Tybalt, Quentin, and I exchanged a glance. Tybalt raised an eyebrow, apparently leaving the decision of whether or not to follow entirely in my hands. Swell. I do so love being the one who has to choose to follow the maybe-ally, maybe-enemy people down dark hallways.
“Root and branch, I hate my life sometimes,” I muttered, and stalked after her. My skirt snagged on the heel of my shoe. I grabbed the fabric in both hands, yanking it upward until my knees were exposed and my walking was unimpeded. I might not have looked very dignified, but I wasn’t going to eat floor.
The light from the single globe faded behind us, only to be replaced by a dim glow from up ahead. I could make out Marlis, but barely: she was more shadow than woman, sketched on the fabric of the world. The light grew brighter as we walked, and Marlis continued to move up ahead, never coming fully back into the light. It was enough to make me nervous, but it was too late now; if we exited these narrow hallways, I didn’t know where in the knowe we would reappear. With my luck, it would be inside King Rhys’ private chambers, or worse, in front of his guards. We’d find ourselves arrested for treason a second time, and this time, it would stick.
Marlis stopped walking. She was easily twenty feet ahead of us by that point, and it took a few seconds before we caught up. A large door blocked the hallway, barring us from going any further. There was no knob or keyhole: its only feature was a gold plate set where the peephole should have been. Marlis turned, studying the three of us, before peering down the hall behind us, eyes narrowed, like she was looking for signs that we were being followed.
“Sir Daye, I apologize for placing demands upon you, but I understand that you are skilled at the art of wind-reading,” she said, in a low, deferential tone. “Can you please taste the air, and tell me whether we are alone?”
I blinked at her. “I’ve never heard anyone call it that,” I said. Then I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, breathing in deeply as I looked for signs that we weren’t alone.
Marlis was still bleeding. That made things harder: I’d become so attuned to blood that forcing my way past it was virtually impossible. But Quentin was next to me, and he was Daoine Sidhe. I’ve spent most of my life in the company of the Daoine Sidhe, often while trying to convince myself I was one of them, and I could find that bloodline through anything. Once I had him, it was easy to find Tybalt, and to breathe deeper, confirming that no other bloodlines or magical signatures appeared in the hall. I opened my eyes.
“We’re alone,” I said.
“Good,” said Marlis, and turned to press her bloody hand against the gold plate. The metal seemed to pulse, drinking in her blood as fast as it smeared against the door. Marlis pulled her hand away. There were no traces of blood remaining on the gold plate.
“Nice trick,” I said.
“This one’s better,” said Marlis, and blew on the door. It opened, seeming as insubstantial as a feather, even though I could see that the wood was thick and sturdy, and probably weighed at least fifty pounds. She flashed us a quick, satisfied smile, and I saw Walther in the bones of her face. Until that moment, the fact that she was his sister had been somewhat academic, but now I could see it, and see the woman she would have been if her Kingdom hadn’t been taken over by someone who was determined to grind her and her family beneath his heel.
“Come on,” said Marlis, and stepped through the now-open door, leaving the rest of us with no choice but to follow if we wanted to keep her in sight. And I very much wanted to keep her in sight. I needed to know why she’d risked herself to bring us here, and what she was hoping to achieve.
Although it wasn’t like losing sight of her would have meant actually losing her. I could have followed the smell of her blood for a hundred miles, and always known exactly where she was. That was a little bit disturbing, if I allowed myself to think about it too hard, and so I tried not to think. I just followed, with Quentin and Tybalt close behind me.
The light didn’t reach past the door. I heard Quentin mutter something, and the smell of heather and steel briefly overwhelmed the smell of Marlis’ blood. Then a small ball of light drifted over my head to hover in front of me, bobbing in the air a few inches below the ceiling, which looked rough and rocky, like it had been carved from the body of the earth. I glanced back at Quentin, slanting him the briefest of smiles. He smiled back, although the expression did nothing to remove the tight lines around his eyes. He was worried. That was good. Failure to be worried when following a strange woman down a dark tunnel would have shown a deep and catastrophic lack of self-preservation, and I wanted to keep him around for a little longer.
Marlis was visible up ahead of us. I focused on walking, silently cursing her for grabbing us while we were in transit from the King’s company, and not waiting until after we had reached our quarters and had the chance to change our clothes. My shoes were sensible, but my dress was ridiculous. Formal gowns were not designed to be worn in underground tunnels—and I was becoming increasingly sure that when we had stepped through that door, we had transitioned from the stately, manicured halls of Silences to something older and rougher, probably intended as an escape route if things went poorly.
Marlis stopped. When we reached her, she was standing next to another door, this one made entirely of rose brambles. It was clearly Ceres’ work, and Marlis was just as clearly unhappy about the idea of opening it. There was no doorknob or keyhole.
I’d seen doors like that one before. Blind Michael—Ceres’ father—had used them in his stables, probably courtesy of his wife, Acacia, who was the Firstborn of both the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. “Does it need your blood, specifically, or will any blood do to open it?” I asked.
Marlis jumped, like she had forgotten that we were there. “Any blood will do,” she said. She was speaking in a normal conversational tone now: apparently, we had moved outside the sphere of the King’s surveillance. That, or we had moved deep enough into his trap that she no longer needed to pretend to be quiet. “Only a member of our family can open the door to the tunnel, but Aunt Ceres’ roses are less picky. They don’t care who bleeds for them.”
Behind me, Tybalt sighed. I smirked. He was clearly anticipating my next move, and while he didn’t approve, he wasn’t going to stop me.
“Let me,” I said, and reached into the brambles. As I had halfway expected, they writhed, repositioning themselves around my hand, before driving their thorns like needles into my skin.
Healing quickly doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain. If anything, it means the opposite. I don’t get nerve damage and I don’t build up scar tissue: I can recover so fast from an injury that I experience it again for the first time while it’s still ongoing. It seems like a blessing, and it has been, in a great many ways—I would never have been able to live this long if it weren’t for the fact that I can bounce back from things that should by all rights have killed me. But sometimes, when it seems like the pain is never going to end, I wish I’d gotten a different suite of magical talents from my mother. Like the power to avoid situations that end with me willingly jamming my arm into a door made entirely from animate, apparently angry rose briars.
The thorns bit into my flesh until it felt like they were touching the bone. I gritted my teeth, asking, “Does it always do this?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. If Tybalt or Quentin decided I was in trouble, they might come into range of the door. I didn’t need to deal with multiple people being attacked by the architecture.
Marlis didn’t answer with words. She just raised her arm and rolled down her sleeve, showing me the hundreds of tiny white scars pocking her skin. Some of them were old and almost faded, while others were glossy and as pale as birch bark.