by L. J. Smith
Maggie leaned to look. Outside two big calves were tethered to iron pickets. There were also a dozen trussed-up chickens and a pig in a pen made of rope.
“Those are for Night People,” Jeanne said. “The shapeshifters and witches eat regular food—and so do the vampires, when they want to. It looks like they’re going to have a feast—they don’t bring the animals here until they’re ready to slaughter.”
P.J.’s face was troubled. “I feel sorry for them,” she said softly.
“Yeah, well, there are worse things than being hit over the head,” Jeanne said. “See those cages just beyond the pig? That’s where the exotics are—the tigers and things they bring in to hunt. That’s a bad way to die.”
Maggie felt ice down her spine. “Let’s hope we never have to find out—” she was beginning, when a flash of movement outside caught her eye.
“Get down!” she said sharply, and ducked out of the line of sight of the window. Then, very carefully, with her body tense, she edged up to the open square again and peered out.
“What is it?” Jeanne hissed. P.J. just cowered on the floor, breathing quickly.
Maggie whispered, “Sylvia.”
Two figures had appeared, walking through the back courtyard and talking as they went. Sylvia and Gavin. Sylvia’s gown today was misty leaf green, and her hair rippled in shimmering waves over her shoulders. She looked beautiful and graceful and fragile.
“Are they coming here?” Jeanne breathed.
Maggie shook a hand—held low to the ground—toward her to be quiet. She was afraid of the same thing. If the Night People began a systematic search of the huts, they were lost.
But instead, Sylvia turned toward the cages that held the exotics. She seemed to be looking at the animals, occasionally turning to make a remark to Gavin.
“Now, what’s she up to?” a voice murmured by Maggie’s ear. Jeanne had crept up beside her.
“I don’t know. Nothing good,” Maggie whispered.
“They must be planning a hunt,” Jeanne said grimly. “That’s bad. I heard they were going to do a big one when Delos came to an agreement with Hunter Redfern.”
Maggie drew in her breath. Had things gone that far already? It meant she didn’t have much time left.
Outside, she could see Sylvia shaking her head, then moving on to the pens and tethers holding the domestic animals.
“Get back,” Maggie whispered, ducking down. But Sylvia never looked at the hut. She made some remark while looking at the calves and smiling. Then she and Gavin turned and strolled back through the kitchen garden.
Maggie watched until they were out of sight, chewing her lip. Then she looked at Jeanne.
“I think we’d better go see Laundress.”
The hut Jeanne led her to was a little bigger than the others and had what Maggie knew by now was an amazing luxury: two rooms. Cady was in the tiny room—hardly bigger than an alcove—in back.
And she was looking better. Maggie saw it immediately. The clammy, feverish look was gone and so were the blue-black shadows under her eyes. Her breathing was deep and regular and her lashes lay heavy and still on her smooth cheeks.
“Is she going to be all right?” Maggie asked Laundress eagerly.
The gaunt woman was sponging Cady’s cheeks with a cloth. Maggie was surprised at how tender the big red-knuckled hands could be.
“She’ll live as long as any of us,” Laundress said grimly, and Jeanne gave a wry snort. Even Maggie felt her lip twitch. She was beginning to like this woman. In fact, if Jeanne and Laundress were examples, the slaves here had a courage and a black humor that she couldn’t help but admire.
“I had a daughter,” Laundress said. “She was about this one’s age, but she had that one’s coloring.” She nodded slightly at P.J., who clutched at the baseball cap stashed inside her tunic and smiled.
Maggie hesitated, then asked. “What happened to her?”
“One of the nobles saw her and liked her,” Laundress said. She wrung out the cloth and put it down, then stood briskly. When she saw Maggie still looking at her, she added, as if she were talking about the weather, “He was a shapeshifter, a wolf named Autolykos. He bit her and passed his curse on to her, but then he got tired of her. One night he made her run and hunted her down.”
Maggie’s knees felt weak. She couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be colossally stupid, so she didn’t say anything.
P.J. did. “I’m sorry,” she said in a husky little voice, and she put her small hand in Laundress’s rough one.
Laundress touched the top of the shaggy blond head as if she were touching an angel.
“Um, can I talk to her? Cady?” Maggie asked, blinking fast and clearing her throat.
Laundress looked at her sharply. “No. You won’t be able to wake her up. I had to give her strong medicine to fight off what they’d given her. You know how the potion works.”
Maggie shook her head. “What potion?”
“They gave her calamus and bloodwort—and other things. It was a truth potion.”
“You mean they wanted to get information out of her?”
Laundress only dignified that with a bare nod for an answer.
“But I wonder why?” Maggie looked at Jeanne, who shrugged.
“She’s a witch from Outside. Maybe they thought she knew something.”
Maggie considered another minute, then gave it up. She would just have to ask Cady when Cady was awake.
“There was another reason I wanted to see you,” she said to Laundress, who was now briskly cleaning up the room. “Actually, a couple of reasons. I wanted to ask you about this.”
She reached inside her slave tunic and pulled out the photo of Miles that she’d taken from her jacket last night.
“Have you seen him?”
Laundress took the picture between a callused thumb and forefinger and looked at it warily. “Wonderfully small painting,” she said.
“It’s called a photograph. It’s not exactly painted.” Maggie was watching the woman’s face, afraid to hope.
There was no sign of recognition. “He’s related to you,” Laundress said, holding the photo to Maggie.
“He’s my brother. From Outside, you know? And his girlfriend was Sylvia Weald. He disappeared last week.”
“Witch Sylvia!” a cracked, shaky voice said.
Maggie looked up fast. There was an old woman in the doorway, a tiny, wizened creature with thin white hair and a face exactly like one of the dried-apple dolls Maggie had seen at fairs.
“This is Old Mender,” Jeanne said. “She sews up torn clothes, you know? And she’s the other healing woman.”
“So this is the Deliverer,” the cracked voice said, and the woman shuffled closer, peering at Maggie. “She looks like an ordinary girl, until you see the eyes.”
Maggie blinked. “Oh—thanks,” she said. Secretly she thought that Old Mender herself looked more like a witch than anyone she’d ever seen in her life. But there was bright intelligence in the old woman’s birdlike gaze and her little smile was sweet.
“Witch Sylvia came to the castle a week ago,” she told Maggie, her head on one side. “She didn’t have any boy with her, but she was talking about a boy. My grand-nephew Currier heard her. She was telling Prince Delos how she’d chosen a human for a plaything, and she’d tried to bring him to the castle for Samhain. But the boy did something—turned on her somehow. And so she had to punish him, and that had delayed her.”
Maggie’s heart was beating in her ears. “Punish him,” she began, and then she said, “What’s Samhain?”
“Halloween,” Jeanne said. “The witches here normally have a big celebration at midnight.”
Halloween. All right. Maggie’s mind was whirring desperately, ticking over this new information. So now she knew for certain that Sylvia had gone hiking on Halloween with Miles, just as she’d told the sheriffs and rangers. Or maybe they’d been driving, if Jeanne’s story about a mysterious pass that only
Night People could see was true. But anyway they’d been coming here, to the Dark Kingdom. And something had delayed them. Miles had done something that made Sylvia terribly angry and changed her mind about taking him to the castle.
And made her . . . punish him. In some way that Maggie wasn’t supposed to be able to guess.
Maybe she just killed him after all, Maggie thought, with an awful sinking in her stomach. She could have shoved him off a cliff easily. Whatever she did, he never made it here—right?
“So there isn’t any human boy in the dungeon or anything?” she asked, looking at Laundress and then Mender. But she knew the answer before they shook their heads.
Nobody recognizes him. He can’t be here.
Maggie felt her shoulders slump. But although she was discouraged and heartsick, she wasn’t defeated. What she felt instead was a hard little burning like a coal in her chest. She wanted more than ever to grab Sylvia and shake the truth out of her.
At the very least, if nothing else, I’m going to find out how he died. Because that’s important.
Funny how it didn’t seem impossible anymore that Miles was dead. Maggie had learned a lot since coming to this valley. People got hurt and died and had other awful things happen to them, and that was that. The ones left alive had to find some way of going on.
But not of forgetting.
“You said you had two reasons for coming to see me,” Laundress prompted. She was standing with her big hands on her hips, her gaunt body erect and looking just slightly impatient. “Have you come up with a plan, Deliverer?”
“Well—sort of. Not exactly a plan so much as—well, I guess it’s a plan.” Maggie floundered, trying to explain herself. The truth was that she’d come up with the most basic plan of all.
To go see Delos.
That was it. The simplest, most direct solution. She was going to get him alone and talk to him. Use the weird connection between them if she had to. Pound some sort of understanding into his thick head.
And put her life on the line to back up her words.
Jeanne thought the slaves were going to be killed when Hunter Redfern and Delos made their deal. Maggie was a slave now. If the other slaves were killed, Maggie would be with them.
And you’re betting that he’ll care, a nasty little voice in her brain whispered. But you don’t really know that. He keeps threatening to kill you himself. He specifically warned you not to come to the castle.
Well, anyway, we’re going to find out, Maggie told the little voice. And if I can’t convince him, I’ll have to do something more violent.
“I need to get into the castle,” she said to Laundress. “Not just into the kitchen, you know, but the other rooms—wherever I might be able to find Prince Delos alone.”
“Alone? You won’t find him alone anywhere but his bedchamber.”
“Well, then, I have to go there.”
Laundress was watching her narrowly. “Is it assassination you’ve got in mind? Because I know someone who has a piece of wood.”
“It . . .” Maggie stopped and took a breath. “I really hope it isn’t going to come to that. But maybe I’d better take the wood, just in case.”
And you’d better hope for a miracle, the nasty voice in her mind said. Because how else are you going to overpower him?
Jeanne was rubbing her forehead. When she spoke, Maggie knew she’d been thinking along the same lines. “Look, dummy, are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, he’s—”
“A Night Person,” Maggie supplied.
“And you’re—”
“Just an ordinary human.”
“She’s the Deliverer,” P.J. said stoutly, and Maggie paused to smile at her.
Then she turned back to Jeanne. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but it’s my only idea. And I know it’s dangerous, but I have to do it.” She looked awkwardly at Laundress and Old Mender. “The truth is that it’s not just about you people here. If what Jeanne told you about Hunter Redfern is right, then the whole human world is in trouble.”
“Oh, the prophecies,” Old Mender said, and cackled.
“You know them, too?”
“We slaves hear everything.” Old Mender smiled and nodded. “Especially when it concerns our own prince. I remember when he was little—I was the Queen’s seamstress then, before she died. His mother knew the prophecies, and she said,
“In blue fire, the final darkness is banished.
In blood, the final price is paid.”
Blood, Maggie thought. She knew that blood had to run before Delos could use the blue fire, but this sounded as if it were talking about something darker. Whose blood? she wondered.
“And the final darkness is the end of the world, right?” she said. “So you can see how important it is for me to change Delos’s mind. Not just for the slaves, but for all humans.” She looked at Jeanne as she spoke. Laundress and Old Mender didn’t know anything about the world Outside, but Jeanne did.
Jeanne gave a sort of grudging nod, to say that, yeah, putting off the end of the world was important. “Okay, so we have to try it. We’d better find out which slaves are allowed in his room, and then we can go up and hide. The big chambers have wardrobes, right?” She was looking at Old Mender, who nodded. “We can stay in one of those—”
“That’s a good idea,” Maggie interrupted. “Everything but the we. You can’t go with me this time. This is something I have to do alone.”
Jeanne gave an indignant wriggle of her shoulders. Her red hair seemed to stand up in protest and her eyes were sparking. “That’s ridiculous. I can help. There’s no reason—”
“There is, too, a reason,” Maggie said. “It’s too dangerous. Whoever goes there might get killed today. If you stay here, you may at least have a few more days.” When Jeanne opened her mouth to protest, she went on, “Days to try and figure out a new plan, okay? Which will probably be just as dangerous. And, besides, I’d like somebody to watch over P.J. and Cady for as long as possible.” She gave P.J. a smile, and P.J. lifted her head resolutely, obviously trying to stop her chin from quivering.
“I really do need to do it alone,” Maggie said gently, turning back to Jeanne. Somewhere in her own mind, she was standing back, astonished. Who would have ever thought, when she first met Jeanne in the cart, that she would end up having to talk her out of trying to get killed with Maggie?
Jeanne blew air out pursed lips, her eyes narrowed. Finally she nodded.
“Fine, fine. You go conquer the vampire and I’ll stay and arrange the revolution.”
“I bet you will,” Maggie said dryly. For a moment their eyes met, and it was like that first time, when an unspoken bond had formed between them.
“Try to take care of yourself. You’re not exactly the smartest, you know,” Jeanne said. Her voice was a little rough and her eyes were oddly shiny.
“I know,” Maggie said.
The next moment Jeanne sniffed and cheered up. “I just thought of who’s allowed up into the bedrooms in the morning,” she said. “You can help her, and she’ll lead you to Delos’s room.”
Maggie looked at her suspiciously. “Why are you so happy about it? Who is it?”
“Oh, you’ll like her. She’s called Chamber-pot Emptier.”
CHAPTER 15
Maggie shuffled behind Chamber-pot Emptier, heading back toward the castle. She was carrying piles of folded linen sheets given to her by Laundress, and she was doing her best to look like a slave. Laundress had smudged her face artistically with dirt to disguise her. She had also sifted a handful of dust into Maggie’s hair to dull the auburn into a lifeless brown, and when Maggie bowed her head over the sheets, the hair further obscured her features. The only problem was that she was constantly afraid she was going to sneeze.
“Those are the wild animals,” Chamber-pot Emptier whispered over her shoulder. She was a big-boned girl with gentle eyes that reminded Maggie of the calves tethered by Laundress’s hut. It had taken Laundress a while to make her un
derstand what they wanted of her, but now she seemed to feel obligated to give Maggie a tour.
“They’re brought in from Outside,” she said. “And they’re dangerous.”
Maggie looked sideways at the wicker cages where Sylvia and Gavin had walked earlier. From one a brown-gray wolf stared back at her with a frighteningly sad and steady gaze. In another a sleek black panther was pacing, and it snarled as they went by. There was something curled up in the back of a third that might have been a tiger—it was big, and it had stripes.
“Wow,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to chase that.”
Chamber-pot Emptier seemed pleased. “And here’s the castle. It’s called Black Dawn.”
“It is?” Maggie said, distracted away from the animals.
“That’s what my grandpa called it, anyway. He lived and died in the courtyard without ever going in.” Chamber-pot Emptier thought a moment and added, “The old people say that you used to be able to see the sun in the sky—not just behind the clouds, you know. And when the sun came up in the morning it shone on the castle. But maybe that’s just a story.”
Yeah, maybe it was just a story that you could see the sun in the sky, Maggie thought grimly. Every time she thought this place couldn’t surprise her anymore, she discovered she was wrong.
But the castle itself was impressive . . . awe inspiring. It was the only thing in view that wasn’t dusty brown or pallid gray. Its walls were shiny and black, almost mirrorlike in places, and Maggie didn’t have to be told that it wasn’t built of any ordinary human stone. How they had gotten it to this valley was a mystery.
Delos lives here, she thought as Emptier led her up a stone staircase, past the ground floor, which was just cellars and storage rooms. In this beautiful, frightening, impressive place. Not only lives in it, but commands it. It’s all his.
She got just a glimpse of the great hall, where she’d seen slaves setting a long table yesterday. Chamber-pot Emptier led her up another floor and into a series of winding corridors that seemed to go on for miles.
It was dim in this internal labyrinth. The windows were high and narrow and hardly let any of the pale daylight in. On the walls there were candles in brackets and flares in iron rings, but they only seemed to add wavering, confusing shadows to the twilight.