and shuddered, grateful that, corpses or not, his room did not smell the way the Lord's had. As his eyes roamed the dark, he found the bundle of letters he had stolen from the Lord's bedroom. He hadn't the time to read them, as Caelony's insult had distracted him for the rest of the day, so he sat up against the bed, held the letters, and began to read in the dwindling light.

The first letter he saw was dated some forty-three years prior, a good fifteen before even Caelony was born. The handwriting, he noted for the second time, was beautiful, written in a kind, swirling hand.

The overall contents of the letter weren't terribly interesting - they detailed the goings-on of another estate in Tottenham Cross, about thirty miles from Kelfordshire. Eiren supposed this was Lord Van Wyk's first wife, before they were married.

It came as a sort of surprise to him, that somebody could have been capable of expressing such ardent love for the Lord Van Wyk. Had he always been as dashing and gentlemanly as the writer declared? The Lord appeared about as dashing as a beggar child, and as gentlemanly as the crassest of beasts. He need only remember the disastrous first dinner, and the state the Lord had arrived in, to believe most firmly in such a characterization.

Bored with the joy and love scrawled across the paper - still smarting as he was from Caelony's reveal just a few hours prior - he progressed to the second letter. This was much the same as the first, only from Kelfordshire, and not to. Quickly skimming the contents, Eiren found that the Lady and her "dashing" suitor had been married some years, before the Lord Van Wyk had been forced to attend to some vague business beyond the country. Was this business related to the mysterious sculptor that everyone seemed to dislike? There was no way to tell -Lord Van Wyk had obviously not shared this information with his current bride, for she wrote only of how she missed him dearly.

The third letter was quite shocking to behold. The handwriting was strict and severe, the prose more rigid in its construction, and the author addressed Lord Van Wyk merely as My Lord. No expressions of love or charm graced the page - this could only be the second of the Lady Van Wyks. What had happened to the first? Eiren made an excited note to ask Caelony, before wincing and taking in a sharp breath. No, she wouldn't do at all. He looked around the room for some substitute, and his eyes landed on the red cover of the notebook, peeking out slightly from under the bed. He reached forward and tugged, and soon stared at the empty pages.

The reason for the Lord bestowing such a peculiar book upon him surely couldn't have been to write of his snooping, but Eiren found it an amusing purpose - what irony, to jot down stolen thoughts, and observations of the Lord, in a device of his own doing?

Scheming set in place, Eiren eagerly wrote on the first page What happened to the First Lady? He looked at the words and decided he liked the way they looked, so bold and demanding, and right on the first page of his enemy's book. He thought for a second before adding Who is Severin Quilby, and where is he from? This, too, seemed just as important to write in here. Was the sculptor not also a comrade of the Lord? The knowledge that he was a foreigner made Eiren all the more interested in this character - Although the country was large, and many varieties of people lived in it (here, Eiren tried not to remind himself of the Luttons, who were of the blond and blue-eyed variety of the country, as they lived closer to the North, and enjoyed the benefits of the sun more than the residents near Kelfordshire), the inhabitants still maintained the same language, the same religions, the same mannerisms and politics. Even to quit the country, for business or pleasure, was an ordeal that most never bothered to experience.

Foreigners did not practice the sacred rites of the Echoists and Returnists. Despite Eiren not exactly caring one way or the other who was right about the validity of each, even he still appreciated the importance of the beliefs. They dominated the culture throughout the country - ranks, titles, and holdings were all meted out on the influence one had in the religions. His own father had been the head of Kenton Abbey, a Returnist Church that Eiren was destined to inherit. Everything about their society followed the regulations imposed by the only two religions, which were, he thought with some amusement, essentially the same thing.

Belief in anything outside the holy writings of the Golden and the Silent One was sure to cause ridicule, scorn, or bias. Despite how hard it was to leave, most inhabitants of the country remained largely for their religious squabbles. Nobody at all wanted to associate with the foreigners who refused to follow the Ists of the country, as Eiren often thought of the lot. Where Severin Quilby was from was of great importance, Eiren thought, and he scribbled below his third question What does Severin follow? Perhaps, knowing what sort of foreigners Lord Van Wyk associated with would reveal some greater answers, possibly regarding the mysterious absence of his first wife.

He continued reading this second letter, but the author - who Eiren quickly deduced was another wife - held none of the easy way of writing the first did. She wrote stiffly and without personality, and sounded more like an itinerary rather than a person. He skimmed through her letters, realizing that the largest difference in the two wives was piety. While the first very well could have believed in something, it seemed the second's sole mission in breathing was to preach at the Lord, and remind him of some passage or another with every sentiment she wrote of.

It came as a wonderful surprise to find that she, too, had been replaced. After reading several droll letters of the same type from the second wife, he found a letter from someone who sounded timid, subservient, or possibly just shy. Their words were often misspelled, or written in the wrong tenses, and the handwriting looked pained. It came as a greater surprise to see the signature of the largely forgettable letter - although it was signed as generically as the others, it was dated at the year of Caelony's birth.

Had her mother been an idiot? Half hoping for this outcome, Eiren eagerly read on, but found that the third Lady had not been simple, but poor! She apologized often in her letters for her lack of finesse, or told the Lord of how her lessons with - unsurprisingly - Father Bele were progressing. Was the woman's wealth the cause for her frightening depiction in the statues outside? Was a lower station, or an ignorant background, why Caeloby believed her father saw her mother as a bad person?

He scribbled this question in the notebook and, when looking up for another letter, found that there were no more. He felt a sense of loss with nothing else to read, nothing else to learn of the Ladies of Kelfordshire, but still, it was an informative box that he had been able to peruse. Now, all he needed to do was sneak out back into the Lord's bedroom, a task he did not look happily upon.

Before he could pull himself up and slither out into the hall, a knock sounded suddenly and sharply at the door.

He shrieked and jumped, sending several of the letters floating about the bedroom. Quickly, he snatched at them. "One moment, please!" He urged himself on, trying to ignore the painful way his pulse throbbed.

Once he had crammed the letters back in their box, and crammed that in turn under the bed, he stood, smoothing out his shirt and approaching the door. His fingers shook as they grasped the handle, and he forced them still. Do not give anything away, he told himself sternly.

The knocker was, to his great and unpleasant surprise, Caelony. She did not smile at him, as he felt she would have upon interrupting him, but raised an eyebrow and gestured her head to the stairs.

"Dinner," she said simply, before turning away. He swallowed hard and followed her, biting back the pain and forcing the sting in his eyes away with a series of blinks. She did not, luckily, turn back to him, or say anything at all as they walked downstairs. He looked at her hair, swept back into a loose braid, and considered the last day.

Why did she do it, he found himself thinking, although he knew to do so would only invite that horrible pain back into his chest. Why did she lie, why did she pretend she loved me? Would this all not have been so much easier, if she had kept our relationship as cold as it had been before? As they entered the dining hall, he sniffed and wiped at a tear that had emerged so rudely on his cheek.

To dwell on her would do no good, he thought as they sat. The priest greeted Eiren warmly from his seat, before beginning a prayer for their food. As they ate, Caelony looked at Eiren, chewing and swallowing with a cold precision that made him deeply uncomfortable. After a few minutes of sending her emotionless look his way, she began to make conversation with the priest about her birthday. The two chattered on for the remainder of the night, Eiren sitting in agonized silence all the while.

The evening could not have ended on a worse note, he thought as he made his dress for the night, later that evening, but at least he had the letters, and he had some information that Caelony did not. Who am I really fighting, now, he asked himself, but the answer eluded him, as most things here seemed to. He slid into his bed, clutching the lamp and his notebook as he stared ahead. Whatever sort of creatures came in the night, be they Lord Van Wyk's dogs, or the priest's fairytale wolves, he would not be plagued by them in the dark tonight.