The narrow door let her into the loft where the birds were. She opened it only a crack, enough to see two of the cages. A large arrival cage had a door that was propped open. It held about twenty birds, the ones who regarded the tower as their home. The other cages, now empty, should have held pigeons that homed on other locations. As she moved her head forward to peek around the door, she saw the side of a frame on the back of the door.
She stepped back. A picture? Unlikely in this place. A map? Possible. A mirror? Unlikely, and yet . . . She stood in thought, thinking of mirrors and curses and a tactic called the mirror defense.
A blanket was folded at the bottom of the bed. Holding it high before her, she entered the room and draped the blanket over whatever it was, holding the blanket there as she lifted the thing. Chances are it would reflect only a particular person, but she would not take the chance. It was only hanging from a hook by a wire. She rubbed a finger against the blanket, feeling it slide easily: probably glass, so very likely a mirror. Holding the wrapped bundle, she examined the room. In addition to the cages and food for the birds, it held another small table and a little shelf of supplies: a pad of thin papers sewn together along one side with strong thread; a spool of the same thread, to tie the messages when they were rolled; a box of little message tubes; pens; an inkstone; a water jug.
She wrapped the blanket into a package, using the thread to tie it fast. Moving quickly but carefully, she went down the stairs and out to the privy. It had a board seat, but it was hinged as she had thought it would be. The pigeon droppings had to have been disposed of somewhere and this seemed the likeliest place. She heard nothing when she dropped the bundle into the evil-smelling pit, which meant it went straight and very far down, as it would if this were a natural fissure in the stone. The deeper, the better.
With the mirror gone, she felt somewhat more at ease as she went back to the cage room, where she shut the cage door and sorted among the birds to see whether any carried messages. Three of them did. She removed the tiny metal vials from their legs, putting the vials in her pocket. Another vial, capped, lay on the table, and she took that one as well. She would not take time to look at them now. If the thing she had dropped down the privy had been a mirror, someone might be trying to look through it from the other side, and that someone might already be on the way here. There were scribbled papers in a small box on the table; she rolled them together, tied them, and put them in her pocket.
Finally she took away the props that held the cage door open and broke the door in a way that could appear to have been an accident. Abasio had been here; presumably he had freed the birds in the smaller, empty cages along the wall where birds for various destinations were kept. With the arrival door broken, any birds still here or still to arrive would not be trapped inside.
Downstairs, she stopped to examine the cell, looking closely at the shackles. Xulai might have been held there, and when she rubbed the shackle with her handkerchief there were stains that might have been of blood. She did not know if the stains were old or new, but they could not stay there if Xulai’s blood was in them.
She returned to the loft to fetch several message papers and a candle, noticing as she picked up the pad that it bore the impression of an earlier message. That one and several beneath it she thrust into her pocket with the others. Downstairs again, she lit one of the papers with her flint lighter, lit the candle from that, and carefully held the shackles in a fold of her cloak as she burned the edges and the surfaces of the cuffs, including even the chain links that might have pinched flesh. The leg shackles were clean. Xulai had been wearing boots. She searched for hair, skin, anything that Xulai might have left behind. Nothing. Xulai had been fully dressed; her hair had been braided; it would have been unlikely that anything was left behind. Still, Precious Wind went over the top of the stone bench, inch by inch, over the wall behind it, over the floor itself, all of which were very slightly damp, as though they might have been washed. Perhaps they had. Abasio was no fool.
She tossed the candle down the privy and made sure the seat was down. On the way back, she rode through the trees, not coming near the trail until she had passed the first woodcutters’ trail. Even so, she stayed alert, stopping every now and then to listen for the clop of hooves. She was almost at the road before she heard them, just in time to slip away once more into the forest.
Four mounted archers. She had seen them before as part of the mounted group that had stopped them on the road when they first met the duchess. She did not want to be
