Page 52 of A Divided Duty

We passed several more doorways, all leading into empty rooms, all silent. A few of the rooms had windows of their own, and the starlight that flowed through gave me a vague idea of furnishings and dimensions, but none of them offered any further passageways or directions. The main hall seemed like the only way to get anywhere useful.

That was probably false. Judging by the rest of the keep, a few of those rooms would have doorways tucked away in corners and hidden in plain sight with careful masonry. The servants would need to have a way to get around the place without making a fuss or inconveniencing anyone, and a keep this size would absolutely have needed servants when it was fully operational. The Daoine Sidhe especially have never been fond of doing their own housework or putting themselves out when they don’t have to, and Titania’s focus on crowns and thrones meant that most of them had very firm ideas about status and hierarchy, ideas that had spilled seamlessly over into the rest of Faerie. There was no way this place was as linear as it seemed at first glance.

But first glance was what we had to go by, and what we could follow to our hopeful destination. The smell of blood was getting stronger.

The hall dead-ended at a closed wooden door. There were no windows or other visible ways through. Whoever was in that room would absolutely see us coming if we opened the door. I exchanged a look with Tybalt, then backed off several feet, trying to put a little distance between myself and anyone who might be trying to listen for interlopers.

Voice pitched low, I said, “We can back up and look for the service doors.”

“Can’t you just ask for them?” he asked, waving a hand to indicate the hall around us.

“Nope. This isn’t a knowe.”

He blinked, then frowned. “I fail to see the distinction.”

“This keep is part of the skerry, it’s not an entity in its own right. I can’t explain what the difference is, just that it exists. Not every part of Faerie is alive the way the knowes are. Like I can’t talk to the Shadow Roads.” But they were aware of me, weren’t they? I always had the feeling that they were watching me, that they knew I was there and more, knew that I didn’t belong. There was none of that feeling here. We didn’t belong in this keep, had no place in the plan that it was part of, and yet it didn’t reject us the way the Shadow Roads rejected me. It didn’t know we existed, and it wouldn’t have cared if it did.

“So we must retreat,” he said, half-mournfully.

“Yes, and…”

“Please don’t finish that sentence. I know what you’re going to say.” He looked at me, sighed, and folded downward into cat form, walking over to rub himself against my ankles before slinking away down the hall on his own.

Well, at least he’d been right about me suggesting that we needed to split up. There could be service halls located on both sides; this could also be one of the keeps where all service was expected to come from the same direction. It was slightly more secure, slightly less convenient, and thus ragingly popular with certain groups of deeply paranoid nobles.

I watched until Tybalt slunk into one of the side rooms, then turned and headed for a door on the other side of the hall, holding my candle high to light my way.

This wasn’t one of the rooms with windows: it was small and claustrophobic, the walls lined with empty shelves, a large table that would probably be used for poker nights in the modern world, but had most likely been intended for maps. There wasn’t a scrap of paper left in the room, only cobwebs and dust.

I stepped as lightly as I could as I crossed the floor, trying not to leave too much of a trail for someone to follow, and turned left as soon as I was inside, heading for the far wall. Like the others, it was lined in shelves, and like the others, those shelves were empty. I looked at the spacing between them, trying to estimate which would be at shoulder-height for a woman several hundred years ago.

There was a time when the fae had a reputation for being uncommonly tall, mostly because they’d all had access to good childhood nutrition while a lot of the humans were still struggling to find their next meal. As human standards of living caught up with the fae, they got taller and we, well, didn’t. So things that were built for fae use a few centuries back were likely to correspond to modern human sizes.

It was a handy shortcut, and meant I got to skip out on watching way too many historical documentaries in order to figure out how tall people had been when places like this were constructed, thus leading me to the hidden doors into private spaces. Being a knight errant means needing to know a lot of seemingly random things about a lot of entirely random things.

The shelves were spaced for someone taller than I was, whose eyeline would be higher, and whose natural reaching points were about six inches above mine. I adjusted for that, leaning up onto my tiptoes, and reached for the appropriate shelf, grasping the edge and pushing down.

Nothing happened.

That was fine: no one gets everything right on the first try. I continued down the wall, testing the corresponding shelf on each piece of furniture, and was rewarded on try four, when the shelf depressed under my hand, sliding down by about an inch and a half as the catch at its base came loose. There was a clicking sound, and the entire case swung toward me, soundless on perfectly balanced hinges, revealing a completely dark passage on the other side.

I slipped through, despite every scrap of common sense I had telling me that this was a terrible idea, and pulled the case closed again behind me. From this side, there was a convenient handle, and I could feel the catch with a quick brush of my fingers. I wasn’t going to be trapped here.

That was all I needed. Turning so that I was angled back toward that main room, I lifted my candle and began walking again.

The flame was small, but it was enough to illuminate the full width of the passage, circling me with a sphere of brightness that was remarkably helpful as I inched my way through unfamiliar territory. The floor was mostly level, but was made of the same stone as everything else in the keep, and it had settled somewhat as time passed, forming little dips and drops that I had to be wary of. If I tripped and dropped my candle, I didn’t know what would happen. Nothing good, I was willing to bet on that.

The walls were lined in small latches like the one I’d used to get here from the map room. I stopped and squinted at a few of them, looking for symbols scratched into the walls, and was pleased when I managed to find a few rough representations of what I guessed were nursery rhymes or children’s games. Like many pureblood fae, Michael had committed to his aesthetic when he built this place, and it carried all the way down to the bones of it.

The symbols had to be representative rather than literal because there was always the risk of someone doing exactly what I had done, finding a way into the service halls and using them to move around the keep without being seen. Service halls generally weren’t booby-trapped, because killing the staff is considered bad form in even the most unfriendly of households. If you want your meals hot and your laundry clean, you need to let the people who take care of those things move around without being afraid they’ll get stuck in an oubliette or something. That meant they needed a way to make things confusing for anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there.

If I’d been trying to follow the symbols to my target, I would have been utterly confused. Since I knew how far I was trying to go, it was a little easier for me to pass up the first handful of rooms, continuing onward until I estimated I’d walked back to the door that stopped me before, and past it into the wall of the chamber beyond. It helped that the hall I was in dead-ended, becoming a plain, impassable wall.

Here went everything. I turned to the nearest catch, took a deep breath, and gently depressed it.

As in the map room, it swung open silently. This time, I was ready, and caught it before it could open more than about a foot and a half, giving me as much cover as possible. No light came in through the opening, and so I pressed myself against the corner of the wall and slipped slowly, deliberately into the main room.

The smell of blood was immediately strong enough to make me stagger, striking me like a blow. I managed not to gasp at the strength of it, keeping hold of the door and sliding the rest of the way out. I eased the shelf I was now holding back against the wall, hiding my entryway, and turned to look around the room.