Chương 172: Chapter 168. Hide and Seek

"Lady Morgana!" A voice came up faint through the stone from two floors below, and I pressed both hands over my mouth and shook with the effort of not laughing.

"Lady Morgana, come now! I am a mage of the royal household, I will have you know, not a— Morgana!" The castle was the whole world, and I knew every inch of it better than anyone alive. Better than the steward, better than the guards, and certainly better than poor Brunhild, losing a footrace to a seven-year-old somewhere down by the solar. I had found the best hiding place in the castle that week and saved it for an occasion, and this counted.

There was a deep window seat in the east gallery, set behind a tapestry of some battle nobody remembered. If I climbed up and tucked my knees to my chest, the cloth fell straight again and swallowed me whole. I could hear everything from inside, but no one could hear me. So I waited. I was good at waiting. It took her a long while. I listened to her work up through the castle floor by floor, her voice climbing the stairs ahead of her, the exasperation in it curdling by degrees into real complaint.

Brunhild was not a young woman, the east gallery was a long way up, and I had made her walk every step. Then her footsteps came into the gallery and slowed, and I went still. Through the gap beneath the tapestry I could see her feet. Soft grey slippers, the hem of her robe dragging the floor, stopping a few paces short of my window. She didn't move. The gallery had gone quiet, and I held my breath until my chest ached, certain the smallest sound would give me up. The silence stretched.

Then the tapestry was flung back and a face dropped down level with mine." BOO." I shrieked. It tore right out of me, half terror and half delight, and then I was laughing too hard to stop, nearly off the seat with it, and Brunhild was laughing as well, that low dry laugh of hers, hugely pleased with herself.

"Got you," she said.

"Oh, I have got you. Do you know how many stairs you made me climb? Do you?"

"You found me," I said, which seemed the important point.

"I found you. And now there is the matter of your punishment." She reached in, got both arms around me, and hauled me out of the window seat against every kicking protest.

"For every stair you made me climb. One apiece."

"No—" Her fingers found my ribs. I came apart while she tickled me until I couldn't breathe, until I'd promised her everything she asked and a few things she hadn't, all the while keeping up a grave running tally of how far I'd marched her, sentencing me stair by stair. The late sun came gold through the gallery windows. She smelled of ink and dried herbs. I was held, safe, and I laughed until it hurt, believing without once having to think about it that the afternoon would go on forever.

"Come now." Brunhild set me back on my feet at last, breathing hard, and smoothed my hair down where she'd mussed it.

"Enough of that. We're going back in." I planted my feet.

"No."

"Morgana."" No." She straightened, and looked at me, as the laughter went out of her by degrees.

"Ah," she said.

"Still cross with your lord father, are we?" I nodded, hard. Though I wasn't, particularly. Not anymore. But it seemed important to hold the line, and a nod cost nothing. Brunhild lowered herself onto the edge of the window seat, which took her a moment, and drew me in to stand between her knees, so we were nearer to eye to eye.

"Listen to me," she said gently.

"Grown people have their reasons, even when the reasons don't show. Your father isn't angry with you. Not in his heart. But you did a thing in front of a great many watching faces, and a man in his position can't let a thing like that simply stand. He had to be seen to answer it. That is not the same as being angry."

"He was angry." My lip was starting to go.

"He sent me out of the hall."

"He sent you out because he had to. There's a difference, and one day you'll know it."

"But Uncle was being mean to him." It came out in a rush, all the unfairness of it at once.

"He was. I heard him. I only helped." A shadow crossed Brunhild's face but was gone as she took both my hands.

"Your uncle is the Emperor, child," she said.

"And your father is the Emperor's younger brother. That is a hard thing to be, some days. Brothers quarrel. Even grown ones. Even crowned ones. And it is not for little girls to go stepping into the middle of it, however much they want to."

"I quarrel with Kael and Daven all the time." I was properly indignant now.

"Kael took my wooden horse and wouldn't give it back and I bit him on the arm. But I never—" I stopped, hunting for how to say the size of it.

"I was never mean like Uncle Rayhan is. I never told them I'd kill them. Just because they made me angry." Brunhild didn't answer straight away. When she did, it wasn't really an answer at all. She only gathered me in against her, her chin coming to rest on the top of my head, and said we had best go down before the light went. In the end I went, because she asked it and because the light really was going.

She took my hand, and we started down through the east wing toward the bridge that crossed to the main house, where the family would be at dinner by now. They were a long way off, on the far side of the castle. I couldn't hear them. I remember being cross about the distance, about all the corridors still between me and my supper, and dragging at Brunhild's hand to make her walk faster. But we never crossed the bridge. A guard stepped out of the cross-passage into our path, and stopped, and bowed his head.

"My lady. If you'd follow me, please. There's been a change to the arrangements for the evening." I thought nothing of it. Guards said such things. I was already leaning toward the bridge and the smell of dinner somewhere beyond it, tugging at Brunhild's hand to make her hurry. But Brunhild didn't move.

"Wait," she said. Her voice had gone very pleasant, and very soft. She looked the man over, top to bottom, unhurried.

"Who are you?"

"Evening rotation, my lady." He kept his head lowered.

"Posted to the inner halls tonight."

"I know the evening rotation. Every face on it." A small pause.

"I don't know yours."

"... I was taken on recently, my lady."

"Were you." She tilted her head.

"Well, that would surprise me greatly, because I see to the hiring of this house's guard myself. Every man of it passes under my eye before he ever wears the colours." Her tone did not shift at all.

"And I have never once seen you." Then nobody said anything. I didn't understand it. I looked from the guard, who had gone very still, up to Brunhild, and back again, trying to work out what was the matter, why we weren't simply going in to dinner. Her hand had closed around mine without my feeling it happen, tight, tighter than the game had ever pulled it.

"Brunhild?" I said.

"What is it?" She went on speaking to the man, as though there were all the time in the world.

"You can put it down," she told him.

"Whatever you came here to do." His hand suddenly dropped to his sword. The blade came clear of the sheath, half a foot of it, bright in the failing light. Then Brunhild's free hand lifted. She didn't even look away from him. There was a sound like a door slammed shut, only far larger, and I felt it in my bones, while the man left the floor and hit the far wall hard enough to jump the torches in their brackets. He came down it slowly and did not get up.

There was a great deal of blood, more than I had ever seen so far. Then he shook all over, and finally stopped moving altogether. I think that was when I started to make a noise.

"What… Brunhild, what happened, why did he…" The questions came apart before I could finish them.

"Is he…" I had never seen a man die before, and I thought, surely, it couldn't be this easy, right? He was alive just a moment ago, and now… now…

"Look at me." Brunhild was already on her knees in front of me, both hands framing my face, turning it up to hers and away from the wall. Her voice was the calmest thing in the room.

"Look at me, little one. It's nothing. It's nothing for you to carry. Do you hear me?" I nodded, because she was Brunhild, and Brunhild did not lie to me.

"You and I are going somewhere safe. Right now. A little game, like before." She rose and gathered me up onto her hip, and her arms held steady even as, somewhere below us, a new sound started up and began to climb.

"It's going to be all right. I promise you. It is going to be perfectly all right." A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. She carried me the other way entirely — away from the bridge, away from the main house and everyone in it, deeper into the cold stone of the east wing. And behind us, somewhere far across the castle, the noise began. Soon enough, the corridors weren't empty anymore.

We met people all through the east wing as Brunhild carried me, and they were fighting one another. Household guards I knew by name were trading blows with men in the same colours who I did not know at all, and it was hard to tell, in the dark and the noise, which were which. The floor shook every little while, a deep tremor that came up through Brunhild's body and into mine and set the lamps swinging. Somewhere glass broke. Somewhere, men were screaming. Twice, people came at us.

"That's the girl!" One of them got out, lunging, his hand already reaching for me.

"That's his daughter, catch her, that's—" Brunhild barely turned her head. Her hand came up, and the man was on fire before he finished the word, all of him at once, and he reeled away from us trailing flame and a sound I have tried for years to forget. After that I stopped looking. I pushed my face into Brunhild's chest and kept it there, both fists knotted in her robe, and I did not lift it again, because I could not watch one more man die that day.

I felt it when she moved, when she turned, when her arm came up and the heat washed past us. I heard it. But I didn't see, and at seven that felt like the same thing as it not happening. Then a door, and the dark behind my eyelids going darker, and the bolt thrown home with a heavy iron sound. The noise dropped to a mutter on the far side of the wood. Only then did I lift my head.

It was her own room; I knew it, the narrow bed, the shelves crammed past sense with jars and books, the smell of her everywhere, ink and dried herbs, the only smell in the whole reeling castle that still meant safe. She set me down on the bed and crossed to her drawers and began quickly going through them, looking for something.

"Brunhild." My voice came out very small.

"What's happening? Why are they doing this? What did we do?"

"You didn't do anything, my love." She didn't stop searching. Drawer after drawer, her hands moving fast.

"Not one thing. None of this is yours to answer for, do you hear me? Not a scrap of it."

"B-but the guards… they were ours—""Some of them were, but some of them were never ours at all, and tonight they stopped pretending." She found something, set it on the table, kept looking.

"Listen to me now. I need you to be very brave for me, braver than the game, and I need you to do exactly as I say. Can you do that?" I nodded, even though she wasn't looking at me, even though I did not understand and every part of me had begun, quietly, to shake. She suddenly drew a ring from her finger, and out of it came a sphere of smoky glass the size of an apple. I knew that sphere.

She had shown me things in it before: fish in seas at the far end of the world, a city riding on the back of a great slow beast, snow falling somewhere it was high summer. Wonders. She had only ever shown me wonders. She then cupped it between her hands and breathed across it, and it lit, showing me a room which I recognized almost instantly. It was the small solar off the great hall, where we sat sometimes after dinner. And they were all in it. My father, in his nightrobe, down on his knees on the stone.

Behind him my mother with Kael and Daven gathered close against her, all three in their sleeping clothes, none of them bound, only standing there and watching. And around them, men in armour I did not know. The glass gave me their voices too.. I could hear my father as clearly as if I stood in the doorway.

"My brother and I will settle this between us, as we always have. Only let me speak with him. Blood is blood, whatever has been done tonight. He will hear me." It was my first time seeing my father like… this.

"I have laid down my sword. My men have laid down theirs. We offer you no fight at all, you see. Only let my wife and my children go from this place, and take me to Rayhan." Beside me, Brunhild closed her eyes. She pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers and let out a long, slow breath.

"Oh, Soren," she said, barely above a whisper.

"You good fool. You laid down your sword." I didn't understand.

"Father!" I came up on my knees, both hands flat to the cold glass.

"Father, I'm here!" But he didn't turn. He couldn't. The glass carried their sound to me, but never mine to them. I had always known that, and I knew it now, but it did not stop me calling. Then another man walked into the room. I knew this one. Everyone knew the Chancellor. Mephtilem came in unhurried, in his good dark robes, and looked down at my father, kneeling there, with no feeling in his face at all.

My father began to speak to him and Mephtilem listened to the whole of it with his head tipped a little to one side. Then he said something I couldn't make out, and gave a small motion of one hand. Suddenly, the men around my father moved at once. All of them, together. And they did not stop when it should have stopped, but went on, and on, long past any sense or need, and the glass carried every sound of it to me whole. My father made one cry at the very start, then made no other.

My mother screamed and threw herself toward him, and they turned on her where she stood, and she went down beneath them. Kael was crying, and Daven had not moved at all when Mephtilem looked at them next, and I understood before he spoke I think I screamed too. I must have. But I never heard it, because the room pitched sideways and the glass went white and far away as the cold floor of Brunhild's chamber rose up to meet my cheek, and the dark closed over me before they reached my little brothers.

For years, I was ashamed of fainting that night. It felt like weakness, like some final failure of courage. Only much later did I understand it for what it was: the only mercy that night had left to give me. When I came to, the world was on fire. I was moving— or rather, being moved, jolted, my cheek against something warm and wet. For a moment none of it would cohere.

Then it came together all at once: the orange light flickering through the trees, the roar of it behind us, the castle that had been the whole of my world burning black against the sky. And men's voices, not nearly far enough off, calling to one another. Calling about a girl. Brunhild had me in her arms. She was running, or near enough, through the dark at the forest's edge, her breath tearing in and out of her, and when I twisted to see her face I saw that she was bleeding. Not a little either.

Her whole front was dark and soaked with it, and some of it was on me now, on my cheek, and my hands. I started to come apart.

"Brunhild! You're hurt, there's blood, you're—""Hush." She didn't slow.

"Hush now." We went on deeper in, the shouting falling behind by degrees, until she found what she was after: a great old tree split open at the root, the hollow in it just big enough for two, close by the bank of a river I could hear but not yet see. She folded us both down into the dark and the smell of wet earth, pressed my head against her chest, and went still. Through a gap in the wood I could see torches moving between the trees, swinging as the men searched. I was crying, and I couldn't stop.

I had been so sure, even through the worst of it, that I would wake; that this was the nightmare it felt like, and any moment there would be grey light and my own bed and the whole of it would dissolve the way bad dreams do. But the bark was real against my back, so was the cold. Brunhild's blood was real and would not wipe away. And slowly, I understood that there would be no waking. This was the world now.

"Listen to me." She took my face in both hands, hard, harder than she had ever held me, and made me look at her. There was no softness left in her voice at all.

"You will stop crying. Not because you're wrong to weep, but because there is no time for it, and I need you whole. The time for being a child is over. It ended tonight, and I am sorrier than I have words for; that you must grow up all at once, by force, and in a hole in the ground. It is the cruelest thing I have ever done."

"I don't—""But you will live. And one day, if there is any justice left anywhere in the world, you will laugh again. Truly laugh, the way you did this afternoon. Hold on to that. Whatever comes after, there will be laughter again someday. Promise me you'll wait for it." I didn't understand, and I told her so. I said I wanted to go home, I wanted Father, and then I stopped, because there was no Father, and the knowing of it went through me like cold river water. Brunhild was already speaking again.

But not to me, and not in any tongue I knew. The words were low, strange and very old, and the air changed around them. I felt them more than heard them, a pressure rising under my skin, in my teeth, behind my eyes. I tried to ask what she was doing but my voice came out wrong and my whole body had begun to feel wrong, too tight and then too loose, the bones of me shifting like furniture dragged across a floor, and I would have screamed except I no longer quite had the mouth for it.

When it stopped, I was lower to the ground than I had ever been in my life, and the dark was not dark anymore. I could see. The whole hollow stood out in silver and grey, every edge of it knife-sharp, and the smells came at me in a flood: the river, the earth, the smoke, the iron of Brunhild's blood, each one suddenly meaning something. My own paws lay in front of me. Black and enormous.

Brunhild looked down at what she had made of me, and for one moment her face broke entirely, all the steel running out of it, and she laid a shaking hand on the top of my head. Just once. Then she put the steel back, and stood, and her voice came down at me like a whip.

"Go. Now. Run, do not look back, and do not stop until you cannot hear any of this anymore." I didn't move. I didn't understand. I only stared up at her, the last thing left in the world that was mine." Go!" She stamped her foot, driving me backward out of the hollow.

"Shoo! Get gone, away with you, you stupid creature—" and then, cracking, scarcely a command at all: "go, child. Please. Go away from here." She herded me out into the open dark, arms waving, and I went, because I did not know what else to do, stumbling on legs that bent the wrong way. The last I saw of her, she was turning back toward the torches. My new body knew how to run even when I did not. That was the strange mercy of it. Once I was moving, the shape took over.

I poured between the trees faster than any girl could have, the ground vanishing under me. I could hear my own heart, and the river ahead, and the men behind, each sound clear and apart from the others. I was strong. I had never once been strong in my life, and now the strength was simply there, waiting in the new make of me, and some small cold part of my mind understood that this was why she had done it. I was nearly to the river when I heard her.

Brunhild was screaming in fury, a sound I had never heard from her in all my life. Under it came the ring of steel, and shouting, and the crackle of her magic let loose all at once. She had stopped running. She had stopped to make the time for me, and she was spending the last of herself to buy it, and I understood that too, in the body's flat cold way, even as the girl still inside it wanted to turn and go back to her but was not permitted to. Then there was movement in the dark ahead of me.

Shapes, between the trees. So I ran. I do not know how long I lived in that forest. Seasons turned and I stopped counting them. I learned the shape of myself slowly over time. When something came at me I grew large, and larger, until the thing that came at me reconsidered. When the nights turned cruel and I needed a gap in the rocks or the hollow of a log, I shrank, folded myself small, warm and hidden. I ate what I could catch. And slowly, the wild made me forget who I was. But it did not last.

One day there were hunters, many of them, who saw me, and came at me. I fought them until the forest floor was a ruin and several of them would not be hunting anything again, and when I understood at last that I could not win, I did the only thing left and made myself small, a cat in the undergrowth, nothing worth the trouble. They caught me anyway, noticing my particularity.

A midnight puma was a fortune on its own, but a midnight puma that could become a housecat and back again was something they had no word for and no end of buyers for. So I was sold. After that the years ran together into one long corridor of cages. I was sold, and shown, and sold again. I stood on silk in gilded boxes while rich men walked past and named prices over my head. I crossed water I never saw the far side of.

I learned the particular boredom of being a treasure, the endless looking, the fingers that never quite dared the bars, and the silver plates because a creature worth a kingdom could not be fed off tin. I stopped fighting, mostly. There was no winning, and the girl in me had gone so far down by then that some days I forgot to look for her. And then, one day, in another cage at the bottom of another city, there was a boy.

He came through the crush of that place with trouble at his heels, and he should not have looked at me twice, but he did. Then he stopped, looked into my cage, and I looked back at him, then saw his eyes. They were blue. Bright, startling blue, the exact blue I had once been used to seeing in my brothers. So, for the first time in longer than I could measure, the girl came all the way back up to look. So I followed him. …

Morgana sat back, and let out a slow breath, and the smile she found was a thin and tired thing, nothing like the ones she'd worn on the quay.

"There," she said.

"That's my whole story." And she looked at Adom.