by Andre Norton
“My mistress left no such order,” she returned.
He shrugged. “Perhaps it was forgotten. I understand your mistress now has weighty concerns—she tends Vazul himself—the Chancellor having gone to his bed with ague.”
Willadene was aware he was watching her closely, yet seeming under half-closed lids to have his gaze fastened on the basket.
“My mistress was summoned for her skills yesterday,” she answered quietly. “As to whose bed she was summoned I do not know. If the Chancellor ails may the Star grant him swift recovery.”
He gave a snickering laugh. “Oh, sooner or later he will doubtless be stalking among us again, that devilish creature of his wrapped around his neck. Perhaps he should take care lest it someday tighten muscles and cut his breath. So—” he picked up the basket “—I am to tell the Lady Zuta I know nothing of her order—or do you?”
“It is not here,” the girl replied. “Doubtless it will be made up for her as soon as my mistress returns.”
Again he snickered. “Yes, half the ladies of the towers will be sending their own orders. Though by all reckoning it would take Heart-Hold itself to gain them what they want the most—a king’s son lawfully in their beds. Your mistress will find her trade growing the closer our hero approaches.”
He was openingly sneering as he took the basket and went out. Certainly Willadene could see there was a measure of truth in his scoffing. When Prince Lorien came there would be again a steady increase in the luxury trade. New robes would be ordered, older ones sent to be refurbished with fresh embroidery and laces, the bounty of the herb shop would be called upon.
Heart-Hold, that one name was strong now in her mind. She hunted out the ancient herbal in which she had read the remnants of the tale concerning it. Certainly, had such a plant still existed, it would have again come into sight during the centuries since that first harvesting. Perhaps the whole story was a concealment for a charm—and the secret of its unraveling long since lost.
The book opened almost of its own accord at the page she had puzzled over so many times. Not only was the writing cramped and faded here but there were names and terms so old she had had to search them out in other guides, and there were a number she could not yet translate.
She was slipping her finger along the edge of that most important page when for the first time she made a new discovery—that this parchment leaf was thicker than the one lying before and the one lying after in the book. She had just drawn closer the shelf lamp and was preparing to light the second when once more the door opened.
That smell was one she could not forget. Willadene pushed the book under the counter and turned to face Figis. Again he seemed to have climbed several steps higher in the world, though the old odors of the inn still clung to him. As before he was wearing more decent clothing—his rags gone—though it was far from clean, dribbles of ale slicking his jerkin. His wild mane of tumbled hair had been partly shorn and there was the shadow of some hairs, perhaps more carefully tended than the rest of his person, across his upper lip.
He stood just within the door, hands on hips and one pointing suggestively at a knife which was more short sword than the ordinary tool worn by all free men. So— Figis must have ended his apprenticeship. He would have been well beaten by Jacoba had he dared to flash steel where she ruled.
Now he was drawing deep sniffing breaths, and then his mouth worked as if he would spit but did not quite dare.
“Master Wyche has him a bellyache,” he announced baldly. “He wants something as will take it away. Where’s your mistress, girl?”
He swaggered forward to the counter, his eyes still making darting searches of the shop.
“She attends one gravely ill,” Willadene answered as she had the whole day through. “As for Master Wyche’s ill—”
She did not completely turn her back on him as perhaps he wished, but rather quickly slipped open a drawer and brought out one of the waiting packets they always kept made up. “That will be two coppers.” She laid it on the counter.
She wanted him out of the shop. Now she had been able to pick up a faint whiff of that stench which had always cloaked Wyche’s fat body—evil. Figis had been spiteful, cruel of nature in the past, but now he was turning into something else.
He dropped the proper coppers on the counter and twitched the packet toward him.
“Your mistress, she’s got a lot of queer knowledge.” He grinned, showing a broken tooth. “Jus’ you hope, girl, as how it don’t do her in.”
What lay behind that ambiguous threat Willadene was not to learn, for the Twilight Bell boomed over their heads, fairly shaking the walls about them. He looked startled and was out of the door into the dusk. Willadene reached under the counter for the book after she had put up the shutters and set the night bar on the door. With it under her arm she went into the living quarters, trying to shrug off the uneasiness Figis’s words had left with her.
11
It was not only Mahart who was to dream deeply and to remember what she so dreamed that night. Perhaps it was the whirl of many scents which had surrounded her all day that now led Willadene to her own deep-held private place. She felt this was so real that the moss under her hands, the faint breeze stirred against her, were as alive and in this night world as firmly as she. Her body was stretched even as she might have rested in her bed, but facedown, on the very lip of a rock-walled drop. Though it was night she could see as clearly as if she had cat’s eyes set in her skull—clear sight, even clearer smell.
That crevice in the earth over which her head protruded was narrow; she hardly believed that she could squeeze into it to descend. Still below, there was a pale radiance and as her gaze centered on that her sight seemed to grow even keener.
It was far below, something within Willadene told her that, and she believed that, save for this strange heightening of eye power, she could not honestly see what stood stem erect, leaves fanned out about it. It was no single color, though it was pale as moonlight itself, for the faintest traces of many hues appeared to ripple across its petals. In form it was not too different from the lilies Willadene had seen carefully painted in the Herbmistresses’s books, and its heart was hidden by the bell of petals about it.
Heart—from even that deep distance below her perch Willadene was able to draw such an intoxication of pure scent as made her almost believe that she had been Star-favored with some flower from that future world they were assured waited those of goodwill.
However, against her will, for she would have lain there happily forgetting time, she braced her body upward until she was sitting and the crevice was merely a dark line, the blossom’s faint light hidden. But her keenness of sight did not disappear. Instead it was as if she were held by some power and then gently turned, marking about her tumbled masses of ancient masonry overgrown with vines, rent apart by trees—no—they were huge ferns! And she understood that this was a sending, such as she had heard of—a setting in her mind of something to come.
In her tower chamber Mahart thought also of another world. There was a new supply of incense to be burned and to her it was very necessary that it be done this night. She said nothing to either Zuta or Julta concerning it, playing the role of one fain to be left to sleep. However, once the door had closed and only the night-light still gleamed she slipped from the great bed.
For a moment she stood gazing at that stretch of wall. During the day she had had the strange feeling that what she heard there—or thought she had heard—was not to be shared. But it was not strange noises in hidden ways which moved her now. She eagerly set the small brazier by her bed and into it spooned some of the lumpy powder from the box which had been delivered from Halwice’s shop. A snap light caught at it quickly, and Mahart sat for a moment on the edge of the bed watching the curls of smoke arise before she cuddled down among her covers and firmly closed her eyes.
Time had no part in these dreams. She could never tell how long it was before she stood in the meadow of flowers.
Yes, stood, for tonight she was fully aware that she possessed a body; she did not even have to raise her hands and touch herself for reassurance. Also the colors this time were sharper, brighter, though she did not feel the full rays of the sun which must hang somewhere overhead.
There were birds, and their songs reached her ears, while fluttered about her butterflies of such splendor of color as she had never seen—far different from the few pallid, winged creatures which sometimes could be sighted in the dreary rose garden.
But her inner eagerness was not for the flowers, or birds, or butterflies, making this dream more alive than any she had ever had. It was the fact that she was certain she was no longer alone. However, when she swiftly swung around, she saw no one, just a break in the meadow where a copse of trees encroached upon its carpet.
Now she did fling out her hands, sweeping them through the air, hoping to so touch what she could not see, blindly seeking that other.
It was as if she thirsted for something she could not put name to—a warm feeling which had never been given her? Mahart had no name for the core of that longing. Yet that in time she would find what she so hunted, she swore in the deepest part of her—determining that nothing would turn her from that quest. And, at the same moment she fastened upon that thought, the meadow world was gone.
At first she was disoriented as one awakened roughly from sleep and stared about her in the gloom. This was her own bedchamber in the tower. She pounded her fists upon the roll of the cover over her. No! No! To be snatched away so— Though it had been years since she had cried, having discovered that to allow any hurt to move her so meant little, she felt now the tears in her eyes, slipping out on her cheeks.
Only, in that same moment what must have drawn her out of that sweetest of dreams, sounded again. She turned her head sharply to face the wall. That rustling sound— and now a single sharp note as if metal had struck the stone. Yet there was nothing to be seen save the three straight pieces of tapestry worked with faded flowers which had been there all her life as long as she could remember.
The strips did not cover the wall. Between them carved paneling made dark bars. Mahart, having shrugged on her fur-lined robe and thrust her feet into slippers, paused only to light one of the stronger lamps, before, with that in hand, she approached the wall.
She shouldered aside the middle tapestry, fighting down a sneeze from the dust that action disturbed, and put her head tightly against the strip of paneling. No, she had not been mistaken. There came a second sound, though much fainter, of metal scraping stone.
Oddly she felt anger instead of fear. If there were passengers in these walls about her very bedroom, had she perhaps been spied upon through peepholes for the past years? She scowled. That thought fed her anger into something approaching rage.
Now Mahart held the lamp very close to that aged wood. The carvings were simple, a vine border which ran along the full outer rim of the wooden slab with a stiff stand of flowers to center it. Yet as she now surveyed the panel closely it seemed to her rather to suggest a door of sorts, rather than the sturdy casing of a wall.
Remembering the ancient legends which had kept her so enthralled when she had read them, she began with one hand to push methodically each leaf of that vine she could reach, thumb hard against the heads of the flowers. If there was an entrance here to hidden ways, she knew she must, for her own safety, discover it.
So far, the panel remained stubbornly immobile. Now she put the lamp on the top of a chest and began trying to insert fingernails under the edge of the panel itself. As she broke a second nail she knew that the problem was not to be so solved. A visit to her dressing table supplied her with a pair of shears, the points of which she tried to lever into that possible crack.
Her anger had given birth to stubbornness—she was going to find out what might lie behind. After three jabs she paused as another thought struck her. Once more she visited the dressing table, this time to return with a jar of scented cream.
What good that might do she had no real understanding, but memories of hasps and hinges which had been oiled to make them manageable lingered. With the points of the shears she steadily worked to outline the wooden panel, having to reach well overhead to insert her tool in the line appearing there.
Then once more she used the points, with determination and all the strength she could summon, along the right-hand edge of the wooden panel. Almost she could have cried aloud in triumph as she felt something reluctantly give under that prodding. Instead she turned and, shears in hand, went to the door of her room. Though Julta had never ventured, as far as Mahart knew, to intrude upon her mistress’s chamber unless summoned, there was always a chance that an unlatched door could betray her, so she slipped the small bar into place.
A second run along that crack, for she could see now it was a crack, opened it yet farther. At about the height of her own shoulder the blades struck a barrier and she wriggled, pushed, jabbed with the scissors. However, it was doubtless chance alone which solved that ancient lock. She felt the shears suddenly slip deeper inward and she gave them a vigorous pull toward her.
The noise which answered was enough to near make her cower, but she neither stepped back nor halted in her task. That harsh grating ended in a snapping sound and the panel swung out, knocking her back toward the bed. Panting, Mahart stared at what she had uncovered.
There was an opening right enough, perhaps not as wide as the conventional door to this chamber but undoubtedly a portal. She was shaking a little now, from both excitement and that uneasiness which struck from the unknown.
Lamp in one hand, the shears in her other, she forced herself into that dark hole. What lay beyond was indeed a very narrow passageway. Even by this feeble light she could see it was carpeted with thick dust. But that dust had been disturbed, stirred, and there was a broken cobweb hanging down the rough wall beyond.
With head and shoulders within the opening now, Mahart could see that, though the passage ran straight along the inner wall of her chamber, not far away there were steps leading up. She withdrew to sit on the edge of her bed and think.
Prudence would dictate that she summon the nearest guardsman and demand a thorough search. Only what if this was one of her father’s secrets? What if he had never been as indifferent to her as she had believed and had had some watch kept on her by means of this burrow?
He thought of her as a tool to be used to make safe his throne—she was well aware of that. On the other hand, Vazul, in his roundabout communications to complete her education in the secret eddies of court intrigue, had made it very plain that her father felt he only ruled by sufferance and expected at any moment to have some form of revolt break forth.
She could not imagine the Lady Saylana using such a passage for spying purposes. But the Lady Saylana doubtless had her own eyes and ears to report to her, even as Vazul kept such a system.
Mahart made up her mind swiftly. No, if there were going to be secrets hedging her in, she was going to have a few of her own. She might need them even as a guardsman needed sword and shield—and she had no intention of sharing this one—as yet.
It did not take her long to strip off robe and night rail, to pull on instead the breeches she wore under her divided riding skirt, a heavy shirt—for the air within that opening was chill—and a hunter’s quilted jacket.
Though she had no skill with any weapon but a knife, she chose the longest and perhaps the deadliest of those— a hunter’s weapon—and made no attempt to sheath it. A second visit to the outer door assured her that the latch was set, and now she dared to wedge it tighter with a bodkin from her worktable.
Taking up the largest of the room lamps which could be easily carried she lit the flame, reassured by the wash of oil within it when she moved it. So with fire and steel in hand she ventured into the unknown.
There were two choices—right or left. She made a quick selection toward the right and that flight of stairs she could see. Dust puffed under her boots, and once t
here was a wink of light to her right which she quickly put eye to— a peephole just as she had thought might exist.
The light was very dim, just enough to show two trundle beds. One stripped and not in use and, curled on the other, Julta! So Mahart realized that she had reached the third floor of her tower. But the steps continued to lead upward, and those she followed, trying to keep both her footfalls and her breathing as noiseless as possible.
She stopped almost in mid-step. There was a murmuring from above. Surely voices, but so low-pitched she could not make out separate words. Straining ears, she listened. No, there was no variation in those tones, even as there was no sign of light above— Whoever waited there was not on the stairs.
Mahart drew a deep breath. Retreat would be easy. She was reasonably sure she could conceal all the signs of her night’s venture. But not to know who these night crawlers in the walls were—no, somehow she could not turn back from that!
Three steps more. Now the murmuring was louder, but it came from her right, surely from beyond the wall against which her shoulder now and then brushed. Once more she caught a lighted eye hole and it drew her past all thoughts of prudence.
There was more light in this room and it was crowded. It must have been wholly a storeroom until boxes and chests had been dragged aside to clear a place on the floor—a floor which was not dusty. Two of those chests, piled one on the other, stood across the frame of the normal entrance. It seemed plain that those within came and went by the hidden stair.
And the room was certainly in use. There were a number of lamps, all tended to give the best light, perched at intervals around where the floor had been cleared and swept. The center of the space was occupied by a thick matting, seemingly put together of a number of faded and even torn bedcovers, folded into a pallet on which lay a man.