by Sharon Shinn
“Well, I don’t suppose—” he began, but his voice was interrupted by a furious pounding that seemed to come from the front of the house.
The three of them looked at each other with wide-eyed dismay. “Was that the door?” said the Gisseltess man in disbelief. “Has someone come calling—at this place, at this time, on such a night?” They had chosen the mansion to conduct their business for a variety of reasons, one of them being its remote inaccessibility. Only someone familiar with the rocky northern stretches of Tilt would have any idea where the house lay, or know which of marlord Gregory’s many vassals was its landlord.
“Perhaps it was only thunder, rattling the casements,” offered the heavyset man.
The Gisseltess man stalked to the window and threw back the heavy curtain. Nothing could be seen but a liquid blackness, midnight washed clean by heavy rain. “I can tell nothing from here.”
“Perhaps—”
But there it was again, a hailstorm of blows on wood, and now the sound of upraised voices crying out for admittance. “Will the servants answer?” the Tilt man asked in a voice barely above a whisper, as if those standing outside below could hear him if he spoke aloud.
There was more rough knocking on the door. “They will have to,” the Gisseltess man said with some grimness. “Or I fear our callers will bring the house down.”
The three of them were on their feet by now, and they moved silently to their own door, closed firmly on the rest of the house, and held themselves still to listen. Voices in the hall, some calm, some excited—no doubt the admirable butler greeting these most unwelcome visitors. The three men waited, unmoving, barely breathing, attempting to catch a word or a sentence that would explain how these travelers had so disastrously come calling. Within minutes, the voices died down to a murmur and then were gone entirely.
“He’s escorted them to some parlor or another,” the Gisseltess man said. “He’s admitting them to the house.”
“But why—”
“He must have his reasons.”
Indeed, a few moments later, they could hear the measured sounds of the butler’s footsteps ascending the stairs. Before he could knock on the door, the older man jerked it open.
“Well?” he demanded. “Who has arrived? Surely you realize this is not a house that can afford to take in chance-met travelers.”
The butler nodded with complete tranquillity. He looked to be quite ancient, his face lined and wrinkled, his gray hair so thin around his face it was almost only a memory of hair. But his eyes were imperturbable and hinted at so many secrets known that he could not begin to recount them all. “These were not the sorts of people who could be turned out into the weather,” he said—adding, after a pause so long it might almost be considered insolent, “my lord.”
The fretful Tilt man hissed out a long-held breath. “Who, then? Who are they?”
The butler addressed the older man as if the other had not spoken. “One is a servant girl, two are guards. But the head of their party is a woman who is clearly highborn. Twelfth House. Serramarra, I believe. She has fallen ill on the road and looks to be in a high fever, which is why they have sought shelter here.”
The Gisseltess man regarded the butler steadily. “Did you recognize her or are you just guessing?”
The butler chose not to answer directly. “She has long golden hair and exceptionally fine features,” he said. “Her clothes were quite expensive. I saw the crest of Danalustrous on her cloak and on her servant’s luggage.”
Another hiss from the short, anxious man. “Kirra Danalustrous,” he said bitterly. “Malcolm’s shiftling daughter.”
The butler nodded. “So I believe. My lord.”
There was a moment’s silence while the Gisseltess man clearly tried to decide what to do next. “What have you done with her? And her retinue?”
“At the moment they are in the small parlor. My lord. I have asked the housekeeper to make up a room for them on the second floor. In the other wing. Her servant girl is quite affected and refuses to leave her side for even a moment. Her guards are—”
“We cannot have fighting men in this house,” the Gisseltess man interrupted. “They must be placed elsewhere. In the stables, perhaps.”
“We cannot put them in the stables,” the Tilt man countered. “Romar’s horse is there. It bears the Merrenstow brand. Anyone familiar with the aristocracy—”
“The kitchens, then! Bed them somewhere else!”
“As to that,” the butler interrupted, his voice still calm, “they seemed most interested in staying at their mistress’s side. I think they would—quarrel—if asked to leave her. I doubt they have plans to roam the hallways, looking for trouble. No doubt they want to do what they can to help the maidservant nurse the serramarra.”
The Tilt man looked up at that. “What’s wrong with her? High fever, you say? Will she be bringing infection into the house? There’s a complication we didn’t think of!”
“It might solve one of our problems, though, don’t you think?” asked the heavyset man. “Depending on who came down with the illness.”
The Tilt man grunted. The older man turned back to the servant. “Did they ask for food?”
“They requested merely a bed for the night and shelter from the rain. It is a most wet and miserable evening,” the butler added, as if he did not trust the lords to glance out the window and draw this conclusion on their own. “I must presume they have travel rations with them.”
The Gisseltess man turned away, pacing toward the hearth. “Very well, then! A bed for the night. Two nights, if she is really as ill as they think. And a fire. Water. But tell them there is almost no one in the house. Tell them the lord has shut the place up for the season and there is only a skeleton staff on hand. We will stay out of sight until they’re gone.”
“Very well, my lord.”
The man turned to give the servant a hard stare. “And make sure they don’t go wandering through the corridors once we’re all abed. Post someone at the stairwell to the upper story. At all times. If one of them goes investigating—well. We will have some time later to think up a reason for why we overreacted to their presence.”
“Indeed, my lord. Very good. I will give you a report tomorrow. We will hope that the fever lifts and the weather breaks and they are gone by morning.”
He bowed and went out. The three men clustered before their fire, two of them gulping their port and the third one holding his hand out to the flames. “Kirra Danalustrous!” the heavyset one said as he bent over the fire. It was as if the very sound of her name made him cold. “Why couldn’t it have been anyone else?”
CHAPTER 2
KIRRA lay on the bed, motionless, listening to the sounds of people bustling around her. The housekeeper’s voice was soft, sympathetic, as she apologized for the dustiness of the room and promised the butler would bring up water soon. She herself seemed to be kneeling before the grate, building a fire, a chore a chambermaid would ordinarily do. “But there’s only the few of us here, what with the house shut up just now,” she said in a contrite voice. “This is the best we can offer.”
“It is most adequate,” Justin answered in a clipped voice. If Kirra hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was genuinely worried about her, taken ill so unexpectedly on the road. “We appreciate everything you have done for us—for the serramarra.”
Small hands brushed across Kirra’s forehead, pushing the golden hair out of her eyes, checking again for fever. Donnal sitting by her side, having shape-shifted himself into the very picture of womanly servitude. “Cammon. Do you think you could make some broth?” Donnal asked, pitching his voice in a feminine key. “I think she might swallow some of that. She hasn’t eaten for more than a day.”
A rustle of skirts, no doubt the sound of the housekeeper rising to her feet and brushing cinders from her dress. “We’ve got a few apples in the kitchen if you’d like me to bring them to you,” she said. “You could mash them up and see if sh
e’d eat something like that. Brandy, too, if you think it would help.”
“We have our own supplies,” Justin answered curtly. “Thank you. Again. But I think it might be best if you—if none of you—returned to this room more than you can help. Whatever this fever is—” Kirra guessed he paused to shake his head. “I pray to the Silver Lady that we don’t bring illness down upon this house.”
The woman’s voice sounded a little fainter, as if she had opened the door and spoken from the hallway. “It won’t be the worst thing to come to this house in recent days,” she said, her voice oddly sad. “I’ll have the butler bring up more firewood and leave it at the door. We won’t trouble you again.”
Cammon, Justin, and Donnal murmured their thanks, and Kirra heard the door shut behind the housekeeper. They all held still, listening with some tension, until Cammon said, “She’s gone. Back downstairs.”
Kirra sat straight up in bed and began to laugh. “Well, that was easier than I expected,” she said. “I thought we might be barred out of the house altogether.”
Cammon smiled over at her. Even three months of study in the royal city hadn’t been long enough to make him look halfway respectable. Though recently cut, his light brown hair was shaggy; his clothes, newly purchased, still managed to look like something he’d sorted from the beggar’s bag. “It was the Danalustrous crest on your cloak,” he said. “That old butler couldn’t turn away someone from the Twelve Houses.”
Justin was stalking around the room, investigating what hazards it might hold, though Kirra thought its plain walls and spare furniture were unlikely to conceal any menace. Justin was dressed in red-and-gold Danalustrous livery and carried himself like the most elite member of a marlord’s escort. She thought his scowling presence might have been another reason the butler admitted them so readily.
“If he respects the Twelve Houses so much, why is he here helping to plot against them?” Justin said with a snort. He peered behind the threadbare velvet curtain hanging over the room’s single window. No one leapt out at him ready to do battle. Kirra thought he might be disappointed.
“They’re plotting against the king, not the aristocracy,” Kirra pointed out. “And, anyway, the servants might not know exactly what’s being planned here. I don’t imagine their masters confide everything to them.”
Justin made that sound again. “Well, they must suspect that something is a bit irregular. Look at this place! As far from civilization as you could possibly hope! It was practically built for intrigue. It must have been the cradle of conspiracy since the day the walls first went up.”
Donnal smiled. In this female shape, with a shy, beardless face that held a conciliatory expression, he was completely unfamiliar to Kirra. She had seen him countless times in wolf or bear form and not found him as strange to her as she did right now. Until he smiled; that was a look she recognized. “Justin’s right, you know,” he said, his soft voice even softer in the feminine register. “A good servant knows whatever’s going on in his master’s house—even if he hasn’t been told. Those few working here are aware that something devious is afoot.”
“Well, I can only hope they don’t get in our way,” Kirra said. “Cammon, can you tell how many we have to contend with?”
“Give me a minute,” he said, and settled onto the floor right before the fire. He frowned in concentration.
“And while you’re at it, can you tell us if Romar Brendyn is actually in the house?” Justin asked. “And where he might be? Didn’t look like there were dungeons, not when we rode up, but these old places can hide all sorts of secret stairwells.”
“Dungeons at Danalustrous, though you wouldn’t think it,” said the woman sitting in Donnal’s place.
“There are not!” Kirra exclaimed. “There are—well—rooms that are not so pleasant that are under the main part of the house, but they haven’t been used for centuries, and they’re not dungeons. They’re just—rooms.”
“I wouldn’t want to pass much time there,” Donnal said.
“Could you be quiet?” Cammon asked. “I can’t get a read on the people here with all of you arguing.”
Immediately, the rest of them grew entirely still. Donnal, of course, had a predator’s instinct for absolute motionlessness; he could go hours without drawing attention to himself at all. But Justin became just as quiet, just as watchful. He was so annoying and could be so loud that Kirra always forgot how good he was at stealth, at the sinister skills that defined the career warrior. At everything, really. He stood with his hands resting lightly on his blade hilts, his sandy hair undisturbed by the slightest motion of his head. Like the others, he watched Cammon.
“I count six people in the house, in addition to us, and two in the stables,” Cammon said finally, his face still furrowed in concentration. “Three of them are together, in a room in the other wing.”
“Those would be our rebels,” Justin said.
“Two are downstairs. I think we’ve met them—the housekeeper and the butler,” Cammon continued.
“And one of the men in the stables must be the groom who took our horses,” Donnal said.
“I doubt he’s a groom,” Justin drawled. “He wasn’t wearing a sword, but I’d bet he’s a soldier. No doubt the other one is, too.”
Kirra nodded. “That was my guess as well. And the eighth person? What can you tell about him?”
“He’s upstairs, I think. Not in this wing of the house.”
“But he’s alive? Conscious?”
Cammon gave her an uncertain smile. “Alive, certainly. And I am picking up a strong sense of rage. So I’d guess he’s conscious. But that might be pain he’s sending. Sometimes the two are hard to distinguish.”
“Where is he exactly? Can you tell me?”
Cammon shook his head. “I’m not good with things—with places. I can tell you body count and general direction, but I have no idea how the house is laid out. I can’t—” He waved a hand. “Brick and stone don’t talk to me the same way.”
“Well, you’ve come up with more information than any of the rest of us, so you don’t need to apologize,” Justin said, squatting down beside him on the hearth. “Anything else? Anything at all? Reinforcements riding in from Tilton City? Knives being sharpened down in the kitchen? The guards from the stables getting ready to come in and murder us in our beds?” He glanced around the room. “Bed,” he corrected.
Cammon shrugged. “A great deal of uneasiness from the three men gathered together. They probably don’t like that we’re here. But they don’t seem to have formulated any plan of action. At least, their thoughts aren’t very focused at the moment.”
“I wouldn’t say my thoughts are all that focused at the moment,” Kirra murmured. “I can hardly blame them.”
Cammon grinned at her. “Oh, you’re fairly bristling with purpose. Not hard to read at all.”
Justin came to his feet and swung around. “So?” he challenged. “What next? Do you actually have a plan?”
Kirra slipped off the bed and started pacing. Indeed, as Cammon said, she was alive with energy and speculation; she thought adrenaline might burst through her skin in a bright, excited flare of light. “I suppose we should wait till the household is more or less asleep,” she said. “Then I’ll take some other shape and creep up to the attics or wherever Romar is being held. Hoping he doesn’t scream to wake the whole mansion when he finds me knocking at his cell door,” she added.
“I’ll come with you,” Donnal said.
She shook her head. “No. I want you to take my shape and lie on the bed. In case anyone comes calling in the middle of the night and wonders where I am.”
“They’ll wonder where your servant girl is if they don’t see her,” Justin said.
“Oh, I doubt it. They probably only registered her, if they noticed her at all, to note that I had a chaperone. She could disappear from the room and never be missed.”
“Another charming instance of the insufferable arrogance of the arist
ocracy,” Justin commented.
“But then, you’ve got so much charm of your own,” she said sweetly. “Or is it insufferability?”
He laughed and dropped back down to the fire to sit next to Cammon, not bothering to reply. Donnal watched her continue to pace through the room, making plans in her head.
“I’m serious,” Donnal said. “I don’t like the idea of you sneaking through this house alone—no matter what disguise you’re in.”
“I don’t think I’ll be in any danger,” she said. “And if there are only two soldiers on the premises—” She shrugged. “I think I can handle them.”
