“Just like them,” Caris wheezed. “You want to…leave me. I won’t let you…sweet Iris. You would…burn.”
Lady Caris suddenly wobbled on her feet, falling over to one elbow. Iris’s head jerked with the motion, and a white mass swept across her face.
Satin.
Lady Caris’s scream was a rusty puff. “Get it…away!” Her words were broken, rocky. She kicked out at Satin and he yowled pitifully as he skittered across the stones against Iris.
No! Iris’s mouth formed the word, but no sound came out. Her own lungs felt tight, frozen, in her chest.
“Away,” the woman gasped. “Can’t…” The blade rattled to the floor as Caris clawed at her throat, dragged her bodice down from her chest. Her mouth continued to move, but no sound at all issued forth.
Iris’s view was blocked as Satin walked between the women once more. He butted Iris’s cheekbone, her chin too, perhaps, then sat down. Iris saw the dark streak on his fur. Her blood.
Satin, she mouthed.
Her eyes were closing. And she was no longer cold.
* * * *
Padraig knew he’d been right the deeper he descended through the bends of the dark stone passage. The steps were impossibly old, worn smooth and slanted beneath the soles of his boots, the walls jagged under his left palm as he stepped carefully, his sword in his right hand. The stairs curved to the left in a semiregular pattern, and after what seemed like a quarter hour of creeping over the stones, a faint glow flickered up the passage.
Light. Someone was down there.
It took all Padraig’s will not to shout for Iris. If she was there she was likely not alone, and for all Padraig knew there could be another way into the subterranean depths. And so he crept on, at last coming out of the narrow channel into a low-ceilinged, wide room, it’s damp-striped walls ringed with benches and shelves, each of which were laden with crockery of all sizes, corked bottles in varying colors, leather-wrapped jugs sealed with wax.
And where no containers stood, tools and utensils and implements of unknown and terrible purpose hung on tidy hooks, all the supplies fitted together so perfectly as to have created a mosaic of sorts. All the tools were dark, stained…
And Padraig noticed the old, wide-shafted boots resting on the floor near the seam of wall—boots discolored with thick, dark grime that could only be grisly in origin. And above the boots, a pair of long, leather aprons, perhaps one time of light color but now splashed with what appeared to be drying blood.
Padraig’s heart stuttered in his chest. Had Hargrave already solved the problem of Iris Montague?
Was Padraig—and Caris Hargrave—too late to save her?
Padraig forced himself on toward the torchlight beckoning from a turn of corridor beyond the iron gate that stood open at the far end of the gruesome supply room. There was still no sound of anything living in the dungeon, and Padraig wondered with anguish how anyone could survive down here for long under the terminal weight of dread emanating from the very stones.
Padraig crept forward, clenching his jaw against the emotion that prickled behind his eyes.
Please, God, spare her. Spare her for her kindness, even to those who doona deserve it. Spare her for her courageous heart. Spare her for her clever mind. The people of Northumberland will need her hope and her fortitude now more than ever.
Spare her also for me, so that I may spend the rest of my life caring for her, and seeking to be as good and honorable as she.
Padraig came around the corner, and for a moment his eyes couldn’t differentiate between the shadows beneath the tall, wide table and the shapes on the floor. But then the shape closest to him jerked, and a breathy squeal emanated from it.
It was Caris Hargrave, her face a terrible gray, her eyes bulged, her lips turned blue, as her own fingers dug into her throat like claws.
And beyond her, facedown, lay the still, crumpled shape of Iris, a white, fluffy pile near her dark hair. Satin.
The cat yowled pitifully.
“Nae.” Padraig sheathed his sword and stepped over the noblewoman to drop to one knee at Iris’s side.
“Iris,” he called. He lifted her upper body and turned her in his arms, holding her against his chest. “Iris, look at me, lass.”
Her eyes weren’t closed evenly, he noticed, and her lips were slack. Her dark hair was like an inky river around her pale face and he smoothed it back with a shaking hand to lean his ear close to her mouth. He cursed the pounding blood that roared in his head and drowned out any sound—he could neither hear nor feel breath.
“Nay. Nay.”
Padraig gathered her high up in his arms and then stood, stepping once more over the noblewoman. The cat mewed, and its lithe, fluffy limbs scissored past Padraig, sending him like a streak out of the chamber and toward the stairs.
Padraig carried Iris up the interminable spiral, feeling the heat increase, the choking smell of smoke thicken as they climbed, and he wondered that he wasn’t delivering them both into an inferno. He bumped his shoulder into the panel at the top of the black stairs, and the lamp he’d left on the table was only the tiniest twinkle of starlight in a black sky. The room was nearly filled with smoke, and so he knew that the passage beyond would be impassable to them.
Satin was nowhere to be seen, and he sent up a breath of prayer that Iris’s beloved pet would be spared.
He stood just beyond the door of the hidden passage, Iris still limp in his arms, struggling against the fear that wanted to overtake him. Their only two options were to retreat once more to the stone dungeon to pray that the burning keep did not collapse and smother them, or the window.
Padraig couldn’t imagine spending his final moments in that ancient den
