She didn’t look like herself at all.
She turned away, rubbing her arms against the chill. A trail of water droplets soaked the red rug behind her. She reached for a linen towel that hung on a peg beside the tub and dried herself, eyeing the armoire, wondering what surprises it might hold.
She cast the towel aside and passed by the fox fur on her way to the armoire. She couldn’t resist running her fingers over it. The individual hairs tickled her fingertips in the softest caress she had ever known. She resisted the urge to hop in bed and roll around in the blankets and instead opened the door of the armoire.
Her eyes grew round. For a moment, she just stared at the assortment of fabrics: dark blue, vivid gold, elegant black, sultry red, deep green, lustrous silver. Lace, chiffon, cotton, leather, velvet, silk. It was like she had stepped into a queen’s wardrobe. A queen from twenty years ago, perhaps, but still too good to be true. As she pulled the dresses off the hooks, she decided their vintage beauty was stunning in comparison with the latest fashions of the rich she’d seen in passing through Crossing’s Square. But their age made her curious about where the gorgeous articles had come from.
Even the spotless white underclothes and corsets looked fancy. She put a set on with a little difficulty, tying the corset tighter than she’d managed to in years with her old one. Then she gravitated toward a sky-blue bodice and skirt that she noted in a tiny thought matched the Overlord’s eyes. A gold sash draped across the dress’s bustle, giving her a much more substantial-looking buttocks when she looked in the mirror after dressing. The clothes were a perfect fit, but she felt small in such bulky attire. Her eyes were still hollowed, her cheekbones still gaunt, her lips still cracked around the edges from weather and thirst. Her hands were still pale spiders.
She closed her hands into fists. Her wardrobe lacked one thing. She closed her eyes and then opened them again along with her palms. She focused all of her remaining energy on her newfound knowledge that she could finally keep most of her magic for herself, that she was on a swift path to rise above her station and gain the respect and dignity she had yearned for since she began peddling stones thirteen years ago.
She twisted her wrists and held a piece of black lace from a purple dress’s trim. She touched it with magic, and the lace extended, weaving itself into the fresh shape of a rose as it spread across her hands. She put forth a little more magic to separate the new lace from the dress’s trim. Rose-patterned lace enveloped her hands in a delicate touch until a pair of black, lace gloves shielded her skin from the greedy eyes of the outer world, save for her sensitive fingertips.
Melaine smiled. She had taken a life or death chance in venturing to Highstrong Keep.
She had survived.
She had won.
Rasping, deranged laughter clawed into Melaine’s sleep-clogged ears. She threw herself into the waking realm, her body scrambling upward until she sat panting in bed. She bunched up the impossibly soft fox fur as if she were strangling the animal it came from. The sight of the dead Luxian man—the man she had killed—faded from her inner sight as shadowed objects came into focus all around.
For a moment, Melaine thought she was outside. The space around her was much larger than her little room above the Greasy Goat pub. Defensive magic crackled at her fingertips, but memories soon flooded into her consciousness, and she knew where she was. The prisoner’s nightmarish, triumphant laughter dwindled as she looked around the bedroom she’d been given in Highstrong Keep, lit by the low flame of a candle that sat on a small table at her bedside. The soft, eerie glow of the moon pushed against the single window in the room, and the thick, green-tinted glaze of the panes seemed to push back, their lead dividers barring the light access.
The haunting dream wouldn’t recede. She had felt powerful when the Overlord asked her to knock the tortured man to the ground. She had been eager to prove herself and show the Overlord her magical talents, but she had tempered her pulse of violence. It was meant to be a strike only, nothing fatal. She didn’t know her blow would kill the man.
The Overlord had used her. She had come to Highstrong with the full intent to let him order her as he wished so long as he taught her to be a Follower and helped her rise above Stakeside. She was only doing as she’d planned. She was only following his orders. She was blameless.
And yet, guilt shadowed her like a stray cat she’d once fed a scrap to as a child. The skeletal creature had followed her with a meow as chafing as the dead man’s laugh, and just when she’d decided to give in and toss it another crumb, a cart had barreled down the street and crushed it beneath the wooden wheels, catching its tail in the spokes. She still remembered the strangled meow and the crack of bones. She’d never thrown scraps to a stray again.
Melaine swung her bare feet from under the covers and planted them on the rug. The hem of her white chemise brushed her ankles. No matter how comfortable her surroundings, she couldn’t sleep now. She shouldn’t sleep—not without inspecting her surroundings with greater care. The opulence had distracted her, but one thing she had learned from a life in Stakeside was to always know who and what was around you. Death could come from anywhere—a shoddy roof patched together by someone too poor to afford the proper materials, a rusty tooth extractor from a barber that could infect bleeding gums, the seemingly innocent child in the gutter who was paid pocket change to murder for a purse he would never see.
Who knew what traps and dangers lay dormant in a place like Highstrong Keep, where dark magic permeated the walls and slipped through the cracks in the floor? Some of the magic was old and stale, other tendrils were fresher and twisted in ways Melaine had never felt before. The two forms of magic contrasted with each other in the same way that the modern furniture and clothing in some parts of the keep differed from the First Era relics and architecture of the ruins which surrounded them.
Melaine wrapped her finger around the brass handle of the candlestick on the table. She swept a hand across the weak flame. The wick glowed with purple magic for seconds, and then the flame reared higher before turning orange and ordinary again. She lifted the blazing candle to light her path as she padded to the door.
She paused. Were those whispers on the other side? Or was it the wind whistling across the glazed windows? Melaine swallowed and chastised herself for being so nervous. If she could handle the Hole, she could handle an old empty castle.
She wrapped her hand around the vertical door handle and pulled. The hinges groaned. She raced a hand along the metal joints, assuaging them with smooth oil that dripped from her fingertips as she called upon her magic to hush them.
She pulled the door another inch. The hinges were silent. She crept through the doorway, her candle held high.
The corridor was empty, devoid of anyone who could whisper in the dark. The stone wall on her left was blank, but the row of standing statues lined the wall on her right. They were each dusty and absent of any dark, magical energy. But three statues down stood the one that Melaine knew bore a nasty face of fury and terror, hidden in the darkness. She suppressed her fear and took slow steps forward. She kept her eyes ahead, the warning from Karina ringing through her ears, “Do not dwell on any object too long in this castle. There will be consequences if you do.”
A sense of dread filled Melaine as she drew closer to the statue, but she kept staring forward. Soon, she would cross its path and be done with it.
She shielded the light of her candle with one hand as if coveting the flame, worried it might be stolen the instant she arrived at the statue. Her heart, which had been racing in her approach, halted as her stomach twisted. She nearly doubled over from the intensity of the black magic that surged from the statue, but she pushed onward, all the while hiding her candle flame, terrified to let any of its light illuminate the ghastly face.
The dark pull of whatever magic the statue held released her as soon as she passed. She swayed a little with the sudden freedom and took a deep breath, but then she pattered away with frant
ic steps, desperate to leave the chill of the haunting statue behind.
The short corridor soon opened up into the room that held a square fire pit in the center of the floor. She took a few moments to inspect the space, though it was empty of everything except stacked wood and spiderwebs. She passed into the next room, which was scattered with elegant but dusty furniture and trinkets. Moonlight stretched its feeble fingers through the windows, elongating shadows of the tables and chairs, which were then twisted and given chaotic motion by Melaine’s candle flame.
There were two doorways connected to this room. The narrow, curtained entrance through which she and Karina had passed earlier that day stood across the room. The other, set into the wall on her left, housed an old wooden door with a rotten section in the upper right corner. A glimpse of the garden peeked through the hole. Melaine approached the door, knowing it might be wiser to inspect the other two rooms that made up the living quarters of the keep. Nevertheless, she was enticed to step foot into a real garden for the first time.
She gripped the iron door handle and pulled. Cold wind assaulted her, but she was used to the elements. Even in her chemise, she only shivered a little as she stepped into the night. Her bare soles touched icy flagstone, but she soon found a broad stretch of grass that warmed her feet a small amount.
Her candle guttered in a fresh breeze. She cupped her hand around the flame to provide shelter and whispered to it to coax it to maintain its strength, a flutter of magic in her breath. She lowered her hand, and the flame stayed straight and tall.
The garden was dark, lit only by the small crescent moon above. The kitchen roof no longer puffed smoke from the two-story, rectangular building to Melaine’s left. Directly ahead, the stretch of wall that connected the kitchens to the second paved courtyard was vacant of any signs of life.
She narrowed her eyes. There was a deep, shadowed entryway in the lowest stones of the wall across the garden, only big enough for a person to crouch inside. All was still around it, but some inner urge called her to inspect it, an instinct she had learned to follow throughout her life.
She crossed the garden, eyes darting around her in every direction. Karina had told her not to go anywhere, and Melaine didn’t know what would happen if the old lady caught her. Or if the Overlord caught her. The thrill of fear and anticipation shot through her at the reminder that the Overlord was within these walls.
She rounded the perimeter of the glassy pond and skirted the ragged picket fence of the garden. She approached the dark pocket in the wall with wary steps and crouched down with her candle held out. The flame illuminated a narrow flight of stairs that plunged into the darkness.
Goosebumps prickled Melaine’s skin, making the tiny hairs on her arms rise. The staircase led to the dungeons, it had to.
Should she dare?
After a moment of hesitation, Melaine glanced around the courtyard and up at the windows of the surrounding buildings. All appeared empty and quiet. She turned back to the low, arched doorway. She took a breath and crawled into the blackness. The stone ceiling rose a few feet once she was inside so that she could stand with a bowed head. Her candle flame flickered, making her shadow dance as she descended spiraling stairs deep into the darkness. Finally, the narrow staircase ended, and she found herself facing a wall with a corridor running to her left and right, tall and wide enough for two or three large men to walk abreast.
She raised her candle and saw several empty torch sconces along the walls on both sides. She resisted the urge to light them and looked hard in both directions of the hallway. Each side looked identical. More empty sconces and voids of darkness.
Melaine chose left. Her candle flame stretched its light into the crevices of rock and mortar with each step before the darkness swallowed them again behind her. Then she stopped.
Whispers. Or was it the wind again? No, the entrance to the dungeon was far too high above her to create such an audible sound.
But the susurrus continued. It was ahead—she was sure of it.
She shielded her flame and coaxed it down to a small flicker. She focused on silencing her breaths and smoothing her stride as she crept forward.
The whispers grew louder. There was more than one voice, but no overlapping words or back and forth conversations. No, the voices—there were many, countless—were all a united, increasingly vivid chorus.
Their chant was in a foreign tongue, but the tone was filled with an unmistakable rise in anticipation. Melaine fought the urge to turn around and run back to the garden. She needed to know what—and who—could threaten her in the keep.
She took another slow step toward the source of the whispers. More voices seemed to join in, bringing new undertones and rhythm to add greater depth to the chorus. As the chanting grew in volume and number, the foreign words became a frenzy. It was a song of screams from a people too petrified and tormented for coherent pleas.
Melaine shuddered, the whispers digging into her bones, rooting around in the magic of her marrow and vibrating within the hard casings. She clenched her teeth and took a few steps more. A glint of metal flickered from the darkness ahead. She drew a breath and pulled her cupped hand away from her candle flame.
An ancient urn rested on a table in a hollowed alcove of a dead end. Its clay was cracked and inlaid with silver veins as if it had once been shattered and remade. The whispers intensified, sounding like hoarse shrieks and guttural groans of dismay. Melaine felt her mouth contort into a dreadful grimace. She felt an urge to smash the vase, to shatter it again into a thousand pieces. Anything to make it stop.
She ground her tingling teeth and gripped the candlestick tighter.
“Quiet,” she said. The whispers amplified and evolved into intense pleas as if a host of people within had heard her speak. A thousand men and women housed within the binding confines of sepulchral clay.
“Quiet, quiet, quiet!” she shrieked. She raised the candlestick and sliced her arm toward the urn. The clay smashed on impact, shooting pain through her hand as shards crashed to the floor. The soft powder of ash bloomed all around her. The flame of her candle snuffed out.
The horrific chorus stopped. Her arm trembled, still hovering over the smashed urn.
Goosebumps shot up her flesh through every limb, and she felt an uncontrollable burst of fear. She felt like the breath had been leeched from her body. She gasped for air but choked on a mouthful of ash cloud.
Melaine turned her heel against the stone beneath her and sped down the dungeon corridor. Her bare feet pounded against the cold floor. Pitch-black darkness surrounded her. She thought she heard the awful whispering resume, but she shut it out and kept running.
She didn’t know if she had missed the staircase leading up to the garden by the time she stopped. She caught her breath as she forced herself to regain her sense of caution. She lifted her dangling candlestick to her breast and summoned a drop of magic from her palm to relight it. A flame pooled onto the wick and lapped into a small wave of light.
A noise ahead made her shelter the freshly created light, but she didn’t dare to snuff it out. It was a grating sound, like the swivel of heavy stone against the floor.
An overwhelming tightness in her chest made her torso cave and her breath stop. Her hand shook, but she fought against the immense dread of something awful coming her way, and she raised her candle high. The sound of grating stone tore at her eardrums. It was coming closer. She wanted to run again, but her feet froze to the icy floor. She closed her eyes for an instant, gathering courage before re-opening them.
A ghastly stone face flashed in the flare of her candle, inches from her. The haunting statue from outside her bedroom was here, in the dungeons. Its tall mouth seemed longer in the candlelight, its cheeks gaunter, its brows more twisted into a fierce rage, terror, and sorrow combined. Its sharp eyes flickered with the flame as if it were alive.
Melaine screamed.
She spun around and fled down the hall. She stretched out her hand, feeling for t
he draft of the staircase as if she could grasp it and be pulled to safety. She stumbled as she caught sight of the stairs and surged up the steps, skipping as many as she could until she tumbled out of the low doorway and into the brisk garden.
She didn’t stop. She hopped over the garden fence and skirted the pond. She bolted up the stairs to the door that led to her living quarters. She slammed it behind her and ran to the room centered by the dormant hearth, but then she slid to a halt as she looked down the short passage that led to her bedchamber. The row of statues loomed on the left-hand wall, though none filled her with as much black dread as the one that had followed her to the dungeons. They were all still, her guttering candle flame highlighting the nearest figure’s grotesque features.
She battled her instincts to run and approached the place she knew the worst statue had resided before her explorations. She wasn’t sure what would terrify her more—if the statue was there waiting, having never moved, or if it had somehow walked away from its post.
She gathered what defensive magic she could muster this late in the night and felt it crackle at her palm. She walked past one dormant statue, then another, a third, a fourth, and then—
It was empty. The black hole that had housed the horrific statue was nothing more than a shadow. Goosebumps flew up and down Melaine’s limbs. She jumped past the empty space as if the statue might suddenly appear and snatch her. She slammed into her bedroom door and shoved it open with her shoulder. She darted inside and shut it with a reverberating bang of wood and iron hinges. The magical ward she had put into place before she fell asleep felt flimsy compared to the evil of her sentry.
Lodestone Page 11
