Keiran let a corner of his mouth twitch upward. “Perhaps I did, but your reaction, Adira, tells me there is something to it.”
She narrowed her eyes and audibly growled. However he’d managed to find out was inconsequential. Adira was angry she’d had such a strong reaction to hearing him mention it as it had given him unintentional validation.
“All you need to know is that she did have an illegitimate child, and the mental trauma she suffered in doing so cost her the throne,” Adira said, trying to calm down again.
“The throne? My mother was the eldest?” Keiran asked, taking another step forward, which sent poor Stepan scurrying into the corner of the cell.
“She was, but the mental decline she slid into after birthing the child was enough to have our parents rightfully and legally remove her from the line of succession.” Adira cocked her head to the side. “They were wise enough not to let someone so mentally unfit take control of the country.”
“And it would take her child out of any legal claim to the throne,” Keiran replied, nodding to himself. “Leaving you without any challenge to your position.”
“That was our parents’ decision, and as far as the child, Ilana didn’t want anything to do with him after his birth, anyway. She hated him, and begged our parents to send him away after he was born. He was still given the title of duke, earning him some privileges,” she said, shrugging.
“I’m sure that’s given him great solace during his confinement.” The vampire wrapped his hands around the bars, doing his best to get into Adira’s head, but she was consciously fighting to keep him from getting too deep.
“He was well tended to. I assure you, he didn’t suffer mistreatment,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s too late to worry about him now, however.”
“And why is that?” he asked.
“His meals have gone unclaimed for months. He’s most certainly dead. It is unfortunate, but there is nothing I could have done to avoid his death in good conscience.” Adira turned to walk away, signaling all of the guards to follow. She wanted Keiran left alone with Stepan for a while, curious to see if he’d attack the guard if left unsupervised.
Keiran continued to search for any clues in Adira as she retreated, but only picked up on some vague, uncomfortable feelings before she moved out of range. He let his hands fall away from the bars and looked over at his two guards.
“Well, that didn’t sound very encouraging,” Jerris said.
“It didn’t, no. If he’s truly dead, I suppose there’s no reason to take Victri here with us if we escape this madhouse,” Kanan added.
The vampire looked toward the advisor’s cell. “Aye.”
Victri pulled himself up off the floor, the effort making the pounding in his head double. “He’s not dead. He might not have taken his meals, but there’s been no body produced.”
“Stepan?”
The guard straightened up his posture, resigning to whatever the vampire intended to do with him. “What?”
“Is Garhan dead? I’d imagine as the head of the Royal Guard, you’d know,” Keiran said.
Stepan blinked a few times. “Well, he… Honestly, we don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s kept in the abandoned manor house on the back of the property.” Stepan relaxed slightly, but his discomfort with the subject lingered. “Every day, meals are brought there and placed inside the door. The plates have just been piling up for a long while now. He used to come and carry them off elsewhere in the house, but it has been months since any of us have noticed him eating.”
“But no one has gone inside to see what is going on?” Keiran asked.
“Adira ordered us never to enter,” the guard replied.
Keiran looked to the side. If Garhan was a vampire like he was, there was no doubt in his mind the other man would have died at some point if he’d never been allowed human blood. The fact no one knew for certain bothered him greatly, though.
“I know you all are deathly afraid of vampires but allowing a man to die slowly of starvation alone? What sort of place is this?” Keiran’s eyes narrowed and he took a step closer.
“Adira has always been terrified of Garhan, though he never seemed particularly threatening. He’s always been too sickly to do anything,” Victri said, leaning a shoulder against the bars separating his cell from Keiran’s. “And now that brilliant Stepan has volunteered where Garhan is being held, I suppose I’m not going to be helped out of this little situation.”
Keiran glanced over at the advisor and drew a long breath. “I don’t know what to do with you, yet. We still need to figure out how we’re going to get out of this dungeon.”
“We’ve gone over every inch of our cell, and we don’t see any way out,” Kanan said from across the aisle. “There’s nothing even to use other than our drink cups and an insect-infested straw bed. The damn hole in the corner going into the sewers is the only break in the stonework.”
“We’re not ruling it out,” Jerris added, “but we’d prefer not to escape that way.”
“I don’t think any of us would fit,” Keiran said, shaking his head.
Stepan fidgeted where he stood. While he was still afraid of Keiran, it was obvious the vampire wasn’t presently in the mood to kill him.
“Stepan?” Kanan asked.
The Alerian guard turned around to face his Tordanian counterpart. “Yes?”
“Head of the Royal Guard as you are and such,” Kanan said, “if there were a way out of these cells, surely you’d be the one to ask. I know of a few tricks back in the dungeon in our castle.”
That put Stepan in a difficult spot. If his loyalty was to the queen and her family’s mission to keep vampires from running amok in Aleria, doing anything to set the one he was imprisoned with free was an act of treason. However, helping them might give him a chance at redemption for a few of his past actions.
Keiran picked up on something odd coming from the guard. “What is it, Stepan? For a man in charge of security, I’m afraid your emotions are far too easy to read.”
“How do I know I can trust you?” Stepan asked quietly.
“You don’t,” the vampire said, “but I stood up for you to Adira just now. If I was a tyrant, I probably wouldn’t have done so. We obeyed all the orders given to us on the way through Aleria, we harmed no one. I haven’t given anyone here any justification to think I’m dangerous.”
Victri snorted loudly at that, but his minor protest to Keiran’s words went ignored.
“We’ve simply seen what they’ve done in the past. It’s rather difficult to put that all aside on the word of one of the two vampires I’ve met.” Stepan moved a step out from the corner he’d retreated into.
“I’ll admit, having only known one other vampire all of my life, I’d have my reservations, too.” Keiran scanned around the cell. “But if I get out so do you, so there’s that to remember.”
Victri frowned. “And what of me?”
“I’ve seen what is in your mind.” The vampire looked over his shoulder. “You do belong in prison.”
“If I get out, I don’t know what Adira will have done to me,” Stepan said. “I’d imagine I’m too far out of her good graces at this point. She’s become increasingly difficult to deal with in the past few years.”
“Because she’s losing her faculties,” the advisor added. “I’ve been the one honestly running the country for years, leading her where she needed to be led. She’s become more combative, though.”
“I can’t rightly blame a queen for pushing back against an overbearing advisor,” Keiran said. “We had some issues with my father’s grand councillor.”
“You may not like to hear it, but monarchs get old and lose their minds just like everyone else, King Sipesh,” Victri shot back. “God knows what sort of madness and paranoia she would have driven this nation into if I hadn’t been keeping a watch over her dealings! And what is my reward? Imprisonment? Possible execution? Lovely rewards for a lif
e of service.”
Kanan rolled his eyes. “I think we need to focus on the situation at hand more than this shamed advisor’s feelings.”
The vampire turned to his guard. “Agreed. If I don’t get back home, who knows what will happen there.”
The advisor turned from the bars and wandered back toward the mattress on the floor of his cell. “I hope you don’t end up needing me once you’re out of here. There are things I can do, influences I hold that might be valuable.”
“There is something to Victri’s claim in regards to the queen’s senility,” Stepan said quietly. “I used to love the woman dearly, and it’s been difficult to watch her change over the years. It definitely accelerated when her husband died several years back.”
“He was a fool. Luckily, not being in the bloodline, he held no real power, just a title,” Victri said as he lowered back onto the mattress.
“You just weren’t able to push Adira around as much when he was alive,” Stepan went to the wall of Victri’s cell. “I’ve always known you were trying to use Adira’s power for yourself. I couldn’t say anything about it due to our respective ranks, but now that we’re on equal footing here—”
“Silence,” Keiran said, cutting through their bickering. “You two obviously dislike each other. We shouldn’t be wasting time arguing about it. We need a way out.”
Stepan relented and hung his head. “All right.”
“Again, Stepan, if there is a way out of here, you’re the one who’d know,” Kanan said, wrapping his hands around the bars of his cell.
He nodded and moved to look down the corridor, making sure the guards had all retreated. “All right, first off, I can tell you that voices carry down here, but the echo from the walls makes them basically unintelligible. You’re lucky on that front, or the guards would already be responding to what has been said.”
The Tordanians all gave the Alerian guard their attention.
“There have been a few small things I’ve noticed down here over the years. I intended to mention some of them to have them corrected, but I never did. I feared a day might come when I needed to exploit those weaknesses,” Stepan said, looking back at Keiran.
“If you have an idea, Stepan, we will cooperate,” Keiran replied.
The guard hesitated. Where he would go if he got out left him stumped. He had no wife or children to worry about, fortunately. Running would be a must as he knew Adira wouldn’t forgive him. They were days away from the border, however, and it would be tough escaping.
He realized he needed the Tordanians’ help if he was going to make it. If getting them out of their cells gained him any advantage, he had to do it.
“There is a way out, but it will be tight, and we’ll need to go through Victri’s cell,” Stepan finally said.
This caught the advisor’s attention. “If you come into this cell to escape, like hell I’m not going with you.”
“Fine, now silence, Victri.” Keiran raised a hand toward the advisor’s cell to hush him. “Go on, Stepan.”
The guard nodded and went over to the wall of bars separating Victri and Keiran’s cells. He knelt down in the back corner and started to try and pry up one of the stone floor tiles running under the bars.
Keiran went over and watched, seeing the tile move slightly as the man worked away at it. “Loose?”
“Broken,” Stepan said. “This palace is old, and the stonework has settled rather badly on this side of the dungeon. These floor tiles are thick, but half of them along the back wall are cracked. While we can’t get through the wall itself, we can probably get into Victri’s cell under the bars. Then, I will show you something else.”
Keiran understood why the guard wasn’t going to give anything else away, not wanting Victri to exploit the knowledge before they made it into his cell. He nodded and looked over at Jerris and Kanan.
“Let us know if anyone heads this way,” he said, pointing toward the corridor.
The two guards nodded as their cell was better positioned to see anyone coming.
Stepan looked up at Keiran. “Grab one of the tin drinking cups and crush it flat.”
The vampire moved off to do as asked. He pushed one of the metal cups onto its side with his boot before slowly crushing it, trying to keep the noise to a minimum. Once that was done, he passed it to the Alerian.
Stepan took it and wedged the flattened cup into the joint where the tile butted up against the next one further into the cell. That gave him the leverage he needed to lift up the first half of the broken tile. He set the cup aside and grabbed the heavy slab, lifting it out of its resting place.
Keiran took the half-tile when it was passed to him. It was nearly six inches thick, and easily three-times as wide on the unbroken edge. Though he was stronger than he otherwise would have been from his recent drink, it was still heavy.
He moved over to the mattress and lifted the edge of it up before doing his best to shove the stone fragment beneath. It left an obvious lump in the mattress, but he hoped it would avoid casual notice if someone came by.
Stepan set to extracting the other half of the tile that went under the bars and into Victri’s cell. The advisor came over and knelt down on his side, trying to help. The bars above the tile weren’t set into it, ending a few inches over the floor. There were supporting bars that did bore down into the stonework, but they were spaced out to every fourth tile.
After some work, the remaining half of the tile began to slide toward Stepan. Once again, he pulled it out and handed it to Keiran.
The three men then stared down at the nine-inch gap beneath the bars.
“And how, pray tell, are you two going to fit through there?” Victri asked, underwhelmed.
Stepan scratched the back of his head. The stones around the one he’d removed were all firmly set in place, and weren’t going to come out.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not a contortionist.” Keiran looked down at the gap. “I could probably have squeezed through that when I was five or so.”
“I think you’d be surprised just how small a space you can fit through when you are desperate,” Stepan said, already maneuvering to get onto his back.
They watched on as Stepan got his head under the bars, then began to wriggle his body along the floor and through the gap created. The ends of the bars above him tore into his shirt as he writhed, and he was getting scraped up badly, but he was making progress.
Victri reached down and grabbed the guard’s arms to pull, getting him the rest of the way through after several minutes.
Stepan sat on the other side, working to catch his breath and assessing how badly he’d gotten torn up in the process. The bars above had left three long cuts down his chest, and it felt like most of the skin on his back had been grated away.
“That was, perhaps, just slightly worse than I thought it would be. I guess I’ve put some weight on over the years.” He hissed as sweat trickled into the wounds. “I feel like I’ve been skinned alive.”
Keiran was leaner, younger, and more flexible than the guard, but he still didn’t relish struggling through the space. His innate claustrophobia reared up, and he desperately wished he could perform the shape-shifting tricks Athan could.
Stepan looked at the vampire. “Stay there, you’re fine.”
Keiran gave a nod, desperately hoping the guard wouldn’t make a quick escape without coming to free him or his men.
Stepan moved toward the mattress of Victri’s cell and worked to pull something from within it.
Victri moved closer, seeing something in Stepan’s hand.
He had a key.
The advisor quirked a brow. “That seems convenient.”
Stepan looked up at him with a smirk as he went to the lock. “If you don’t trust your ruler not to imprison you someday on a whim, doesn’t hiding one make sense?”
“That was in here with me all along?” Victri said, incensed. “You could have just told me and I would have freed the rest of you!�
�
“Would you?” Stepan asked, having his doubts.
The advisor looked to the side, choosing to go silent lest the vampire read his mind and tell everyone he would have run away and left them all to rot.
“I knew if I ended up on this side, I could get into this cell from either of the two flanking it,” Stepan said, getting the key into the lock then coughing loudly to cover the distinct click of the mechanism opening.
“What if they’d thrown you on the other side?” Keiran asked.
Stepan moved out of his cell and quickly unlocked the door to Keiran’s. “Then, we would have had problems. I couldn’t get away with stealing more than one key without raising suspicions.”
With Keiran out, he went over to free Jerris and Kanan. Soon, the five of them were together, but none of them wanted to remain there for long.
“Is there another way out of here besides the stairs?” Kanan asked, knowing they’d encounter guards that direction.
Stepan nodded and headed further into the dungeon, vanishing into the darkness. “Follow me.”
Chapter 5
Sorna had continued living on her brother’s farm after leaving the castle. She walked out to the henhouse to collect eggs one morning as was her ritual.
Still angry at Thana’s defiance and willful disobedience, she’d grown increasingly bitter as time had passed. She’d not pursued any communication with her daughter or anyone at the castle since the wedding between Thana and Keiran, and she never intended to.
The weathered wooden door to the chicken coop had fresh scratches upon its surface, and she bent down for a better look. There were plenty of small predators in the area and having one break in and make off with a chicken or two wasn’t uncommon.
A hole had been dug under the door where the claw marks marred the wood, and she immediately frowned. She could hear chickens within clucking away, so she knew it wouldn’t be a complete loss, but it was still troubling.
Dreading what she’d find, she stepped inside. The interior was illuminated from the light streaming in between the planks of the walls, so she was able to see. A few feet inside the door, there was a mess of feathers, the remains of an eviscerated hen amongst them.
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