The room still seemed unoccupied.
She sighed and consigned herself to patience. Erren had shown her the passages within the walls of the castle years ago, not long after she had become queen. The corridors were very narrow and very old. Erren claimed that her order of coven-trained assassins had manipulated the choice of architects when the palace was built, convinced him to include their covert additions, and then made certain that neither he nor the workman who built them would ever tell anyone. Thus the dark hallways were a secret kept only by the sisters of Cer, and a few of their charges.
Muriele had often wondered if such secrecy was truly possible, over the course of centuries. If other queens had been shown the passages as she had, surely a few of them would have told their husbands, daughters, friends.
And yet, in her time, she had never met anyone other than Erren in the recondite halls, which suggested her old friend had known what she was talking about.
They were well and cleverly hidden, the peepholes disguised and clotted with glass to keep them from being easily discovered. The doors were marvels, showing no seam when closed.
She had used them often since Erren’s death. They seemed safer than her own rooms, and without Erren or a trustworthy replacement, she had to do her own spying, if she was to have the faintest idea what was being plotted around her. But tonight she wasn’t merely browsing, trying to catch Praifec Hespero or some member of the Comven in secret conversation; tonight she had a particular business.
It had come to her in the form of a note, folded and slipped beneath her door, written in a clean, simple style.
Your Majesty,
You are in danger. So am I. I have information that can save your life and your son’s throne, but I in turn need your protection. Until I have your pledge, I cannot reveal my identity. If you agree, please leave a note beneath the statue on the table in the Warhearth saying “agreed.”
Well, there was her reply, safely hidden from sight—and here she was playing this childish game—but in five hours, no one had come to collect the note. She had signed the note “agreed,” of course, but she was determined that she would know who the messenger was—the entire affair could be an elaborate ruse of some sort.
Perhaps whoever it was had come earlier, before she had been able to excuse herself from her duties. They might have read the note and then returned it to its hiding place. But the Warhearth was located in the central part of the castle, and while quiet at night, during the day any visitor would attract attention. Besides, why leave the note?
Darkness was just falling, and she had formally retired. She had until morning, and no use for sleep and the dreams it brought.
And so another bell passed before a sound caught her attention, a faint scuff of leather against stone. She squinted through the small hole, trying to see who or what had made the sound, and noticed a shadow edging from the west end of the room. That was peculiar, as the entrance to the Warhearth was on the east end. She waited impatiently for the figure to step into the light, and in due time was rewarded.
It was a woman; she saw that first, with curly chestnut locks, wearing a pale blue dressing gown. Her “friend” was clever, then. He’d sent a serving girl to fetch the note. Perhaps I will recognize her, she thought, and thus know her master. But she had little real hope of that. There were many servants in Eslen Castle, and she knew no more than a tenth of them on sight.
Then the woman turned, and the light caught her face, and Muriele blinked in utter astonishment. She did, indeed, know the girl, but she was no maid or serving girl. No, that youthful face belonged to Alis Berrye, the youngest of her late husband’s mistresses.
Alis Berrye.
Anger, jealous and reflexive, began heating in Muriele, but she fought to cool it, because something wasn’t right here. Alis Berrye had the brains of a leek. She was the younger daughter of Lord Berrye of Virgenya, who oversaw one of the poorest cantons in the country. William had taken a liking to her sapphire eyes and girlish curves when her family had visited two years earlier. Since William’s death, she’d been all but invisible, and though it had crossed Muriele’s mind several times to have her ejected from her old rooms, the truth was that she had far more important things to do than satisfy a pitiable and now-irrelevant resentment.
Until now. Now Alis Berrye was once more very much her concern. Even Erren had thought the girl too stupid and frivolous to harbor political motives beyond keeping the king’s favor. Gramme had always been the dangerous one. Berrye didn’t even have issue, and had apparently never tried to conceive any.
That meant her first guess had been right, and Berrye was someone’s servant in this. But whose? Besides William, she’d never shown obvious ties to anyone in the court. Still, there had been plenty of time for that to change, and in the present climate, with everyone scrambling for whatever position and advantage they could, someone had clearly found a use for the girl.
Berrye retrieved the message, read it, nodded to herself, and then turned again toward the west end of the room. A moment later there was a very soft sound, but it lifted the hairs on Muriele’s neck.
The only exit from the west end of the room was a secret one that let into the very corridors Muriele now occupied. Alis Berrye knew about it.
She knew the girl used to meet with William in the Warhearth, at times. But William hadn’t known about the passages at all.
Or maybe he had, and Muriele hadn’t known her husband as well as she had supposed.
She felt a pang of loss so sudden and deep, it was shocking. She and William hadn’t married for love, but they had found it, at least for a time. And even though she had always resented his mistresses, she’d always felt that one day, somehow, they would settle into their love again.
And she missed him—his laugh, the smell of his clothes, the silly names he called her in private.
All gone. And now it seemed he had known about the passages all along, and never told her, never trusted her with that information. That wouldn’t be so bad—after all, she hadn’t told him—but that he had told Alis Berrye of all people, the silliest, most irrelevant of his whores—that hurt.
It also worried Muriele. What if he had told Gramme, too?
She waited a bit, both hoping and fearing that the girl would come down her passage, so she could strangle her and hide the body where it would never be found, but after several minutes, when no one appeared, Muriele padded back along the long, winding way to her own chambers, feeling for the raised signs on the wall that gave the directions.
When she opened the secret door that led to her bedchamber just a crack, she knew something was wrong. She had left a lamp burning in her room, but no light greeted her. The room was utterly dark. Had her maid Unna come in and put out the light? Why would she do that?
She stood frozen for an instant, her eye pressing through the crack at the darkness. Maybe the lamp had gone out on its own.
Someone said something. A single word, too low to hear. She gasped and shut the panel, backing away, knowing whoever it was must have heard her, but her mind was cluttered with spidering fear-webs, and she couldn’t do anything but gape at the blackness in front of her.
She could only think how wrong she had been. Berrye knew about the passages of Cer, so others did, too. Did the man in her room know? Was it a man?
Something bumped against the wall, and she heard the faint hiss of breath. Her hand dropped to the dagger she wore next to her chatelaine, but it gave her small comfort.
The bump was followed by a muffled tap, and then another, and another, moving along the wall. The chill in her grew so deep, she began to shake. Someone was searching for the door. But that meant that they didn’t know where it was. It would be hard to find, from the other side. Still, she had given away its approximate location.