entrance to the main stairs leading up and down, wide stone steps around a square shaft. Peering down, she couldn t see the bottom, but only endless galleries lit with fire, brighter and brighter the deeper she looked, a spectrum of infuriated colors. She went the other way, climbing up into the darkness, though when they reached what must have been the ground floor of the brick prison, they wandered through a series of dusty, ruined, windowless rooms without finding any exit.
Shit, she murmured, hiding her distress. She was the one with the plan, she reminded herself, though in fact all of her thinking had ended here, with them breaking through the wide doors into the courtyard and then into the street. She had thought it might be evening, had imagined the fresh soft air. Shit, shit she must have been spending too much time with Lukas, and some of his stupidity must have rubbed off on her. This was the fey she was dealing with. There was no gate to the outside.
They stood looking at each other in the empty room, a big, high-ceilinged useless cube with only a single doorway. Light came from a remnant of the searing fire that rose up from the bottom of the stairwell. It curled over the threshold. Opposite, an expanse of moldy brick. But surely this was where the gate had been. What purpose otherwise could the room have served?
They had taken the three crossbows and other weapons. Marabaldia had her iron bar, and Suka had filched a long, hilted knife from the turnkey s belt. Poke had dressed herself in the clothes of one of the archers, leaving him naked. She stood breathless in her most human shape, a strong fleshy woman with an upturned nose, long hair down her back, and a powerful set of teeth.
Now they heard a noise from the direction of the light, an ominous clanking and the stamp of heavy feet. We have to leave, whispered the gnome. Can you find a way?
Unspoken was the obvious, that Lady Ordalf had sealed the gates not with bricks and mortar but with something more subtle, a woven pattern of illusion. Suka, in one of her first jobs after leaving home, had traveled with a circus among the small towns of Alaron. One of her teachers had been a hypnotist who could make his subjects stagger around stupidly, looking for the opening to the tent. Moving her head back and forth, Suka felt some of the same queasiness, the same inability to see what was plain and clear. Marabaldia s eye was useless now.
Worse was a feeling of numb hopelessness, which Suka knew was part of the spell it didn t help to know it. The excited rush of her escape was over. Doubtless the Ffolk wardens three floors below had already succeeded in freeing themselves, and had summoned some terrible power to recapture her. Perhaps all of the events of the past hour had been plotted in advance by Lady Ordalf and her slaves, part of a web of fey deceit more complicated than the future of a single stupid gnome what had made her think, years ago, when she left her father s house, that she could ever truly get away?
She heard the rhythmic smash of iron boots back in the antechamber the way they d come. Marabaldia stood with tears her in eyes, wearing the threadbare blue dress she d been arrested in so many years before. Her bar sagged down. She was stuck in the same funk. Only the lycanthrope seemed unaffected. She snorted, and struck the floor with her bare foot, carving a line through the dust and plaster rubble, revealing a stripe of old mosaic. Beyond the threshold, the sound had stopped.
They heard a soft, sibilant voice speaking in the Common tongue.
Who is there?
Suka said nothing, only bowed her head. She recognized the source of her weakness in that voice. Nor was she surprised when the eladrin slipped into the room, a tall, gray-haired man who was underdressed for any kind of fighting. He wore a soft, embroidered linen shirt open down his chest, moleskin trousers with a tasseled codpiece over his groin, and soft, high leather boots. Instead of a weapon, he carried a pair of leather gloves.
Bravo, he said, striking the gloves across his palm. Your ingenuity must be commended. I am pleased I am not too late to offer my protection. Princess Marabaldia of course we ve met. Partly I am here to offer you your freedom, and conduct you back to Umbra in the dignity you deserve. And you, he said, turning his attention to the lycanthrope. As soon as my mother told me about you well, she might have expected I would come. Perhaps that is why she broke her word to the brave captain this small game she plays, with the removal of the bars. He nodded at the iron bar in Marabaldia s hand.
Am I right in thinking she had accelerated her schedule? I think perhaps she wanted to forestall me.
He slapped the gloves across his palm, the only sign of anger, Suka thought, that he permitted himself. His voice was low, his face calm, full of the predatory beauty of the leShay. I will not draw you into our family squabbles. But is it true you ve seen my aunt, the Lady Amaranth? He smiled. It must seem strange to hear me call her that my mother s sister. Her half sister, of course. But she is younger.
All this, Suka imagined, had to do with the politics of inheritance among kings and queens who lived for many hundreds of years, and yet whose bloodlines were so meager. Her own problems seemed suddenly tiny, whether she escaped this labyrinth or not, whether she lived or died. She stood with the crossbow in her hands, and yet defeated.
Marabaldia, however, wasn t ready to give up. How could you have left me here for all these years? she cried.
How could you have stolen my love from me? Were you jealous of the one little thing that was truly mine?
Prince Araithe s eyes trembled with amusement, though his lips maintained their placid smile. Oh, my dear, he said, never think that. All of this has been a sad misunderstanding, for which my mother is to blame. It was not until seven days ago that I learned where she had kept you. Luckily, all this can be fixed, because we are speaking of a trivial amount of time. A mere tenth of a century. Please believe me, your lover is waiting for you, though at the moment I cannot quite recall his name.
Suka s mind was not moving quickly. But even she could tell the prince was lying. More than that, she thought she glimpsed the outline of some larger idea, which would not at this moment come into focus. What was the connection between Lady Amaranth s story and Marabaldia s? Was it a coincidence that the fomorian and the lycanthrope had been locked up in the same place? Was it a coincidence that Lady Amaranth had disappeared ten years ago, when Marabaldia had first climbed up from the Underdark into Citadel Umbra?
I am here to make amends, continued Prince Araithe. Please put down your weapons. My dear, look what I have brought you, an honor guard to escort you back to your own country. He raised his gloves and half a dozen drow filed into the room. Their swords were drawn.
And we have brought one of your servants to pull your carriage. And food for you, and a wardrobe of clean clothes. Please, allow me to make amends. You have nothing in common with this gnome, unless you would like to keep her for your slave. As for this pig
The trouble with eladrin, Suka thought, their weakness, if you wanted to call it that, was their inability to guess the feelings of lesser creatures. She saw Marabaldia stiffen with distrust, and raise her iron bar. But now the source of all the previous noise in the antechamber revealed itself: A cyclops guardsman ducked his head under the doorway and stamped into the room.
He was bareheaded, his single eye shining in the middle of his forehead, a new source of light in the now- crowded room. On seeing the fomorian he sank to his knees and raised his hands. At the same time Marabaldia s eye, which had been dormant, caught up some of his light and turned it back. Suka could see it pass between them, a beam of golden radiance that might have been partly her imagination. She knew these cyclopses from ancient times had bound themselves to the fomorians in the Feywild and in the Underdark, worshiped them as gods. Now she guessed the reason: Surely the effect of Marabaldia s gaze was even stronger in a creature with one eye.
But at the same time she realized that the diffuseness of her thoughts, her inability to do anything here but watch and wonder, was part of the influence of the leShay prince, who was looking right at her, a contemptuous expression on his grotesquely beautiful features she was earning his low opinion. The drow were ranged behind him, their black armor, black weapons, and black skins glistening as if oiled, their white hair and eyebrows ah, gods, she felt a sudden pain in her head as if she had been struck with a hammer between her eyes, just at the moment she d begun to ask herself what these malevolent elves, the source of so much suffering in their own dark lands, were doing here in Caer Corwell, allied with Prince Araithe. She took a step backward. It was obvious to her that the prince s interest here was the lycanthrope, as he had confessed at first. That s why he had come. Everything he had said to Marabaldia was a crude and obvious lie, which he imagined she was too innocent to understand. And Suka herself was utterly expendable as far as he was concerned. Why didn t he give his orders to the drow? They stood like statues made of night, each in a different posture of defense. And why had he allowed the cyclops into
