Parric grabbed the Mage roughly by the arm. “Come on,” he yelled. “We can’t defend this place now that the bastards are using fire. We’ve got to get out of here!”
13
Through Earth
This isn’t going to be easy, Zanna warned herself as she crept out of the lower entrance to the servants’ quarters and darted back across the broken flagstones toward the kitchen. Though her talk with the Lady Aurian had stiffened her courage and given her hope, the Mage had not been able to provide the food and sleep that she desperately needed. Zanna’s mind was dulled; her limbs felt heavy with fatigue—but there could be no rest for her in the foreseeable future. The Lady could not be there to help her should she make a mistake or run into danger. She had only her own wits to rely on now. The hours before dawn would be brief indeed for all she had to do—and there was no guarantee that she would succeed at all.
It took more courage than she had known she possessed for Zanna to go back into that kitchen with its uneasy sleepers—and, worse still, its lingering memories of Janok. Though she had taken the Mage’s advice and replaced her torn, bloodstained rags with warmer clothes from the abandoned closets in the female servants’ dormitory, she shivered with more than the cold as she carefully lifted the latch and opened the heavy door just enough to edge her slight body through the gap.
The cavernous chamber was darker now, for the fires had burned down, but as Zanna slipped inside and closed the door behind her, she heard a sleepy, querulous mumble from the shadows near the hearth as one of the menials stirred and rolled over, disturbed by the sudden draft. Without thinking, she dived into the dank, dark space beneath the sinks and froze, heart hammering, her knuckles pressed tightly to her lips to still the sound of her breathing. Eventually the stretching silence reassured her that the sleeper had gone back to his dreams, but she waited a little longer, afraid of disturbing him again if she tried to move out of her bolt-hole.
Remembering her previous lucky find of the knife beneath the sinks, Zanna groped cautiously around her in the darkness, but such good fortune could not be expected twice in one night. All she found beneath her fingers was greasy dirt, and the stiff remains of an ancient floorcloth. When she finally encountered a cluster of clinging cobwebs whose owner scuttled across the back of her hand before dropping to the floor, that finished it. She snatched her hand back with a shudder, biting her lip to stifle a scream, and decided it was about time she got moving—even though the small, detached voice of common sense that always lurked in the back of her mind was pointing out the irony of someone who’d had the courage to stick a knife into a man twice her size being afraid of a little spider.
As she crept out of her hiding place and ghosted through the silent kitchen, Zanna went through the Lady Aurian’s instructions in her mind. It was fortunate that she was sufficiently familiar with the contents and organization of the room to find what she wanted without a noisy search, or the need to risk a light. Nonetheless, she picked up a handful of candles and a tinderbox, knowing she would need them later. Moving as quickly as she dared, she took one of the shallow baskets that were often used to carry food and crockery to and from the Mages’ Tower, dumped her candles inside, and added three goblets, wedging them carefully so that they would not rattle and clink.
Crossing the kitchen to reach the pantry, where Janok kept (had kept, Zanna reminded herself with a shudder) his immediate supplies, was the worst part of the business. She had been dreading the moment when she’d be forced to pass close to the huddled sleepers near the hearth. Holding her breath, she crept carefully past them on tiptoe, gripping the handle of her basket so tightly that the twined wicker of the handle dug into her palms. Each time one of the humped figures near the fire turned in its blankets or sniffled or sighed in its sleep, she froze like a hunted animal, so that her progress was slow and achieved in a series of halts and scurries, like one of the mice that darted by night across the kitchen floor—the same mice whose frantic scamperings for cover she could hear when she finally gained the relative safety of her goal.
It was pitch-black in the pantry, so she closed the door behind her and risked a candle, though it was difficult to strike a spark when her fingers shook so badly. Securing it to a shelf with a glob of dripped wax so that she could have both hands free, Zanna rummaged quickly among the stores for bread, cold meat and cheese, then checked the wooden racking beneath the shelves for wine. When the cool, smooth side of a flask met her questing fingers, she dumped it into her basket with the rest of her gleanings, blew out the candle, and left the mice to their feasting with greater sympathy for the little beasts than she had ever known before. Retracing the nerve-racking journey across the kitchen as quickly as she dared, she slipped back outside as silently as she had come, and ducked across the narrow alley to the infirmary that had once been Lady Meiriel’s domain.
For a dreadful moment, Zanna thought the door was locked, but a sturdy shove proved that its handle had simply stiffened from disuse. It shot open with a protesting groan and a bang that brought her heart into her throat. Damn, oh damn! Not in the dead hour of the night when the noise would carry. Not when she was so near the gatehouse…
Zanna’s inarticulate prayers were drowned by the clatter of running feet across the courtyard. Instinctively, she looked around for a place to hide, but there was nowhere to go except the infirmary—and that would only buy her worse trouble than she already had. An attempt to run at this point would get her an arrow in the back and no questions asked.
And then it was too late for thinking. A massive shadow loomed in front of her, and she shrank back against the door frame with a cry of terror as the point of a sword was pressed against her throat.
“Why, bugger me—it’s a girl! Marek, stop standing there picking your nose, and bring that lantern over here.”
Zanna blinked as a dazzling light shone into her face. Beyond it, the two guards were still nothing but anonymous, hulking shadows.
“Aren’t you the Lady Eliseth’s little maid?” the same voice demanded. “Thara’s titties, girl—I bloody nearly gutted you for a prowler! What in all the festering hells are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”
Almost absentmindedly the guard lowered his sword, and its absence came as such a relief to Zanna that she found her voice, and her wits, at last. “It wasn’t my idea,” she muttered, with just the right note of sullen resentment. “Lady Eliseth can’t sleep, can she? So she hauls me out of bed—after I’ve been up half the night in any case ruining my eyes with her wretched sewing—and sends me down to fetch her something to eat.” For proof, she held up her basket.
“Listen, girl—I don’t know what your game is, but the watch before we came on duty told us that the Lady had gone out just after midnight. She slipped past the gatehouse and never said nowt, but young Feddin saw her all right. And she hasn’t come back while we’ve been on duty, so what do you have to say to that?”
“You must have been asleep on watch, then,” Zanna retorted brazenly. “Why, the Lady came back hours ago. Would you like to come up with me to the tower and explain that you didn’t see her?” She stood rigid to keep her knees from trembling, and prayed to all the gods that they wouldn’t be brave enough to catch her out in the lie. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she added, seeing them hesitate. “She gets madder than a scalded weasel when she can’t sleep.” For good measure, she pushed back her hair from her face to let them see the bruises that Janok’s fists had left.