The Traitor Queen

or grease grown thick with time and dust. Cery took a turn pulling the lever, then they both put their strength into it, but with no effect.

“Go fetch Gol,” Cery said.

He peered through the spy hole again – even tried holding up the lamp and looking through at the same time, but saw nothing but darkness beyond the door. It occurred to him then that maybe the hole was blocked. Digging a pick out of his coat, he poked it through and confirmed there was a void on the other side.

Maybe it’s a trap, set up by Akkarin or someone else long ago. Perhaps for the same reason we want to set traps: to fool and stop pursuers. Who knows what reasons the Guild had, in the past, to dig these tunnels.

The sound of two sets of footsteps approached behind him and he turned. Gol rolled his eyes as he saw the door.

“Can’t leave a mystery unsolved, can you?” he rumbled.

Cery shrugged. With a roll of his eyes, Gol moved to the door and grasped the handle. He pulled once, paused to examine the mechanism, then took the handle again.

“Be careful: you don’t want to pull that wound open,” Anyi said.

Gol stepped back from the lever, then cast about. He moved back down the passage for a short distance and picked something up. As he returned, Cery saw that it was a brick.

“That’ll make a lot of—”

The clang that filled the passage as Gol struck the mechanism was painfully loud.

“—noise,” Anyi finished.

But the shock appeared to have done what Gol intended: break the seal of the old oil. The lever now flexed under his hand. Cery felt his heart beat a little faster as the door swung open. It was heavy: the other side was covered with thin bricks and mortar. The door formed the back of an alcove.

As the light of the lamps penetrated the darkness it illuminated old wooden cupboards and tables. Cery felt his heart sink with disappointment. He wasn’t sure what he had been hoping to see. Hidden treasure, maybe? A better place to hide?

They moved inside the room. As the light of all three lamps filled the space, Cery felt apprehension replace his earlier anticipation. The room was clean. There was no dust or rubble. He moved to one of the tables. It was covered in small pots. Each contained earth and a tiny plant.

“Are we at the fa—” Gol began.

“Quiet!” Anyi gasped.

Cery and Gol turned to see that she was peering up a narrow staircase, holding her lamp away from the well so that its light wouldn’t penetrate. They moved closer and, as they joined her, heard voices above. There was the creak of a handle being turned.

Without another word, they fled into the tunnel, Gol pulling the door closed behind him. Cery’s heart was beating so quickly his chest hurt. Anyi put her eye to the spy hole and Gol set his ear to the door. Amused, Cery gently pulled a silently protesting Anyi aside and took her place at the spy hole.

The room beyond was no longer dark. Something bright was moving down the stairwell. He felt a wry relief as he saw a magical globe of light appear, then two magicians descend into view. One was an old woman, the other a young man.

“What’s happening,” Anyi murmured.

“Magicians. They’re looking around the room. Can you hear them, Gol?”

“Faintly.” The big man replied. “One said he thought he heard something. The other agreed.”

The two magicians shook their heads and walked toward the tables. The male one picked up a plant, then put it down with obvious careless anger.

“The old woman asked something. The young one says he’s sure,” Gol reported. He paused, and Cery could hear the faint sound of voices. He signalled for silence, then pressed his ear to the door.

“So we’ve been tricked,” the woman said. She didn’t sound surprised.

“Yes, as you suspected we would be,” the younger magician replied. “If you smoked this... this common garden weed, you’d get nothing but a headache.”

“Well, we knew getting hold of roet would not be easy.”

Roet? Cery felt something hot race through his veins. The Guild wants to grow roet?

“We’ll just have to keep trying,” the woman continued. “Skellin must be growing it somewhere – and growing a lot. Eventually someone will betray him, if we offer enough money.”

“All we need are a few seeds.”

“I wish that we didn’t need any.”

The voices were growing quieter. Cery put his eye to the spy hole again and watched them ascend the stairs, the magic light rising ahead of them. When all light disappeared abruptly, he guessed that the door above the stairs had been closed. He pulled away from the spy hole, closing its cover, and described what he’d heard to Anyi and Gol.

“What does the Guild want roet for?” Anyi asked, scowling at the door.

“Maybe it has potential as a cure,” Gol suggested.

“Maybe,” Cery echoed. “Maybe more than a few Guild magicians are addicted to it now, and they want to take control of their supply out of Skellin’s hands.”

“Perhaps they want to put Skellin out of business,” Gol said. “Then when they control all trade, stop growing it.”

Anyi turned to stare at him, horrified. “What about all the common people who are addicted to it? It would be... people would go mad!”

“The Guild has never stopped the underworld acquiring anything it wanted,” Cery reminded her.

His daughter did not look reassured. “It’s never going away, is it?” she said, her eyes wide with realisation. “We’re stuck with roet forever.”

“Probably,” Cery agreed.

Gol nodded. “But maybe if the Guild gets hold of some, and studies it, they’ll find a way to stop it being so addictive.”

Anyi still looked glum. “I guess, as an escape route, this is no better than fleeing into the University”

Cery looked at the door. “We don’t know if whatever is above that cellar is occupied by magicians all the time. It will probably be guarded by someone, if they get more seeds and try again, but that could be just a servant or two.”

“Skellin is more likely to follow us through there than into the University,” Gol added. “So it might be a good play to lay our trap.”

“Might be. But let’s not tell the Guild we know they’re trying to grow rot until we have to.”

* * *

“Bad memories?”

Sonea looked at Regin in surprise. Was it that obvious? Since the carriage had begun its slow ascent into the mountains she had been pushing aside dark and gloomy feelings. At first she’d dismissed it as weariness and worry, but then she would see some feature – a tree or rock – and feel sure she’d noticed it the last time she had travelled this road. But surely her mind was playing tricks on her. My memory can’t be that good.

Not sure how to answer Regin’s question, she shrugged. He nodded and looked away. She’d thought at first that their conversations had dwindled to silence because he was distracted by the view outside. Unlike her, he had never travelled this road before. Now she wondered if the silence was her fault. She hadn’t felt like talking for some time now.

Is that the place we stopped? A gap had opened in the trees, revealing fields and roads stretching into the distance, divided by rivers, roads and other human-made boundaries. The trees seemed small, however. Surely they would have grown taller in the last twenty years. But objects tend to be larger in our memories. Though... I thought that only applied to objects remembered from childhood, because we