“I’ll meet you at the Bonnie Blues tonight,” she promised as she walked him to the front entry. A few curious glances were cast their way, but she ignored them and no one said anything. “Just remember to be there to meet me,” she added.
She ushered him back through the gates and went up to her room to wait for nightfall.
It was all very exciting.
She managed to put up a good front through dinner, even pretending that she would think more about going off to Libiris—
But she talked and smiled and laughed and pretty much acted the way she knew they wanted her to act and didn’t let her anxiety over managing a clean break interfere with their meal. She loved her parents, after all, and she knew they wanted only the best for her. Mostly, they delivered. But in this case they were going to have to start over and find a better route.
When dinner was finished, she excused herself on the pretext of wanting to do some reading and retired to her bedchamber. There she sat down to wait, biding her time until the castle stilled and her parents retired. They always followed the same procedure, looking in on her before going off to bed, so she couldn’t try to leave before then. Because she had slipped them a sleep-inducing potion in their ale at dinner, they were likely to check in on her much sooner than usual. So she sat patiently, and before long there was a knock at her door.
“Mistaya?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Your father and I are going to bed now. But you and I will have a talk in the morning about what’s happening. Your father means well, but he is impetuous and sometimes oversteps his parental boundaries. Sleep well.”
Mistaya listened to her footsteps recede, and as she did so she felt a pang of regret over what she intended to do. She had committed herself, though, and there was no guarantee that her mother could help her in this business, no matter how well intended she was. Better that she go to her grandfather’s and bargain from a position of relative strength.
She gave it another ten minutes, then pulled on her cloak and went out the door.
It was dark and silent in the hallway, and she slipped down its length on cat’s paws, little more than a passing shadow faintly outlined by clouded moonlight against the wall. She didn’t have far to go, so she took her time, careful not to make a sound or do anything that would alert the watch. Once she was safely down the hallway and had reached the hidden passage, they were unlikely to find her no matter how hard they looked.
She arrived at her destination without incident, triggered the lock in the panel that concealed the door, waited for it to slowly open, and stepped inside. From there, she went through the walls and down the stairs to the cellars, opened another hidden door in the stone-block walls, and followed a second passage to the outer walls and the door hidden there that opened to the outside world. She knew all this because she had made a point of finding out. You never knew when you might need a way to slip out without being seen, and an obliging Questor Thews, not once suspecting her reasons for asking, had revealed it all to her some time back. She supposed this constituted some sort of betrayal of trust, but she didn’t have time to worry over it now.
Once outside the walls, she slipped around to where the old rowboat was anchored at the back docks, stepped in, and paddled her way across the moat to the far shore. It took hardly any time at all, and because the moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, there was no light to betray her to the watch should they happen to look down from their towers.
Smiling with no small measure of self-satisfaction at how easily she had accomplished her goal, she prepared to set out for the stand of Bonnie Blues and Poggwydd. But first she decided to see if Haltwhistle was anywhere around. She called for him in a whisper, and almost immediately he appeared, standing right in front of her, short legs barely enough to keep his mottled brown body off the ground, long floppy ears faring little better, reptilian tail wagging gently.
“Good old Haltwhistle,” she greeted, and she kissed at him on the air.
Together they went looking for Poggwydd. They found him waiting in something of a grumpy mood, sitting with Mistaya’s sheet-wrapped travel bag clutched between his bony knees, a scowl on his wizened face. “Took your sweet time about getting out here, Princess,” he muttered.