The Silver Key

by Emery Gallagher

  * * *

  Light from the open door woke Charlie up the next morning. She was still sitting with her back against the wall and was almost surprised to find herself asleep. She had spent a fair part of the night trying to saw through one of the wooden poles with her little knife. It had been terribly ineffective. She estimated she could probably escape in that manner in about a month. If she had to stay another night, she would devote her attention to the hinges on the door instead. She was also beginning to wonder why a village this small would need somewhere to restrain criminals. Wearily, she turned her head to see who had opened the door.

  A girl about her own age stood timidly in the doorway, holding a cup in one hand and a bowl in the other. “Good morning,” the girl said uncertainly when Charlie stood and abruptly appeared over the solid half of the partition.

  “Good morning,” Charlie replied slowly. She probably looked awful after a night in a room barely big enough to take a step in. She certainly felt awful. “Are you here to let me out?”

  The girl blushed and shook her head. “No, but I brought you something to eat.”

  “How kind,” Charlie remarked dryly. “Now, how exactly are you going to give that to me?” She was pretty sure she could knock the girl down if she opened the door, and she was more than willing to do it.

  “I’m waiting for the guard to open the door,” the girl explained, dashing any hopes of Charlie’s escape. “He should be here soon. It’s so exciting to have a stranger here.” Her blues eyes were huge in her thin face. “Where are you from?”

  “Fallond,” Charlie said absently, no longer interested. “Do you know where my horse is?”

  The girl opened her mouth to answer, her expression slightly quizzical, but she was interrupted by footsteps outside.

  The soldier she called Sandy entered, blocking the sunlight with his bulk for a moment. He frowned at the girl. “I told you not to talk to the prisoner.” She looked down at her shoes contritely. “Stand back, you,” he ordered Charlie gruffly. She suspected he was bitter about how much his nose hurt—it was definitely bent to one side now. He unlocked the door, letting the girl inside. Carefully the girl set the cup and bowl down on the floor, still watching Charlie with great interest.

  “Thank you,” Charlie said as the girl backed out. “Have you contacted your priest about my unlawful detainment, Sandy? When is he coming to declare that you’re an imbecile?”

  The man glared. Both of her captors seemed to have lost all patience with her. “A messenger will be sent this morning. You’ll have to wait until the priest has time for you.” He locked the door and left, the girl following. “You should use this time to think about what you’ve done,” he added pompously as he left.

  “But I haven’t done anything!” Charlie shouted after him, answered only by the outer door shutting.

  The liquid in the cup proved to be watered down beer. She still had water in her waterskin, so she put the cup aside. The bread was hard, but still edible. The mush in the bottom of the bowl was unidentifiable—she decided she wasn’t hungry enough to eat it. She shook her head as she chewed, thinking about how elaborate meals had been at home. She was so used to eating soft bread and pies and sweets. She had never thought she wouldn’t have them. Even the food in her saddlebags would have been a great improvement.

  She tried to think of a way to use the cup or bowl to escape. If they had been metal, she could have used them to dig through the packed earthen floor. That would probably take approximately as long as sawing through the bars with her tiny, becoming-dull knife. She decided to start on the hinges. If someone could tell her how long they would keep her here, she might be willing to grit her teeth and stick it out, but now she was beginning to think that she might have to flee, even if it meant leaving on foot or without her sword.

  Charlie spent the better part of an hour prying at the hinges. She succeeded in snapping the tip off her knife. Frustrated, she stood and threw her weight against it a few times. It shuddered encouragingly but didn’t splinter.

  Stopping for a breath, she could hear people arguing outside the hovel. It sounded like they were approaching the door, and they were discussing her. She decided this was as good a time as any to escape. Even if they caught her again quickly, she might get a better idea of the surroundings and perhaps where her horse was. She crouched behind the door with her knife in one hand and the bowl of mush in the other.

  The outer door swung open, and two sets of footsteps entered. There was a jingle of keys as the lock turned. When the door opened, Charlie sprang to her feet and hurled the bowl straight into the face of the man standing in the doorway. With a cry, he let go of the door and put his hands to his face. Ruthlessly Charlie shoved between him and the door frame and came up against the second man. She raised the hand bearing the knife menacingly, hoping he would be shocked into moving out of her way. She definitely wasn’t brave enough to actually stab him.

  The sudden light after being in the dimness of the cell had dazzled her eyes, and both men were just shadowy figures to her. The one she faced now still had his back to the street, and she couldn’t see his face. She didn’t realize he was familiar to her until he laughed instead of being frightened by her brandished knife.

  “Don’t stab me, Charlie! I’m friend, not foe.” Her eyes began to adjust to the sunlight, and she could make out dark, curly hair and a pair of snapping green eyes.

  “Griffin!” Charlie exclaimed, lowering the knife.

  It was indeed Griffin of Darklight, appearing for a mysterious third time in her life. He was grinning.

  The other man, the one she had hit with a bowl of food, turned out to be Sandy, and he was not pleased at having been struck in the face for a second time. He seized her arm.

  Griffin immediately frowned. “Unhand her at once,” he ordered.

  “I’m sorry, my lord, but she’s a criminal. We caught her defacing a sacred shrine,” Sandy explained. “We’re keeping her here until the priest passes his judgment.”

  “What exactly did she do to the shrine?” Griffin asked.

  “She was standing on it when we found her, sir,” the soldier answered while Charlie shouted, “Nothing! I didn’t deface anything at all!” over him.

  “Did she actually cause any damage to the shrine?” Griffin wanted to know.

  The solider began to look uncertain. “Not physical damage, sir, but the shrine will have to be cleansed and reconsecrated. Someone will have to pay for that.”

  Griffin crossed his arms, his expression grim. “If she didn’t do any visible damage to your shrine, how can you know there was any damage at all? If you hadn’t seen her, you never would have known. For all you know, the shrine was spiritually contaminated by someone else before you ever saw her. And you can’t keep a highborn girl in a common cell no matter what she’s done,” he added bluntly. “You’ve no right.”

  “We thought we’d turn her over to her parents when we found them,” Sandy tried feebly. “We can’t in good conscious leave a young girl on her own with no guardians. And the way she’s dressed…” He trailed off as if Charlie’s unorthodox appearance spoke for its own problems.

  “You can rest assured she’ll be quite safe with me,” Griffin said firmly.

  “We’ve already sent for the priest. What will we tell him?”

  “Tell him she was already collected and that the nobility have an unfair advantage in life. Go collect her belongings to return to her.”

  Withering, the soldier left to do as he was told.

  After watching him go, Griffin looked at Charlie speculatively. “Were you really going to stab me?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But I was hoping it would scare you into moving. I couldn’t see anything in the sunlight, so I thought you were the other soldier.”

  “Hmm. Not a particularly competent set, are they? Let’s get your horse.”

  Charlie followed him outside and to a corral behind the buildings on the opposite side of the street. Mys
tic looked entirely untroubled and unharmed and came up to her at once as if curious about where Charlie had been all this time. Her saddle and bridle had been left by the fence, and she set to tacking up her horse. Griffin’s black destrier was tied to the fence.

  Sandy arrived shortly with her saddlebags, sword, and bow. He turned them over to her grimly while Griffin watched him critically. The soldier was clearly disgusted and angry, but he didn’t dare lash out in front of the knight. Even beyond his high social status, Griffin had the air of someone who didn’t tolerate disrespect and would not react politely to it.

  “Make sure everything is still in your bags,” he told her. She guessed by the way he looked at the soldier instead of her when he said it that he was intentionally needling the other man. Sandy glowered.

  “It is,” Charlie said after a very cursory search. “Can we go, please.” She was feeling very desperate to get away.

  “Yes, let’s.” He held the gate open for her to ride out, then climbed onto his own horse. With an arrogant tilt to his head, he addressed the soldier one last time. “Know that I will be reporting this incident to authorities. The next time you apprehend a young woman of her station, take her address and file a complaint. Or at least lodge her with a respectable family while you search for her relatives. It’s up to her parents to make reconciliations anyway.”

  “And will her parents be making reconciliations, my lord?” Sandy asked through gritted teeth.

  “No,” Griffin said easily. He withdrew a small silver coin from his belt purse. “Here. Have your shrine cleansed or whatever.” He flipped the coin to Sandy, who didn’t deign to catch it. “Let’s ride,” he said to Charlie.

  She followed him out of the village in silence, turning back only once to see the soldier still watching them, his posture as stiff as a pole.

  * * *

  “So,” Griffin said, when they were safely away, “how did you end up in a village cell exactly?”

  Charlie glanced up at him. “I was maybe two miles or so outside the village when they rode up to me and insisted I was ‘desecrating’ their shrine. Even though there wasn’t any damage to the stupid thing, they dragged me back here.”

  “I’m surprised you let them take you anywhere, given your strategic ambush back there.” He seemed highly amused by it.

  “I didn’t let them do anything,” she said sourly. “They got between me and my horse first, so I couldn’t escape, then they got my sword away from me too.” She grimaced at the memory. “They didn’t do a good job tying me up, and I got free, but there wasn’t really any point in trying to run away on foot. I thought I’d just wait it out, but when they couldn’t tell me how long they were going to keep me, I decided to at least get out long enough to find my horse.”

  “You’re quite a spirited girl,” Griffin said casually. “And if your escape was thwarted?”

  “Well, I was sawing through the wooden bars with my knife.”

  “And how was that going?”

  “It probably would have taken me only a few weeks.”

  He laughed. “It probably would have been faster to dig through the floor. I can’t believe they didn’t check you for that knife. That’s just lazy.”

  “They forgot after I broke the soldier’s nose,” Charlie explained. “Ah, here’s that stupid shrine now.”

  They had reached the spot in the road where the ignominious capture had taken place. She stopped her horse to observe the little statue bitterly.

  Griffin was watching her instead of looking at the shrine. “I still don’t understand why you were standing on it,” he said.

  “I was just looking at it.”

  “Do you always look at things with your feet?”

  She glanced at him, annoyed. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.” She fixed her gaze on the little shrine, wondering in vain if she had somehow missed the dagger. Perhaps it was buried under the statue. She wanted to look again, but she couldn’t with the Shalan knight there.

  “I could always hand you back over to the overzealous soldier,” he warned.

  “You wouldn’t,” she replied, unafraid. She observed him from the corner of her eye for a moment. “And how exactly did you come to rescue me, Sir Griffin?” That question had been turning over in her mind for the last mile. Seeing him twice might be a coincidence, but a third time had to be deliberate.

  “Oh, some lucky stroke of fate,” Griffin said nonchalantly. “I crossed paths with the messenger they sent out and waylaid him to see what news he carried. His description of the prisoner sounded so much like you that I thought it wouldn’t hurt to cross through here. And when I saw your horse in the corral, I knew it was you.”

  “Wow,” Charlie said flatly. “It’s amazing how our traveling courses have aligned so closely that you just happened to be nearby.”

  “Well, this is a pretty common way people journey east.”

  That may have been true of the main road, but she had left it days ago for this nowhere place specifically to visit the shrine. And even when she was loosely following the main road, she never camped near it and hardly even rode on it. There was also no way he would not have outpaced her quickly on his big, sturdy warhorse if he had actually been riding east.

  “Perhaps,” Charlie said slowly. “But I think you must have been following me.”

  He tilted his head back and looked at her through half-closed eyes. “But why would I do that?”

  “You tell me,” she shot back, growing angry.

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” he said dryly. “And I’m not.”

  “I don’t think there’s any possible way you could have ended up in the same place as me so many times if you weren’t.”

  “So many times? Twice is a perfectly reasonable number for a coincidence,” he told her. “And since our paths do seem to align so well, as you said, we might as well ride together for a bit.” He made as if to start down the trail again.

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary.” It was not only unnecessary, the idea alarmed her. “I prefer to travel alone, and I don’t want your company.”

  “Why not? It’s safer to travel in company. Might provide a little conversation to relieve the boredom of traveling. You could tell me about whatever adventure you seem to be on.”

  Now it was Charlie who turned her horse to ride away. “No, thank you.”

  Realizing he had miscalculated, Griffin followed her. “Or we could talk about mundane, non-personal topics.”

  “Go away.”

  He switched tactics. “You know, technically the village just turned custody of you over to me, so I have to look after you,” he half-joked.

  “If they had no rights over me to begin with, they had no authority to transfer any rights to you,” she pointed out. “And I don’t need looking after.”

  “Oh, I could argue that point.” She found his tone insulting

  “And why is that?” she demanded, truly angry now. She could feel how hot her face was and knew her cheeks were probably turning red.

  “Because in the three times I’ve met you, you’ve needed my help twice. You knocked yourself out and lost your horse the first time, and this time you were in a village jail!”

  “Neither of those things was my fault!” she shouted. “And I would have survived both of them without you, just like I’ve managed everything else by myself.”

  “Hmm.” He was unconvinced but didn’t argue any further. “Do your parents know you’re out here? I could take you home.”

  “No, they think I’m in my bedchamber doing embroidery. And I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you like that,” she said stonily. “After all, you must be anxious to get to your own destination, that just happens to be nearby.”

  Griffin shifted slightly. “I’m just traveling east.”

  “Griffin,” Charlie said very deliberately, “what is it that you want? You’ve clearly been following me for a few days now, though you seem to realize that that’s a very strange thing to do, so you’re l
ying about it.” He opened his mouth to protest, but she continued before he could speak. “And now you keep suggesting that we travel together even after I’ve told you very plainly that I want nothing to do with you. So what is it you want?”

  He tilted his head back slightly and gazed at her a long, considering moment, his expression unreadable. “I want to know who you are, where you’re going, and why,” he said finally.

  “So you followed me to find out?”

  “To be fair, I have tried asking you, but you’ve been very secretive.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” she demanded.

  “Not really.” He sighed. “Look, I wasn’t following you when I met you on the mountain. I had honestly assumed you were a runaway and would go back home after your fall. But when I did meet you again, I got curious.”

  “How did you follow me without me knowing?”

  Griffin shrugged. “I’m good at tracking. And your trail was easy enough to follow. I could swear you stepped in every mud puddle and soft spot you passed. And I could tell it was you because your horse is shod with some strange shoes.”

  Charlie was silent for a long moment. “And somehow finding out where a stranger is traveling is important enough to follow her for several days?”

  “I really am traveling east,” he answered, “so it really isn’t out of my way. And why can’t you just tell me?”

  “Because I don’t want to, and I don’t have to,” she replied, affronted. “And I don’t think telling you would make you go away. Would it?” she challenged.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’d promise, but you might be going somewhere really interesting, and then I’d have to break that promise.”

  “So I take it you’re planning on following me no matter what,” Charlie said sourly.

  “I don’t want to follow you. I want to ride with you. It’s been terribly dull with no one to talk to all day. You don’t really have the best attitude, but you seem intelligent enough for a decent conversation.”

  Charlie rubbed her face with both hands. “I hate you so much. Go away.” She turned her horse down the path again and kicked her into a trot.