Chapter 15: What Lord Stormcroft Considers at Three in the Morning

The fire in the gamekeeper's cottage had been out for two hours.

Darian knew this with the precise, useless certainty of a man who had watched it die and done nothing to prevent it, having reasoned, at the time, that sleep was imminent and warmth an unnecessary extravagance. He had been wrong about sleep. About warmth, he was beginning to revise his position.

He lay on his back on a straw mattress of uncertain vintage and stared at the ceiling, which offered him nothing. The storm had not stopped. Outside, it continued with the comprehensive indifference of weather to human inconvenience, and the cottage walls, though solid, transmitted every variation in its pitch with the fidelity of a particularly conscientious instrument.