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Authors: Mercedes Lackey

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BOOK: Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

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Coryn squatted on his haunches next to her. She squinted, but he seemed real. He was out of breath, as if he had been running to catch her.

“How can it be empty?” she asked him. “There is a Lady, or someone who claims to be. She visits me every year. She sends my father gold and soldiers. I’ve had nurses and tutors. They’ve taught me all about this place, the staff, the servants, and who or what belongs in every room. How can it be deserted?”

“The Lady must have another residence,” Coryn said. “A manor, maybe.”

“Then why don’t I know about it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Then he went still, as if straining to hear something faint and far away.

“After the sun goes down,” he said, “Selena says, look below.”

Merris frowned. “What? What does she mean?”

“Look below, she says. That’s all.”

“There are dungeons below,” said Merris. “Caves, really. Part of the river flows through them.”

“Then that’s where we’ll look,” he said. “We can rest while the daylight lasts. There’s no food here and I don’t trust the water, but I brought provisions.”

He held up the rucksack he had brought from Forgotten Keep. It was bulging. “Bread from the bakery in town,” he said, “and the water we brought from the spring at last night’s camp, and a few odds and ends. We’ll be comfortable while we wait.”

Merris was not hungry, but she was thirsty. She sipped from one of the water bottles while Coryn ate half a still-warm, crusty loaf with cheese melted inside.

It smelled so good that Merris was tempted after all. She managed a few bites. They helped more than she would have expected. She felt stronger.

When they had both had enough to eat and drink, Coryn said, “I saw beds below. Maybe we should get some proper rest.”

Merris shook her head. “I need the sun,” she said. “You go, if you’re too tired.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll stay with you.”

“But your Companion—”

“She’s down below,” he said. “She’ll be safe.”

“As long as it’s daylight,” Merris said, and shivered. He looked as pale as she felt.

They propped themselves against the parapet, side by side but not touching. Merris tilted her head back and let the sun bathe her face. Her eyelids drooped shut.

“Merris.”

She started awake. Coryn was bending over her. In the confusion of sudden waking, she wondered why he had been bathing in blood.

Before horror could consume her, she realized that it was not blood; it was sunset light. Coryn was his honest self, with rumpled hair and travel-stained clothes.

He was much more awake than she was. “I’ve been exploring. I found torches,” he said.

She nodded. There were no words in her. She took one of the torches, leaving him with the other two.

The sun was sinking fast. She did not need Coryn’s encouragement to follow him out of the open air into the dusty stillness of the Keep.

The shadows were thick there. Once or twice as they worked their way down from the tower, Merris thought she saw someone, or something, flitting around a corner. It must be a trick of the light.

No matter how often she told herself she had a right to be here, she felt more like an invader the farther down she went. She would have loved to run out the gate and away and never come back, but neither she nor Coryn paused there. They kept on going toward the entrance her maps had shown her, down below the gate in an empty and echoing hall.

Coryn lit the torches in that hall, laying a finger and a hard stare on each until it burst into flame. The light put the dark to flight but made the shadows somehow stronger. In its flicker, they seemed more like living shapes than ever.

Merris had to lead, since she knew the way. Coryn walked close behind her. He was a solid presence compared to the shadows that crowded thicker as they descended the narrow stair.

There was a cold smell in that place, like old stone and deep water. The air that breathed upward made the small hairs stand up on Merris’ body.

She desperately wanted to stop, turn, run back into the last of the daylight. Every part of her that was wise or prudent was shouting at her to do exactly that. But she had come to find out the truth. She had to know. She could not seal the bargain without some knowledge of what she was agreeing to.

And if it killed her?

Then it did. She had been bound to this since before she was born.

It was a long way down. Her legs were aching and her breath was coming hard, well before she came to the end of the stair. Her torch lit nothing but a tunnel carved out of the black rock, and steps descending below her.

They must be at least as far down as the river by now, if not even farther. She was stopping more often, and it was taking longer for her legs to stop shaking before she could go on.

Coryn had not said a word in all that descent. She kept looking back, terrified that he had vanished, or perhaps worse, that his spirit had been taken away and there was nothing left to follow her but an empty shell. Each time, he met her stare with one just as tired and almost as wild.

Just when she was about to give up, the steps ended. She almost fell down, but Coryn caught her and pulled her back onto her feet. He was breathing hard himself. Even in the ruddy torchlight his face was pallid.

He rummaged in the pack he was still carrying and pulled out a water bottle. She drank gratefully, then handed it to him so that he could drink, too.

They were still in a tunnel. The cold, damp smell was stronger. The only way to go was forward, unless they wanted to climb all the way back the way they had come.

Merris strained to remember the maps she had studied. Her memory was good, but the darkness muffled it. She should be at the level of the underground river, or just above it, but she was not sure which. The tunnel branched—at least, she thought it did. One way wound through a succession of caves to a blind end. The other led to the river.

First she had to get to the branch. Then she had to remember which direction to take. She raised her torch, though her arm was as tired as the rest of her, and pressed on.

Right,
she thought.
No, left.

The tunnel branched as she had thought. But which way? The wrong one would lose them both in the bowels of the earth.

She closed her eyes. In the dark behind her eyelids, she tried to picture the map. It had been in a book that Master Thellen gave her to study, tucked away in the back with the dry notes and the endless rambling appendices. She could feel the book in her hands, the worn leather cover and the crumbling pages.

There it was. She almost lost it, she was so glad to have found it. She struggled to keep it steady, then to focus on the part that she needed.

Right. She should turn right. She almost turned left out of sheer doubt and panic, but she gritted her teeth and followed her first inclination. The cold smell was stronger in that direction, or so she told herself. It must be the smell of the underground river.

The passage widened some distance past the turn. Coryn moved up beside her. Her hand reached out and clasped his. His fingers were as clammy as hers, but they warmed with the contact. Hand in hand like children, they went on into the dark.

The tunnel did not divide again, which gave Merris hope that it was the right way. It twisted and turned like some vast worm’s trail, sometimes doubling back on itself. Their torches began to burn low.

Merris was beyond exhaustion. One more turn, one more doubling—just one more. Then she would worry about the one after that.

She walked straight into a wall that should not have been there. Only slowly did she realize it was a door. She pushed. It gave, swinging outward.

There was the hall she remembered from the map, and there was the dark, oily slide of the river running through it. If the tunnel had been a worm’s track, this had the look and feel of a dragon’s lair.

All the stone in the Keep and the tunnels had been black, but this hall was golden red: the same color as the stone that Mistress Patrizia had given Merris. Curtains and streamers of waxy stone streamed down the sides and pooled in columns on the floor. It almost looked like flesh—even to the veins that ran through it.

It was calling to Merris. Even the little time that she had worn the stone had been enough. It had marked her—bound her. And, she realized in a kind of despair, it had brought her here.

Coryn’s fingers tightened on Merris’. His breath hissed.

Merris willed him not to speak. There was something in the center of the hall. It looked like a depression in the floor, a long, shallow oval, with a statue standing over it.

The statue moved. Like the crows on the arch of Darkwall Keep’s gate, it was alive. Slowly, in the fading torchlight, it took shape as a tall, narrow figure in a dark cloak.

The hood slipped back. Darkwall’s Lady looked directly at Merris. She was the same as Merris remembered: gaunt, aging, not beautiful, though her features had a certain stark elegance. Her graying hair was loose, falling on her shoulders.

She smiled. “Welcome, my child,” she said. Her voice echoed in the cavern, reverberating from wall to wall and back again, over and over.

Merris gasped and clapped her hands to her ears. Coryn had fallen flat.

“Your eagerness is charming,” the Lady said. The echoes were fainter now, fading away. Merris dared to lower her hands from her ears.

The Lady spoke again, this time without echoes at all. “Come here.”

Merris found she could not resist. She left Coryn lying and walked slowly across the hall. It must be her imagination that the Lady’s cloak was made of dark scales, and the bottom of it wound away in a long tail. It was her shadow, that was all.

The torch was guttering badly now. Both of Coryn’s had gone out when he fell. That must be why the river looked as if it ran not with water but with blood, and the basin in front of the Lady brimmed over with glistening darkred liquid.

“There’s no one in the keep,” Merris said. “All your gold and soldiers—where did they come from?”

“I do have a manor,” said the Lady, “and loyal men in my villages.”

It sounded like an answer, but it did not feel like one. When Merris tried to back away, she found she could not move.

The Lady came toward her. She could swear she heard the rustle of scales. The Lady’s gait was eerily smooth—but ladies were trained to walk so, gliding in their long skirts. She could not be slithering over that too-smooth floor like a great snake.

Her hand brushed Merris’ cheek. It was warm and dry. “So young,” she said. “And growing quite lovely. We have not always been blessed with beauty. Your bravery is impressive, though some might call it foolishness. Is that your young man yonder? Or a loyal servant?”

“A friend,” Merris said thickly. “It’s just a friend.”

The Lady’s smile was as patronizing as any adult’s in the face of a child’s silliness. “Just a friend. Yes. We may keep him, if he pleases us. Every Lady needs a friend.”

Merris bit her tongue. There was no way she was going to tell the Lady what Coryn really was. She had been very, very foolish—just how foolish, she was only beginning to understand. If she lived through this, she would never again sneer at a character in a story for doing something so demonstrably stupid that the veriest idiot would know better.

And no, she was not going to blame Coryn’s Companion for getting her into this. She had done it herself, with or without anyone else’s advice.

The Lady’s hands came to rest on her shoulders. They applied no pressure, but they held Merris rooted. Her eyes were black, glittering in the waning light. “So lovely,” she said. “So young. Blood so sweet with innocence—and just a tang of arrogance. You highborn are so sure that the world is yours to own.”

“And you’re not highborn?”

The Lady blinked. Had it startled her that Merris could still speak? But then she laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “I am much, much older than your Lords and princes.”

Merris fought to get away. She could not move at all. The Lady’s nostrils flared, as if Merris’ anger and frustration and her swelling terror had an intoxicating scent.

“So sweet,” the Lady said, almost a purr. “So strong. I did well when I chose you. Young blood is precious, but young blood that is strong—that serves me very well indeed.”

“I’ll never serve you,” Merris said through gritted teeth.

“No,” said the Lady, “but your blood and body will. It was most enterprising of you to come early. Convenient, too. Pomp and circumstance have their amusements, but the crowds can be distracting—and there are so many questions. I’ll take you now, then, with many thanks.”

Her grip tightened. Her smile had grown wide—unnaturally so. Her face was changing, stretching. It had a strange look.

A snake, Merris thought, getting ready to swallow its prey. Except, why swallow her own heir? What—

BOOK: Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

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