Eleven
THERE WERE NO GUARDS. The door was unlocked. I tested the latch, then nodded to Tybalt, who turned back into a cat and ran off to leap lightly onto the nearest window ledge, looking back at me and flicking his tail.
“Showoff,” I mouthed, wrinkling my nose at him. He looked, if anything, more smug as he turned to jump down from the ledge into the keep proper.
I opened the door and slipped through, stepping into a dimly lit stone antechamber with walls that had been left unwashed long enough to have acquired a faint patina of lichen.
The walls were still sound, but this looked more like an abandoned ruin than an occupied stronghold.
I sniffed the air, picking up lingering traces of Acacia’s blood, but that was all I found.
Concentrate as I might, I didn’t hear anything, no voices or clanking of armor from deeper inside the structure.
The window Tybalt had entered through wasn’t in this room.
There was a wall instead, shutting me off from anything else that might be in here with me.
I guess it was too much to hope for us to have ended up in the same place.
I composed myself, shunting aside my vague discontent, and started moving deeper, following the curve of the wall toward what I hoped would be a larger central chamber.
Most purebloods stopped updating their idea of how to build a home sometime in the medieval era, and as a consequence, you can generally predict what’s going to be where.
There will be a poorly ventilated coatroom or antechamber just inside the door, and beyond that will be the main hallway.
From there, you can find most of the relevant rooms, and at the end will be the central hall—which is not another word for hallway when you’re talking about impractically large houses.
It’s sort of like a living room, if the living room had to double as a ballroom and occasionally host dinner parties where the guests were numbered in the dozens.
Not a real fixture of the modern house, in other words.
Of course, all bets are off when it comes to knowes, which can be considerably more modern and, for all I know, read architectural digests in their spare time.
Who’s to say what intelligent, opinionated residences do with themselves when they’re not being asked to produce six perfectly outfitted guest rooms at a moment’s notice?
But this wasn’t a knowe. I got none of the feeling of presence and awareness that I usually got when stepping into a knowe; this was a magical creation, yes, but it was just stone piled high and shaped to suit Michael’s needs at the moment of construction.
He must have needed this place once, long before I met him.
But it had been falling into disrepair for decades if not centuries, and was now barely more than a monument to what had long since been lost.
I crept along the hallway, following the scent of blood, tensely waiting for the moment when some sound or ambush would confirm that I wasn’t alone. I passed several doorways, and at the third I flinched, drawing my horn knife with my free hand, when I saw something move in the darkness beyond.
Tybalt stepped out of the room, back in bipedal form, one eyebrow raised in silent question. I relaxed and shook my head, sliding my knife back into its sheath. No point in wandering around with a weapon out when there was nothing in sight to stab.
Now side by side, we resumed the walk down the hallway.
And still the keep was silent around us, silent as a tomb.
Only the fact that the air smelled of dust and blood told me anyone had been here anytime in the last decade.
The body can tell when something’s disturbed the air, and my skin was telling me that I hadn’t missed the last people to walk here by much longer than it took the air to settle.
Tybalt pressed close, closer than the confines of the hall demanded, and pulled a little bit ahead, so that he’d be the first to encounter any real danger.
I rolled my eyes and gave his back a hard look.
This wasn’t what we had discussed, but it wasn’t surprising, either.
I believed that he would run if necessary.
I also knew that he would defend me until he couldn’t do it anymore.
That was just the kind of man he was, and there was no changing it.
Not that I was particularly invested in trying.
We walked, and his footsteps were silent, while mine were quiet, marked only by the soft scuff of my shoes against the stone.
I would never match his feline silence, no matter how hard I tried.
At least our candles meant that the way ahead was lit, if only dimly, and I was able to see where we were going.
Pureblood fae can see in the dark, with varying degrees of sharpness.
As a Cait Sidhe, Tybalt barely needed any light at all.
But my eyesight is still closer to the human side of my family than the fae, and without something to show me the way, I would be in serious trouble.
We passed several more doorways, all leading into empty rooms, all silent.
A few of the rooms had windows of their own, and the starlight that flowed through gave me a vague idea of furnishings and dimensions, but none of them offered any further passageways or directions.
The main hall seemed like the only way to get anywhere useful.
That was probably false. Judging by the rest of the keep, a few of those rooms would have doorways tucked away in corners and hidden in plain sight with careful masonry.
The servants would need to have a way to get around the place without making a fuss or inconveniencing anyone, and a keep this size would absolutely have needed servants when it was fully operational.
The Daoine Sidhe especially have never been fond of doing their own housework or putting themselves out when they don’t have to, and Titania’s focus on crowns and thrones meant that most of them had very firm ideas about status and hierarchy, ideas that had spilled seamlessly over into the rest of Faerie.
There was no way this place was as linear as it seemed at first glance.
But first glance was what we had to go by, and what we could follow to our hopeful destination. The smell of blood was getting stronger.
The hall dead-ended at a closed wooden door.
There were no windows or other visible ways through.
Whoever was in that room would absolutely see us coming if we opened the door.
I exchanged a look with Tybalt, then backed off several feet, trying to put a little distance between myself and anyone who might be trying to listen for interlopers.
Voice pitched low, I said, “We can back up and look for the service doors.”
“Can’t you just ask for them?” he asked, waving a hand to indicate the hall around us.
“Nope. This isn’t a knowe.”
He blinked, then frowned. “I fail to see the distinction.”
“This keep is part of the skerry, it’s not an entity in its own right.
I can’t explain what the difference is, just that it exists.
Not every part of Faerie is alive the way the knowes are.
Like I can’t talk to the Shadow Roads.” But they were aware of me, weren’t they?
I always had the feeling that they were watching me, that they knew I was there and more, knew that I didn’t belong.
There was none of that feeling here. We didn’t belong in this keep, had no place in the plan that it was part of, and yet it didn’t reject us the way the Shadow Roads rejected me.
It didn’t know we existed, and it wouldn’t have cared if it did.
“So we must retreat,” he said, half-mournfully.
“Yes, and…”
“Please don’t finish that sentence. I know what you’re going to say.” He looked at me, sighed, and folded downward into cat form, walking over to rub himself against my ankles before slinking away down the hall on his own.
Well, at least he’d been right about me suggesting that we needed to split up.
There could be service halls located on both sides; this could also be one of the keeps where all service was expected to come from the same direction.
It was slightly more secure, slightly less convenient, and thus ragingly popular with certain groups of deeply paranoid nobles.
I watched until Tybalt slunk into one of the side rooms, then turned and headed for a door on the other side of the hall, holding my candle high to light my way.
This wasn’t one of the rooms with windows: it was small and claustrophobic, the walls lined with empty shelves, a large table that would probably be used for poker nights in the modern world, but had most likely been intended for maps.
There wasn’t a scrap of paper left in the room, only cobwebs and dust.
I stepped as lightly as I could as I crossed the floor, trying not to leave too much of a trail for someone to follow, and turned left as soon as I was inside, heading for the far wall.
Like the others, it was lined in shelves, and like the others, those shelves were empty.
I looked at the spacing between them, trying to estimate which would be at shoulder-height for a woman several hundred years ago.
There was a time when the fae had a reputation for being uncommonly tall, mostly because they’d all had access to good childhood nutrition while a lot of the humans were still struggling to find their next meal.
As human standards of living caught up with the fae, they got taller and we, well, didn’t.
So things that were built for fae use a few centuries back were likely to correspond to modern human sizes.