* * *
The next morning, Charlie slept late and had her breakfast on a tray in bed. She had another bath just because she could and dressed in the cleaned and neatly repaired clothes that had been returned to her before heading off on a wander. She went out to the barn to check on Mystic, who seemed nervous that Charlie might pry her away from the feed trough and make her work, then started a tour of the extensive grounds. She had been through the gardens and had stopped to pet the barn cats when she was hunted down and sent to get ready for an outdoor lunch.
Blankets were spread on the ground in the shade of a idyllic peach grove when Charlie arrived to join the others for the midday meal. It would have been quite the bucolic scene were it not for the fine dishware and linen set out for the diners, the quantity of the repast, and the silent servants waiting a discreet distance away. Still, it was a beautiful day, and a picnic lunch could hardly be an imposition. Charlie sat next to Michael, who was a friendly and agreeable young man, and enjoyed the cold ham, soft bread, and little pastries while servants darted in to refill their cups and vanished again. Other than the occasional comment about the food or the weather, little was said as most of the party was content to eat and enjoy the day. When they had finished eating, Griffin stretched out on his back in the grass, and Michael fished a small book out of his pocket and became quickly lost in it. Charlie watched Griffin for a minute, amused by how relaxed he was.
“Do you have any siblings, Charlie?” Duchess Taka asked conversationally.
“Yes, several,” Charlie said simply. She wasn’t particularly interested in answering questions about herself. She hadn’t spent weeks keeping her personal life and history away from Griffin to spill it all now.
Griffin had, of course, heard. “She has at least two brother and two sisters,” he said casually. The respite of Hawk’s Rest had ended any stress or sense of responsibility he felt, and he was restored to his usual glib, clever self.
“Yes? And how do you know that?” Charlie wanted to know.
“Because you always talk about them in the plural,” he answered, pleased with himself. “So you have at least two of each.”
“Well. Aren’t you clever,” Charlie said flatly. “You know all about me.”
Griffin ignored her tone. “I do, actually,” he insisted as he sat up. “I’ve learned plenty about you these few weeks.”
Charlie arched an eyebrow dangerously. “Such as?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Michael put away his book and lean forward to listen.
This seemed to be the challenge Griffin had long been waiting for. His eyes were almost sparking. “Hmm, let’s see, what do I know about Charlie? I know you’re the daughter of a nobleman, even though you won’t say. That’s pretty obvious.
“Obvious,” Charlie echoed darkly.
“Yes. You were selling your jewelry for money because you didn’t have any coin because ladies don’t do their own purchasing. You can dance, and I saw you do that ballroom staircase thing girls do. I’ve never known a girl who didn’t practice walking down the staircase like that for her presentation to the crown,” he added pointedly. “And frankly, you’re a bit spoiled.” He headed off her protest. “Oh, you’re very hardy and uncomplaining and all that, I’ll admit, but you’ve always got to have your way, and you expect people to obey you.” Griffin was almost bouncing off the ground with excitement. “And a sword is a noble’s weapon. You take for granted that you’re allowed to wear one, don’t you?”
“I see you’ve been waiting a long time to tell me what you think about who I am,” Charlie said cuttingly.
“Yes, and I’m not done. You’re foreign, and you won’t say from where, so I know you’re not from Fallond because you would just say so. I know that you were your father’s pet and he spoiled you, hence the fencing and the riding like a boy. You’re the oldest girl, because you must have been the only one for a while, or he wouldn’t have bothered. He’s dead, I think. You talk about him like he’s gone.”
Charlie paled at that, and Michael said, “Griffin, I think you may be being a bit too intuitive. Perhaps a reminder that you’re rather fond of your privacy as well would be in order.”
“Anything else?” Charlie challenged feeling anger beginning to bubble beneath the surface.
“Yes,” Griffin shot back. “I know that wherever you’re from, you’ve run away.”
She interrupted with a snort. “I did not. You’ve missed that one.”
“You have,” he argued. “You may have convinced yourself that it doesn’t count because you’re going back whenever you finish this ludicrous adventure you’re on, but you left without permission or telling anyone, didn’t you? Does a single person at home know where you went?” He crossed his arms and waited.
After a long moment, Charlie admitted, “No.”
“See?” he said triumphantly. “And your actions are justified because you’re on some sort of self-assigned quest to do something. Someone fancies herself quite the fabled heroine.”
Charlie stood up. “Someone needs to learn to mind his own business and not rearrange pieces of a broken plate into a statue.”
Griffin scrambled to his feet as well. “You’re just angry because I’m right,” he insisted.
“Griffin, perhaps this has gone on long enough,” the duchess warned. No one looked at her.
“No, I’m angry because you’re making all kinds of twisted assumptions about my life that reflect only a part of the reality,” Charlie shot back. “And I’m angry that you can’t just mind your own business.” She turned to go back toward the castle.
“You can’t just leave because you’re losing the fight, Charlie,” Griffin said, following her. “And if I’m wrong, why don’t you just correct me?”
“Because it’s none of your business, you obsessive, ignorant, nosy weasel!” Charlie shouted over her shoulder as Griffin caught up with her. “Does it make you feel smart to guess about other people’s lives? Haven’t got enough going on yourself?”
At that, Griffin seized her arm suddenly, and the abrupt arrest to her momentum caused her to jerk around to face him. Furious, Charlie swung her fist toward his face. For a moment, time seemed to stretch, and she was able to watch in fascination as her hand connected squarely with Griffin’s nose, and his head snapped backward. It happened so slowly that she didn’t even feel the pain in her hand from the blow yet. Then time jumped ahead to catch up with itself again, and with a vague glimpse of dripping blood and a swinging hand, she was sitting on the ground with a ringing head. She heard people yelling in the distance.
With some surprise but no real disbelief, Charlie realized that Griffin had retaliated by backhanding her squarely in the side of the head, hard enough to knock her down. Since she had hit him first, and his nose was bleeding, she did not feel this was an undeserved result, but she still wasn’t ready to lose. As soon as her equilibrium returned, she sprang up and launched herself at Griffin, who had his head tilted back in an attempt to stop his nose from bleeding.
Her attack was thwarted almost as soon as she made contact. After a brief struggle, she allowed Michael to pull her away from Griffin. For a moment, the two eyed each other warily.
Duchess Taka arrived leaning on her stick and shoved a handkerchief at Griffin. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he muttered.
“Good.” The duchess no longer appeared amused by the antics of the young people, but she did not seem particularly angry either. She looked at Charlie a long moment, and Charlie looked back, undefiant but unyielding. “Michael, why don’t you take Charlie back to her room for a little while?” she suggested finally.
“Come on then,” Michael said cheerfully, gently taking Charlie’s elbow. “No fun out here anyway.” He guided her toward the castle, and she went willingly, not once looking back at Griffin.
Michael escorted Charlie back to her room with an apologetic smile and an assurance that the duchess was not really angry with her. After he shut the doo
r, Charlie threw herself on the bed to fume. She hated Griffin. And her head hurt where he had hit her, an action that seemed increasingly unbelievable and unforgivable as she sulked. She didn’t think anyone had ever hit her before, actually. Her brothers and the guardsmen at Windsong were always very careful not to hurt her when they practiced with her. Knights weren’t supposed to hit women anyway.
Her brooding was interrupted by the door opening. She raised her head slightly to see a glowering Griffin being pushed through the doorway with a helpful shove from his cousin.
“Sorry,” Michael said over Griffin’s shoulder, “but she says you two have to stay in here until you can make peace and get along.” He looked at Charlie sitting on the bed, staring, and at Griffin standing barely inside the door, scowling. “Sorry,” he muttered again and quickly left.
Griffin stood quietly for a moment, waiting for Michael’s footsteps to fade, then reached behind him to try the door handle. It was locked. He looked at Charlie a moment, then selected the chair pushed up to the table, turned it away from her, and sat, staring at the wall in silence.
Charlie watched him for a long moment, then lay back on the bed again. It appeared they were to endure each other’s company for a while and that Griffin intended to spend that time in silence. Fine with her, she decided. She tried to return to her seething but found that the moment had gone. She was still angry, but now she just wanted to get away instead of smother Griffin with a pillow. For what felt like a long while she stared at the ceiling and tried to ponder how she came to be in this place and where she would go next, but she was too restless for that kind of thinking. Bored, she turned her head just enough to see Griffin.
He didn’t appear to have moved at all in the hour they had been shut up together. Charlie studied him covertly as he sat like a breathing statue. He had washed his face and changed his tunic; no signs of her attack remained. She was struck by how utterly resigned he looked, and she felt somehow this was hardly the first time Griffin had been made to sit quietly in punishment. Watching him, she had a sudden impression of a much younger Griffin, all of the protest and liveliness trained out of him, made to sit for hours on end without moving, without questioning, without feeling anything. She watched his long eyelashes brush his cheek and felt sorry for him. He pried so much into her life that she avoided thinking about his, but she wondered briefly if he was sad.
Feeling her gaze, Griffin slowly turned his head in her direction. He let his eyes follow slightly behind the turn, so that his face was pointed toward her a second before his eyes met hers. The result made her start slightly to find him staring back at her. He gazed at her petulantly for a moment, then returned to his statue impersonation, staring at the wall again.
Charlie scowled. Maybe he was content to imitate a rock, but she was tired of being shut up. She rolled off the bed to her feet and went to try the door. It was, of course, locked. She went to the window and looked out briefly. It wasn’t terribly far, but not exactly an easy jump either. She began rummaging around the room, looking for inspiration for an escape. She found a stray hairpin in her bag and knelt by the door to try to wiggle the pin into the lock.
“There’s no point,” Griffin said suddenly.
“Oh, it speaks,” Charlie snarled.
“There’s no point,” he repeated. “If you get out before you’re supposed to, you’ll just have to come back or get punished some other way.”
“So when will this ‘punishment’ be over?” she demanded.
“When it’s over.” Griffin shrugged indifferently.
“Go back to staring at the wall,” Charlie snapped.
He did so indifferently, and she went back to her struggle with the hairpin. Her patience with turning the lock didn’t last long, and she resorted to prowling about the room again. After several circuits of the room, opening and closing drawers, looking under things, and picking up things only to set them down again, she threw herself onto the bed again in an angry huff of displeasure. Griffin had tracked her movements around the room with mild interest, but when she became still again he returned to his private reverie. The minutes continued to drag on endlessly, and the light began to fade from the room.
As Charlie lay on the bed and watched the shadows creeping across the floor, she became aware of some discomfort. For a while, she ignored it, but the matter began to feel more pressing. She sat up. “Griffin,” she mumbled at last, almost hoping he wouldn’t hear her.
“Hmm.”
She chewed her lip for a moment. “I have to use the privy.”
Griffin’s head swiveled around the room. He pointed. “There’s a chamberpot under the wash stand,” he said. His finger moved. “And a screen in the corner.” Having neatly solved the problem, he settled his gaze on the painting he had been watching for the last hour. After a moment, he seemed to notice that she hadn’t moved. “What?” he asked suspiciously.
Charlie avoided his gaze uncomfortably.
“Really?” Griffin demanded. “You can’t go because I’m in the room?” With a noise of disgust, he hurled himself to his feet and stomped to the open window. He threw himself over the edge of the window and vanished from sight.
Alarmed, Charlie jumped up and ran as quietly as she could to the window to discreetly peer out. For a moment, he was nowhere in sight—at least he wasn’t flattened on the ground. Then she saw him, perched comfortably on a rampart of sorts, staring out at the fading light. Feeling surprisingly relieved, Charlie left him there and went to attend to some more urgent business.
When she returned, Griffin was still sitting like a bird on a branch. Carefully, Charlie eased herself over the windowsill, finding an uneasy purchase on the slanting roof. Griffin looked up as she made her tentative way toward him, one hand on the roof. He grabbed her arm and pulled her down next to him, wedging her between himself and the roof.
“You’re going to fall,” he grumbled.
“I’m not,” she said. “This is how I left my house when I decided to go traveling. Right off the roof.”
“Castles are not supposed to be climbable,” Griffin grumbled some more. “And now we know of at least two of them that are.”
“Anything is climbable if you try hard enough. I used to climb the towers on the wall all the time and sit on the roof at night.”
“That’s an odd thing to do. Shall we go down?” he suggested, with a sweeping gesture at the ground.
“Yes,” Charlie decided. “Might as well.”
Following his lead, Charlie slowly climbed down the wall after Griffin, putting her hands and feet where he told her to on the top of the window of the ground floor and in small cracks on the stone. They weren’t very high above the ground, and it took only a few handholds before they could jump the rest of the way. Once on the ground, Griffin started off at a brisk pace across the courtyard, and she followed. The unspoken truce had been momentarily reinstated in the name of mutual benefit, and they felt no need to discuss the decision to cease fighting. It was dusk, and there was nobody in sight. After a considerable walk around the outside of the castle, Griffin stopped in front of an inconspicuous door. He looked over his shoulder at her.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” Charlie admitted. The lunchtime feast had long since left her belly.
Griffin pushed the door open and led her into a dark room, producing a ball of light in his hand as he went. It turned out to be a large kitchen, with a big fireplace suitable for cooking feast-sized portions of meat on spits and a wood-burning stove to boil liquids.
Charlie watched Griffin dig through the shelves of jars and pots before producing a pan covered with a cloth. “Aha,” he said with satisfaction, waving her toward the little table against the wall. He put the pan down and rummaged through a drawer before coming back with two spoons. He handed her one before peeling back the cloth to reveal an apple pie. Without ceremony, he dipped his spoon directly into the pan and began to eat. Sensing she’d better hurry or she wouldn’t get any, C
harlie joined him. Together they finished off the entire pie in silence, eating by the light of the candle Griffin had lit.
When they’d finished, Griffin yawned and gazed at her a moment.
“What?” Charlie sighed.
“I suppose you could have eaten that all by yourself,” Griffin smirked, unable to resist another dig about Charlie’s ability to eat.
“I hate you,” Charlie said without much feeling.
“Well, off to bed then.” He stood
“How am I supposed to get back into my room? It’s still locked,” She pointed out.
“The key is probably in the door, but we’ll take the spare anyway. I know where they’re kept.”
After retrieving a ring of keys from the steward’s closet, Griffin led her on a winding journey through the depths of the castle, a good thing since she no longer knew where she was. When they arrived at her door, he tried the keys in the lock one at a time, then swung the door open with a bow. “Your chamber awaits, my lady. Wait,” he added as she went past him. He worked the key off the ring and handed it to her. “Just in case. And this.” He gave her the candle too.
She took both. “Goodnight, Griffin.”
“Goodnight,” he said simply as he vanished into the gloom of the hall.
* * *
The next morning when Charlie woke, Griffin had gone. She found herself rather surprised by the abruptness of his absence, rather like a suddenly missing toothache she had learned to live with. After the length and persistence of his presence, she had been expecting their parting of ways to be somewhat more meaningful instead of him simply leaving without a word to her. She told herself it was the relief she had been waiting for, but she still found herself prodding the hole where the metaphorical tooth had been.
His departure also left her in the awkward position of being a guest in the home of strangers. She was quickly assured that she must stay as long as she desired, possibly until winter was over, a lengthy period of time as autumn was only just beginning. Her scuffle with Griffin and the subsequent punishment were never alluded to again, and Charlie was treated with solicitous kindness and hospitality. As uncomfortable as she was at first, the allure of regular meals and a real bed convinced her to agree to stay just a few more days. She was expected at mealtimes but otherwise allowed to do as she wished and to treat the castle as home. For a few days she fell back into her old habits from her life at Windsong—reading books in the library, exploring, walking in the gardens, and just lazing about. Michael even took her to the castle’s aviary and let her fly one of the lovely, sharp-eyed hawks they raised.
The Silver Key Page 19