The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [91]
Until now. Now Alis Berrye was once more very much her concern. Even Erren had thought the girl too stupid and frivolous to harbor political motives beyond keeping the king’s favor. Gramme had always been the dangerous one. Berrye didn’t even have issue, and had apparently never tried to conceive any.
That meant her first guess had been right, and Berrye was someone’s servant in this. But whose? Besides William, she’d never shown obvious ties to anyone in the court. Still, there had been plenty of time for that to change, and in the present climate, with everyone scrambling for whatever position and advantage they could, someone had clearly found a use for the girl.
Berrye retrieved the message, read it, nodded to herself, and then turned again toward the west end of the room. A moment later there was a very soft sound, but it lifted the hairs on Muriele’s neck.
The only exit from the west end of the room was a secret one that let into the very corridors Muriele now occupied. Alis Berrye knew about it.
She knew the girl used to meet with William in the Warhearth, at times. But William hadn’t known about the passages at all.
Or maybe he had, and Muriele hadn’t known her husband as well as she had supposed.
She felt a pang of loss so sudden and deep, it was shocking. She and William hadn’t married for love, but they had found it, at least for a time. And even though she had always resented his mistresses, she’d always felt that one day, somehow, they would settle into their love again.
And she missed him—his laugh, the smell of his clothes, the silly names he called her in private.
All gone. And now it seemed he had known about the passages all along, and never told her, never trusted her with that information. That wouldn’t be so bad—after all, she hadn’t told him—but that he had told Alis Berrye of all people, the silliest, most irrelevant of his whores—that hurt.
It also worried Muriele. What if he had told Gramme, too?
She waited a bit, both hoping and fearing that the girl would come down her passage, so she could strangle her and hide the body where it would never be found, but after several minutes, when no one appeared, Muriele padded back along the long, winding way to her own chambers, feeling for the raised signs on the wall that gave the directions.
When she opened the secret door that led to her bedchamber just a crack, she knew something was wrong. She had left a lamp burning in her room, but no light greeted her. The room was utterly dark. Had her maid Unna come in and put out the light? Why would she do that?
She stood frozen for an instant, her eye pressing through the crack at the darkness. Maybe the lamp had gone out on its own.
Someone said something. A single word, too low to hear. She gasped and shut the panel, backing away, knowing whoever it was must have heard her, but her mind was cluttered with spidering fear-webs, and she couldn’t do anything but gape at the blackness in front of her.
She could only think how wrong she had been. Berrye knew about the passages of Cer, so others did, too. Did the man in her room know? Was it a man?
Something bumped against the wall, and she heard the faint hiss of breath. Her hand dropped to the dagger she wore next to her chatelaine, but it gave her small comfort.
The bump was followed by a muffled tap, and then another, and another, moving along the wall. The chill in her grew so deep, she began to shake. Someone was searching for the door. But that meant that they didn’t know where it was. It would be hard to find, from the other side. Still, she had given away its approximate location.
The tapping grew a little duller as it moved away from her, then began moving back. She could hear his breath now, and suddenly, another whispered word, though still she could not make out what it was.
She backed farther away, trembling, realizing that she was growing light-headed because she hadn’t breathed.