Starcrossed (25 page)

“Why are you doing this? Going after the Nemair?”

His gaze went straight over my head, out into some shadowy distance. “Because someone has to. You know that too — I’ve seen the way you look at them. What is it you called them — nobs? Men like Antoch Nemair think they can get away with anything, and it has to stop. He’ll find out soon enough that lands and a title won’t protect him from the Goddess’s justice.”

“I don’t understand.”

His gaze fell on me, clear and sharp as ever. “You don’t need to understand. You need only to obey. Go along now; I believe you have a report due.”

I wasn’t
budging
, not until Meri disappeared into those dark trees. “Report of what?” I asked wildly. “I haven’t found anything else!” Just the hints from Cwalo and Lady Lyll’s weird notations, which, without evidence, added up to exactly nothing. Oh, yes, and the little matter of magical Merista Nemair and the wizards in the woods.

A figure in violet, with a fair pale head, stepped out of the trees and opened his arms to Meri. Stagne. I had to keep Daul occupied until they turned back into the forest.

“What’s in that journal you want so badly? Don’t you have enough evidence yet to send your Greenmen friends?”

Daul’s expression darkened. “No. The journal is . . . a personal interest.”

“A personal interest?” I repeated. Mainly because Meri and Stagne were still lingering by Meri’s horse, stroking and patting it. Sweet Tiboran — was I going to have to kiss the man? “I charge extra for personal interest.”

“Enough.” He loomed over me, and for a moment really looked like he could send me over the edge, and it would be nothing for him. “What was amusing grows tiresome. Do the work you’re capable of, or there will be consequences.”

“Wait — what about this?” In desperation, I dipped into my bodice and pulled out the letters I’d been carrying for weeks, crumpled and warm from being up against my body. “They’re not from Bryn Shaer, but I think they might be useful to you, in some way.”

Daul’s gaze sharpened, and he released his grip on my arm. I used my freedom to unfold Chavel’s letters. “Look. Here’s a letter from Secretary Chavel to somebody in Corlesanne — asking after ‘friends’ in Varenzia. That could be suspicious,” I added hopefully. “I don’t know what that second page is, but that last one —”

Daul’s eyes lifting over the paper and settling on my face were enough to stop me cold.

“Well, you can see for yourself,” I finished.

“Where did you come by these?”

I shrugged. “Are they any use to you?”

Daul was difficult to read, but he gave the third letter — the one that had so shocked Marlytt with its news of a royal bounty on Prince Wierolf — only a cursory glance.

“I thought that was the important one,” I said. “That’s not news — a price on Prince Wierolf’s head?”

Daul gave a mirthless laugh. “No, little mouse, that’s not news.” He folded the letters carefully and slipped them inside his doublet. “In fact, they’re worse than worthless.”

“Then why are you keeping them?”

That slow, dangerous smile I was coming to hate. “Because clearly they have some value to
you
.”

“Give them back, then!”

“When you bring me something I can use. Incriminating letters written
by the Nemair
. Evidence of treason. My journal.”

I glanced down to the woods. Meri and her purple friend had stepped
away
from the trees. If Daul turned to go now, there was no question he’d see them. I grabbed for one last wild chance. “Stockpiled weapons?”

Daul wheeled around and looked hard at me. “Did you say weapons? Firearms?”

I stepped back, nodding warily.

Daul broke into a wide, wolfish smile. “But that would be a grave offense,” he said. “According to the Covenant of Kalorjn — which Antoch himself signed — former Sarists are strictly prohibited from owning any artillery, let alone raising a standing army. If the king were to find out that the Nemair were secretly buying and storing weapons on this property . . .”

“I get my life back?”

“Exactly, little mouse.”

Meri had actually given me the best place to start looking, the very day we’d arrived here:
Tunnels under the castle, all the way to Breijardarl.

Lyll and Antoch had made it very plain that those tunnels were in dangerous disrepair, that they weren’t part of the restoration. But if the tunnels were one of Bryn Shaer’s most important defenses, then surely they’d want to make sure they were as war-ready as the walls and towers.

And just a tiny thread of a voice whispered that those tunnels went to Breijardarl. Right
under
the snow-blocked pass. Away from Daul and too-shrewd merchants and wizards lurking in the trees and Sarist revolutionaries planning their next rebellion.

And Greenmen waiting for Daul’s report. My report.

After leaving Daul, I joined Lady Lyll in the stillroom, where she put me to work sorting through a bowl of seedpods. She stood with her back to me, cataloguing our work, moving easily through the motions of labeling bottles and scribing notes in her ledger. The heavy pleats of her skirt fell in smooth, even folds that never seemed to wrinkle. Watching her now, it seemed impossible that this peaceful woman might be mixing up a war as deftly as she stirred a batch of head ache tincture. I
wanted
it to seem impossible. I wanted her to just be Meri’s mother, the bighearted, soft woman who had taken me in without a question. I wanted to be a girl who didn’t find that suspicious.

“Milady, did you once tell me there were tunnels to Breijardarl underneath the castle?” I blurted it out like that, hoping — I don’t know for what. For her to laugh and give me some reason to think I was crazy, that Daul was crazy and a bird was a bird, and for her to put her hand on my head and smooth my hair and say,
Digger, you worry too much.

Lady Lyll scrubbed with a rag at a stain on her workbench. “There were. Before Llyvraneth was one nation, there was frequent fighting between Kellespau and Briddja Nul — particularly who laid claim to exactly what land in the mountains. Bryn Shaer was constantly in dispute, so one of the landholders — Ragnhald Shortbones, I believe he was called! — supervised the excavation of almost the entire mountain between here and the pass. It was really quite an amazing undertaking. Though of course they had magic to help, in those days. I don’t know how you’d accomplish such a thing without it.”

I buried my hands deep in the seeds and let them pour through my fingers. “I’d love to see them.”

Lady Lyll turned to me with a smile. “Wouldn’t it be exciting to explore them? Unfortunately, the cellars here are unstable, and part of the tunnels collapsed about a hundred years ago. There’s been no reason to open them up again, of course, now that Briddja Nul and Kellespau are at peace. Not to mention the expense. Even Antoch and I haven’t been more than a few hundred yards inside them.”

“Oh,” I said, and I was almost relieved.

“And so I must urge you, Celyn — I know how much you like to wander off by yourself — not to go looking for them. It’s much too dangerous. I can’t imagine what we’d tell your brother if anything should happen to you.”

I blinked at her. Her broad face looked gentle, genuine, but there was a core of iron in her words, just the slightest edge of something I couldn’t make out. She
never
mentioned my brother; was that meant to be a threat of some kind? Or merely the sensible cautions of an overprotective mother? I shook my head, said, “No, milady,” and told myself that I was definitely imagining things.

I rose to join her at the workbench, but I set the bowl too close to the edge, and Lyll’s next movement knocked it to the floor, scattering seedpods every where. I bit back a curse.

“No matter,” Lyll said. “We’ll just count them again.” She crouched on the floor with me to gather the spilled seeds. The spiky pods snagged in the fringe of the rug as I picked them up, lifting the corner of the rug off the floor, and I couldn’t help peeking under it.

Impossible. Tiboran didn’t love me this much. I glanced toward Lyll, but her back was to me, so I lifted the rug as high as I dared, and reached my hand under.

My searching fingers found something that was not a lost seed: a cold smooth curve of iron in a recess big enough for my hand. I pulled my hand back and gave it a look to be certain. In Lady Lyll’s stillroom, set into the flagstones and hidden under a rug, was the iron pull ring of a nice-sized trapdoor.

I love trapdoors. They mean secrets and hiding places and the thrill of discovering things you were never meant to see. Of course, this one might be nothing more than a cold-box, set into the chilly floor and the cool stone beneath to keep perishable medicines fresh. But then why hide it with a rug?

I could find out right now — flip the rug back, grab the handle, and haul it open with Lady Lyll watching, there to explain away its very mundane purpose. And lose my chance at anything that might
really
be hidden down there.

I folded back the edge of the rug and smoothed the fringe.
Tonight
, I promised it.

The hours until Bryn Shaer fell asleep were an agony of mindless impossible boredom in the stillroom and solar and Round Court. I felt edgier than I had since that first nob banquet at Favom Court — was it only a month ago? Though we’d been ticking off the days until Meri’s
kernja-velde
, my sense of the time passing had been buried by the barricade of snow, added to almost every day, that trapped me here in Bryn Shaer.

Finally, finally, the family and guests all went to bed, and by some miracle Meri fell instantly asleep beside me. I slipped out of bed and crept down the servants’ stair to the kitchens. I had timed my hour precisely; the kitchen staff was asleep and I passed no servants on my way.

I slipped my lock pick from my seam and tumbled the stillroom lock. With the door shut behind me, the light from the hallway was swallowed up immediately. Inside the stillroom it was dark and freezing; the moons light filtering through the small, high window didn’t help much, but I had some good idea where I was going.

I knelt on the floor by the workbench, flipped back the rug, and, cringing against the possible shriek of stubborn hinges — and the possible disappointment of a cavity full of chilled medicines — heaved hard on the pull ring. It came open easily, revealing a square opening large enough for a person to fit through. I flattened myself to the floor and reached a hand down into the hole. I don’t know what I expected — a cache of documents, perhaps, maybe valuables — but my outstretched fingers found nothing, brushed nothing but darkness. I scowled. Nobody took this much care to hide an empty
hole.

I peeled myself from the floor and rolled a scrap of paper into a taper that I lit from the tinderbox on the workbench. Carefully I lowered the burning taper into the hole and found what I was hoping for: stairs. Moving slowly so the taper didn’t blow out, I slid feetfirst over the polished edge of the opening and dropped easily down onto the stone floor below.

Well. I was in it now. The opening above me glowed with square silver light, making it easy to see the distance I’d have to climb to get out again. One good jump, and I’d be able to grab the edges. But that was for later. I gathered my skirts in one hand and edged downward, the flickering taper throwing the passage into uneven light.

The stairs twisted downward in a tight spiral, each tread barely wide enough for even my small feet; this passage had been constructed for secrecy, not for convenience. There was no dust on the stairs, but I didn’t know if that was because they were used often, or just that no dust ever found its way this deep.

When I found myself on flat ground once more, I paused for a moment, feeling the darkness press all around me. When I was small, I’d spent a lot of time hiding in dark spaces like this — tucked behind shelves in a root cellar, or curled up tight in a catacomb. I felt safe in the dark and silence; the world went on, however wicked or righ teous, far above, never touching the lives of the mice and spiders below.

The little landing was hardly big enough to turn around in, let alone conceal anything as bulky as a stash of firearms. I moved the taper in a slow arc, showing up the space I’d found myself in. Shadows flew out of its range, up into the darkness above me and against stone walls barely an arm’s reach away. After turning three quarters of the way around the space, I came face-to with a smooth wooden wall.