Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  The western watchtower, at which Graegor had been looking that afternoon from Lord Contare’s roof, had very thick walls, and they passed a staircase winding up into shadow. Torches lined a short corridor, and they climbed a staircase, then another, to the fourth level of the keep. Two more guards flanked a pair of doors, and after passwords were exchanged, the doors opened to another guard inside, who completed the password ritual and shut the doors behind them. Graegor figured they must have just entered the royal apartments, for no guards accompanied them now. The corridor was hung with tapestries and spread with carpets, and the sconces had lamps instead of torches.

  After delivering their sisters to the nursery, Darcius and Adlai led Graegor around some corners, down some stairs, and up again to emerge in a corridor with a heavy oak door at its end. “This is my suite,” Darcius said, then pointed to where the corridor sharply turned and ended at two more doors. “No one uses that room on the right, but Adlai’s is the door straight ahead. We think the passage runs between our walls.” He opened his door with a shove, as if it usually got stuck in the frame, and led them into an anteroom with wingback chairs and low round tables. Through another, narrower door was the bedchamber, where Darcius immediately took off his circlet and dropped it on a footstool next to a pair of wardrobes. The canopied bed, hanging lamps, fireplace, and tapestries all defined the room’s owner as a prince, and the clutter of sporting, hunting, and fighting equipment further defined the owner as unobsessed with tidiness.

  “King Breon had these rooms when he was crown prince,” Darcius said. “At least, this is traditionally where crown princes are kept—when the kennels are full.”

  “Not that it smells much better,” Adlai put in.

  But Graegor was having one of those moments of strangeness again, when the turn his life had taken seemed too incredible to be believed. Even if Darcius was mistaken and Breon had never had these rooms for his own, he had been here—King Breon had been here, on the other side of the trapdoor they had come to see.

  King Breon. The weight of the name settled over him again, and he had to take a deep breath to fix it back in time.

  Darcius was lifting a tapestry off the wall, and Adlai had gone back to the table to get one of the chairs. While the two of them, clearly having done this before, set about removing the tapestry, Graegor stood by the window with his quarterstaff. The shutters were opened to the late spring night, and Graegor could smell the sea again, and flowers from the queen’s gardens. Like Queen Selena’s lilies. Centuries ago, the wind had carried the scent of those lilies up to this very window.

  Adlai was standing on the chair and had unhooked the tapestry from a wicked-looking spike near the ceiling. He passed the corner down to Darcius, who dragged it back against the wall to the fireplace. “All right,” he said, rubbing the dust from his hands onto his trousers. “The pedal is along here ... you have to press it at the same time you pull on the lever ...” He crouched to inspect the stone where the wall met the floor.

  “It’s right there,” Adlai pointed, jumping down from the chair.

  Darcius’ hand smacked against something. “Ow.” He stood up and placed his foot carefully on the pedal, then reached up and patted the wall, searching for the lever. With a sound of satisfaction, he flattened his palm and curled his fingers over a small break in the stone. He looked over at Graegor. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  He thought he was, but he jumped in alarm at the horribly loud scrape of stone against stone. A square of the wall near the ceiling was slowly turning on a horizontal axis. When Darcius let go and the grinding noise finally stopped, Graegor could see two rectangles of black, one above the pivoted stone and one below, showing the way between the walls.

  Darcius picked up a candle from a table near his bed and lit it from one of the hanging lamps. When he lifted it to shine below the trapdoor, Graegor could see the Godcircle marked on its underside. The lines of the four joined circles were the width of a fingertip, and they were very dark red.

  It’s real. She was really here. It really is a bloodspell.

  He reached up, and his fingers brushed the Godcircle. He felt something ... white, like the earth magic that had shook the ground in Farre, and purple, like the whirling knot in his head when he had been fighting ... both very faint ...

  The princes stood silently, and when he looked over his shoulder at them, the first impression he had was the gleam of the silver wolf pattern running across the dark green of Darcius’ shirt. They were Carhlaans. Their family was as ancient as his own; Bor Carhlaan had been Carlodon Torchanes’ trusted friend. But Khisrathi had set this bloodspell against the Carhlaans, and Carhlaans had died in its fury.

  Now the Carhlaans were kings, and the Torchanes were dead. Graegor didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about that. Lord Contare’s regrets were old, and apparently he could live with them, but should Graegor be upset? Indifferent?

  “Does it bother you?” he asked, suddenly needing to know where he stood with these two. Their father wanted the new Torchanes sorcerer allied with his House for obvious reasons, and offering the friendship of his sons was a clear route to that goal. But how did Darcius and Adlai see it? Did they resent the history that their families shared, that denied them full possession of this castle? What did they think would happen now that the Torchanes had returned?

  “Does it bother you?” Darcius asked, just as low and serious. He deliberately swept the candle in a slow arc to encompass the room, the castle, the kingdom. “All of this should have been yours.”

  They want to know where they stand with me. He realized that he had the choice here. His answer to this question would mark his association with Telgardia’s royal family for the years to come. The princes were ready to trust him; were there any true barriers to trusting them?

  “I wouldn’t be here without the Rohrdal coup.” The thought came in a flash of insight, and he kept going with it: “Prince Augustin would have married someone else and had different children, who would have married other people ... my father wouldn’t have married my mother, wouldn’t even had been born, and I would never have been born. So—I, who I am, I was never a prince, and never could have been. So none of this should have been mine.” He stopped talking because he felt like he was babbling, and Darcius and Adlai were regarding him with curious expressions.

  But then Darcius nodded, and offered a tentative grin. Graegor returned it, and Adlai let a look of relief cross his face. “Besides which,” Darcius said, his voice still low but not quite as serious, “being a sorcerer beats being a prince, hands down.” He made a gesture to suggest laying cards on a table—and of course in most games, Sorcerer did beat Prince. Graegor grinned again at the joke, and he wanted to say something witty in return, but he couldn’t think of anything.

  He turned back to the tunnel. The dark rectangle beneath the pivoted trapdoor was broad, but top-to-bottom it was not very wide. Darcius stepped up onto the chair and extended his arm, palm out, into the darkness. His hand moved its own breadth past the threshold, but then stopped. He pushed, and the tips of his fingers flattened.

  “What are you pushing on?” Graegor asked.

  Darcius pulled back his hand, flexing it. “Nothing. My hand just won’t go any further. Here, you try.” He jumped off the chair, landing with a heavy tread of boots.

  Graegor stared up at the trapdoor, trying to open his mind to it, to sense the magic there ... still very faint, like a whisper. He propped his quarterstaff against the wall and stepped onto the chair. Closer up, the dark rectangle was just as dark.

  Go. Do it.

  He extended his hand. Chill swept through him like winter winds. He thought he saw a faint sheen of white that vanished when he looked directly at it. His arm tingled, and as he reached further into the passageway, the tingling moved up to his shoulder. It was the barrier—the same barrier that had stopped Darcius. He set both hands at the edge and hauled himself underneath the trapdoor and into the tunnel.<
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  The tingling rushed over his hair, his shoulders, arms, body, legs, past his boots, and then he was through. He lay on his stomach for a moment, willing his heart to slow. Any secret doubts he’d had about the truth of his heritage had vanished. He really was descended from King Breon. The Torchanes really had returned.

  I am Carlodon’s heir. The last son of his blood. The next vessel of his power.

  He shook off that thought and pulled his feet under him so he could stand up, pressing his hands to the walls. He was in a corridor, about a yard wide and twice that high. It smelled stale. He ducked to look down at Darcius and Adlai, who were wide-eyed with awe. “Can you hear me?” Darcius asked.

  “You’re a little muffled.” Like on the other side of a shut window.

  “So are you. Can you see anything?”

  “There’s no light.”

  “Here.” Darcius lifted the candle, and Graegor reached through the barrier to prepare to take it. The tingling moved from his fingers to his wrist and his arm, and suddenly Darcius gave the candle to Adlai and grabbed Graegor’s hand. “Try to pull me through,” he said, his face alight with excitement.

  Graegor locked his wrist with Darcius’ and pulled. The barrier tingled at his hand, but even when he set his back to the wall and heaved, Darcius’ hand wouldn’t go any further than it had before. Finally Darcius let go, frowning in frustration.

  Adlai held up the candle, and Graegor reached down to take it. The flame went out as soon as it met the barrier. “It does that when it gets too close,” Adlai explained, but Darcius was already getting his tinder-box from the hearth. With flint and steel, Graegor quickly relit the candle and passed the tinder-box back through.

  Darcius wore a puzzled look. He took a ring off his finger and tossed it up to the passageway. It bounced off like it had hit a wall and landed at his feet. He picked it up and held it out to Graegor. “Can you carry it through?”

  He could, as easily as he had the candle. “Try to toss it back to me,” Darcius suggested. Graegor did, and it bounced off the barrier and landed at his own feet.

  “How does it know?” Adlai wondered as Graegor reached through the barrier again to give the ring back. “You can’t pull someone through, but could you carry someone? A child?”

  “Go get the girls,” Darcius said.

  “Darc!”

  “Joking.”

  Adlai shook his head and looked back up at Graegor. “What can you see?”

  “Not very much.” Graegor stood up fully and held up the candle, which didn’t illuminate more than a few feet. “It ends here.” He tapped the wall on his right.

  “Makes sense—the window’s on this wall,” Darcius said. “What’s above you?”

  “Nothing ...” He felt along the ceiling, only a few inches over his head, but couldn’t discern anything like a trapdoor handle or lever.

  “The trapdoor in my room should be on the tunnel’s other wall—about five paces down,” Adlai said. “Can you see it?”

  “Not yet. Hold on.” He took a step, but stopped. He wanted his quarterstaff. He didn’t know what good it would be in here, since the passageways had to be empty ... no one had been here since Augustin had made his escape so many years ago ... he crouched by the trapdoor and reached his arm through the tingling barrier again. He grabbed the top of the quarterstaff from where he had propped it against the wall below. The princes’ expressions suggested that they thought this was a sensible precaution. One does not go unarmed into the unknown. He had to angle it just right to get it through the trapdoor opening, and he obviously couldn’t swing it around, but he felt better once he had it in his right hand and the candle in his left.

  After a few careful steps, the light showed another dark red Godcircle marked on the wall—the opposite wall from the first trapdoor, so it led to a different room. The square outline was easy to see, and there was a squared-off rock sticking out of the wall that could be a lever. He backed up and shouted, “I see it!”

  “We’re going over there!” Darcius shouted back, and he faintly heard their footsteps rushing out of the room.

  Graegor set the candle and quarterstaff on the floor and took hold of the lever with both hands. The noise of the stone turning from the wall was even louder in this confined space, and it seemed to grind against something in his brain even more than in his ears. Light came in, and he let go of the lever. Darcius and Adlai were right below the trapdoor with another candle, under the heavy drape of a tapestry, both grinning from ear to ear. Darcius said a foreign or slang word that evidently meant something good, because Adlai nodded emphatically.

  “Are there more that you know about?” Graegor asked them as Darcius boosted Adlai up the wall so he could unhook the tapestry.

  “These are the only ones we’ve ever opened,” Darcius said, at the same time Adlai said, “They say that every room in royal apartments has one,” and jumped down, dragging the tapestry with him away from the trapdoor.

  “Why are they so high up?—It’s offset by more than half a story, but this is the highest level of this wing, isn’t it?”

  “It is now,” Adlai said. “The fifth story collapsed before Breon’s time.”

  Graegor stood up fully again and held his candle up to the wall. A couple of feet above the trapdoor, there seemed to be the outline of another one—at least, the stone was the same size and shape—but there was no Godcircle outlined on it, and no lever. “It looks like this passageway was meant to access the fourth and fifth floors,” he called down to them. “It’s sealed up, though.”

  “We need to find more,” Darcius said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Breon’s blood, I wish I could go in there.”

  “Breon’s blood is why we can’t go in there,” Adlai pointed out.

  “Should I start exploring?” Graegor asked.

  “No, wait,” Darcius forestalled him. “We don’t want you getting lost—I’d hate to tell Lord Contare that you’ve gone missing! Adlai, do you have a ball of string or ...”

  Adlai gave him a look that suggested the sorely tried patience of all younger brothers. “Yes, I keep it under the bed with all my other cat toys.”

  “Don’t be a pain.”

  “You don’t have any, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I did.”

  “It’s all right,” Graegor said. “I’ll go just to the next one.”

  They agreed, and he straightened from his crouch and peered into the tunnel. It looked different ahead, and he poked his quarterstaff at what seemed to be a wall. He was about to shout back that the tunnel had ended—which made no sense—when he got closer and saw that only half of it had ended. The ceiling was the same height, but the floor stepped up a full yard, turning the passageway into a crawl space.

  He held the candle as far forward as he could without climbing in. It seemed that the crawl space was only a couple of paces long before it ended in a sharp left turn. He couldn’t tell what lay beyond. He ducked back down to the trapdoor in Adlai’s room and relayed this information.

  “I bet that’s right over the corridor,” Darcius suggested.

  Adlai agreed. “Right, the tunnel should pass behind my anteroom, and then you have to climb over the part where it crosses the corridor before you can get back between the walls again.”

  “I’ll go see.” Graegor went back to the crawl space. It didn’t look too cramped. He slid the quarterstaff toward the left turn, then climbed in, awkwardly trying to keep the candle from dripping on his hand. At the left turn, the floor dropped down to its prior level, and he could walk again.

  Almost immediately, the tunnel branched. One way continued north, and the other turned to the right to go east again, like the tunnel between Darcius’ and Adlai’s rooms. He peered around the corner—and there was another trapdoor, its outline plain in the lamplight, its Godcircle partly rubbed out.

  Did someone try to clean it? Was the trapdoor used so much that it wore away?

  He wondered if ther
e were bones in here. The legend said that the invaders were already in the tunnels when the sorceress had cast the spell, and that the magic had crushed them against the walls until the blood had burst from their skin.

  He shivered. How many Torchanes princes had had to come in here to clear away the remains of their enemies? Had they done it all at once, or a little at a time? Had it been a coming-of-age ritual for Breon’s sons and grandsons—gather bones and armor into buckets, one for the graveyard, the other for the smithy?

  Graegor shook his head. Stop spooking yourself. He found the lever, set the candle and quarterstaff on the floor again, and pushed with both hands. At the sudden shriek of stone on stone he nearly jumped out of his skin. He pushed harder to get it open faster, but the candle was the only light, and he couldn’t see where the edge of the trapdoor was until it hit him in the chin. He swore explosively just as two spots of light appeared in the dark room below. Darcius and Adlai ran in with candles, shouting was he all right, what had happened?

  “Nothing,” he assured them several times. “Nothing, I was just clumsy.”

  “We weren’t sure where you were,” Darcius said.

  “We just heard this awful screeching noise,” Adlai reported.

  “This is different, though,” Darcius remarked as he glanced around. “I thought the trapdoors were all in the bedchambers, but this one’s in the anteroom.”

  “Maybe that’s why we never saw it before,” Adlai said. “It’s in plain sight.”

  “You’re sure no one uses this suite?”

  “Just Lady Mathilde,” Darcius said, inspecting the underside of the trapdoor.

  “Lady Mathilde?” His voice cracked at the thought of some dowager aunt asleep in the next room, but then he saw Darcius grinning and Adlai rolling his eyes.

  “It’s a portrait,” Adlai explained. “It’s on the same wall as you are, so you can’t see it, but it’s got those eyes that look like they’re following you around the room.”

  Darcius was pulling a footstool closer to the wall, and Graegor moved back, but the barrier wouldn’t allow Darcius to poke his head in more than a few inches—not enough to let him see further down the passageway. “Does it keep going this way?”