Chapter Seven #4
“The princess,” said Bait again, “is in the White Palace. And she’s safe. She got taken by the dragon, but she found her way home.”
“Yes, exactly.” Nala bent her head over the desk. “I must get to work cataloguing these, Bait. Go and pack your things.”
Tell them to bring you home.
She didn’t need them. She could bring herself home.
And so it was that the child who was Ealdufrida, or Bait, but definitely was not Princess Aldebara, left the keep on the borderlands.
She vanished that evening. The alarm was raised, of course, and they searched all the likely corners and hiding places of the castle – and then, because of her past proclivities, they searched all the unlikely corners, too.
She might have been hiding in the rafters of the great hall, after all, or concealed in a well, or lurking like a gargoyle on the roof of the South Tower.
All searches were in vain.
Mistress Clove took this as vindication. Mysteriously vanishing was the sort of thing changelings did. No doubt the monster had dissolved into shadow, or turned into a rat, or flown away on a broomstick.
Sir Rudyard’s view on the matter was one of regretful resignation.
He had offered the child a place in the system of the world; she’d refused to fit into that place, and now she was gone.
He had acted in accordance with the law, and done all that could be reasonably expected of him.
If others could not be equally reasonable, that was on them, not him.
Nala was torn between her genuine concern for Bait, and her obligation to the august Institute that she served.
The fate of one strange child, however fascinating, was a very small thing compared to the high purposes and affairs of state; she told herself that she must put aside all fears and feelings, and do her duty.
She departed at midsummer, and was in the capital before the last leaves fell.
And Neb? As the cart approached the village, he suggested that his father might like to go to the alehouse.
Neb would take the cart home and see that the carthorse got a good rub-down and a feed after the long road.
Neb’s father spluttered that he couldn’t contemplate such a thing, that it was his duty as head of the household to see son and horse and cart back safe and sound, what would his wife say, utterly unthinkable, but on the other hand he was the village reeve now, a man of importance in the community, perhaps on second thoughts it would be best if he popped in, showed his face, brought news from Sir Rudyard’s court . . .
So Neb alone drove the cart to the edge of the wood, and drew back the blanket.
Bait sat up and swung her legs over the side of the cart.
“You don’t have to go,” said Neb. “You could live in the woods near the village again. Or in the village – we’d find you a place. You could stay.”
“I’m going home,” said Bait. She hopped down and darted towards the eaves of the dark wood, then stopped. “I’ll come and see you again. I’ll bring more treasure if I can.” She took another step forward, then stopped again. “And thank you.”
Then she was gone.
Bait had not left the tower wholly empty-handed. Her loot consisted of the following treasures: one of Nala’s leather-bound notebooks, a quill pen and a bottle of ink.
The pen got eaten by Gloop when he was feeling peckish; later, she’d creep down the mountain to pluck feathers from the village geese. The ink ran out after a few months. Goblin spittle proved an adequate and inexhaustible substitute.
The book, though – that endured. All through the rest of her time in the Dungeon, the Dungeon Book was never far from Bait’s side.
In it, she wrote descriptions of the rooms she visited, her explorations of the lower levels.
It began, I think, as an imitation of Nala; later, she thought of it as an act of devotion, a claim on the Dungeon itself.
Only later, after the dragon, did she understand what she was really mapping.
The journey back to the Dungeon, she told me, felt much shorter than the journey out.
She followed the Buried River, the waters merry and clear, having worked out the wildness of snowmelt and spring floods, and she heard the singing of nixies in its bubbling.
She ascended the steep upper slopes, where the exposed rocks felt like dungeon stone under her bare feet.
She found the remnants of the old road, and thought of the histories she had read in the South Tower as she followed its winding path up the mountain to the Dungeon Door.
And she found me, a skull sitting in the lap of a corpse in a gorse bush. The mountain ravens were working on the meat of his clavicle when she arrived; they scattered with indignant croaks.
“Hello, Bait,” I called, fearing she’d overlook me. It had, after all, been a year since she’d seen me, and I worried one skull looks much the same as another. But at least I could greet her with a toothy grin.
“Who’s your friend?” she asked, peering at the skeleton. “Oh, is that Japhot?”
“We weren’t introduced. You seem to know more about these fellows than I do.”
She shrugged. “Surface folk.”
“I take it,” I said carefully, “that you did not, ah, do as Sir Peledon wished?”
“I’m not her. The real princess was rescued years ago.
Maybe I’m a changeling. Maybe I’m something else.
But I’m not her. She’s out there.” She glanced down at the mountains and the forest and the village and Eskerlund and Crowhaven and all the other villages and cities and everything, all spread out under the bright sun that day.
She turned her back on it. “And I’m here.”
“So you are,” I said. “Shall we go back below?” We made a good partnership, she and I. She brought quick hands and nimble legs, I provided historical context and sardonic commentary. A worthy match.
She picked me up, but paused on the threshold of the Dungeon.
“Sir Peledon . . . will he be angry with me?”
“Perhaps – but I have not seen him in months. I hear he’s gone wandering deep.” Privately, I doubted he would even remember her. There was nothing left but beast in him.
She stepped over the threshold and closed the Door behind her. She exhaled.
“I missed the dark.”
In the end, we did not return to our old haunts.
The gargoyle guardians of the entrance chamber had been destroyed, and without a master in the tower, there was no one to carve new ones.
The only remaining gargoyle was Old Throte, still perched sentinel on the Master’s Tower above the Dungeon, and if he was troubled by the sledgehammer disposal of his stony siblings, he showed no sign.
Bait claimed the entrance as her new lair. It was the first page of her Dungeon Book.
At first, the Denizens disapproved. The Rule of the Dungeon states that guarding the Dungeon is the common task of us all, and the Denizens misliked having a lone human child – well, a human child, a talking skull and an affectionate slime – be the first line of defence against any further raiders.
But Bait won them over. First, she promised that she would raise the alarm before intruders even reached the Door; second, she went out into the sunlight and snared birds and small animals, and the Denizens fed better than they had in a long time.
Indeed, it soon became common for monsters from the deep levels – a manticore, for instance – to take shifts watching over the entrance and get a fresh snack of mountain raven or a haunch of deer. Bloody were Bait’s hands that autumn.