From Darkness Won - Jill Williamson [73]
Sparrow! A moment of silence passed, then the invisible man growled.
Averella jumped at his angry tone. Sparrow, indeed! How peculiar. She continued to the temple and approached a guard dressed in a black New Kingsguard cape.
Good day, sir. May I—
“You there! Where do you think you’re going?”
Averella turned toward the voice. Two guards dragged a burly young man out of the inner gatehouse. She drifted closer. She did not believe she had ever seen this young man before, yet his familiar pockmarked face drew her near.
He struggled between the two guards. “I must get inside! You don’t understand!”
The guards pushed, the man pushed, back and forward like a game of reverse tug-o-war. On one of the tugs when the guards had the man back in the outer bailey, two peasants— a man and a woman—slipped through the gate and scurried toward the keep without looking back.
A diversion?
She breathed out a laugh. A diversion, indeed! Listen to her. One would think she had been cavorting with soldiers all her life to have such assumptions quick to her mind. Still, she drifted after the peasants, curious why they snuck about. Peasants came and went from Castle Granton. Why not here?
Wherever here was.
Averella followed the peasants inside. The stone structure cut off the heat and light from the sun, bathing her in cool shadow. The peasants stood inside a small foyer. A stone corridor led off on the left and right. Two flights of stairs lay ahead, one going up, the other down.
The man started up the stairs.
The woman stepped to the right and whispered, “Noam! Not that way!” She waved the man to follow and ducked into the dark corridor on the right.
The peasant girl’s brown dress was identical to Averella’s. She drifted behind Noam’s lanky form. Torches crackled every ten paces or so, lighting the corridor in a bronze glow. The peasant woman took the first left and strode through the dark halls as if this were her home. “No one will question us on the servants’ stairwell.”
“But someone will question us eventually,” Noam said. “Gren, please stop. We need more of a plan.”
Gren spun around, her chestnut hair twirling over her shoulders. “Fine. If anyone asks, Shelga sent us to mend a ripped canopy in Lady Marah’s chamber.”
Averella’s memory surged at the mention of Lady Marah, mistress of Sitna Manor, wife to Lord Nathak.
Then this must be Sitna’s keep. It was very cold and drafty compared to Granton Castle in Carmine.
Gren continued down the dark corridor and turned up a spiral staircase. Noam and Averella followed her to the top floor and exited on a well-lit passageway that stretched along the outer wall of the keep. Sunlight stabbed through dozens of arrow loops. Averella soared into a sunbeam and let the warmth soak into her.
Gren stopped where another corridor shot off on into the keep and peeked around the corner. “There are guards posted at the door,” she whispered. “Listen.”
“…guess he’s a god now,” a man’s voice croaked, low and slow, like a bullfrog. “Traded his soul for a new arm.”
“To who?” Another man’s voice. High-pitched.
“To Nathak’s sorcerer, I guess.”
Averella drifted around the corner. Two New Kingsguardsmen stood before a door. One had bushy brown hair and a beard. The other was younger, though his face was creased as if he had not slept in weeks. He also was missing four front teeth, two on the top and two on the bottom.
“This sorcerer collects souls?” The bearded man’s high-pitched voice sounded almost like a critical woman.
The toothless guard grinned, baring a black hole where his teeth should be. “Guess so. Guess that’s how he gets stuff done. Binds people to him.”
“You think that’s something to smile about, do you?”
“Nah, just that Prince Gidon was—”
“Esek.”
“Oh, you know who I mean. He was a thorn to serve, wasn’t he? Sent me to Myet twice for his own bad temper. Guess I can’t help but smile thinking of him being tethered so. To a master of his own, you know?”