She freed a hand long enough to wipe sweat from her forehead and the back of her neck. The other three had taken the place of other cleaners and sweepers. Gwyna was two stations over, in charge of pewter mugs and utensils; Talaysen and Sional had been in charge of carrying garbage out to the compost-heaps. Now they waited, brooms in hand, for the signal that the nobles were finished eating. That was when they and the other cleaners would trot up the steps into the dining-hall-
That is, that's what they would do if they really were sweepers.
The lowest of the low, the invisibles. Dull-witted, just bright enough to clean up after others, not bright enough to be any danger to anyone. That was the kind of servant Talaysen had been looking for to impersonate. Someone no one in his right mind would ever suspect.
It wouldn't be long now. The great ovens were closed; the last of the pastry courses had been sent out. Servants were trickling out of the kitchen, in the opposite direction of the stair they were going to take; heading for the barn-like servants' hall and their own dinner. A gong sounded above, as Rune watched them out of the corner of her eye. That was the signal that dinner was over, and no one was lingering over food or wanted something else. The cooks gathered up the last of their utensils and dropped them in the nearest dishtub. The cleaners could now begin their job-
The chief cook and all her helpers swept out of the room, chattering and complaining, which left no one to oversee the kitchen itself. The drudges on dishwashing duty were normally half-wits at best, like Maeve; dull creatures that would do anything they'd been set at until the last dish was washed, or until they were stopped and set on something new. They wouldn't notice when Gwyna and Rune left.
Talaysen and Sional hung back from the rest of the sweepers; like the drudges, the sweepers weren't the brightest of folk. Probably no one would notice that they were missing until noses were counted-and then it would be assumed that the missing men were either off drinking filched wine, or tupping the missing drudges. When servants were missing, their superiors generally assumed 'improper conduct' rather than anything sinister, and the lowlier the servant, the more likely that was. That was why Talaysen had chosen the ones he had; the ones thought to be shiftless, ne'er-do-wells. When he and Rune had made their earlier foray into the kitchens, there'd been trouble with those two men over laziness and slacking. For the kitchen steward, it would simply seem a repetition of the same, with the tall simpleton drawn into the group to make up a foursome.
Gwyna and Rune dropped what they'd been working on back into the dishtubs and joined the men. As they had figured, the other drudges didn't even look up form their work.
'Follow me,' Talaysen whispered, propping his broom in an out-of-the-way corner full of shadows where it might not be seen for a while. Kestrel did the same. Rune wiped her hands on her apron, grateful that the King's concern for his servants extended to keeping them bathed and clean. Some of the drudges she'd seen in inn kitchens would have given them away by the reek of their stolen clothing, and there weren't any fleas to torment the conspirators with unexpected biting at precisely the wrong moment.
They followed Talaysen up a back stair-not quietly, but yawning and letting their feet scuff against the stairsteps, talking among themselves as if they had just finished dinner and were heading for bed. Talaysen first, followed by Kestrel-then Robin and Rune together, as if they were two best friends, whispering and giggling behind Kestrel's back. This part of the staircase was well and brightly lit, and it would have been impossible to slip past the guard posted at the entrance to the second floor-so they weren't even going to try. Instead, they were going to be as obvious as possible.
The guard on the landing of the second floor-the floor with the royal suite on it-nodded to each of the men, and winked slyly at the women. Rune giggled and hid her face behind her hand as if she was shy. Robin gave him a saucy wink right back, and wrinkled her nose at him.
He gave her a pinch as she went by; she squealed and slapped playfully at his hand-but once again, the King's care for choosing his servants came to the fore. He made no effort to follow them, and no effort to back up his flirtation except a verbal one.
'Saucy wench like you needs a man t' keep her warm o'nights,' the guard said, with a grin, but without leaving his post. 'Tell ye what, ye be tired of an empty bed, or cold around about midnight, ye come lookin' for Lerson, eh? By then I be off.'
'I might,' Gwyna replied smartly, not betraying by so much as a blink that the guard had just told them something they hadn't known-when the change of guard was. 'Then again, I might not!'
'Ah,' Lerson growled playfully, faking a swat at her with his halberd. 'Get along with ye!'
She scampered up the stairs behind Rune, who'd waited for her. They giggled together all the way up to the next landing-which was unguarded-where they opened and closed the door twice, to make it seem as if they'd gone to their quarters.
But instead of leaving the stairs at the servants' floor, they continued quietly, carefully, to the top, and the seldom-used storage rooms for old furniture.
Talaysen had been here before them, in the guise of a dim-witted fellow assigned to carrying up barrels of summer clothing, and he had made certain that the door at the top of the stairs was well-oiled. Nevertheless, Rune held her breath as he opened it, they all filed through it, and he closed it behind them without a betraying creak.
The darkness in this hall was total, and the air was thick with dust. She suppressed a sneeze.
This part of the plan was pivotal. She waited as Talaysen felt his way past them; then took Gwyna's hand at his whispered command. Gwyna held Kestrel's hand, and Kestrel had hold of Talaysen. Careful questioning of palace servants on Talaysen's last visit had told him of the existence of a spiral stairway that went straight from the Royal Suite to the attics, with no doorways out onto any other floors. It was guarded-but by only one man. It came out in a linen closet at the end of the hall, and had been built so that bedding and furniture could be lowered down the hollow center of the stairs by means of a block and tackle. That had been Talaysen's second job here-lowering down the boxes of warming-pans and featherbeds for winter. With no landings in between, the stairs could be made as narrow as feasible and still be used by men to guide the burden up or down. There was, however, no railing. And the stairs were bound to be just as dark as these attics.
Talaysen found the door and opened it, a little at a time. It did creak, and Rune just hoped that the guard at the bottom would attribute the tiny squeaks as Talaysen moved it, bit by bit, to mice.
She tried not to think of the drop that awaited her if she missed her step, and waited until it was her turn to follow Gwyna into the stairway. She felt her way along the wall, and inched her foot over the doorframe.
There. Her hand encountered the rough brickwork of the inside of the staircase, and her foot found the first step. And the abyss beyond it.
She pulled her foot back, and began the agonizingly slow progress down.
There was no way of telling time in the thick, stuffy darkness. She thought she heard Gwyna breathing just ahead of her, and the occasional scuff of a toe against the stone of the stair, but that was all. She couldn't have seen her hand if it was right in front of her face, rather than feeling the wall. She counted twenty steps-thirty-began to wonder if there was going to be an end to them. Maybe this was all a dream-or worse yet, maybe they were all really dead, killed protecting Kestrel, and this was their own private little hell, to descend this staircase forever and ever and never come to the bottom of it-
But before she managed to give herself a case of the horrors, her questing foot found only a flat surface, and she bumped into Gwyna.
Talaysen held his breath for a moment, and pressed his ear against the crack that marked the door into the linen closet. He heard nothing.
Good.
The King never expected any serious threat from above-so the guard on this stair was really one of the guards that patrolled the hallway beyond. And if what he had been told-under the influence of a 'trust me' spell on another of the guards-was true, the guard stationed here was more in case someone broke in through one of the windows. He never checked in with anyone, from the moment he went on station, to the moment he turned his watch over to the next guard.
Talaysen eased the door open, slowly-this one, thank God, had been better taken care of than the one above. It opened with scarcely a squeak.
Now there was light; outlining the door at the other end of the closet. He motioned to the others to stay where they were, and eased himself up to kneel beside it, pressing his ear against the gap between door and frame.
