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Kaye shuddered. "Does that have something to do with the debt she thinks she owes you?"
"Perhaps," he allowed.
"What about through there?"
"There's the library, the music room, the conservatory, and the chess room."
"Chess room?"
"Yes, chess was well loved by the Queen. They gamble with it like mortals gamble with cards. She once used it to win a consort, as I recall."
"Corny loves chess—he was on the chess team in high school."
"We must go through the library to get there." He hesitated.
"What's the matter?"
"We've seen no guards. Not at the entrance and not even here."
"What if that means we're just doing really, really well?"
"Of a surety, it means something."
The door to the library was mammoth and elegant, clearly different from the plainer doors in the lower chambers. It was dark wood, banded with copper, carved with a language she could not read. Roiben pushed the door, and it opened.
Bookshelves were arranged in a maze, so tall that it was impossible to see across the room to whatever exit there was. The shelves themselves were intricately carved with faces of gargoyles and other strange beasts, and there was the overwhelming scent of turned earth. Whenever Kaye looked in one direction, something seemed to shift in the corner of her eye. The books themselves were in such varied sizes that she wondered who read them all. As they walked, she tried to scan the titles, but they were all in strange languages.
As they turned a corner, she saw a shape slide between the shadows. It was slender and vaguely human.
"Roiben," she whispered.
"The keepers of secrets," he said, not looking back. "They will tell no one of our passing."
Kaye shuddered. She wondered what was written in the tomes that lined the shelves of the library if the idea was to keep secrets. Were the shapes custodians or guardians or scribes?
As they came to a crossroads in the bookshelves, she saw another dark shape, this one with long, pale hair that started too high on its forehead and large, glittering black eyes. It slipped into the shadows as easily and soundlessly as the first one.
Kaye was very glad when they came to a small, oval door that opened easily to Roiben's touch.
Heavy draperies hung on the wall of the chess room. The entire floor was inlaid with black-and-white tiles, and five-foot pieces loomed on the edges of the room. Corny was sleeping on the floor, his body overlapping two chess squares.
"Cornelius?" Roiben knelt down and shook Corny by his shoulder.
He looked up. His eyes were vague and unfocused and he was a mass of bruises, but even worse was the satiated smile he turned up at them. His face looked aged somehow, and there was a tuft of white in his hair.
"Hello," he slurred, "you're Kaye's Robin."
Kaye dropped to her knees. "You're okay now," she said, more to herself than to him, reverently smoothing back damp strands of hair. "You're going to be okay."
"Kaye," Roiben said tonelessly.
She turned. Nephamael was stepping into the room, from behind the draperies on the far wall. His hand stroked the marble mane of the black knight chessman.
"Greetings," Nephamael said. "You will pardon my humor if I say that you have been the proverbial thorn in my side."
"I rather think you owe me," Roiben said. "It was I that got you the crown."
"From that point of view, it's a shame that life is so often unfair, Rath Roiben Rye."
