Next time I saw him, I was going to sock him. Again.
We made it up one more level, and as we turned a corner, Mor murmured, “Oh.”
I forgot myself and looked at the ground.
A servant girl, younger than Diggy and me, and a guardsman I recognized. He had stood watch outside the dining hall doors during meals. He always nodded as I passed into the room to take my seat at Queen Braith’s table.
A slit gaped across the girl’s throat, and the guardsman’s stomach was slashed open.
Warmil knelt to examine the wound. “Their attackers had blades.”
Surely he was right, but I had no thought for such practical matters. My mind spun. Who were they to each other? Had he died protecting her? Was this his lass? His sister? Had they merely happened to be in the same place when a flood of rebels spilled into the palace?
What was his name? I had never asked, and now I would never know.
Grief swelled inside me until I felt there wasn’t enough room in me to hold it all.
“Tannie, don’t look.” Mor pulled me gently.
“I know him,” I choked around my tears and the smell of rot. “He guarded the dining hall.”
“Aye, that’s right.” Mor tugged me again. “Come on.”
“I didn’t know his name.” My voice rose, and I knew I was practically shrieking. “Mor, what was his name?”
He put his arm around my shoulders and led me away. “I don’t know either. Maybe we can find out.”
Somehow, I couldn’t cry. The swollen grief tamped down my tears, stoppered them as if I were a bottle.
Father paused before a door at the end of the hall. “The infirmary is here.” He turned to Zel. “Son, are you—”
But Zel didn’t even wait for him to finish. He pushed through the door.
And the rest of us followed him into a bloodbath.
CHAPTER SIX
TANWEN
“Ifmere!” Zel shouted.
Silence answered him.
I covered my mouth with both hands. I wanted to cover my eyes, but somehow, I wasn’t able to.
Splashes of blood spattered everything. A place of healing—usually clean, white, crisp—was painted as if by a murderous child.
Braith’s physicians and their assistants—people who had helped Karlith care for Gryfelle when she’d stayed here—lay crumpled on the mattresses where patients usually reclined. Broken glass was scattered across the floor like fallen leaves. One patient remained in bed, white as the sheet beneath him, but his face was still peaceful. As though he had been unconscious in his final moments and hadn’t known to be afraid. Hadn’t known to scream.
I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, then Diggy appeared from behind me, sprinting across the room and drawing a knife. Before anyone had time to say stop, she’d dived behind a bed at the far corner of the room. She reappeared a moment later, yanking a girl up with her.
Diggy’s fingers laced through the girl’s ashy-blonde hair as she pulled her head back to expose her neck. The knife, unsurprisingly, rested blade-first against the girl’s throat.
The lass’s eyes popped wide, and she looked too terrified even to scream.
“Diggy!” Mor shouted. “Don’t hurt her!”
“I won’t.” Diggy tilted her head to one side. “Not yet.”
The girl whimpered.
“Diggy, be careful,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “Don’t nick her.”
“She was hiding. Sneaking.” Diggy squinted. “She’ll know something.”
Father took a step toward them, one hand out. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to calm the girl or Diggy. “What’s your name, lass?”
“L-Lany,” she squeaked, leaning away from Diggy’s dagger.
“Lany, can you tell us what you’re doing here?”
“Cleaning up. Steward’s orders.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to do nothin’ wrong.”
Father still held a hand toward Diggy and Lany. “You didn’t, lass. Can you tell me what happened here?”
“Rioters. The steward’s rebels came and took the castle. I didn’t do nothin’ with that.” She glanced down at Diggy’s blade. “They rounded up some folks to help clean.”
“Where do you live, child?”
“I ain’t a child. Just turned eleven!” But she sucked in a breath as Diggy tightened the distance between the knife and her throat again.
“Diggy!” Mor pleaded. “She’s just a child.”
Diggy frowned. “I didn’t stab her.”
I bit back a sigh. I knew she wouldn’t hurt Lany unless the girl gave her a reason to. But Lany didn’t know this. And Diggy didn’t seem to see the cruelty in frightening the lass.
Was that the kind of thing you could teach someone? Someone who had gone feral in a Spice Island jungle?
I hoped so.
Lany flinched. “I live in the city. In a pub with my mam. Mam runs the bar, and we live upstairs.”
“Does that mean they’ve killed all the servants?” I wondered aloud. “If they’re recruiting from the city . . .”
“Digwyn, she’s just cleaning up the room she’s assigned to,” Father said to Diggy, his tone soothing and as fatherly as it was when he spoke to me. “We can let her go, don’t you think?”
Diggy considered this. Then she released Lany with a small shove. “Watch yourself, though. It’s dangerous around here.”
She didn’t seem to see the irony, and Mor sighed—mingled relief and exasperation.
Lany looked like she might have a few choice words for Diggy, but she clamped her mouth shut.
“They ain’t here,” Zel said suddenly. He had been checking the bodies, apparently, searching for his wife and son. The comfort of not finding them among the dead was not enough to blot out his panic. “I need to check the other rooms in the wing.”
Now that I thought about it, I was sure Ifmere and Dafyth had been moved to the private rooms before we left. They shared a room like the one Gryfelle had spent most of her time in.
Zel and Mor disappeared, Warmil close behind them.
But Father focused on the peasant girl. “How long ago did the rebels come?”
“Five days past, I think. Maybe seven.”
“And what did they do to the queen?”
The girl’s eyes lit—more with the novelty of such a thing than malice, I thought. But still it made me ill. “They took ’er, right out of the palace gardens. I saw it, even.”
She had Father’s full attention. “You saw her?”
“Well . . .” Lany bit her lip. “I didn’t see that part, exactly, but one of the other girls who lives at the pub did, and she told me.” She looked at me knowingly. “My mam doesn’t like her mam.”
I could tell Father was fighting to keep his voice even, exercising every ounce of his considerable patience. “Lany, I need you to tell me everything you know about what happened to the queen. This is very important.”
“They took her. Her and that one noble. Sir somebody.”
Helpful.
Father’s brow furrowed. “Sir Dray?”
“No, not him.” Lany laughed. “Haven’t heard a thing about him since the trial.”
Blast. We had missed a lot. Had Dray been executed at last?
“Who, then?”
“The queen’s suitor.”
Stars.
“Anyway,” Lany continued, “they dragged them through the streets of Urian—and that part I did see with my own eyes—then they stormed the castle. Took it over. No one was ready, and it wasn’t that hard. Once you get past the walls and all. And if the guards ain’t expecting you and ain’t organized and there’s no leaders because you got to them first, well, you just run down the halls and kill people, I guess.”
Brilliant.
Father paused for a long moment. “Lany,” he said. “This is the most important part now, so I want you to think very hard about what you saw. When they dragged out Queen Braith an
d the nobleman . . . were they alive?”
Lany pursed her lips. “I think so. They had cloth tied round their eyes, and I don’t see as why you would do that if they was dead. They wasn’t awake, though. And the man was bleeding.”
My breath hitched. I didn’t know who this man was, but if he truly was Braith’s suitor, I certainly wanted him to be alive and well.
“Bleeding from where?” Father asked.
“His head. Like he’d been hit.”
“And the queen?”
“We’re not supposed to call her that anymore.” Lany brightened. “I seen her once before, you know! When she wasn’t knocked out and being dragged away. She was so pale. Like a cup of grazer milk. I never seen a person so pale. Mam would think I was sick if I was so pale.”
Father and I shared a glance, and I could tell he was thinking what I was. She had told us all she knew, and the rest of what we would get would be the random musings of a child.
“Thank you, Lany,” Father said. “This was very helpful.”
Lany beamed, then glared at Diggy. “She was not helpful, thanks much. I could do without seein’ her again.”
Couldn’t say I blamed her on that one.
Mor’s, Zel’s, and Warmil’s voices carried in from the hallway, and I supposed we should go face whatever they had found.
The rest of us turned to leave, then I stopped. “Lany?”
She glanced up from where she was already kneeling beside a bucket of bloody water, rinsing a rag. “Aye?”
“Did you see which direction they took Lady Braith and the nobleman?”
“North,” she said immediately.
“You’re sure?”
“Aye. I remember. Because Rae—that’s my friend—Rae said they was taking them to the river and heading north, and I remember Rae’s mam saying it would be cold this time of year if they went too far north. Then she said she’d like to go south to Meridione for the winter, if only it weren’t full of Meridionis.”
I cringed. Dylun stood right beside me. He seemed not to notice the child’s careless comment—or else he was so accustomed to hearing such things he didn’t react anymore.
At least not on the outside.
We met up with the others in the hall. I made eye contact with Mor, silently begging him to give me good news.
“They’re not here,” he said.
Best news we could hope for at the moment, short of finding them safe and alive right where we had left them that balmy summer morning.
A chill late-autumn breeze whispered across my shoulders, as if to whisk away the memories. I shivered. I hadn’t noticed how drafty a castle could be. I guessed I’d only lived in one during the spring and summer moons.
Zel looked twice his age, lines of concern creasing his face. “Where could they be? There were no bodies. No babies and no mothers or nurses. It looked like someone grabbed a few things from the chest in Ifmere’s room before they left.”
“Could have been somebody ransacking the room afterward,” Dylun mused, then looked pained. “Forgive me, Zelyth. I didn’t mean to be unfeeling.”
Zel’s face pinched tighter. “I don’t know where to look.”
“They might have gotten out,” I said. “Would she have gone back home? Back to Hauplan? She could have blended in with the peasants easily enough. Perhaps she made her escape.”
“I don’t know that she would have had the presence of mind to get away. She’s . . . innocent. Kind. Like a light-foot. If danger came, I’m afraid she’d—” His voice caught. It took him several moments to collect himself. “I’m afraid she’d just freeze. And not know what to do or how to fight back or flee.”
“But she had her son, didn’t she?” Diggy looked at Zel.
“Aye, I believe so.”
“Then she would know what to do. She’s a mother. She would protect her child.”
I spun to look at Mor. “She’s right. I once saw the sweetest woman you’d ever met beat away a pack of hungry fluff-hoppers with a stick because they were coming for her wee twins.”
His eyebrows rose. “A whole pack of fluff-hoppers? By herself?”
“Yes. With only a stick. Ifmere would do the same for Dafyth.”
Diggy shrugged. “It’s just nature.”
I glanced at Father. He was staring intently out a window. “Father?”
He jumped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I believed . . . that is, I assumed that wherever Queen Braith had been taken . . .” Uncertainty filled his words.
Realization clicked in my mind. “That Cameria would be with her.”
“Yet Lany didn’t mention a maid or servant or advisor.”
“Only the suitor nobleman.”
I closed my eyes. Cameria was anything but a light-foot. She most certainly would not freeze. Or shrink. If she had been with Braith at the time Braith was taken, she would have fought. That meant Cameria was most likely dead.
And if that was the case, there was nothing we could do to help that now.
But if she hadn’t been with Braith—if they had been separated at the time the palace was stormed—where might she be?
Anywhere.
If she heard trouble, what would she do?
Fight back? Maybe. But that would be hopeless with so many peasants and legions of Brac’s goons running roughshod through the halls.
My eyes popped open. “She would protect others,” I said. “She would have tried to protect those who needed help. People who were vulnerable or unable to defend themselves.”
“Like infants and mothers.” Hope kindled in Father’s expression. “She might have come here.”
“Here or any of a hundred other places,” Dylun said. “How will we know?”
“Father,” I asked, “if she had come here or somewhere others needed help, what then? Where would she go next?”
“She would take anyone she was protecting to safety.”
“Aye.”
His eyes went wide. “She would hide them.”
And in the same breath, Father and I both knew exactly where she would have gone if she’d had the chance. We turned and ran for the staircase that led to our old apartments.
I could take the stairs three at a time in my trousers. I didn’t know if I’d ever wear a dress again.
We stumbled across a few more peasants from the city who had been assigned to clean up the carnage of Brac’s coup. And we skirted around far, far too many bodies. But we didn’t meet any of those green-suited soldiers on our way to the place that had been my family’s home in the palace.
The hallway that led to our apartments was like a graveyard. I tripped over a noblewoman in a fine dress and forced myself to look at her face.
Though the unseeing eyes and blue skin altered her appearance, I recognized her. A woman who ate at the queen’s table most meals. Someone Braith had known from childhood, maybe?
I couldn’t remember now. But we had spoken several times. Just niceties over our wine at dinner. But that was enough to make bile rise in my throat at the sight of her lifeless body.
Mor didn’t need to pull me away this time. I wanted to run and never look back. To get to our private chambers and search for them. Any of them.
Please, Creator. Let someone be alive.
We burst in through the door—unlocked.
Zel looked crestfallen. “If she were here, she’d have bolted the door, surely.”
But I had been expecting this. “Follow me.”
I moved toward the bookcase, but as I took a few more steps into the front room, the stench of blood and death nearly knocked me to my knees. This wasn’t like the drafty hallways or the large, open infirmary. This was a close space, the small windows shut tightly.
And someone had died in this room.
I scanned the ground, the furniture, everything. There was a spray of blood across Father’s writing desk. Books and papers shoved to the ground—signs of a struggle.
But no body.
Father and I both darted to the bookcase behind his desk—the one with the open back. Father could reach the false stone hiding the lever without standing on a chair the way I had to. I slipped my mother’s necklace over my head and handed it to him. He pressed the twisted knot of metal into the hollow on the false stone.
A click. He wiggled the false stone from its place to reveal the lever. Then he pulled.
The whole bookcase budged away from the wall and swung outward on hidden hinges to reveal a pitch-black hallway—the darkened secret tunnels in which my father had lived for thirteen years.
Father pulled back the bookcase to allow more light to flood the passage. I didn’t wait another moment. I bolted into the darkness.
And was met with the tip of a sword.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TANWEN
My boots skidded against the stones just in time. I stopped a hairsbreadth from the point of a blade I vaguely recognized.
It was one of Father’s swords. The one he kept in his bedroom.
“What the—”
“Halt,” a lady’s voice commanded from the darkness. “Take one step further, and I will run you through faster than you can spit.”
I believed her. I lifted my hands in surrender. “Don’t spear me, please.”
A long pause. And then, “Tanwen?”
“It’s me.”
The sword lowered, and a woman stepped into the light—the woman who belonged to the softly accented voice. The woman threatening to run me through. Her silky black hair fell over her shoulders, disheveled but still beautiful. She blinked in the light like it assaulted her eyes, and I wondered if she had been back here all five days.
But it was definitely her. No mistaking it.
“Cameria.” Father rushed to her.
His sword fell from her hands and clattered to the stones. “Yestin, my lord.” Despite the formality, she threw her arms around his neck. Her shoulders wracked with great, heaving sobs. “I knew you would come. I knew, if it was at all possible, you would come for us.”
Us.
As she spoke, figures emerged from the shadows behind her. So many I wondered how they all fit, how deep these tunnels must run throughout the palace, and what number of people were, at this moment, jammed inside. They were women and children, all of them, and it seemed everyone had some sort of battle scar. A hastily bandaged wound, a torn shirt or skirt, dirt or blood smeared on their clothing.
The Story Hunter Page 4