He reached for her free hand. Briefly she was still, surprised, but then she twined her fingers through his. Toinette’s hand was cold, but still warmer than the air around them, her fingers callused and strong. “Best we don’t get separated, anyway,” she said. A smile like a guttering candle crossed her face. “And if it comes to a fight, I can always use you as a shield, no?”
Erik managed a laugh: brittle, but it counted. They met each other’s eyes once, and then began to climb.
* * *
Each step was a heartbeat. Their feet lifted and came down in unison on the next block of stone, sending echoes down the steps and through the starved land. Before they’d gone more than a quarter of the way up, Toinette’s mind was blank of words. There was only the count:twenty-five, and then the strain of leg and thigh as she stepped upward,twenty-six.
For the most part, she kept her eyes fixed ahead of her. She glanced from side to side on occasion, alert for possible attackers though she doubted there’d be any, and she listened for any sounds other than footsteps, but she didn’t look down. She’d never been afraid of heights. Shecouldn’tbe afraid of heights: she flew, for Christ’s sweet sake.
But she didn’t want to look down.
The top of the staircase came as a surprise, not because she’d reached it quicker than she expected—Toinette doubted she could tell quick from slow any longer—but simply because shehadreached it, and the stairs hadn’t gone on forever. Catching her breath, she also made her vision expand out of the tunnel it had fallen into as she climbed.
She and Erik stood in the entrance to a courtyard like the ones she’d seen in Roman ruins. People had walked through those, set up market stalls along the edges, fought and courted and lived in the sunlight. There was no sunlight here, and no people save her and Erik: only ancient gray emptiness.
Erik squeezed her hand, and Toinette wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it. They stood together in the shadow of the pillars like Adam and Eve just outside the gates of Eden. What lay behind them had been no Paradise, but ahead would be far worse.
“Won’t get better for waiting, I fear,” Toinette finally said. Speaking took more effort than she’d been expecting. Her throat felt rusty.
“Ah,” said Erik, “and here I’d been hoping.”
The courtyard was darker than the forest, which hurt to think about. Toinette couldn’t see more than a foot or two in any direction. Judging from what vision she did have, that was no great loss. She saw only the flat, featureless rock to either side, gray and blank. If they’d gotten turned around, she wouldn’t have known what direction they were heading.
A shorter walk than climbing the stairs brought them to a pair of tall doors. Despite the lack of light, they had a metallic gleam, but in a green-purple shade that belonged to no metal Toinette had ever seen. A black handle on each jutted out and back in again, forming angles sharp enough to injure any who encountered them with force.
“Should we change, do you think?” she asked, then added, “After we open the doors.” Her talons would be too large and clumsy for gripping the handles. Teeth might have worked, but the notion of putting her mouth on that sharp, dark substance made Toinette clamp her jaws together.
“N-oo,” Erik said slowly. He was looking at the doors carefully. “It’d likely be too small inside for us to move well, and we dinna’ know what we might have to avoid, and quickly.”
“Right you are.”
One last time, Toinette clasped Erik’s hand tightly, then reluctantly let go. Comfort, as always, took second place to necessity.
The handle was so cold that her fingers stuck to it at first. Toinette swore, let go before the pain could become more than a brief sting, and shrugged one hand up into her sleeve. She wished she’d brought cloth with her, or that she had more of her skirt left to sacrifice. Keeping her arm bent bled off some of her strength, and the door was heavy enough as it was. She had to put her other hand to the handle, keeping it over the first, and set her hips to get leverage before it would budge.
Metal scraped across stone with a scream damnably close to human. As the door only moved slowly, the scream kept going, while the cold of the door handle crept through the cloth and up Toinette’s arms. That probably did her muscles good. If Toinette lived to see another sunrise, it would be an immensely painful one, but for the moment cold and fright kept soreness at bay.
Erik’s door shrieked in earsplitting harmony with hers. Their breathing, quick and ragged, made up the percussion. Toinette stared at the green-purple sheen in front of her and tried to ignore all of it, until at last they’d opened a passage wide enough to fit through, though they’d have to go in single file.
Beyond was more light than Toinette had expected: a cloudy, half-green storm light that would have had her furling the sails and tying down the cargo had she seen it on theHawk—but at least it was light, and she could see. She was thankful. Her near future, she suspected, would involve often being thankful for extremely small blessings—
—and that would be her future if she wasfortunate.
Thirty-Four
Stone surrounded them. Erik thought it was stone, at any rate. It was solid gray, thick, and had no metallic shine to it. He could see no joinings or chisel marks, though, nor even any distinct blocks. By his feet, flat wall merged seamlessly into smooth floor. He imagined the same was true at the ceiling, though that was just too high for him to see well.
“No human hand made this,” he said.
Toinette shrugged. “Well. Demons, you said.”
“Aye, but I’d pictured them laying stones and all. Doing as humans do, but on a grander scale, and getting the rock from elsewhere if it came to that. Not that I had much reason to think I knew one way or another,” he admitted, not too unsettled to be embarrassed when he said it. Erik gestured around them. “This, where it’s all of a piece, it’s as though itgrew.”
“Like a tree?”
“Or a creature.”
By her grimace, Erik knew Toinette was thinking along the lines he’d started to, of bowels and throats, and that she liked it no more than he did. “Thank you for that,” she said dryly. “How did Jonah end up faring, do you remember? It’s been a while since I heardthatstory at mass.”
