The View From Castle Always

by Melissa McShane

  She reached out to touch a beautifully embroidered handkerchief, and an urge to pick it up struck her so powerfully she jerked her hand back. She could feel, deep in her bones, that the Castle wanted her to choose something. If this was how it determined her destiny, she wasn’t going to pick up the first random object she saw.

  She made her way to the back of the room, where a squat cabinet with slim, curved legs stood, its top piled with coins of different metals and sizes in irregular stacks. Ailanthe wanted to pick them up to look more closely at them, see what distant foreign lands they came from, but she put her hands behind her back to resist the temptation and instead bent to get a closer look.

  In leaning forward she saw, hanging from one of the lower doorknobs, a key on a short silver chain. It was made of gold and had silver tracings all down the shaft. It was so unusual, an ordinary object made from such precious material, that she reached out and took it in her hand.

  Between one blink and the next, the room was empty. Ailanthe straightened and looked at the key in her hand. This definitely looked magical. The silver lines flowed across the golden shaft like trickles of argent water. It looked as if it might open something extraordinary, like a chest full of treasure or a box containing the breath of the North Wind. She looped the chain around her wrist—it was too short to go around her neck—and went back up the stairs. It was time to find the exit. Maybe she would be lucky, and the Castle would let her out where she’d entered.

  A movement caught her eye, something furtive, and she tensed. Suppose she wasn’t supposed to take anything, and the Castle had servants to enforce that? Whatever it was had been small, low to the ground—she looked across the flagstones and saw a black and white animal approaching from the direction she’d come from. A cat.

  She moved cautiously toward it; it could still be dangerous. But it merely twined around her legs and rubbed its head against her shin. She scratched its head. “Are you the Castle’s guardian, then?” she asked. “Because if you are meant to welcome guests, you’re late.” The cat’s purr was inaudible, barely more than a vibration. Ailanthe scratched its head a little longer, then straightened. “I don’t suppose you can show me the way out?”

  The cat either didn’t know the way out, or he didn’t feel like helping, because he just followed Ailanthe down halls and through rooms as she looked for the exit. She wandered for a long time until the rooms blurred together, most of them so opulent and strange she felt out of place, like a bird trapped indoors. Several rooms seemed dedicated to foreign cultures; she’d read about Indrijan in one of her family’s books, and here were robed mannequins dressed the way the Indrijanese had looked in the pictures, and one of their stone-bladed plows, and the machines that did everything from make their wheeled carts go to create books bound in leather and gold.

  Finally she came to a corridor tiled in gently pitted red stone with a comfortably low ceiling. Leading off the corridor were store rooms, pantries, and a kitchen filled with more cabinets and drawers than she had ever seen. The cat leaped onto the big stone-topped counter in the center of the room and flopped over to lie on it, but Ailanthe didn’t stay to investigate further. She passed through more store rooms until she came to an ancient wooden door bound with iron. Its knob was in the exact center of the door, and a small barred window at the top revealed only a dim glow.

  The door opened easily on a short, low-ceilinged corridor, no more than ten feet long and half as wide, paved with the same large stones as the vaulted passageway. The mortar here was almost entirely missing, though she saw no dusty chips; it all looked much older than the rest of the Castle.

  At the far end was another iron-bound door, though this one had a latch rather than a knob and its small window had glass instead of bars. Through the window, Ailanthe saw clear, bright daylight, not the cool light of the forest but a hot, blinding light that left her blinking and seeing its dark inverse when she closed her eyes. Ailanthe set her hand to the latch and pressed down on the thumb lever. It didn’t move.

  She laid both her palms on the lever and pushed down, hard. Still nothing, not even a minute shift that would tell her it was simply stiff with disuse. It might as well have been a decorative handle, fixed to a door that wasn’t a door but one of those museum displays.

  She searched the door with her eyes and her fingers, feeling for the real latch, or a keyhole, or anything that might open it. She pressed the whorls on the door, hard as iron itself, pushed every rivet and bolt she could find, tried to fit her fingers between the door and the jamb, thinking wildly that she might pull the door open with her fingertips alone. It didn’t respond to anything she did.

  She was trapped inside Castle Always.

  Chapter Two

  She leaned against the wall, panting not from exertion but from fear. She’d done something wrong, failed to perform some step, and now the Castle wouldn’t let her go. Or she’d taken the wrong thing. She lifted her wrist to look at the key hanging there. Well, she could go back and return it, take something else. Maybe she was supposed to take the first thing her eye fell on. Maybe she was supposed to take something symbolic of what she sought.

  Or maybe there’s something wrong with me, maybe it’s rejecting me the way the trees have, she thought, retracing her steps at a sedate pace; she wasn’t afraid, this was a temporary problem, nothing to worry about. But her steps came more quickly despite her efforts, and when she reached the flagstone passageway she was almost running.

  She trotted down the stairs and waited. Nothing happened. She backed up, tried again, but the room remained empty. She walked slowly across the patterned floor and removed the key from her wrist. “I’m sorry I took the wrong thing,” she called out, and set the key on the floor a short distance from her feet. “I’m putting it back. I’m ready to choose again.”

  Nothing. The key glimmered on the floor and its reflection glowed dully. Ailanthe sat on the steps. The key lay there unmoving. The room remained empty. Ailanthe clenched her hands and willed herself to breathe slowly, regularly, not to pant in rhythm with her racing heartbeat. She was not trapped in Castle Always. She just hadn’t found the way out.

  She left the key where it was and retraced her steps to what she’d thought was the outer door. There must be another one I’ve overlooked. I’ll just have to be more thorough.

  She began opening doors, feeling her way around the windows and walls; maybe the glass swung outward, leaving a gap she could crawl through, or maybe there were doors concealed in the panels of dead wood covering some of the walls. She searched for what felt like hours, went through dozens of rooms, and found nothing.

  Eventually she ended up back in the vaulted stone passageway, where in despair she leaned against the wall, pressed her cheek against the cold stone, and stared blankly down its length; it gave her the momentary illusion that she was lying on the ground, looking out across the floor. The cat came trotting along the passage toward her, appearing from that perspective to be walking along the wall. She ignored him when he once again butted his head against her legs.

  Banazir’s lore was clear: go in, take your destiny, go out again. It said nothing about the possibility that the Castle wouldn’t let you go. Ailanthe couldn’t think what she’d done wrong. Was it the key? Why would the Castle present her with that object if no one was meant to take it? She didn’t even have it anymore, so why couldn’t she open the door?

  She fought back panic. Someone else would eventually come to the Castle, and that person would open the door, and she would walk out with him. Unless the Castle traps him too. Unless the Castle is broken. The panic tried to turn into a scream, which she muffled with her hands. She’d lived all her life in the shelter of the wide forest, and these walls and doors of dead wood were starting to close in on her, trying to choke the life out of her—no, that was ridiculous, she was being ridiculous, and she needed to stop being a fool.

  She stood erect and thought for a moment. There was food back there in the kitchen; there
must be people here to eat it, or else what was the point? Maybe one of them would know a way out. Her stomach growled at the thought of food. She’d been searching all morning without rest, and the stone-hard biscuit she’d eaten just after dawn had not filled her. She would eat, and then she would find a place to sleep, and perhaps in the morning the Castle would have changed its mind.

  She took a few steps, and hesitated, then descended the stairs once more and crossed the floor to where the gold key shone. “I chose you, so you might as well stay with me,” she said, and looped the chain around her wrist. The key felt warm, as warm as her own skin, though the silver lines were a cool contrast and tickled her palm as they moved. Ailanthe examined it again. It would be interesting to see what lock it opened, though the size of the Castle made it unlikely she would ever find its hiding place. Assuming it opened something here.

  She moved off in the direction of the kitchen, the cat at her heels, trying not to think about the possibility that she might have plenty of time in which to seek it out.

  She took a different route this time, down a long hallway tiled entirely in tiny squares of blue of all possible shades, with curling borders of gold marking off sections of the walls and more gold tiles making circles and crosses at random along the floor. Windows looked out on a gray, depressing courtyard with a couple of spindly trees and thin grass trying to hold its own against the clayey mud it was growing in. Across the courtyard, Ailanthe could see the Idrijian room; her heart leaped to see human figures there before she remembered the mannequins.

  She was almost at the back door before she realized she wasn’t the only one making noise. Someone was in one of the kitchen rooms, someone who moved without attempting to be stealthy. The cat put its ears back—was that a good sign, or bad?—and bolted forward around the corner. She stayed where she was, trying to calm her heart. Now that she was nearly face to face with one of the Castle’s inhabitants, her earlier eagerness deserted her. Suppose the person attacked her? She didn’t belong here, after all, and the people who did might not like intruders.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, then quickly opened her eyes so whoever it was wouldn’t come upon her unawares. She needed to get out. This could be the Castle’s way of giving her an exit. She took another deep breath, then walked around the corner and into the kitchen.

  The man had his back to her, busying himself in one of the giant store rooms nearly the size of the kitchen. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed plainly in loose trousers and a short-sleeved tunic with a sword belted to his waist, and his long brown hair was tied back at the base of his neck. The cat was trying to tangle itself around his legs, its purring now barely audible at the limit of her hearing.

  Ailanthe was about to clear her throat to announce her presence when the man turned around and jumped in surprise, juggling his armload of food. “You’re still here,” he said.

  It wasn’t at all what she’d expected him to say, and it left her groping for a reply. “Was I supposed to be gone?” she finally said.

  “Yes,” the man said. He had a strong, angular face and brown eyes that were uncomfortably direct. “Didn’t you take anything from the Honor Hall?”

  Ailanthe held up her wrist with the key dangling on its chain. “But the door won’t open.”

  He continued to gaze at her with that steady expression. “The door always opens after you’ve made your choice. Maybe it’s stuck.”

  “You’re stronger than I am,” Ailanthe said, eyeing the well-defined muscles of his arms and his broad shoulders. “Will you open it for me?”

  The man shook his head, making the hoop in his right ear quiver. “It won’t open for me.” He set his armful of food on the counter in the center of the room, then bent to pick up a fruit with a pebbly orange skin that had fallen to the floor and rolled a short distance away, chased by the cat. “Not even if I try to open it for someone else.”

  “But—if you can’t get out, you must know why I can’t!”

  “It’s not the same.” He looked at the fruit in his hand, then set it on the pile. “I can’t help you. The Castle must have some reason for keeping you here.”

  “But—” Ailanthe closed her mouth on the rest of the sentence, not sure what it might have been. “But I can’t stay here! I was supposed to go on a journey so I could return home!”

  “I’m sorry.” The man began gathering food into a more stable pile. “You should eat something. The food won’t hurt you.”

  She put her hands on the counter and heard the key go clink against the white stone top. She quickly raised her hand again. “Could this be what’s keeping me here?”

  The man shook his head. “None of those things are magical. The Castle gathers them up from all over itself and takes the rest back after a quester chooses something. I don’t think it has anything to do with where it sends people.”

  Ailanthe looked at the key again. It had to be magical; how else could the silver streaks move like that? “I—no, wait!” she said, seeing the man was heading out the door with his pile of food. “What’s your name?”

  The man looked at her as if she’d asked him to give up some secret. “Coren,” he said finally.

  “I’m Ailanthe. Can I…can I come with you? The Castle is so quiet…” Her voice trailed off in the face of that level gaze. He seemed to be considering her, and she wondered how she looked, disheveled from sleeping rough in the forest for four nights. She wondered what he would do if she slapped him, or pinched him, anything to get a reaction out of that still, expressionless face. She felt as if she were beginning to go mad in the face of his silence.

  Eventually, he shrugged. “Take what food you want,” he said, and waited for her to gather bread and apples and a round of cheese, the only foods she recognized that didn’t require cooking.

  Clutching her food and a wax-sealed bluish glass bottle of what had turned out, when she picked at the seal, to be water and not alcohol, she followed Coren back down the blue-tiled hall and around the stone passageway to a flight of steps broad enough for ten people to climb at once, arms linked. They climbed and climbed until Ailanthe, who’d never seen more than ten stair-steps in one place before, was out of breath and felt the prickle of sweat start under her arms.

  The stairs changed as they passed each landing, going from shallow carpeted steps to steep unvarnished wooden ones to stairs covered in a strange green material that gripped Ailanthe’s shoes like a burr clinging to her shirt. Brightly lit hallways led off the stairs’ landings. Some of them had long rows of windows through which she could see the ocean, or the scrubland desert, or a range of snow-blown mountain peaks. She longed to explore those corridors, but obediently followed Coren instead. If she wandered off, she might not be able to find him again.

  Eventually the stairs ended, and Coren went down a hallway with white rough-textured walls that was lit by more of those glowing hemispheres, then through a door set into a carved wooden arch. Ailanthe followed him, her leg muscles burning, past a bedroom the size of the kitchen and into a spacious chamber with a ceiling twenty feet tall and floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. She’d never seen so much glass in one place. Coren put his load on the floor, and Ailanthe did the same.

  “I use those padded boxes as chairs,” Coren said. “They might actually be chairs. The Castle has a lot of furnishings that make no sense.”

  He took a stiff white rectangle as wide as his outstretched arms off a stand in the center of the room and laid it face-first against the inside wall; Ailanthe had time to recognize something was painted on it before it was hidden. He next moved the stand over to the same wall, then removed his sword and laid it on one of the boxes. He dragged another box over to the eastern windows and settled there with the pebbly orange fruit.

  Ailanthe selected her own box and pushed it over to the northern windows. Now that she was here, wherever here was, she felt awkward about intruding on this man’s…well, it seemed to be his home. Had he lived here his whole li
fe? Was that even possible? He sat peeling away the bright orange rind of the fruit, revealing a paler orange meat veined with white inside, and stared out the window as if he’d forgotten she was there.

  Ailanthe bit into a crusty loaf of fresh bread and sighed at how soft and rich it tasted. The window looked out over sand dunes that stretched as far as she could see. Wind rippled the tops of the dunes, then a tiny creature, unrecognizable at this distance, came trotting over a crest. Ailanthe stared at it in fascination, turned to point it out to Coren, and realized his window had a very different view from hers. The eastern windows overlooked a narrow valley through which flowed a shallow stream. The walls of the valley were sheer granite cliffs that rose high above the Castle, the tops shrouded in fog.

  Ailanthe went up to the glass and pressed her forehead against it, trying to see the base of the Castle far below. “Are we at the top of the Castle?” she asked.

  Coren startled again. Maybe he really had forgotten she was there. “Yes,” he said. “There’s only one place taller, and the door is locked.”

  “If it’s locked, how do you know it’s taller?”

  “I read about it in a book.” He pulled the orange meat apart into neat sections and ate one, then glanced at her. “Where are you from?”

  “Lindurien.”

  He offered a section of fruit to her. “You won’t have had this before. Be careful, there’s a lot of juice.”

  She took it from him and bit, carefully, and was surprised when juice spurted into her mouth and down her chin. It was sweet and tangy and delicious. She caught the drips in her other hand and pushed the rest of the fruit into her mouth, and was rewarded with another burst of juice she kept her lips carefully closed over. She swallowed, wiped her chin, and licked the last drops of juice from her palm. “What is it?” she asked.