“The monastery is deserted, or we believe it is. Did Jeffery’s father attack them?”
Brice shook his head. “That sort of thing couldn’t be contained. Soldiers are worse than washerwomen for spreading tales. No, there is another story that may be true. There came a time when stories of sickness in the monastery spread. People fled from the area.”
Hannah let the ideas gel in her mind. Illness could account for the monks dying, or perhaps a harsher winter than usual. Jeffery’s father somehow found out about the gold. He probably spread the stories of illness to help hide his actions in recovering the gold statues and melting them into coins. He probably also learned he controlled a secret escape route across the mountains. If the King of Wren ever came for Jeffery’s gold, he’d disappear across the Eagle’s Nest Pass—along with his gold, where he’d buy a good life in Peermont.
While Elenore held a high position in the Line of Succession, Jeffery held the gold to ensure she was crowned. The two might not even like each other, but the match was as perfect a fit as a pair of dancing shoes on a maiden. A left and a right, and neither would ever match another pair of shoes.
“That explains a lot.” She pulled all four blankets over herself while clutching a slice of dried beef to chew on under the covers. She had a lot to think about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sometime after midnight, lightning and thunder woke them. Rain pelted them at first, then it turned into a torrent. The blankets were soon soaked, but Hannah still huddled under them because it would be worse to expose herself to the storm without them. She sat miserable, making a tent with her head holding up the blankets, hoping the water would run down the sides in sheets.
Footsteps squished nearby. The corner of her blankets lifted and a hand slipped under the opening and then withdrew. She smelled something odd. What?
Hannah felt a surge of pain. Her eyes opened, but she saw nothing. Her feet were asleep, her wrists hurt, and her mind felt sluggish. She was dry, but not under her blankets.
She felt no breeze, saw no stars and smelled the musty odors of a room long closed up. Her attempt to move her arms failed because ropes bound her wrists and her feet. She lay on her left side, her cheek pressed into the rough stone of a floor. Not a flicker of light revealed where she lay.
Panic surged, and she pulled harder at the ropes, but a slight scuff of a foot on stone drew her attention. She couldn’t see, but she could hear. And smell. She controlled her fear and sniffed the air. Ale, sweat, and wood smoke. A short cough told her a man was near, but not too near.
Oddly, being tied up and laying in the dark in a strange place was not nearly as frightening as being there alone. “Who are you?”
“Shut up and let me sleep.”
The voice was rough, the words slurred as if the speaker had downed a lot of ale. Her eyes searched for light, a sliver from under a door, a single star in a window. There was nothing.
Speaking again would antagonize him, probably a guard who wished to be there only a little less than she did. He was sleeping off the effects of several mugs of ale, and she’d already decided he was not a regular soldier.
Her mind worked slow but provided another clue. The hand that had slipped under her blankets had deposited a sleeping potent, or similar. A spell to knock her out. The storm. It hadn’t been real. Well, real was not the right description, but natural was better. It was unnatural, the sort of storm expected in the lowlands during hot summer evenings, not high in the mountains.
A mage had created the storm. It kept the army huddled against the pouring rain, and the thunder and deluge had covered the footsteps of someone, perhaps many people, entering the camp and capturing her.
They had carried her to the Eagle’s Nest, where she now lay. The words of the crow returned. They know where you are.
It seemed so obvious, now. Travel to the Eagle’s Nest from Calverton took two days. The natural place to stop for the night was beside the river before going into the menacing cleft in the granite wall. There were troops that had traveled the cleft, and more stationed on top of the sides. But there was another way to proceed, a hidden way that allowed Elenore’s people to circle around those advance guards.
The cleft was not a trap, but stopping for the night below it was. As Brice had warned, Elenore had had five years to prepare the trap Hannah had walked into. Like an idiot, Hannah had been as innocent as any bunny hopping down a familiar trail and into a snare.
The guard snored. She had been asleep, and with no light, she was convinced it was still night. But, if that was true, it would soon be daylight because the storm came near midnight.
No, there was a flaw in her calculations. It should take a full day to reach Eagle’s Nest from where she camped and more time for men carrying an unconscious woman. So, she was either in a room without any light at all, or she had been asleep all day, and it was the next night.
She listened for other breathing, hoping she might hear Brice. She heard nothing. A wiggle of her shoulders told her the throwing knife was gone. She bent at the waist and didn’t feel the short blade, but that was expected. She flexed her thigh and found the familiar resistance of the rapier. After finding two knives, they had assumed there were no more.
“How long before morning?”
The snoring stopped, and she heard the guard shift. “Plenty,” he grunted.
Good. That confirmed the idea that she had slept all day. It provided her a timeline. It also told her Elenore was not in the monastery, not yet. But, she would be on her way.
“I have to pee.”
“You just did.”
Hannah felt the wetness now that he mentioned it. After a full day asleep, no wonder. It had probably been what woke her, and in her grogginess, she had been intent on relieving the pain in her bladder. She shut her mouth and tried futilely to relax. The guard began snoring again.
The closing of a door echoing down a distant corridor drew her attention and panic started to return. If the mage came in and found her conscious, he would either torment her or increase the security. Right now, Hannah had a chance to escape by using her oldest magic trick.
Her wrists were tied behind her back. The guard was across the room, but he would quickly notice even a small light behind her if he woke. Hannah’s index finger touched the bindings on her left wrist. The flame from her finger was tiny, but even so, it provided enough light to see the guard.
He sat in a chair with arms, his head slumped forward, his snores regular and even. The footsteps grew louder. She slowly increased the size of the flame, wincing when it burned her wrist. The footsteps continued.
She forced the flame to grow and smelled the hemp burning. The rope parted, and the fire extinguished. Her wrists were free. She reached down inside her waistband and pulled the small rapier from the thin scabbard. She quickly sliced through the ropes around her ankles, took three stumbling steps and sliced the throat of her guard.
The footsteps moved closer, and she leaped to place her back to the wall beside the door. It flew open, coming to a stop when it struck her toe. Light flooded into the room.
She imagined another guard coming to relieve the one she had killed. He carried a lantern and the surprise he would feel as he found the dead guard would be her chance. The holder of the lantern paused for the briefest time, then moved quickly to the guard, placing the lantern on the floor beside him to provide light as he knelt to examine the body. Hannah sidestepped silently from behind the door, knife in hand.