They had learned how close they were to the castle through a chance meeting with another band of treasure hunters in a tavern three days’ ride to the east. She had heard of it before, of course, and the retreating hunters had repeated what had consistently been rumored among their kind—that no one had ever been able to enter the castle, so it was probably filled with loot should anyone manage to get inside.
It was enough for her father. Geb and Finch were chafing for a payday, so the four of them had travelled to the castle to try their luck. Zara had tried to find out more about its past, but she had no access to books or records and the people, Erathi or not, seemed strangely close-mouthed about the abandoned seat of a long-dead queen. It bothered Zara, but there was no stopping the men when they had a goal in mind.
Once they arrived in the valley, they had prepared for a protracted hunt, hoping to chance upon some hidden ingress. Much to their surprise—and Zara’s dismay—the great door at the front of the castle swung open with an experimental push.
Had everyone lied about not being able to get in? And if not, why was it open now? She’d been curious, of course, but wary. She’d heard enough tales of Erathi sorcerers to wonder whether there might actually be some truth to them. After all, there had to be a reason why Erath had remained so isolated and mysterious for hundreds of years.
But her father claimed not to believe in magic, so they entered the great hall and camped there for about three days, exploring a little farther each day. On the third night, about sunset, a wind arose out of nowhere, spinning through the hall, bringing a host of shadows and a blast of wintry cold. Suddenly her feet had seemed swallowed up by the stone, and a roaring sound surrounded them, blending with the echoes of her own terrified screams. It felt like standing alone in the center of a whirlpool, at least until the great doors slammed shut and locked themselves behind Geb and Finch. Her father had fled even faster.
The castle itself did not terrify her as much as it probably should have, with its wind and shadows and whatever ghosts still lingered in its halls. She had experienced no further incidents since the men’s departure, and even if she had, Zara had been exploring buried tombs, abandoned temples and mysterious caverns since she was ten years old. There was little to frighten her in something so simple as wind, no matter where it might have come from. The locked doors and the silence, though… That was another matter.
So she made as much noise as she could without feeling silly as she began her descent from the tower. The stairs wrapped around the outside of the wall, probably to protect the space on the inside from cold during the winter months. Zara had found access to a few of the tower rooms, but there was definitely a space where no doors were evident. She’d been half hoping to find a trapdoor in the room at the top, but the floor had been disappointingly solid.
A task for another day. It was a mercy, really, the sheer size of the place. There seemed to be no end to the rooms and halls she could explore. No end, as long as she did not attempt any of the outer doors. Disabling locks of all kinds had been her specialty since she was very young, but there were no actual locks to defeat—only wood and stone that had simply refused to budge once her father and Geb and Finch were on the outside.
At the bottom of the tower, Zara took a right-hand turn down a long hallway carpeted in faded blue, though the carpet was the only evidence of habitation to be seen. The recesses that might have held torches or candles were empty, and the walls featured evenly spaced patches of slightly discolored stone, where she assumed paintings or tapestries had once hung.
It was curious, the barren emptiness, especially when one considered the tales told of this place. Erath had frequently featured as the subject of legends, lying unexplored by outsiders for centuries until its destruction some thirty years ago. But even after the land itself lay open and empty, ripe for the plucking, the castle had proven impregnable.
All across Erath, abandoned houses crumbled into ruin, though even the earliest looters had turned up little of value. The terrain was too wooded for much farming, and the passes difficult to reach. No one wanted to settle it, so it became a refuge for raiders and lawless bands of predators who needed a place to hide from the laws of other lands.
And as the years turned and people came and went, the castle at the heart of the desolate kingdom kept its secrets.
Zara wished it had gone on keeping them. She could imagine few secrets less thrilling than a cold, empty castle, especially one that stank of magic. Doors did not lock and unlock themselves and wind did not simply appear out of nowhere. Her father might disregard such things as stories to frighten children, but he also believed if he drank enough his hair would never fall out. Or so he claimed. Zara had learned at a very young age not to take her father’s assertions too seriously.
At the end of the hall, she turned left, and then right, through an iron-bound oaken door that opened onto a grand balcony. The sweeping staircase at the center led down into a vast entryway, where even the echo of her footsteps seemed ashamed of trespassing.
Zara stomped harder out of sheer annoyance. If she could have scraped dirt off her boots and left it on the enormous rose mosaic in the center of the floor, she probably would have. The castle had clearly been impressive once, and had it been filled with light and color and voices it might have been a pleasant place to live. But as a prison and very possibly her tomb, it left rather a lot to be desired.
Out of every place she’d explored, the grand entryway left her feeling the smallest and most alone, so she hurried across it and passed under an archway on the other side. The passage beyond had a low, arched ceiling that made it feel like a tunnel, but it was better than the soaring emptiness of the entry. At the other end of the tunnel were what Zara had determined were probably servants’ quarters and kitchens.
She had appropriated the smallest of the kitchen fireplaces for her use, and kept the fire there going at all times. She never lit any of the others. It meant that she was cold any time she stepped out of that corner, but there was no sense in being greedy. Though the stack of wood in the scullery was large, and should last for several years at the rate she was going through it, she had no idea when her imprisonment was likely to end. As long as she kept the kitchen warm, she was unlikely to freeze.
Food was eventually going to be problematic, but not yet. She tried not to consider too hard the fact that in a castle so empty it didn’t even have cobwebs—a castle that had proven impenetrable for thirty years—there had been a stack of wood, a generous supply of grain, and enough root vegetables and jerked meat to meet her needs. Such things kept well, but they were still perishable fare, and ought to have already succumbed to mold or simply shriveled into dust.
The water, too, that flowed from the kitchen pump was clear and unspoiled.
But Zara simply ate and drank and asked no questions, because, really, what choice did she have? What choice had the wretched castle given her? If the food and drink was enchanted and turned her into a monster to haunt the place for the next hundred years, what could she do about it?
Dinner that night, as every night, was stew that had simmered over the fire while Zara was exploring. The meat was tough and stringy and the broth was thin, but Zara had eaten worse. Frequently. Itinerant treasure hunters did not generally eat well, and considering that she was a better cook than any of the men, it was probably a wonder none of them were dead.
As she did every night, Zara ate her way down to the bottom of her bowl and left the last few bites. Then she set the bowl off to the side, pulled off her boots, and waited.
And just as it did every night, the cat meandered in before more than a few minutes had passed.
It was a female, mottled gray, with numerous scars and part of an ear missing. Nevertheless, she possessed a certain dignity that Zara could not help but admire. She would enter on silent paws, then sit beside the bowl Zara had left. After a minute or two of an unblinking, green-eyed stare, the cat would finish the stew and lick the bowl. The
n she would stretch and wash her front paws and wander over to rub herself against Zara’s legs. She never purred or permitted Zara to pick her up, but Zara treasured each and every gray hair that adhered itself to her patched leggings. It felt like proof that the cat was real and that she had not yet gone crazy from the silence and the solitude.
And because the silence was thick and the shadows close, while the cat shared her kitchen, Zara talked. She felt like an idiot, but she talked, sometimes about what she had done that day, sometimes about the past. The cat never seemed to notice, except for the occasional flick of an ear, but Zara didn’t care.
She wished the cat would stay, and sleep beside the fire, but it never did. After her evening ritual, after Zara had talked on for a time, the cat would leave as soundlessly as she had come, and Zara would be alone once more to fortify herself against the cold, endless night with bitter, useless longings.
Sometimes she wasn’t even certain what she was longing for. Something else. Something other. Certainly something other than an enchanted castle. It wasn’t that she had spent her entire life feeling discontent. She couldn’t even imagine living like any of the other girls she’d known—tied to one place and confined by expectations. But to have someone besides herself that she could talk to, someone who might care what she had to say or what she was feeling—that, to Zara, might be considered a greater treasure than any she had yet found.
Dezarae her father had named her. Desire of his heart. His one true treasure. But in truth, the only treasure he seemed to care about most of the time was the kind that glittered. The kind that could be sold. Her mother had learned that truth sooner than Zara and drifted away from her family both in dreams and in drink by the time Zara was six. After her mother died four years later, Zara had travelled with her father, and for the first few years, she had loved it. The thrill of travel, of danger, and of discovering the unknown had been a heady experience for a young girl with a taste for adventure. She was, in many ways, every bit the treasure hunter her father was, and sometimes better. But by the time she was twenty, she yearned for more. For friends. For a home. For some place to rest after their adventures. And every year, her father would promise her that they would one day have a home. That she would have a dowry and he would find her a husband and she would not have to travel with him anymore.
This last bit had never seemed very appealing. If she married, her husband would expect her to wear dresses and cook and have babies. She would never again experience the joy of awakening to an unfamiliar horizon, or pitting her skills against an unexplored labyrinth. For her, the true treasure was not the objects they carried away, it was the getting there—the journey into history that so few would ever have a chance to experience.
But. A home? That she would have given much for. And it was the one thing she knew she would never have. Not as the itinerant daughter of a perpetually impoverished treasure hunter who was all charm and promises and no substance. He would plan and spin visions of the future out of nothing, and when he was finished, nothing was exactly what she would have. And at thirty years old, she was unlikely to have many chances to be anything else. Adventuring was all she knew how to do.
Before she slept, Zara firmly put aside thoughts of the outside. She could not bear to wonder whether her father was trying to find her or looking for another way in. Because the moment she let herself think about whether or not he was trying to get to her, she had to consider the possibility that he wasn’t. That he had given up and left her behind. That no one would ever find her and she would die, alone, in this echoing pile of stone.
And on that cheery thought, Zara fell asleep.
Next morning, after dining on cold mush and the dried up carcass of an apple, Zara donned her leather vest and her tool belt, banked the fire, and set off on the day’s exploring. She didn’t really know what she was looking for. Rumor proclaimed that the castle must be home to astonishing treasures, given the strength of its enchanted protections, but considering that in the past three months she had found quite literally nothing of value, Zara was ready to consider the rumors little more than drunken exaggeration.
But if she didn’t do something she might lose both hope and what was left of her mind, so she kept on. There was a crude map of places she’d already searched, drawn in charcoal on the wall in the kitchen, next to her tally of the days she’d been trapped. Thus far, most of her adventuring had been in the upward direction, as she hadn’t felt quite ready to find out what lay below ground. But, given that she had discovered nothing but stairs, she couldn’t imagine there was much more to fear below. Shadows had never hurt her yet, and she doubted there was anything worse to avoid.
After she returned to the grand entry, Zara paused to consider what she knew of the castle’s construction. From the outside, the castle had been built on a low rise in the center of a valley. The ground sloped gradually away from its flanks, revealing a rocky foundation beneath the ruins of the castle gardens. If there was anything beneath the castle, it must have been tunneled out of solid rock, and probably would have been built beneath the most stable, most inaccessible part of the structure—the center.
On one of her first days trapped in the castle, Zara had found a small, insignificant-looking door in the back of what she’d assumed to be a closet. When she picked the relatively simple lock, there was nothing but a narrow set of stairs, leading down into darkness. At the time, she’d slammed the door and relocked it, because even when one was unafraid of the dark, there was something horrible about the idea that if anything was down there, it could come up out of the depths any time it felt like it.
Of course, if anything really was down there—and still alive—a locked door was unlikely to stop it, but by now she’d regained enough of her professional dignity to pretend it didn’t scare her. Much.
The door was still there, and still locked. She shouldn’t be relieved by such a thing, but she was, and her relief no longer even surprised her. Considering what else the castle had done, it could probably make a door disappear if it wanted.
The lock was as she remembered it, and the stairs were just as dark, but this time she held her torch a little higher and started down, after using one of her tools to prop the door open. It occurred to her, not for the first time during this ordeal, that if she encountered anything hostile, she had no way to defend herself. She had never carried a weapon and would have little idea what to do with it if she had.
On their crew, she had been the solver of locks and puzzles, good with numbers and finding hidden things. If anything needed slaying, one of the men took care of it. Despite his distaste for work, her father was passably skilled with a sword, and though he had never attempted to train his daughter, neither had she ever cared to learn. On this occasion however, Zara suspected that she might have felt better with something wickedly sharp to hide behind.
The stairs curved as they went down, much as she’d expected. After three spirals, they let out into a hall that was narrow, but did not appear designed to be inhospitable. There were hooks on the wall, probably for lanterns, and the floors were of smoothly joined stone with a pattern in different colors. The stone glittered in the light of her torch, tiny flecks of some shiny mineral reflecting the fire back at her.
Zara decided to go right. If she was not mistaken, that direction should take her back under the entry hall, under the heart of the castle. Though when she thought about it that way, it seemed a little ominous.
As she walked she let her fingers trail across the wall, feeling how smoothly the stones had been finished, sensing a care that was unusual for a part of a building that would rarely, if ever, have been in the public eye. People had walked here, once. People who belonged, who knew the purpose of these halls and who had a purpose there themselves. The thought made her feel even more alone, so she shoved it away and watched for irregularities in the floor or walls.
The corridor came to an abrupt end at another nondescript door, but this one, like the main doors into t
he castle, had no lock and no handle. It was simply closed, and if it was anything like the main doors, it would refuse to budge. Zara gave it a halfhearted push and was rewarded by an easy swing inward, as though the hinges had been oiled only yesterday.
A jolt of excitement darted through her stomach as she peered into the dark space beyond and, for the first time, saw something that piqued her interest.
The room was perhaps eight to ten strides across and perfectly round. The floor, she noted as she held the torch closer, was not of plain, rough stone, but of highly polished marble in shades of gold, pink, gray, black, and what she thought might be a pale green. Each piece was fitted so seamlessly that even Zara’s father might have agreed it had to have been done by magic. And as she walked further in, it became clear that the colors made a picture. There was some kind of pattern in it, that she could probably understand easily if she could see it all at once. She looked around the walls for a way to get up higher, and then noticed a pedestal in the exact center of the room.
Heart pounding, Zara moved closer. After a few moments, she realized she was trying to walk without making a sound and stopped to roll her eyes. Moving more normally, she stepped up to the base of the pedestal. It was empty, of course, but there was writing on it. Traced in gold, the letters curled lovingly around the column and shone brilliantly in the light of her torch. The pedestal had to have been intended for some important purpose. Some object must have rested on it. There was a slight indentation in the top, irregular in shape, but whatever had once lived there was obviously long gone.
Stifling disappointment, Zara turned to the rest of the room. There did not appear to be any other doors. Nor were there any niches in the walls. Realizing with a wry twist of her lips that she could be desecrating an important cultural artifact, she managed to pull herself up on the pedestal and crouch on top to get a better look at the floor. What she saw took her breath away.
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