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By Root 400 0

subtlety in the choice of a hiding place. I think we can eliminate creativity as well.” He laid his ears folded over the top of his head. It looked very peculiar, as if he was trying to hold his head down with his ears. “Now, when the Katschei died, I suspect his minions proceeded to flee rather than looting the place. I would in their shoes. He wasn’t called ‘the Deathless’ for nothing, and you never know when a creature like that is going to bounce back from apparent death. So the good saints only know what got left behind. I suppose you’ve found that out to an extent, but I am talking about dangerous things. You might find other items in these hiding places besides the bottle. If I were you, I wouldn’t touch them, no matter how attractive or harmless they appear.”

She shivered, thinking of all of the deadly potions, possessed daggers, gems and pieces of jewelry that had either curses or inimical spirits attached to them that she had encountered just in her travels. “No worries there,” she assured him. “I’d rather not spend my life as a toad.”

“Or worse, find yourself dead and your body hosting the Katschei’s spirit. Or anyone else’s spirit for that matter,” the Horse said darkly. “There are more nasty things in pretty packages in the world than most people would believe. All right. The first hiding place was the most elaborate. There was a fountain in the garden. Is there still a goose in it?”

“No, not when I got here,” she said.

He heaved a sigh of relief. “Good. That one was a nightmare. You’d have to be an expert archer to deal with it. Have you looked for a secret compartment under the throne?”

“Not yet. We were leaving the throne room until last. The Jinn is sometimes in it, and it’s generally guarded.” She couldn’t imagine why the Jinn would be in the throne room, but she had caught a glimpse of him there once or twice.

“There’s a second hiding place in the throne room. If you sit on the throne and stare directly at the wall opposite, you’ll see the reflection of light from the facets of a jewel no larger than a grain of sand. Press that jewel and the hiding place will be revealed. Another hiding place is in the well in the root cellar under the kitchen. Lower someone down on the rope. Halfway down is a niche.” The Horse sighed. “The Katschei used all of those before he hit on what he thought was the perfect solution, and that was an elaborate version of the goose. There was an oak tree in the forecourt—it’s gone now. There was a dragon curled around the foot of the tree. In the tree was a chest. In the chest was a fox, in the fox was a rabbit, in the rabbit was another duck, in the duck was an egg and in the egg was his heart. You had to get past the dragon, climb the tree, open the chest, kill the fox before it got away, then kill the rabbit, then kill the duck and break the egg.”

Katya’s brows rose. “Good heavens. That just shrieks ‘I am an important hiding place, look into me!’ Why didn’t he just put a big sign on the tree that said My Heart Is Up Here?”

“He should have.” The Horse sounded amused. “Thank the saints that The Tradition favors villains making mistakes. But we can’t count on that this time. The Jinn isn’t in our Tradition. Any mistakes he makes will be due only to himself, not to The Tradition. We will have to be careful as well as clever. I think that bottle is our only hope of really ending this.”

“Once I find the bottle, Sergei, I still have to read what is on it,” she reminded him. “That brings me to another question, when I find the bottle. Should I move it, or leave it where it is?”

His eyes widened. “You are careful as well as clever! Leave it, by all means, if you can manage to read it without touching it. We won’t actually need the bottle until the time comes to confront him.”

She smiled. “Thank you for the flattery.” Now the question she really and truly wanted answered. “Sergei—how is Sasha?”

“Worried sick about you. Missing you. Blushing when he thinks about you. Blushing and other things that is, making me wonder how blood can rush to two places at once.” She blushed, but