The View From Castle Always

by Melissa McShane

  The woman continued to frown at her. “Why cannot you leave?”

  “I don’t know. I think I took the wrong thing from the Honor Hall. But you won’t have any trouble—”

  “And you are sure of this why?”

  “I…” There was no good answer to this question. “You came here for a destiny, right? So take your destiny, and we’ll see what happens.”

  The woman nodded, slowly. “My use-name is Idantra,” she said. “Where is this Honor Hall? I do not wish to linger in this Castle. It feels wrong, deep in my bones.”

  “I know,” Ailanthe said, though aside from the mannequins and the shadows she hadn’t felt anything particularly dangerous from it. “The Honor Hall is this way.”

  Despite what she’d said about leaving quickly, Idantra stared at the Hall for some time. “It seems impossible for man to have built something of this nature,” she finally said.

  “When you step into the Honor Hall, it will fill with things,” Ailanthe said, wishing she could propel the woman down the steps and onto the shining floor. “When you take one, the rest of the things will disappear, and you’ll be able to leave.”

  “So you say,” Idantra said. “Suppose I am trapped here too?”

  “There’s no way to know unless you try.” Pick her up, carry her down the stairs, as if you could lift someone that size. And she’d probably brain you with that staff. The knob at the top was carved to look like a snake’s head, though so awkwardly it was barely recognizable as such.

  Idantra took one last look around her, then strode without hesitation to the stairs. Ailanthe followed her. She almost went down the stairs before she realized the things—the Things, the Castle’s strangeness made tangible—might not appear if she were in the Hall. So she stood at the top of the stairs and watched the Things flash into sight.

  Idantra made no movement of surprise, simply began wandering the narrow paths made by the tables and cabinets. Ailanthe forced her fists to open and balanced on the balls of her feet at the top of the stairs, craning to see what the woman would choose. Was she really going to look at absolutely every item in the Hall? Ailanthe pressed her lips tightly together to avoid calling out advice. She was the one trapped in the Castle, probably by her choice of Things, and any advice she might give was probably wrong.

  Idantra stopped to look at a pile of jewelry tangled together on a tabletop. “How strange,” she said, and reached out to take a wide golden bracelet from the pile. Instantly the rest of the Things vanished, and Idantra twitched, surprised this time. She returned to the stairs, her attention on the bracelet.

  “I believed mine to be unique,” she said, passing the bracelet to her left hand and pushing up that sleeve with her right. A wide cuff of beaten gold encircled her wrist; she held up the bracelet she’d taken from the Honor Hall and displayed it to Ailanthe. It was identical to the first. “This seems a sign that I am on the correct path.” She put the new bracelet on her right wrist, where it fit as snugly as if it had been made for her.

  “The Castle is bigger than you can imagine, and there are rooms containing nothing but castoffs that don’t have a home anywhere else,” Ailanthe said. “Who knows what else it might hold?”

  “Indeed,” said Idantra. “Now show me the exit, and we will see if we can leave together.”

  Idantra’s stride was longer than Ailanthe’s, but she nearly outraced the woman to the door. “Through there,” she said, opening the inner door and waiting for Idantra to walk through. The woman looked up at the small window, which today showed a night sky and part of a crescent moon.

  “So Castle Always does exist in all places and all times,” Idantra said, her voice subdued. “What place is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ailanthe said. “Somewhere far away, probably. If you open the door, you’ll find out.”

  “How long have you been caught here?” Idantra said, her expression barely visible in the dimness of the chamber.

  “Five days.”

  “And already so eager to be gone? This Castle does not feel hospitable, true, but five days does not seem so long.”

  “It is when you have somewhere else you want to be.”

  “True.” Idantra put her hand on the latch. “Let us see, then, what will come of this.”

  She pressed down on the latch. It didn’t move.

  Ailanthe’s stomach knotted. “Try harder,” she said.

  “I am putting all my strength into this, and it is not inconsiderable strength,” Idantra said. “It is as if it was not made to move. Are you certain there are no other doors?”

  Ailanthe nodded. She didn’t think she could speak through her disappointment. “Then I suppose you’re trapped here too,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” Idantra said, again eyeing Ailanthe. “Or perhaps it is simply responding to your presence.” In an instant, the hard knob of the staff was under Ailanthe’s chin, pressing against her throat. “Back away now,” Idantra said.

  Ailanthe raised her hands. “Don’t—” she began, and the staff pressed harder, cutting her off.

  “There’s no need for violence,” Coren said. “She’s no threat to you.”

  Idantra hissed and whipped her staff around toward Coren’s head. He dodged it, stepped inside her guard and gripped the staff with both hands above hers. He twisted, and suddenly the staff was in his hands and Idantra was backing toward the outer door.

  “Get out of the Vestibule, Ailanthe,” he said, his eyes never leaving Idantra’s. He had still been exercising when the bell rang; he was half-dressed and looked sweaty. Ailanthe dodged past him and through the inner door. “You, whoever you are, count five after this door closes and you should be able to leave. And for your sake I hope you’re less willing to leap to the attack when something out there challenges you.”

  He threw the staff on the ground and had the door shut on Idantra before she could take it up again. “Back to the hall,” he said, and took Ailanthe by the shoulder and steered her into the blue hall. Ailanthe was too surprised to resist.

  They stood, waiting, until Coren said, “She must be gone now,” and released her. Ailanthe rubbed her shoulder, though he hadn’t hurt her, and stared back the way they’d come, half expecting Idantra to come leaping out of the kitchen annex with her snake-staff raised.

  “I’m sorry,” Coren said. “I thought, since you had your Thing, that maybe another quester could open the door for both of you. For me—it won’t open if I’m in range to run through it, and if someone holds the door open, it slams shut when I approach.” He hesitated, then laid a hand on her shoulder, gently. “If I’d known, I never would have given you hope like that.”

  Ailanthe turned and walked away down the blue hall, away from his touch that he probably meant to be comforting. Her mind was filled with the image of the door latch and Idantra’s hand on it, trying to force it down, and then it was the image of her own hand doing the same thing, and Coren’s, and when she came to herself she was at the top of the tower, looking out across Lindurien.

  The cushion was hard beneath her knees, barely softer than the wooden bench it rested on, and without knowing why she brushed her fingertips against it and sniffed the dust that clung to them. It was dry and bitter and smelled of dead things. Maybe they were all dead, she and Coren and Miriethiel, and the Castle kept them moving out of some deranged need to have toys to play with.

  “I really am sorry,” Coren said from behind her. She nodded.

  “I’m not angry,” she said. “It’s not your fault. I’m honestly surprised you’re still sane after six years.” She hadn’t meant to say that, it seemed like such a personal comment, when what she really meant was I’m not going to make it six years. I might not make it six months.

  “So am I,” he said. He sat down beside her and looked out the window. “I did a lot of shouting, that first year. One week I had a sort of contest to see how many rooms I could smash before the Castle put them all back together. Then I got used to the silence. I’v
e never minded being alone, and this was just more of it.”

  He traced the black window frame with his forefinger. “Sometimes I go to the Honor Hall and look at the empty floor, and think about walking down the stairs and taking something, just so I can make the door open. Then I remember being alone isn’t the worst thing that could happen to me.”

  “Before I left home I’d never slept alone in my life,” Ailanthe said. “My sister and I shared a room, and I didn’t know what silence was until I curled up on that bedroom floor and didn’t hear another person breathing.”

  “You’re sleeping on the floor?” He was trying, and failing, not to sound shocked.

  “The bed is too soft.”

  “You’ll get used to it. The Castle won’t make up the bedding if you’re in it. It’s more comfortable than waking to bare floorboards, or a carpet.”

  “I’ll remember that.” She didn’t want to get used to it. She didn’t want to get used to anything about this Castle. That reminded her of something else. “Do things in the Castle ever…come to life? Start moving on their own?”

  Coren shook his head. “Have you seen something like that?”

  She described her encounter with the mannequins, and added, “I was wondering if I should expect more of the same.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up on getting out of here. Maybe I can at least ask one of these questers to send a message for me, tell my family I’m still alive. Though they probably aren’t expecting to hear from me any time soon, since they think I’m off on a grand adventure.”

  “I wonder if the Castle would let a message through.”

  “It’s worth trying.”

  “It is. I never thought about it. Though…” Coren paused for a moment, then said, “We’d be writing in the language of the Castle, so probably no one would understand anything we sent.” He turned and sat with his back to the windows, laced his fingers together and rested them on his knee. “We could…no, that wouldn’t work. Or…no. We’d have to wait for a Hesperan or Lindurian to come here, and that might take years. Damn it. That was a really good idea.”

  Ailanthe’s heart sank again. She was going to be trapped here forever and everyone she loved would think she had died on her adventure. No. She was not going to be trapped here. There was a way out, and she would find it.

  “You’ve decided not to give up,” Coren said. He sounded amused.

  “Can you tell that just by looking?”

  “You have a very expressive face.” He smiled at her, and she felt cheered by his presence.

  “Thank you for stepping in with Idantra, back there,” she said.

  “Was that her name? She’s not going to find much success, if she thinks she can get her way by threatening unarmed people smaller than she is.” Coren stood, then seemed to realize for the first time his state of undress. “I’ll go get cleaned up, and then I’ll join you in searching. That Idantra must have thought I was some kind of Agranite savage.” He grinned again and descended the stairs out of sight.

  Ailanthe found her embarrassing desire to cry had passed. This Castle was not going to defeat her. It might be able to hold those doors closed, but she’d find a way out, and she’d take Coren and Miriethiel with her.

  She and Coren spent the rest of the day exploring that hall. Coren, against Ailanthe’s protest, insisted on investigating the mannequin room; nothing happened. The mannequins had returned to their original places. Ailanthe felt embarrassed, and wondered if Coren thought she had been imagining things, but he just shrugged and said, “Strange things happen in the Castle.” They found nothing useful, though Ailanthe exclaimed in wonder at the long gallery filled with golden treasures that had to come from some Galendish queen’s trove.

  Finally, exhausted, she went back to her bathroom and luxuriated in a hot bath, then washed her clothes in the tub and hung them up to dry. Clad in her spare clothes, she went toward the stairs and met Coren coming up, laden with food. “Hungry?” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said so fervently he laughed.

  The view from the window room at evening was extraordinary. The eastern windows showed the valley in twilight, the clouds at the tops of the cliffs turning pink and gold with the last of the sunlight. Sheep with matted grayish wool leaped from impossibly tiny ledges, unafraid of the hundreds of feet of open air beneath them. Through the western window, the ruddy disk of the sun was about to dip into the ocean, and the sky was molten gold and carnelian red above the white-capped waves throwing themselves against the shore. And through the northern windows, a blue-black sky burning with white stars hung over luminous sands stretching to the horizon. Ailanthe gazed out at the dunes and breathed, “It’s so beautiful.”

  “The Castle may be our jailor, but it has some amazing views,” Coren agreed. He offered her a leathery strip of something. “Dried meat,” he said. “Not as good as the real thing, but better than nothing.”

  “I wonder why there’s no fireplace,” Ailanthe said. She bit into the meat and tore off a strip. It was juicy once she gnawed on it for a while.

  “I can’t imagine there isn’t some way to cook food, unless the original inhabitants liked their meat raw, but I haven’t been able to find it,” Coren said. “And I don’t want to risk setting myself on fire by experimenting. But sometimes I can’t stop thinking about a nice, juicy steak, red in the middle and hot all the way through, or a leg of roast chicken—”

  “Oh, don’t start talking about that or I won’t be able to eat this,” Ailanthe said, waving the meat at him.

  “I didn’t realize Lindurians ate meat.”

  “Is this because we live in the trees, again?”

  “No, it’s because I didn’t think you had anywhere to raise cattle, in the forest.”

  “Oh. Well, we don’t raise cattle, but we keep chickens, and there are the goats out at Duathenin, and there are the plains where some of our people breed sheep. But what I really love is fish. Fresh salmon—you can’t imagine what it’s like, watching them thrash their way upstream to breed, roasting the filets over hot coals, and the salty roe….” Ailanthe looked at her meat and set it aside. “Now I’ve done it to myself.”

  “My family lives too far inland to have fish often. I’ve never cared for it. Too fishy a flavor.”

  “That means it’s not fresh enough.” Ailanthe took a small loaf of white bread and picked at it. “You know, raw salmon is pretty good, too.”

  Coren shuddered. “I’ll stick to my leathery meat, thank you.”

  “Suit yourself.” Ailanthe grinned at him. He smiled and took another bite of meat, then made a face. “Some days it’s harder for me to accept my fate than others,” he said.

  Ailanthe couldn’t think of anything to say to that. She looked at the wall—6 YRS 28 DAYS. And all he wanted was to go home. She looked back at him. He was staring out over the ocean and seemed not to notice her attention. He had a nice profile, all those sharp lines and planes—he was actually very good-looking, she thought, and flushed with embarrassment. She really must be lonely for human contact.

  She walked over to the eastern windows and watched the last tinge of color fade from the mists until the sheep looked like faint clouds against the dark cliff. But he was remarkable, she told herself, and not because he was the only other human being, the only man, she had any contact with. He’d managed to stay sane all this time and he hadn’t assaulted her, though he must be as starved for…female companionship…as any other kind of human interaction. And he still had a sense of humor.

  “Ailanthe,” he said, startling her. He beckoned to her, then pointed out the western window. At first, she saw nothing, then, far in the distance, water spouted from a sleek, dark back that crested the waves and then disappeared. She found she was holding her breath. There it was again, or maybe it was a different creature, but in either case it was so beautiful she was speechless.

  “Whales,” Coren said. “You don’t se
e them very often. Makes me wish to be out there on the waves, close enough to really look at them.”

  “They must be enormous if we can see them from this far away.”

  “They are. I read a book that said some whales get to be almost one hundred feet long. But I don’t think those are that big.”

  “That’s amazing.” He was close enough she could smell the fresh, clean scent of his soap, and it made her feel uncomfortable, as if she were intruding on his privacy yet again. They watched in silence until several minutes had passed with no more signs of the creatures, then Ailanthe went to look at the desert, conscious that she was moving out of Coren’s reach and not sure how she felt about that, other than ashamed of herself. The desert was so still it might as well be a painting. The animal she’d seen the other day was probably still out there somewhere, free to travel as she was not. She suddenly felt tired all the way to her bones. “I’m ready for sleep, I think,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”

  “My pleasure,” Coren said. He was still looking out the window. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Ailanthe nodded, though he wouldn’t see the gesture, and went back to her room, feeling dull of mind and body. It seemed darker than usual in the hall outside her room, and she was just able to think I wonder what’s wrong with the light before the shadows engulfed her.

  Chapter Seven

  It was like being pulled under the forest pool in midwinter, cold so intense it burned through every part of her. She was drowning in spider’s silk, sticky and cottony, surrounding her body and her mouth and eyes so she could hardly breathe, let alone scream. She tore at the shadows, but they barely gave way before more of them took the place of the ones she destroyed. Lights danced before her eyes, white and gold and copper and even, insanely, black. She needed more light to drive the shadows away. The lamp was in her bedroom, just beyond the closed door.

  She clawed more shadows away from her face and tried to shout for Coren, but all that came out was a choked gasp. The dancing lights were brighter and larger now, and she felt herself becoming dizzy. She staggered backward into the wall, knocked her head hard against the doorframe, and the lights vanished. If she could only find the doorknob—she could see the lamp, feel its smooth casing under her fingers—then her hand closed on something hard, and white light filled the hallway, blinding her.