“Don’t scowl, Kymber.” Magnus bent and rolled one of the dead guards onto his back. “Dereliction of duty is a crime punishable by death. We gave them a far more merciful end than King Garai would have, had he caught them at their games.”
“I know. It’s just…they didn’t expect it, that’s all.”
“Fortunate for us.” Magnus tugged at the ties on the man’s leather jerkin. “Help me get his clothes off before they’re all bloody.”
I crouched beside him. “Why?”
“If it gives an advantage, use everything available. Don’t you remember that lesson?” He smiled. “Behold, the Pentorian uniform complete with body armor. Not only will these things provide us with a disguise, but their outer jerkins are made of thick leather. The chainmail is dense, but light and flexible.” Magnus hoisted the soldier up to a sitting position. I slid the leather vest off and pulled the hauberk over the dead man’s head.
“I remember,” I said, though I truly hadn’t until he mentioned it. “Which one of the interior sentries will be the first to notice the one guard wandering the halls in a uniform that’s three sizes too big for her? Most of these men . . .”
“Take the clothes off the one you killed. He’s the smallest.” Magnus stripped down to his underclothes. “If they won’t fit, I can always bind your wrists and pretend I’m bringing you in as a prisoner.”
“No. I don’t like that idea at all.” It would be just my luck to meet Garai in a dark hallway, with me already trussed up like a hog bound for the spit.
I stared at the body peeking out from under the bottom branches of the lacy pine. Only his hips and legs were visible, but Magnus was right. He was the smallest. His clothing would fit me well enough, if the jerkin and tunic weren’t already drenched with blood.
I gripped the guard’s ankles and dragged him out to have a look. Blood had begun to congeal around the neckline of his jerkin, glossy and bright red against the dark leather. I pressed a hand to my abdomen as my stomach protested.
“You’re as pale as a swamp ghost.” Magnus shook his head. “The sight of blood suddenly sickens you?”
I knelt to strip the man. “Suddenly” was an apt description for the way I felt. I was suddenly tired of fighting and killing. Future misery awaited the families of these four dead, drunken men who’d sought a bit of mindless pleasure in gaming.
All because I wanted my old sword back.
Every time I thought of abandoning our mission and going home, the voice in my head scolded me. “Go and take that damned sword back.” The time I’d lost here demanded retribution. I didn’t know which voice was the wisest.
“I don’t enjoy killing those who don’t deserve it.” I tossed the guard’s clothing to the ground, wincing as the hauberk hissed into a gleaming pile, and stripped down to my chemise. “You shouldn’t either. They were simply gaming and passing around a bottle. I’m sure there’s probably not much to smile about around here.”
Magnus slipped his purloined hauberk over his head and jerked the hem, causing it to settle into a more comfortable position on his body. “You’re letting your past experiences blind you to the task at hand. Any one of these men would’ve happily cut your throat for you, Kymber.”
“I know. Gods, I know that.” Was I losing my nerve? My warrior’s heart? Cheeks aflame, I bent to the task of dressing.
I slipped the hauberk over my head and let go. The mail draped down the lines of my body like it had been made for me, though it was much too long. I slipped off my breeches and used them to wipe the blood from the collar of the leather jerkin. It was too long as well, but I could take up some of the slack by tying it tightly.
The man’s black hose came next, a surprisingly good fit. Finally dressed, I slipped the leather baldric and the scabbard holding Promise onto my back and buckled it across my chest.
“What should we do with the bodies and our clothing?” I asked. “And make sure you find somewhere to hide your shoe nails.” The nail I’d forced into the bottom of my boot was still there. I pulled the other from the hem of my tunic and pushed it inside the jerkin’s collar.
“Shove everything under the hedge row. I wish I could tell you no one will miss these men, but that’s probably not true. Their replacements will eventually come looking.” Magnus buckled Bloodreign around his waist and gave the belt a tug to tighten it.
“Hopefully, we’ll be miles away when they’re finally discovered.” I nervously glanced in the direction of the guardhouse.
“Let’s not waste time getting in and getting out then. It will be dark soon. Do you know where you’re going?”
“If I can get in from the burnt wing, yes. I was dragged down that hallway often enough.” I deftly tied the leather straps down the front of my jerkin. “When I wasn’t already out of my mind with pain, I tried to pay attention to my surroundings. In case I ever got the chance to run. How do I look?” I smoothed my hands over my waist.
“How do you feel?”
“The hauberk isn’t as heavy as I thought it would be. I don’t think I’ll have a problem fighting. If I do, I’ll strip down to my chemise as fast as I can.”
“Well, you look like a woman trying to disguise herself in a male soldier’s gear. Pull the hauberk’s hood up to hide your hair.” I did as requested. “That’s it.” He frowned and shook his head. “No, the hood doesn’t come forward far enough to hide your eyes and the delicate lines of your face. I can tell you’re a beautiful woman wearing a disguise.”
“What am I supposed to do about that?”
“Here. Hold still.” He scooped up a handful of dirt and began to rub it over my cheeks and forehead. “This will help a little, though you may have to keep your eyes lowered if we run into trouble. Those long, dark lashes of yours scream female.”
“I’ll stay behind you if I can.” I shrugged. “If not, I have Promise.”
“All right.” He put firm hands on my shoulders then bent to give me a kiss. “Let’s go.”
It was eerie to stand within the ruins of the back wing.
I’d laid my head on a pillow here. On the second floor, in the west corner tucked against the main building. Now open to the sky, this entire ghostly skeleton had once been part and parcel of the castle.
It had stood three floors high, with tall, arching windows in every room, staggered throughout the walls for strength. Very few of the arrow slits at the top, near where the parapet would’ve been, had survived the fire, having either crumbled inward or outward. Some of the walls delineating the rooms and privies remained in place, making it easy for us to hide ourselves as we explored.
Wind moaned through what was left of the building. It sounded forlorn and dreadful, like a dead man fighting to stay in a world that didn’t want him anymore. The castle itself was a soft gray, but the interior walls still standing were black and crusted with soot.
It must’ve been a roaring fire, with tall flames licking at the sky. Could they see it from miles away? How many had rejoiced, thinking the goblin army had set the castle ablaze during the battle? I smiled. No one could have known it was simply a desperate woman trying to escape by torching her curtains with candles she shouldn’t have been able to reach.
I glanced up at the jagged edge of brick along the east wall. The glass-roofed aviary had been in that corner, to catch the morning sun. Small shards of glass glinted like diamonds amongst the weeds and rubble on the ground.
Had Garai lost his birds in the conflagration? Unexpected remorse coursed through me. At one time, those birds had been a welcome distraction.
A few of them had talked. “Hello” and “How are you today?” said in the cheerful-if-scratchy voice of a parrot were sometimes the only words I heard all day. Those birds and James the chicken had been my friends for a while.
Unfortunate that I now thought of them only in their capacity to hurt Garai. If he’d lost them, I hoped he was devastated.
Remorse again. Ah, well. Those feelings were probably normal, given what he’d done to me,
but I truly hadn’t meant to harm those innocent birds. “I can’t go back and do anything differently.”
“What would you do differently?” There was a note of reproach in Magnus’s voice.
“I would’ve set the birds in the aviary free before I burnt this place. They looked out through bars too. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even think about them.” I kicked at the partially burnt remnants of a desk drawer, lock intact, astonished that it survived the inferno. “I just did whatever I had to do to get out.”
Magnus nodded. “And rightly so.”
“I know, but they were just as stuck as I was. I never meant to hurt them.”
“Kymber . . .”
“Listen,” I said irritably. “Body and practically soul, I belonged to someone else. I came to view things differently. Birds and sunshine and chickens in the window. They kept me from going insane. Don’t discount my feelings because you don’t understand.”
Magnus turned away, perching his foot atop a round and blackened rock. “I do understand. I used to sit very still and imagine I heard your laughter on the wind. It eased my mind if I could believe you were out there somewhere, forging a life for yourself just beyond my sight. It was the only way I could face the long days.”
“Then you know how it feels.”
He lifted his eyes to the top row of windows. “Yes, I know. I know all too well.” He cleared his throat and lowered his foot from the boulder. “So. I see a double oak door over there. I imagine it’ll get us in.”
“You’re right, though it’s clearly a replacement for the one that burned.” Something that felt like satisfaction caused me to smile.
“It’ll be locked from the inside and probably guarded. What’s the plan?”
“We should find a place to sleep and go in tomorrow morning, before first light.”
“We can’t do that. Someone will find the dead guards we left out there,” Magnus said.
“You’re right. After dark then? It’s the supper hour now. The halls will be full of soldiers. Garai eats in the throne room, so we won’t be able to get near Silverlight. In any case, using that side door is too risky. I know of a hidden staircase. It was made of stone, so it may not have burnt. If it’s gone, we’ll have to pile rocks and crawl in through a window. That one there.” I pointed to a window at the back of the ruined building. “It drops into a pantry and storage closet.”
“You did pay attention to your surroundings, didn’t you?”
“You bet I did. Garai wasn’t stupid, nor was he terribly careless, which is why I can’t believe he left those lit candles in my room. I always thought he wanted me to try something, so he could catch me in the act. So he could justify hurting me. I foiled him with compliance, obedience, and diligent attention, at least to the extent that I could.” I spun in a slow circle as I viewed my destructive handiwork. “Where I was in the castle, how I got there, the people and their routines. I memorized it all. I knew if I ever got the chance to run, it would be my only chance. If that one attempt failed, I was lost. He’d break every bone in my body, and take his sweet time doing it.”
All true. Why, then, had I willingly returned to this place?
52: KYMBER
Thankfully, the fire had spared the hidden staircase, though the walls were soot-stained right up to the arched entrance that stood a few feet away.
I wasn’t raised in a castle, of course, but I’d never seen such narrow stairs. They headed up toward the roof between the thick stone walls in a tight left-hand curve, built into a forgotten corner of a hallway that seemed to go nowhere.
“Brilliant,” Magnus murmured. “Sturdy and probably sound proof. This would’ve been a safe place to hide the royal family during an invasion. Or secretly funnel soldiers up to the roof during battle.” He stepped through the archway and placed one hand flat upon the smooth, gray stones. “The enemy would scale the outside walls thinking the parapet was mostly undefended, only to find an entire battalion waiting for them along the inner wall up there.”
“I always thought it would be hard to fight on these stairs,” I said.
“It would be impossible,” Magnus said with a mysterious smile. “And that’s why they curve off to the left in such a narrow spiral. A right-handed warrior would quickly be killed here if he were going up. He’d be fine coming down.”
“Oh.”
He pressed his lips tight, studying the archway as one would regard a spider. “Let’s get in and get out. We won’t start a fight if we don’t have to.”
“I agree, but I don’t want to rush and make a mistake. Follow me.” Though I dreaded the climb, I moved before my courage abandoned me. “There’s a small window approximately twenty-three steps up that opens into a mews.”
Magnus scratched his chin. “A mews?”
“It housed falcons when King Pinchot lived. The window into the mews is the best, and safest, place to enter. The throne room is down the hallway, maybe fourteen or fifteen steps, then two doors down on the right.”
“Who was King Pinch–?”
“Pinchot. Garai’s grandfather. The mews has been empty for over forty years. Garai encouraged barn owls and bats to take up residence, to help manage the insects and rodents, but they won’t bother us.” I ducked my head and glanced up the staircase. “The rest of the castle is a pig sty, but Garai refused to eat anything made with grain he believed had been infested with mice.”
“And where did you learn all that?” Magnus asked.
“At one of his dinners.” I scowled. The meals were often good for reconnaissance but bad for my overall wellbeing. Some of the worst beatings that bastard ever doled out came after a quiet dinner. “He once threw an entire tray of bread and rolls at a servant, saying he could smell the mouse shit baked into it. I almost laughed, but he was serious.”
“I don’t understand how you puzzled out the interior of the castle from verbal clues.” Magnus furrowed his brow. “How did you know this staircase was here?”
“That much, at least, wasn’t verbal. The guard sometimes sent to fetch me for . . . whatever Garai had in mind that particular night often dragged me with him as he performed chores along the way. I climbed these stairs more than once with the point of a spear in my back. You can smell the guano when you get near the window.” I inhaled. “And wet feathers. The first time I bent to look in the window, I got a sharp rap on the side of the head for my efforts, so I asked what was on the other side. The guard said it was an old falcon mews but there was naught but owls in it. In the same breath, he growled that it was none of my business. Garai told the story of his grandfather’s falcons at the supper table several weeks later. It didn’t take long to make the connection. I took note of the door one day when I was in that hallway outside the throne room.”
“Interesting,” Magnus said.
With no further word, I began to climb the stairs, barely able to see my hands in front of me. I counted twenty-three steps then felt along the wall for the window. My fingers soon bumped against the thick stone sill beneath it.
I stuck my head in the rounded open window; the sharp tang of birds and dust and decades of guano assaulted my nose. “Here it is,” I whispered. “The window is small. I’ll go through first. You’ll probably have to hand Bloodreign in to me. I don’t know if you’ll be able to get through with it strapped to your hip.”
I unbuckled the baldric holding Promise, reached in the window, and propped it against the wall. The golden-pink rays of a setting sun streamed through an overhead loft, just enough to see shadow and outline. The chainmail made more noise than I liked, but I got through the window with no problems.
My hands hit the floor and sank into a thick layer of filth, but I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. I leapt to my feet, took Bloodreign from Magnus, then reached for his hands. “Here. Gods, I hope you can get through wearing that hauberk and jerkin.”
He took my hands and ducked his head inside the window. A moment later, I heard him groan. “I think I’m stuck.”<
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“You can’t be stuck already.” I leaned over to look. He was exactly halfway through the window, wedged like a cork in a wine bottle.
He struggled a little, then a lot. The mews echoed with the squeak of chainmail and leather.
I stepped back to give him room. “Try again.”
“I’m stuck, Kymber. I’m too big to fit through.” He grunted once . . . twice . . . then sighed. “You may have to get Silverlight and meet me back here.”
Fear sent prickles down my spine. Prowling the hallways of King Drakoe Garai’s castle alone was not part of my plan. I’d pictured us going in and fighting together if necessary.
“Is there another way in?” he whispered. “Can I meet up with you in the hall outside the mews?”
I thought about it and rejected it as too risky. Together, we were formidable. If separated, even for the few moments it would take him to join me in the hallway . . . well, I didn’t like the idea.
“Can you take your clothes off, then redress in here?” I asked.
“I don’t think that will help. This doesn’t please me either, but if you want your sword, you may have to go yourself. Think about it. One can move faster than two. It may be easier.”
“I wish I believed you.” I took a moment to think. I no longer knew the castle’s routines. Soldiers were stationed . . . where? It seemed inconceivable that Garai would leave the door into the ruined wing unguarded. He’d know it for the weakness it was.
Which meant there would be guards in the hallway to the throne room, which meant Magnus couldn’t very well open that door and swagger in by himself. We were both dressed as guards though – that would buy us a little security.
I still didn’t like the thought of separation. Soldiers travelled in pairs. A lone man would raise suspicion. “Try again, Magnus. Please.”
Another long sigh, grunts and groans, then a small snort. “I’m too big to fit through. In fact, I’m going to have trouble backing out. I’m wedged in tight.”
“Damn it.” I clenched my fists. “Damn it!”
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