Leanâlhâm froze beside Chap as he looked to the right, to where Wynn had been hauled off the night before. There was no sign of her in any of the windows of the two-level building flush against the keep’s southeast wall. Chap tried calling to her, anyway.
Wynn, I am here.
The captain sidestepped into the dwarven sage’s path. “Can I help you, Domin?”
“I was passing the entry hall and heard the portcullis gears,” the dwarf answered, not at all politely.
Chap scanned the courtyard’s left side. The building there had no windows, just three doors along its length spanning the whole courtyard’s side. A pair of double bay doors in the left half had been set high at its second level.
He tried again. Wynn ... are you here? Where are you?
Unless he actually saw her, this whole attempt could be pointless. Even if she heard him, as she had in the blizzard, she would not be able to answer if she were locked away. She could hear his voice in her thoughts, but he could only hear her true voice. However, if he could at least see her, he would know where she was, and he could tell her they would come for her.
His anxiety grew. What if she was no longer here? Had they been lured inside ... into a trap?
“Why have you raised the gate?” the dwarf demanded. “I see no sages coming or going. Supplies do not arrive at this time!”
Chap looked beyond the dwarf and the captain to the main keep ahead. A few narrow window slits marked its two upper floors. No one looked out of their panes, no one from whom he might glimpse any memories in the hope of stumbling on Wynn’s exact location. He felt Leanâlhâm’s small hand drop on his neck, and her fingers clenched his sooty fur. Perhaps in fear she’d finally overcome her reluctance to touch him. He glanced up, wondering what had caused this.
Leanâlhâm was looking up to the building on the courtyard’s right side. In the last window on the second level, Wynn stood wide-eyed, looking down at them with her hands flattened against the panes.
Chap almost sagged in relief, and then Wynn’s brow furrowed. A clear memory rose in his awareness as he watched her.
To his surprise, he became lost in it. He saw through her eyes as if he were she in a long-past moment. She—he—was locked up in Lord Darmouth’s keep in a small room.
The memory flickered, though the setting remained the same. She—he—was now closer to the room’s door. Light from one narrow window had changed, suggesting it was a different time of day. The door opened, and one of Darmouth’s armed men stood in the passage outside.
“I do not tell you how to run your affairs,” the captain retorted to the dwarf. “I fulfill my responsibilities as I see fit.”
In the window above, Wynn’s eyes closed, scrunching tight. The previous image went black in Chap’s mind, and something more rose out of that darkness. He began to see a face—no, several faces—of armed men. They were dressed like the guards here in the keep.
One last flash of memory in Wynn came to Chap—that of Darmouth’s guard coming to the other room’s door.
And Chap had his answer.
Wynn’s situation was more than some dispute with her superiors. She was indeed a prisoner, and these guards—this captain in the red tabard—now controlled her confinement.
Chap’s relief at finding her faded. The situation was more complicated than he had hoped.
We are coming ... soon. Do nothing to make them move you elsewhere.
With her hands pressed against the glass, Wynn nodded, looking so hopeful that he hated to leave her.
Only moments had passed since the dwarven sage had first called out. Chap was fully aware the exchange with the captain could end quickly. Then the creaking sound of the portcullis beginning its descent echoed out of the gatehouse tunnel.
With a last look at Wynn, Chap backed toward the tunnel’s mouth, and Leanâlhâm followed without a sound.
Rodian cursed inwardly, wondering how he could explain a visitor being allowed inside. If he even mentioned the young woman was here to see Wynn, it would incite High-Tower all the more, perhaps enough to send him charging to Sykion.
How many more times could he play his authority as trump against whatever challenge these sages cast in his way? Reiterating that he was in charge and would handle things his way would soon wear thin, and the royal family would step in again.
High-Tower shifted to the left more quickly than his bulk suggested possible. His head tilted, and his slash of a mouth opened. The domin was surprisingly silent as he looked around Rodian.
Rodian couldn’t help but look back ... to find the girl and the wolf-dog gone as the outer portcullis thudded closed.
“Who was that?” High-Tower demanded.
Rodian didn’t answer and bolted into the gatehouse tunnel. There was no sign of the pair beyond the portcullis, and he grabbed the shoulder of Wickham’s tabard.
“Where is she?” he barked.
Guardsman Wickham blinked in alarm. “She left. I thought you sent her off.”
Rodian clutched the portcullis’s broad, upright beams, peering out to the bailey gate. As far as he could see over its top and up Old Procession Road, there was no sign of the elven woman with the strange eyes.
“Captain!” High-Tower shouted, and the crack of his voice echoed down the tunnel. “What is going on here?”
Rodian only cursed under his breath again.
A block down the main road from the bailey gate, Chap ducked around a corner with Leanâlhâm and peered back toward the sages’ small castle.
“Something is wrong in there,” Leanâlhâm whispered in Elvish as she leaned out above him. “We should return to tell the others.”
But Chap lingered. With guards inside the keep and the place locked down, he wanted more time to look for any other security measures. In only a moment, he spotted one.
Another guard came into view, walking the top of the bailey wall’s south half. The man paused on reaching the right-side small barbican, one of two framing the bailey gate. He leaned away, likely conversing with his comrade inside the portcullis, and then turned back the way he had come.
Chap hung his head. Of course there would be more guards than just the captain, one man inside the portcullis, and at least one in the gatehouse tower. Likely more than one walked the bailey wall, but he suddenly wondered about Wynn’s trick of memory.
Where—how and why—had she learned to willfully recall and hold a memory as she had for him to see? In all their lost days together, Wynn had never done this. She did not need to, considering he could always speak into her thoughts and she had a voice. The meaning in those memories she had shown him could not have been clearer. And for her to so vividly reexperience a past moment with such clarity, and then overlay others like it ...
“Majay-hì!” Leanâlhâm whispered. “We must go.”
Pulled from his thoughts, Chap huffed once and turned up the road. If only there had been more time with Wynn. Perhaps she could have shown him even more with this new memory skill of hers. As he walked ahead of Leanâlhâm, he glanced back toward the keep.
A movement like a black shadow skulked along the bailey wall’s base.
Chap wheeled and tensed as another form came into view behind that black shadow walking on all fours. Someone in a gray robe trotted toward the bailey gate, passing that shadow, that ... tall, black, wolfish form. He lunged a step back toward the castle.
The rope in Leanâlhâm’s grip snapped tight around Chap’s neck. He heard her stumble, but he fixated on that dark form. The black wolf hung back, out of sight of the portcullis, as the sage in gray opened the bailey gate.