“Damn. Every time I turn a corner in this place, I feel sick.”
The soldier tasked with patrolling the old keep was not alone in that complaint. The old castle’s active halls were riddled with traps whose locations were known only to the royal family, which meant the guards’ primary job was to keep curious visitors from wandering in and losing limbs — or lives.
Or, on the less fortunate occasions, to collect what was left of people who had already wandered too far.
Neither task was exactly pleasant.
“Can’t they just knock it down and build something new?”
“Do you know how many people have gotten hurt just trying to demolish parts of it? Don’t even start.”
The rumors attached to the old keep were grim enough in general, but the particular piece of lore that circulated only among the guards assigned there was in a category of its own.
It concerned the iron door at the top of the tower.
The tallest tower of the old keep. The place where the brothers of King Chesaretto had lived out their lives and died. Before that, where a maddened prince had been confined. Before that still, where a king pursued by rebels had thrown himself from the window.
A place soaked in violence and broken minds.
The story went that an iron door had been installed at the entrance to that tower in order to keep the scores of restless spirits that haunted its interior from spilling out into the rest of the castle.
And on certain nights, the door seemed to support the legend — a sound of weeping, or a scream tearing through the air, or something dragging, or something alive moving in the dark.
The more susceptible of the guards said it was the trapped spirits of the old princes. The pragmatic ones said rats had gotten into the traps. And the ones who had read too deeply into old histories said it was the sound of a person fallen out of the king’s favor, wandering the maze of the keep’s interior.
None of that was the guards’ concern, strictly speaking.
What was their concern was the effect the tower had on their nerves. Patrolling the old keep consumed a considerable amount of will.
And right now, from the other side of that iron door, something seemed to be scraping and clicking —
“Just be quiet!”
The soldier kicked the door out of startled self-defense. A heavy resonant impact. The door shuddered. The lock rattled.
The soldier’s eyes landed on the lock.
Something was wrong with it.
The queen’s inner chambers were still warm with company. Noblewomen and attendants sat in their clusters, and Margarite had settled into the armchair by the hearth, pressing her lips to the fingers of the infant princess and murmuring small secrets.
“My darling. How can anyone have such perfect hands and such perfect feet? You are an angel, I think —”
It was only a temporary peace. But Margarite was very happy in it.
Which was why the figure of a king with a broken neck standing against the far wall, or the half-melted face of one of the maids, barely registered. On another day those sights would have drained her. Today they simply existed.
Even the noblewomen she usually found exhausting were, somehow, a pleasure.
“Lady Gloriosa seems to have gone out and not come back.”
“She left her own baby with Her Majesty and just disappeared… No raising, I suppose.”
The noblewomen were murmuring amongst themselves. Margarite, in an unusually generous mood, decided to say something in Hyderlin’s defense.
“Don’t be too hard on her. She was looking unwell. She may have needed to rest.”
A knock at the door.
“It is Hys.”
Speak of someone and they appear. One of the noblewomen nearest to the door rose to open it, murmuring as she did.
“Ah, Hys, you’ve returned. Her Majesty has been holding little Mac —”
The woman stopped speaking. Her hand went to her mouth.
Margarite looked up from the baby.
The collar of Hyderlin’s robe — the part that fell high around the neck — was soaked through with blood. Her right hand hung at a wrong angle, the fingers loose and bent in a direction fingers were not meant to bend.
Margarite considered briefly whether this was another thing she was seeing that wasn’t entirely real. The reaction of the woman at the door suggested it wasn’t.
“Your — your hand — your hand —”
One of the noblewomen was struggling to form a sentence. Hyderlin raised an eyebrow and held her right hand up to look at it.
Her right hand was fine. The high collar showed no trace of blood.
The noblewoman who had clearly seen something terrible blinked at Hyderlin as though bewitched. The others, who had not had quite the right angle, were simply confused.
Margarite spoke quietly.
“Hys. Your color isn’t very good. Did you rest enough?”
The calm in the queen’s voice imposed a kind of order on the room’s bewilderment.
The noblewoman understood that pressing the issue further would only make her look unhinged. She murmured something about being startled by Hyderlin’s pallor and let it go.
Hyderlin was puzzled but not particularly concerned. She looked over at the queen, and her tone shifted — one of those moments when she completely forgot to sound like anyone but herself.
“May I borrow your ear for a moment.”
The noblewomen exchanged glances at the phrasing. Hyderlin ignored them and leaned close to Margarite.
“Can you keep the king occupied tonight?”
“…Why?”
“There is something I need to verify.”
She pressed a small folded paper into Margarite’s hand. Inside it was a powder of sleep-herbs and a short note — both quietly appropriated from the physician’s room on the way back from the old keep.
“Please look at this when you are alone.”
Margarite tucked the paper into the pocket sewn beneath her skirts. Hyderlin straightened.
“Your Majesty. Thank you for looking after my daughter. I’ll take my leave now.”
“Ah.”
Margarite blinked. She looked from Hyderlin to the baby and back.
“Hys — stay a little longer. I’d like more time with you. Come, sit beside me.”
She didn’t want to be separated from the baby, was the truth of it.
Hyderlin sat without argument. There was no reason to rush back, in any case — and the prospect of facing Sarg right now was considerably less appealing than the prospect of the noblewomen.
“There was an intruder in the old keep tower.”
“Tell me.”
When the soldier had kicked the door and the aged lock failed, the guards had gone to pieces. The state of the lock made its way up the chain of command and into the Knight Commander’s report.
The king listened in composed silence, then pressed his fingers against the corner of his eye.
“Could the lock have given way from age?”
“It is unlikely, Your Majesty. The damage is consistent with a recent impact — something struck it from outside.”
“One of the soldiers might have done it.”
“They would not have the nerve.”
“Was there a body on the stairs?”
“No, Your Majesty.”
The trap mechanisms on the staircase activated when any significant weight was applied to the steps that fell on multiples of five. Any uninformed intruder would be killed outright. There should have been a body.
“The fifth-step intervals were the only ones carrying fresh mud tracked in from outside. The intruder knew exactly where to step.”
Chesa exhaled with undisguised weariness.
“The prophet — nothing from Tiryasora?”
“The prophet is saying nothing about the intruder. If you command it, I will use other means to get an answer.”
What those other means would entail required no explanation.
“…Don’t. The old one wouldn’t survive it.”
Chesa waved the suggestion away. He clasped his hands at his back and turned to look out the window of his study.
“What’s done can’t be undone. All we can do is deal with the consequences as best we can. Let’s think about what someone who has learned that the prophet Tiryasora is being held captive in that tower is likely to do next.”
He put himself in the position of this unnamed person.
The intruder already knew the traps, had climbed the stairs, and met the prophet. Some kind of exchange had taken place. That exchange would almost certainly have included the information that the king locked me here.
What else the prophet had said, Chesa could not be certain. It simply unsettled him.
But the immediate concern was not the unsettling — it was what would happen next.
“There are three things our intruder might do. First: let it go. The secret is too heavy to carry, and the easiest response to something too heavy is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Second: bring it before the lords and nobles and use it to turn them against me. If whoever found this belongs to the faction of the court that is already opposed to me, that becomes a serious problem. Third: come directly to me and report what they’ve found. That would take considerable nerve, and I doubt most people would choose it.”
Every one of his assumptions was wrong. Hyderlin’s choice was a fourth option he had not considered: go back to the prophet and hear the secret directly. He had kicked wide of the mark.
But the king’s missed kick landed squarely on exactly the right spot anyway.
“Right now, the greatest danger we face is the second scenario. To prove what they know, the intruder would need to produce the prophet — to bring Tiryasora before witnesses. That means they’ll return to the tower.”
The road diverges, but both paths lead to Nadirotsa in the end.
“Move the prophet to the lower dungeons. And post watchers throughout the old keep. It seems we need to prepare a reception.”
Chesa dismissed the Knight Commander with a gesture. The Knight Commander inclined his head but did not immediately withdraw.
“One more thing to report, Your Majesty.”
“Speak.”
“It concerns Lady Hys Gloriosa.”
The king raised an eyebrow.
What the king had looked past without a second thought, the Knight Commander — who had spent his life holding a sword — had noticed at once. The calluses on her hands were not the kind made by hard domestic work.
“That woman is a trained swordswoman. A highly trained one.”
When evening came, Hyderlin returned to the guest quarters. The room was empty.
She settled the baby into the crib and dropped into the chair by the hearth, stretching her legs out and closing her eyes.
Sarg appeared some time later.
“You’re back.”
Hyderlin greeted him as though nothing had happened. Sarg crossed the room toward her quickly.
“I visited Her Majesty. The noblewomen were talking about the knights who distinguished themselves in the last tournament — I didn’t recognize a single name. Four years really is a long time. There are knights now that I’ve never even heard of.”
“…Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?”
Hyderlin looked at him. Sarg shook his head.
“Never mind.”
“Where have you been?”
“The king summoned me. Dinner with the lords.”
There was a faint smell about him — food and wine.
“Courtly manners have completely deserted me. Lord Rodichi spent the entire meal looking at me as if I’d crawled in from outside the walls.”
Hyderlin assumed it was a self-deprecating exaggeration, and smiled despite herself.
“Would you like a drink?”
She stood and opened a bottle of wine. She poured from it and handed Sarg the cup she had prepared.
The cup she had, quietly and without remark, mixed with sleep-herb powder.
