He needed to talk to Eddigar, to find out how soon he could question the boy.
And now, more than ever, he needed to talk to Mother Northwind.
While Brenna stripped off her filthy coat and clothes in her bedroom, two mageservants hauled in a bronze bathtub, placed it in front of the fireplace, filled it with steaming water and scented oils, then whisked her clothes away for cleaning as she lowered herself into it.
When she had been younger, Brenna had felt shy about disrobing around the mageservants; now she didn’t give them a second thought as she settled with a sigh of pleasure into the warm embrace of the water. She plunged her head under, then scrubbed her dark curly hair furiously with soft lilac-scented soap from a bowl the mageservants had placed at the side of the tub.
Half an hour later-clean, dry, warm, and much bettersmelling-she donned a forest-green gown of soft velvet, buckled a belt of gold chain around her hips, brushed her hair until it shone, tied into it a bit of gold ribbon that set her hair off nicely and matched the belt, then examined herself in the full-length mirror on the bedroom side of the bathroom door. She wondered if perhaps she wasn’t just a little overdressed to do what she intended to do next, which was to try to see the injured youth.
He’s probably not even conscious, she told herself.
But she didn’t change her clothes.
Instead, she went into the corridor, and this time followed it past the staircase that curved down into the Great Hall and turned into the West Wing, where the guest quarters were located.
Two men-at-arms stood in front of one of the half-dozen closed doors on the right side of the hall. She strode up to them and stopped. “I’d like to greet our guest,” she said.
“Sorry, miss,” said the bigger of the two, a red-bearded giant she’d met before… Buff? Biff? Skiff?… something like that. “Lord Falk’s orders. No one is allowed in.”
“He didn’t mean me,” Brenna snapped, though she suspected that was a lie. “I’ve already seen the boy. I found him, remember?”
The big man’s expression didn’t change. Kuff, that’s his name. “That’s as may be, Miss Brenna. Lord Falk did not tell us of any exceptions.”
The other guardsman, whom she didn’t know at all, kept his eyes focused on the opposite wall, as though he had never seen anything more fascinating.
“And what will you do if I simply push past your silly pikes?” Brenna said. “Skewer me?”
“No, ma’am. But we will restrain you and take you to Lord Falk.”
Bluff called, Brenna could do nothing but try to save face. “No need,” she said coolly. “I’ll talk to him myself and see what he has to say about your impertinence.”
“Perhaps that would be best, ma’am,” Kuff said.
All her cards played and trumped, Brenna turned and not-quite-stomped (not wanting to appear childish, though it certainly would have felt good) back down the hall to her own room…
… where she promptly slipped out through the hidden entrance near the stove into the servants’ corridors. She went down the same narrow stairs she had taken when she’d gone out through the coal shed earlier, but this time went past the entrance to the shed, into the servants’ quarters themselves, plain rooms on the bottom floor of the West Wing, strung out along a corridor that ended in the kitchen but was punctuated by a series of staircases leading up.
Just as in her part of the manor, each of those stairways led to a corridor running between two guest rooms, providing hidden access for servicing stoves, changing linens, delivering food, retrieving dirty dishes, and all the other servantly functions. There were rooms for two-score servants, but they were mostly empty, the few living servants all clustering near the kitchens.
Brenna could hear noise from that direction as she entered the servants’ wing, but there was no one in the hallway, lit sparingly by a magelight every ten feet or so. The stairway she wanted was the second one. She slipped up it without being seen. It doubled back on itself on a tiny landing halfway up, then delivered her into the corridor between the room where the boy lay and an empty room on the other side.
As Brenna reached the top of the stairs, she heard voices. At the same instant the pine planks of the floor creaked beneath her feet. She froze. But, after all, the old house was full of creaks and groans, and the owners of the voices took no apparent notice.
Brenna couldn’t make out any words, but recognized the bass growl of Lord Falk. Very slowly, she crept over to the door to the boy’s room, and put her ear against it.
“… wake?” That was Lord Falk.
“I have put a sleep on him to keep him unconscious until morning,” said a voice she now recognized as that of Healer Eddigar, whom she’d met many times through the usual sicknesses and mishaps of childhood, the last time just a few months ago when she’d cracked a rib after a slip in the tub. She’d been black and blue for days, but he’d knitted the bone and taken away most of the pain in short order.
“When he wakes,” Eddigar continued, “he will be very weak and very hungry. However, I have stopped the internal bleeding and sped the healing of the wound in his leg. I have also cleaned that wound and his various scrapes and cuts. There should be no infection. I expect him to make a full recovery.”
“As long as he is able to answer questions,” said Falk.
“He will be able to answer them,” Eddigar said. “Whether he will answer them is of course beyond my control.”
Footsteps receded, and when Falk spoke again, his voice was more muffled. He must have gone to the door, Brenna thought. “When will he awake?”
“I cannot be more precise than I have been, my lord,” Eddigar said. His voice, too, was more distant. “Sometime in the morning, but whether early or late, I cannot say. It depends not only on my magic but on his body’s powers of recuperation… and level of fatigue.”
“Hmm. Well, I’ll leave the guards. It wouldn’t do for him to wake and wander off, would it?”
“Those decisions are yours, my lord.”
Brenna heard the two men go out and the door close behind them. Falk’s voice rumbled indistinctly for a moment; presumably he was speaking to the guards. Then, silence.
Brenna waited a moment for her racing heart to slow a little, then opened the servants’ door and entered the room.
The curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows, twins of those in her own room, were drawn tight, so that the only light in the room came from the lamp-an oil lamp, not a magelight-barely aglow on the table beside the bed. At first all Brenna could see of the bed’s occupant was an indistinct lump, but as her eyes adjusted she recognized that the young man she had last seen hanging upside down and bleeding from a tree outside the manor grounds now lay on his back beneath a thick red comforter, his head on a feather pillow and his bare shoulders exposed. Brenna stepped farther into the room and closed the concealed door behind her.
She took one step, and a floorboard creaked. The boy stirred, his head turning slightly. His breathing had become faster and louder. Brenna froze, watching, but after a moment the boy’s breathing settled, and he was once again as quiet and motionless as when she had first seen him.
He’s in a magic-induced sleep, she reminded herself. He’s not going to wake up because of a creaky floor.
But there were also guards outside the door, and so she took the remaining few steps toward the bed as carefully as though she were walking on eggshells instead of pine.
Finally she stood beside the bed and could look down on the sleeping youth’s face. He appeared younger than she’d first thought, now that his face was cleaned of grime and blood, but whether he was younger or older than she, she could not tell; she was not a good judge of the ages of young men, having met so few of them.
Remembering the blood dripping from the wound on his leg, and curious to see how Eddigar had dealt with the wound, she moved around to the other side of the bed and lifted the comforter to take a look.
Beneath the blanket, he was naked.
Brenna blinked, stared, realized she was staring, and dropped the comforter in confusion. Even though she was alone, she felt her face flush. I didn’t mean-I never thought-
Her thoughts stammered to a stop inside her head, and a cooler, sardonic voice said, And if you had known, you would have looked on purpose, wouldn’t you?
She couldn’t answer that question. But then, she hadn’t really seen what condition his leg was in. And she
