Chapter Fifteen
In fact, Bait’s escape was quite explicable.
These things often are. No need to invoke sorcery or secret passages; the secret of her miraculous escape was a staff shortage.
As I said, the castle was heaving with courtiers, RATS, royal guards and the like, as well as its standard complement of sentries, servants, scullions, stableboys and such, not to mention a whole courtyard full of impossible monsters.
A great number of bodies, and that meant a great number of mouths.
Indeed, with creatures like Fuglog the goblin as one of the prisoners, the ratio of mouths to bodies was heavily weighted in favour of mouths.
So, the kitchen ovens burned night and day to feed that host, with all their varied demands.
Toast, eggs and bacon for some, boiled oysters and stuffed pheasant for others.
Meat in many forms – fried, roasted, boiled, or served raw and bloody, bones on the side.
The call went out to the village and the surrounding area for temporary staff – and among those employed was Mistress Clove.
Although she’d been captured along with Only-Sister in the Dungeon by the RATS, once they confirmed she was just a horrible old woman and not a monster that looked like a horrible old woman, like a woodhag or a changeling, they abandoned her on the hillside to make her way home or die of exposure, whichever was most convenient.
Swallowing pride and a not inconsiderable amount of bile, Mistress Clove made her way back to Dunshelm and asked for work.
Once, she’d been the undisputed ruler of the kitchen, the iron fist holding the wooden spoon, but she came back as the lowliest of the low, given only the most menial and unpleasant tasks.
Like, say, bringing food to a prisoner in the lowest cell of the castle dungeon.
Bait was sitting up in bed with one ear pressed to the stone wall when Clove waddled in.
“I dreamed I heard him,” said Bait. “The minotaur.”
“ ’Twasn’t a dream,” said Clove, “They brought him down from t’Dungeon early this morn.
But don’t get your hopes up, child – he’s no less witless than he ever was, and he’s in chains.
He’s not rescuing you.” The old cook raised her voice for the benefit of the guards outside the door.
“Ain’t no one rescuing you, little beast. Here you’ll stay until you rot!
No way out for you!” A fierce scowl, almost like a mask, crossed Clove’s lined face – which was quite a trick, as Clove’s default expression was a slightly different scowl.
At the same time, Clove hitched up her voluminous skirt, revealing that she’d clutched an extra blanket between her knees.
Bait was never good at reading faces, or catching tone of voice. For a moment, she did not understand.
“He ain’t rescuing you. I am.”
*
I have not been charitable to Mistress Clove in my narrative.
I find her odious. She mistreated me and Orphir when we were callow, young, condemned prisoners; she has the personal grooming habits of a dung beetle, the grace of a wild boar, the winning charm of a troll, and the palate of a slime.
Now, some might say “Why, Cornelius, what is the point of bearing grudges from long ago? You are alike as two peas in a pod, two bones in a tomb, two humans living among monsters in the Dungeon. Let bygones be bygones.”
And to them I reply, in the words of young Bait, “no”.
So, pray believe me when I say that beneath the skirts of Mistress Clove was a chasm of stinking horror, a dark cave haunted by horrors worse than any dungeon.
No flood of eldritch chaos loosed from the ghast’s forbidden doorway could compare to the stench of Clove’s undergarments.
But Bait – a creature of singular courage – crawled down and hid between Clove’s bony shins.
Moving like some stately dowager, Clove proceeded across the cell and knocked on the door to be let out. Bait crawled along between Clove’s legs, keeping pace with her to stay hidden.
Maybe the guards subconsciously suspected something was amiss. Maybe they noticed an odd furtive billowing of Clove’s skirts. But I assure you, there was no hiding place in the whole castle less likely to be searched than down there.
Bait slipped away from Clove in the dark.
From her own time in the castle, she knew its byways and secret paths almost as well as she knew the Underhalls.
She could tell from the particular texture of one stone step or another that she was close to the storeroom under the buttery or some such, and from there she could find her way.
The storeroom was crammed with all manner of supplies.
Bait’s eager fingers rifled through them in the dark.
She could see nothing, but felt the rough weave of hemp rope, the sloshing weight of a flask of oil, the cold links of iron chain.
Needful things went into a sack. The Trapsmiths’ Arcade was long ago and far away, but she remembered her first lessons under Clickglee.
You can take the child from the goblins, but not the goblin mischief from the child.
Then, sack over her shoulder, she ran through dark passages, up narrow stairs, squeezing through a window, then into the sunlight.
She ran along a narrow roof-ridge I can only describe as architecturally symbolic.
On the one side, it sloped down towards the exterior wall of the castle, and beyond the wall the endless, trackless green of the forest and escape.
On the other, the menagerie of the courtyard, all her friends in chains.
At the far end, the wall of the keep itself, sheer as a cliff face.
On the levels above, it was pockmarked with windows, but it was a long climb to reach any of them, and sentries watched every approach.
Bait passed by unseen.
How? Because Only-Sister was a huntress, and she had the keenest eyes of any of the Denizens in the courtyard.
(Well, excepting Balor the Squinter, who was all eyes, but his vision was impaired by his all-over blindfold.) She was the first to spot Bait, lurking on the windowsill.
When the manticore saw Bait, she began to roar, and all the other Denizens took up the call.
The uproar drew the attention of the guards towards the courtyard, and away from Bait.
To the guards, it sounded like roaring, and yowling, and grunting, and screeching, a cacophony of troll-howls and stirge-calls and goblin meeping and the cries of a hundred other unlikely creatures. But to those who spoke the Dungeon Tongue, all those roars and yowls resolved into a single cheer.
BAIT! BAIT! BAIT! BAIT!
Bait darted along the roof-ridge to the wall of the keep beyond.
Again, she climbed.
Higher and higher, and still higher.
There are grander keeps with taller towers than Dunshelm, but when one is clinging by one’s fingertips to a crumbling stone wall with nothing below you but a ninety-foot drop, the last thing one needs is the narrator pointing out that it would be a two-hundred-foot drop if you were climbing the Black Tower in Crowhaven.
I shall not diminish Bait’s accomplishment with niggling footnotes.
Higher she climbed, and all the castle and all the world beneath her if she cared to look down. There the South Tower, there the kitchen door. There the road to Lastease winding through the forest like a buried river, and beyond that all the lands of the surface kingdom.
There, no larger than a cobblestone from this perspective, was the crowded courtyard.
Indeed, it was as if she’d turned over a cobblestone, but all the strange things that crept and crawled beneath it were cheering her name.
There Only-Sister, proud despite all her wounds.
There the absurd bobbing shape of Balor, there the bloodbeast, there the trolls hollering from beneath their shared umbrella, there the voices of her goblin kinfolk. Only the minotaur was silent.
Had she looked in another direction she’d have seen the mountains, the sun struggling to clear their grim peaks. The Dungeon, ever in shadow. She’d have seen the road home.
But Bait was never one for looking around.
All her attention was focused on the climb, on the wall in front of her.
In the way that one stone block was alike to another, but also different, and in those subtle differences was the way through the maze.
This way was a dead end, that way a crumbling handhold and a deadly fall, that way – another window.
She intended, I believe, to climb up to your room, or to Orphir’s lair, but the wall brought her inexorably to another room on the topmost level of the keep.
There was a heavy curtain just inside this window, so Bait was able to squeeze through unseen. The curtain made the room inside blessedly dark, and her eyes were dazzled by the horribly bright sunshine, so she crouched for a moment in the velvet folds of the drapes and just listened.
Outside, the yowling and roaring slowly faded.
Inside the room, Bait could hear two people breathing.
One faint, regular, slow. Sleeping.
The other a horrible wet rattle, every breath a gasp, every breath a battle.
Dying.
Bait peered through the curtain.
The room was so similar to the princess’s room that for a moment Bait thought she’d miscounted the windows. This had been Sir Rudyard’s bedroom, before the royal court descended on the little keep; the adjoining room that belonged to the princess was for guests.
But Aldebara was not in her own room. She was here, sleeping in a chair, so swaddled in blankets and furs she looked almost entombed.
One of her hands had slipped free to rest on the bed bedside the chair.
Bait had never seen her own sleeping face before, and was struck by how unburdened Aldebara seemed, as if in dreams her mask slipped away and she could be herself, some third thing that was neither the princess nor a changeling copy of Bait.
In the bed lay an old man. His skin was waxy-yellow; his hands lay on the coverlet like the dried carcasses of cave spiders, brittle and unmoving. Bait was reminded of the corpse she’d once found in the manticores’ lair, many years before. She’d pretended that corpse was her father.
This was King Arus. This was her father.
She could see his features in Aldebara, in her own face.
But they conjured no memories in her. In both Neb’s village and in Nala’s genealogies she’d seen what was the common shape of a family, and she knew intellectually she must have parents if she was human, but they were like two missing blocks in a still sturdy dungeon wall.
There were gaps, yes, but there were plenty of other blocks to lend the wall stability and strength.
The gaps did not need to be filled – but still she was aware of them.
A disquiet like an unpaid debt or a promise not yet fulfilled.
Now she stood in the presence of her father, watching him draw what might be his final breaths, and she felt little.
She knew that this man was her father, and she could still sense the absence in her, the shape of something that should have been there, but the two things seemed utterly unconnected.
Bait would have left without a word, left the two of them sleeping there, only Arus coughed and stirred in his sleep. His eyes opened, and his bleary gaze pinned Bait more surely than Balor’s magic.
“Aldebara?” he muttered. Then he frowned. “No. You’re the other. The changeling. Orphir told me.”
Bait nodded. Quietly, she let her sack of stolen bits slip from her shoulder.
“Where’s my daughter?” asked the old king. His voice was barely a whisper, but there was a note of terror and confusion in it, and that pained Bait in a way she had not expected.
“She’s right there. Other side.”
With a great effort, Arus turned his head.
“It’s strange,” mumbled the king, half to himself.
“When Orphir first brought her back, I thought she wasn’t mine.
She’d changed. Months mean so much when they’re that age.
She was difficult when she was young. Disobedient.
Slow to speak. Now she’s perfect. My Aldebara.
” He looked back to Bait. “Orphir says you can heal her.”
Bait shrugged.
“I would like that very much,” said Arus. “I hear shouting in the courtyard. Are they saying I am a bad king?”
The Denizens were still roaring and yowling. None of it was a commentary on the monarchy.
“No,” said Bait.
“I am a bad king. I would give up my kingdom for her.” One of his limp hands twitched towards Aldebara’s fingers. “How scared she must have been, alone in the dark.”
“It’s not knowing what a thing is that makes it scary,” said Bait. “Once you touch a thing, it’s different. You know it.” Gingerly, she picked up the king’s hand, noting how cold and clammy his skin was, the texture of his fingers. She put his hand into Aldebara’s and stepped away.
The king’s breathing slowed. Now it was Aldebara who awoke with a start.
“Oh! I fell asleep! Father?”
“He’s not gone.”
Were you surprised to see Bait there? I knew her as well as anyone, and I would have been surprised. Not that she’d gone after Orphir. After the dragon, I knew she was unreasonably brave.
But that she’d stay instead of slipping away.
Or did you know her better? It’s said that changelings read the minds of those they mimicked, the better to deceive.
“He’s nearly gone.” Aldebara wiped drool from her father’s mouth.
“It won’t be long now. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.
I’m just so tired. None of Orphir’s curative spells have worked.
I’m still . . . fading.” She glanced at a silver bell on a nearby table.
“I should summon the Chancellor. Or call the guards outside the door. Why are you not in your cell?”
“I escaped.”
“So I see. What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to kill Orphir.”
Aldebara nodded. “I think I wish you the best of luck. Someone should have done it years ago. Although . . .” She stroked the king’s hand.
“Then he’d have been alone at the end. I hang on for him.
I’ll see him out, and then . . . well, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been truly alive, so I’m not sure if I can truly die. ”
“You are, so you can,” said Bait. “I’ll wait with you.”