It would be so easy to be someplace else. Someplace far away. Someplace calmer and a hell of a lot safer.
But she'd asked him if he would stay, and he'd said yes. The first night they'd met, she had touched something deep inside him, something that had grown powerful in the strange weeks that followed. And he'd told her that he loved her, after he'd known damn well what the whole package meant. He'd lived before with Death resting a skeletal hand on his shoulder for months and years on end, with less reason.
If he left her now, odds were that the betrayal would push her over the edge into madness. She skirted it close enough as it was. So he had to weigh that, as well.
Buggering psychological blackmail, like threatening suicide if she doesn't get her way. No. Be honest. She hasn't said anything like that. You've just thought it.
Brian grimaced, sighed, and shook his head. He'd been gnawing at the problem for days now, without an answer. Mapping the cellars was simpler and more straightforward. At least the corridors and rooms stayed in one place, didn't move around impossibly like Fiona's hedge. Or at least he thought they didn't. Judging by the feel of creeping fingertips on the back of his neck, the corridors might change if they thought it necessary.
He'd told Maureen he was looking for the back door. That was half of it, the part she'd understand. He searched for something else as well, something less defined. This keep felt wrong. The stones resented people -- humans, Old Ones, men, women, impartial. The hilltop held a grudge deep in its heart, old and festering. And it resisted prying. Coming down here took an act of will.
Judging by the finishes, the cellars had been important once. Judging by the undisturbed dust and stale air, nobody had entered them in centuries -- long before Dougal's time, anyway. Why did people avoid these tunnels?
Some of the rooms had held supplies, old bins of wheat and barley long gnawed to scattered hulls by mice, kegs of wine evaporated to red vinegar stains in the wood. Rooms full of weapons, short javelins with age-split shafts and rust-eaten heads, bundles of warped arrows with shreds of fletching, longbows that shattered when he tried to string them. He'd found racks of swords, short Celtic swords with straight heavy blades, but none of them showed any sign of magic. So much for finding Excalibur.
Siege stores, anyway. Some ancient castellan had expected to have to hold this tower against an army, without the option of escaping through the walk between the worlds. That logic troubled Brian.
Or was he wrong? Did the prospect of siege mean something lurked down here that was worth defending? Something that shouldn't, or couldn't, be carried away? Something forgotten, even in legend? Something that wanted to stay hidden? So he kept searching.
Another doorway loomed ahead, dark in the shadows from his flashlight, age-blackened wood in a carved stone frame. He ran his fingers over the worn jamb and lintel, trying to trace out a design. This doorway opened to the left, into the raw native stone. His skin prickled in the peculiar fashion that had stopped him half an inch from putting his hand on a lump of rock while tracking Yemeni guerillas up the eroded yellow sides of a wadi. He'd stepped back that time, studied the trail, and only then noticed the clean gravel scattered over dust. Tripwire. Anti-personnel mine.
He shuddered at the memory. And stepped away again, careful with his feet, just as he had that time before, because sometimes the buggers hid another booby trap close by, where you'd trigger it while avoiding the first.
Undisturbed dust covered the floor, the only marks his own footprints. He pulled out the brush again and uncovered the stone pavers, as gently as he had probed for that deadly little mine. The floor's pattern flowed continuously along, the grout all matching and gray with time, without gaps or cracks that could mean a pit trap or tampering. Nothing different or suspicious on the walls, either.
He studied the doorway again, the jambs and header of carved stone set into the natural rock. Old. Worn by centuries of hands bracing against the drag of the door, smoothed by centuries of bodies brushing through. He held the flashlight so its beam just grazed the surface, bringing out carved forms. The remains of a faint line skipped and dotted down the center of each side, a vertical stem with horizontal or slanting branches extending to either side in varied lengths -- Ogham runes, the tree alphabet of the ancient Celts.
His fingers brushed the latch, nervous, as if he expected it to bite. He rested his hand on the hilt of his kukri, the Gurkha knife he wore as unconsciously as the belt on which it hung. He gnawed at his lip.
Hell, you'd think I wanted to live forever.
He shrugged with a wry grin, reached out again and tripped the latch, and shoved the door open with his foot. It swung away, jerky and groaning with rust on the hinges. Blackness waited behind it, and nothing came flying out at him to cut or bite or burn. He aimed his flashlight into shadows.
Firewood. Ranks and ranks of firewood marched away into the gloom, ends hewn rather than sawed, stacked wall to wall and within a hand-span of the ceiling higher than he could reach. Brian shook his head.
He eased into the room, sliding each foot in a curve ahead of him before he trusted his weight to it, still wary of traps. Whoever had stacked the wood, centuries ago, had left space to work next to the door. Brian studied the piles of wood again. Just wood, bark and grain looked like oak, nothing remarkable about it except that it was about as well-seasoned as firewood could ever get.
He turned to the door behind him, eased it nearly shut, and examined the
