Then I lighted a dozen torches with my firelighter and gave all but one to the bunwits, who took them nervously. They are not accustomed to using fire. We set out along both sides of the long pile, lighting the fuses of grass. Then the bunwits scampered back into the forest, and I scrambled into the half-dark of the dawn, straight up the hill toward the squatting toad of Daggerhawk.
I wanted to turn around and watch the fire but didn’t dare. When Daggerhawk saw it, I had to be nearby. Close. So close I could see who went and who stayed. As it was, I almost didn’t make it.
I heard the alarm sound while climbing the last little bit of rock to the north of the main gate. There’s a cleft in the rock there, full of dark. They must have had a Herald on the ramparts, because he let go full voice, “Let all give ear; let all give ear; fire. Fire. Fire.” It was an efficient alarm. Lights went on in every window, and the uproar started right away. Everyone was looking down at the forest. No one was looking at the gate.
The portcullis was down. It didn’t matter. It would have stopped a man on horseback, I suppose, but not a skinny girl. Slender. Queen Vorbold says we must refer to ourselves as slender. Slender, then. The bars were no barrier, nor was the door of the little room where the rope that draws the portcullis winds around its machine. What do they call it? Capstan? Or is that on a ship?
Whatever they called it, someone came at it very quickly, half-dressed and dragging on his trousers. He set to work hauling up the gate, never glancing into the shadowy corner of the ceiling where I was crouched on a beam. When the gate was up, he locked the roller down with a lever and went running back the way he had come, leaving the door for my spy post. They all went by me, not one manheight away, Bloster and the Pursuivant and dozens of men and women, all carrying buckets and flails. Buckets and flails would not help them much. We had built a pile that would burn fast and hot as tinder, and there was no stream nearby. Still, let them try, let them try. Let them get out of there.
And at last the ones I’d been watching for. A group of women, all of whom looked much like Dedrina-Lucir, all with that same reptilian grace. Dedrina herself, I thought, and mother and aunts, slouching across the courtyard as though they did not care who might be watching. When they had gone after the others I waited only a little longer. Surely the place was empty. I ran across the courtyard. The central keep was off to the left a little, located long since from a treetop in the forest. If it was like most such places, the way to it would not be direct. We all try to make our home places confusing for invaders—Elators, for instance. If they cannot see where they are going, it makes it more difficult for them to get in.
So I cast about, finding my way. If everyone was not at the fire, those left behind were at windows where they could see the fire. I saw no one except a bare-bottomed baby lying in a basket on my way to the great flight of stairs with the heavy door at the top of them.
Quickly then, puffing a little, for it had been a long climb, I found the council hall. Found it. Stared into it in dismay.
The room was huge, square, and lofty. Across from the door, two high windows looked out onto nothingness, a wide gulf of air above the forested valley. On the right-hand wall was a fireplace with a monstrous, carved mantel high on the wall, and above that the Dagger hanging in lonely significance, a tiny dot upon that stone. To either side was an arras, which may have covered other doors. To my left was a dais with a table, two doors behind it, and down the center of the room between me and the windows another long, heavy table with a line of chairs down either side.
It would have taken an Armiger to reach the Dagger.
Or a dragon. Or a bird. I despaired, biting my lip, feeling the tears gather. Then I saw that the high chairs beside the table had ladder backs higher than my head. They were not so heavy that I could not walk one of them over to the hearth. Then I could scurry up the back, climb onto the mantel, take the Dagger, and hide it under my cape while substituting the false one the Oracle had given me.
It was done almost as quickly as thought of; I came down the chair and walked it back to its place by the table. It was a chair from the end nearest the hearth, the side nearest the windows. It slid beneath the table with a silken, hissing sound, a sound infinitely prolonged, a sound that I only gradually realized came not from the chair but from the doorway through which I had entered, a sound I had heard before in the dark night outside Xammer. The Basilisk’s sound.
In the doorway stood Dedrina-Lucir. Not dead. Not even injured. The Demesne had not been empty after all. Those who had gone had done so only to trick me.
“When we ssssaw the fire in the foressst, we knew it wasss a trick,” she hissed at me. “My auntsss and
