Eleven #2
It was a handy shortcut, and meant I got to skip out on watching way too many historical documentaries in order to figure out how tall people had been when places like this were constructed, thus leading me to the hidden doors into private spaces.
Being a knight errant means needing to know a lot of seemingly random things about a lot of entirely random things.
The shelves were spaced for someone taller than I was, whose eyeline would be higher, and whose natural reaching points were about six inches above mine. I adjusted for that, leaning up onto my tiptoes, and reached for the appropriate shelf, grasping the edge and pushing down.
Nothing happened.
That was fine: no one gets everything right on the first try.
I continued down the wall, testing the corresponding shelf on each piece of furniture, and was rewarded on try four, when the shelf depressed under my hand, sliding down by about an inch and a half as the catch at its base came loose.
There was a clicking sound, and the entire case swung toward me, soundless on perfectly balanced hinges, revealing a completely dark passage on the other side.
I slipped through, despite every scrap of common sense I had telling me that this was a terrible idea, and pulled the case closed again behind me. From this side, there was a convenient handle, and I could feel the catch with a quick brush of my fingers. I wasn’t going to be trapped here.
That was all I needed. Turning so that I was angled back toward that main room, I lifted my candle and began walking again.
The flame was small, but it was enough to illuminate the full width of the passage, circling me with a sphere of brightness that was remarkably helpful as I inched my way through unfamiliar territory.
The floor was mostly level, but was made of the same stone as everything else in the keep, and it had settled somewhat as time passed, forming little dips and drops that I had to be wary of.
If I tripped and dropped my candle, I didn’t know what would happen.
Nothing good, I was willing to bet on that.
The walls were lined in small latches like the one I’d used to get here from the map room.
I stopped and squinted at a few of them, looking for symbols scratched into the walls, and was pleased when I managed to find a few rough representations of what I guessed were nursery rhymes or children’s games.
Like many pureblood fae, Michael had committed to his aesthetic when he built this place, and it carried all the way down to the bones of it.
The symbols had to be representative rather than literal because there was always the risk of someone doing exactly what I had done, finding a way into the service halls and using them to move around the keep without being seen.
Service halls generally weren’t booby-trapped, because killing the staff is considered bad form in even the most unfriendly of households.
If you want your meals hot and your laundry clean, you need to let the people who take care of those things move around without being afraid they’ll get stuck in an oubliette or something.
That meant they needed a way to make things confusing for anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there.
If I’d been trying to follow the symbols to my target, I would have been utterly confused.
Since I knew how far I was trying to go, it was a little easier for me to pass up the first handful of rooms, continuing onward until I estimated I’d walked back to the door that stopped me before, and past it into the wall of the chamber beyond.
It helped that the hall I was in dead-ended, becoming a plain, impassable wall.
Here went everything. I turned to the nearest catch, took a deep breath, and gently depressed it.
As in the map room, it swung open silently.
This time, I was ready, and caught it before it could open more than about a foot and a half, giving me as much cover as possible.
No light came in through the opening, and so I pressed myself against the corner of the wall and slipped slowly, deliberately into the main room.
The smell of blood was immediately strong enough to make me stagger, striking me like a blow.
I managed not to gasp at the strength of it, keeping hold of the door and sliding the rest of the way out.
I eased the shelf I was now holding back against the wall, hiding my entryway, and turned to look around the room.
There was no one there. No one moved; no one lurked in the corners; no one waited to jump me for having the audacity to follow them. I was alone.
This had definitely been the great hall of the keep at one point.
The rotten remains of tapestries and coats of arms hung on the walls, their edges tattered and charred, like there had been a fire here that left no other marks behind.
A massive oaken table stretched almost the full length of the room, still sturdy enough to support the heaped-up pile of armor that had been dropped on it, still dripping with Acacia’s blood.
A small, despairing sound escaped my lips. I couldn’t help it. The people who’d taken Raysel had clearly known that they would be followed, if not who would be following them; their trail had been so straight and easily followed because they’d known that they were laying it.
It might not have been a trap. It was definitely a trick, and we’d fallen for it.
I moved closer to the table, shifting my candle so that the flame illuminated more of the heap, and inhaled, looking for the scent of magic under the blood.
Anything I could learn about the people we were following would be valuable.
I breathed in, then promptly started coughing and staggered back from the table, the taste of a dozen disparate magical signatures clinging to the back of my throat like a sticky film I couldn’t quite shake.
I was still coughing when one of the shelves on the far wall swung open and Tybalt crept through, moving with such silent grace that I was sure I wouldn’t have noticed him if I hadn’t been aware that he was coming.
His head snapped around at the sound of my coughs, and he hurried toward me, crossing the empty room with a frown on his face and his candle raised high.
I waved a hand frantically between us, trying to signal that I was okay.
It didn’t work. He didn’t slow down, and when he reached me he immediately began rubbing my back. “What can I do?” he asked.
I shook my head, managing to wheeze, “I’m fine. Too much magic, too smashed together. The people who took Raysel looked like Riders, and I don’t think it was just the armor. At least some of them were Blind Michael’s victims.”
As soon as I said the words aloud, I knew they had to be true.
What’s more, my conviction brought other things into sudden clarity.
Like the hunting horn we’d heard when we arrived, and then again when we emerged from the wood.
Back when Michael had been here, his Hunt had been able to move freely between the skerry and the Summerlands.
That implied they’d had some sort of method for making the transition without direct aid from either him or Acacia.
If the Luidaeg could make candles, who was to say that her brother hadn’t made horns? Solid, physical things that didn’t gutter and go out, but could be blown to open a gateway?
There was no Ride right now. The Riders had nothing to hunt. Acacia would have told us if she’d set them on something outside her own borders. But if they needed to cross over for whatever reason …
“She’s not here anymore,” I said, finally getting my breath back. “They took her somewhere else, and they had time to change their clothes before they did it. This is a dead end.”
“That implies planning,” he said, cocking his head to the side and frowning. “This wasn’t just a crime of opportunity.”
“No, they knew what they were doing,” I agreed. “Rayseline has been abducted both by and then from her mother. Which means we need to talk to Luna.”
Tybalt’s frown only deepened. “Yes,” he agreed. “We do.”
With the keep deserted aside from us, we were able to leave the great hall via the main door and head straight along the hallway.
We left the piled-up armor behind. We didn’t have access to a human forensic lab, and I would recognize the magical traces I’d picked up if I encountered them again.
Abandoning evidence felt strange. It was still the correct thing to do, given the circumstances. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone here.
Staying close together, we started once again across the moor.
We hadn’t gone far before Tybalt stopped, bending forward to put his hands on his knees.
“We’re going about this the wrong way,” he said.
“I can’t reach the shadows, but I remain faster than you are.
Why aren’t we doing things as we customarily do? ”
“What do you me—” I asked, my voice being cut off by a startled squeak as he straightened, lunged, and moved to sweep me into a bridal carry, holding me close against his chest. He didn’t pause before breaking into a run, carrying me swiftly toward the forest.
I didn’t squirm too much—I didn’t particularly want to be dropped, especially considering how rough the ground was—but I did move around enough to free my left arm and poke him in the chest. “Hey, what are you doing?” I asked. “This is very undignified!”
“It’s always undignified, you can just see it now,” he countered. “It gets us there faster.”