Chapter 14
Fourteen
Cara
Kiegan found one of the entrances, pushing aside moss to reveal a rough-hewn circle of a door, a space wide enough for an orc but entirely dark inside; the entrance slanted at a steep angle.
“I’ll lower you in.”
He held out his hands to me. It occurred to me that I was not coming back out this entrance without assistance, which was a rather grim thought.
Fear stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “If you can’t find the knife, come back out, and we’ll find another way. You do not risk yourself. Not…more than this.”
This was clearly beyond his comfort, but he was tolerating the risk. Barely.
“I promise.” I moved before he could say anything else.
The old stone swallowed the light, and there was a musty scent to the air. I let my eyes adjust before I went the rest of the way through. I almost tripped over potatoes and onions piled up underfoot. I was in some type of storeroom.
The first true room I passed through was a kitchen, so smoky that my eyes watered.
There was food in preparation spread across the table.
I thought the room was empty at first until I saw two small figures, sprites maybe, peeling potatoes and chirping to each other in a language I didn’t know, sounding frantic.
I hurried through the kitchen, keeping to the shadows, and made it through the doorway.
The main hall resolved itself in pieces through the half-open doors.
Obsidian moved through the space, where low Fae and mortal servants alike were spilling gold and jewels and weaponry onto the long tables.
There were three I could see, but the voices of more were beyond.
Dark armor, high humor. They seemed pleased with themselves and with each other.
That gave me my cover. I slipped into the next room I saw, a library, and swept up an armful of trinkets from a shelf. Priceless relics being collected for Obsidian, or at least my best attempt as a dull mortal servant.
Now I dared get closer to the hall.
King Nez sat helpless at the head of the table, his head bowed.
He had a beaked nose and an angular set to his face, and his fingers were edged with feathers where they gripped the edge of the table as if he were on the verge of taking flight.
He was slight, finely dressed like someone who had spent a long time ensuring their clothing announced they were not that kind of low Fae, the kind one dismissed.
Standing at his side was an enthralled mortal.
The mortal who had been his furniture once now held a knife to his throat, enchanted that easily to serve Obsidian rather than him.
The mortal did not move; his eyes were dark, distant, lifeless, as if he were not entirely human anymore.
It was because I glanced twice at the knife he held that I saw the gouges in his wrists, dug deep, to the bone. He had been chained.
Obsidian might be monsters, but I was not sure I was sorry for anything they did to Nez, who was looking at the mortal’s face as if he were seeing it for the first time.
The knife was on the table at the hall’s center, surrounded by other valuables but elevated by the thick cloth it rested on. One of the tapestries. There was a dark gray rectangle of wall where it had been torn down.
There were three Obsidian shifters in this room and more nearby, looking for things to steal. I needed a distraction.
I retreated with only the wisps of a plan and decided to pretend I had Fear’s confidence.
Yet another storeroom gave me what I needed: a stack of linen that had been waiting in the corner long enough to have gone stiff, a worktable covered in musty books and papers, and a lamp that someone had left burning.
It seemed as if half the castle had been given over to piled-up excess.
My hands were steady as I moved the lamp to the cloth. The cloth took it slowly at first, then with conviction.
The passage connected back toward the far end of the hall. I pressed into the shadow at the junction and waited, and I did not have to wait long.
The smell reached them before the smoke did.
“Smoke, there’s smoke.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“If one of your servants set this, you’ll suffer for it.”
“I didn’t! It’s my home. I wouldn’t burn it!”
“Durgan, watch the knife.”
Two shifters raced past me, and I moved steadily anyway, once again clutching my armful of potential treasures. I was an enthralled mortal, too dull-witted with enchantment to save my own life from the flames without being ordered.
In the great hall, one Obsidian shifter remaining. He stood near the door despite the command to watch the knife, one hand on the frame, not fully committed to the emergency, enjoying the owner’s expression too much to go anywhere yet.
The owner still sat at the table. The mortal still stood at his side. The kitchen knife still rested against the old crow’s throat.
“This is what you get,” the Obsidian shifter said conversationally, “for a century of service to our queen.”
Nez’s hands tightened on the table’s edge.
The Obsidian tilted his head, and I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely curious or cruel or both in equal measure. “What did you think she was going to give you that was worth betraying your own kind? Is this what you expected at the end?”
Get the knife, I told myself. Get it and go.
I was past the door and moving before I finished the thought, angling toward the table. I set my armful of treasures down on the table. The Obsidian shifter glanced at me and then away with disinterest. Just another enthralled mortal.
Nez looked up sharply, his eyes widening. He did not know me.
And as he reacted, setting himself forward, his mouth opening in alarm, the blade caught.
A line opened across the old crow’s neck.
The Obsidian shifter cursed and started forward, and I caught the knife up and concealed it, already moving. The mortal did not see or care. Nez was too involved in bleeding all over the table.
I went through the door. Back through everything, eager to reach the storeroom and then the dark beyond it and Fear and Kiegan, waiting to haul me out.
There was chaos behind me. Blood and fire and screaming left in my wake.
I was almost through the kitchen when a satyr came around the door. A bucket of water sloshed in her hands. She was old and smaller than me, a worn shawl pinned at the shoulder, her hooves loud on the stone floor.
She saw me and stopped. My heart raced, expecting for her to send up the alarm, already planning my route.
Then she set the bucket down and reached for my arm. “While he won’t know you’ve escaped—go, now—stick to the road and hide during the dark.”
Her hand closed warm and callused around my wrist, and she took half a step toward a side passage I hadn’t seen.
She had taken me for one of the enslaved mortals.
Then her eyes found mine.
She froze. Understanding moved across her face: that my eyes were awake, that I was holding something hidden against my ribs, that I had walked into this place with a purpose and not under enthrallment.
Her hand left my wrist as if it had burned her.
“You—” she said and didn’t finish.
Something clenched in my chest. “Go. Run.”
She stepped back. Her face was full of indecision.
Behind me, Obsidian voices, ugly now, looking for someone to blame.
I pushed past her, gentle as I could and not gentle enough. She made a small sound of choked fear, hooves skittering, and I was through.
Then I was in the passage.
Behind me, her cry, sharper now, and other angry voices overlappping.
“Did you see where she went?”
“What did she look like?”
“Why didn’t you—”
Her scream cut through the questions before they could finish asking them.
The darkness. My feet slipped over onions as I drove forward. The ground slanted suddenly, so steep that I tripped and landed in roots and earth on my knees. The knife was hot against my ribs through the cloth. Fear’s hand was already reaching as I scrambled up.
Then I was free, and the castle was left behind me in chaos.