One by one, the children linked fingers. A chain of terror and hope, with Marian at its head and Elodie bringing up the rear.
They moved through the passages like ghosts through walls Elodie hadn’t known were hollow, past rooms where she could hear soldiers ransacking furniture, down stairs that seemed to descend into the very bones of the earth. Marian led them by memory and instinct, her bare feet silent on cold stone.
At one junction, she stopped. Pressed her finger to her lips, her eyes going wide. Through the walls, they heard boots. Men’s voices, muffled but close.
“—checked the upper chambers. She’s not there.”
“Lord Alaric wants the faerie woman. Keep looking.”
The crash of furniture being overturned. A tapestry being ripped from a wall. Marian caught Elodie’s eye in the darkness and raised her hands.Don’t move,she signed.Don’t breathe.
Here, in this moment of absolute necessity, the sign language she’d been teaching them all, made perfect sense. No whisper, however soft, could be risked with soldiers mere feet away. Elodie nodded, understanding flooding through her. She turned to the children and pressed her finger to her lips, then signed the simple gesture—quiet, quiet, quiet.
Two soldiers passed within feet of their hiding place. Elodie heard their breathing, smelled the smoke on their clothes, the creak of leather armour. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she was certain they must have heard it.
A child whimpered—the smallest, a boy of perhaps five who’d lost his mother in the Thornwick fires. Marian’s hand covered his mouth gently, her eyes fierce but kind. With her free hand, she signed.Brave. You are brave. Almost safe.
The boy nodded, tears streaming silently down his cheeks.
An eternity passed. Two heartbeats. Twenty.
The soldiers moved on.
Marian led them deeper, through a passage so low they had to crawl, the children sniffling but silent, their small hands and knees scuffing against stone worn smooth by centuries of secret passage. At last they emerged into a space that opened up around them, the old grain store, Elodie realised. Sealed years ago when the new granary was built, forgotten by everyone but the servants who remembered the old ways.
The kitchen staff was already there. Cook and her assistants, the scullery maids, two of the older serving women. Old Wynne sat against the wall, her bad leg stretched out before her, basket of herbs clutched to her chest like a talisman. They’d made it. Somehow, Marian had gotten them all out.
“’Tis safe here,” Marian whispered, her voice shaking slightly now that the immediate danger had passed. “We wait for dawn.”
“You saved them,” Elodie breathed, looking around at the huddled refugees. Sixty souls, maybe more, all of them alive because a seventeen-year-old kitchen maid knew the castle’s secrets. “All of them, Marian. You absolute bloodystar.”
Marian’s chin lifted. Her eyes were steady, older than her years, and when she spoke, her voice carried the weight of someone who had just discovered exactly what she was capable of. “I’m no fighter like Lord Gareth. But I know this castle. Every stone, every shadow, every forgotten corner.” Her jaw firmed with quiet conviction. “And I’ll not let them hurt my people.”
Her people.When had Marian stopped being a kitchen maid and become something more?
“There are others,” Elodie said, mind racing. “The guards’ families. Some of the refugees who were housed in the undercroft?—”
“I’ll find them.” Marian was already moving toward the passage entrance. “You stay. Keep them quiet.”
“I can’t just?—”
“You can.” Marian turned back, and there was something fierce in her expression that made her look far older than seventeen. “They’re looking foryou, my lady. The soldiers. I heard them. Lord Alaric wants the faerie woman.” Her jaw tightened. “If they find you, then it’s all for naught.”
The logic was brutal and undeniable. Elodie was the prize Alaric wanted. But she couldn’t hide. Not while others were stillin danger. Not while Bertram and Miles and the guards fought and died in the halls above.
“I’ll go to Miles,” she said. “Tell him where you’ve taken everyone. Coordinate the defence?—”
Marian’s hand closed around her wrist with surprising strength. “No. Some of the passages are too narrow, you don’t know them like I do. You’ll get lost, caught, and killed.” She pressed something into Elodie’s palm. a small, cold key. “The door seals from the inside. When I leave, you lock it. Don’t open for anyone until you hear three knocks, then two, then three again.”
“Marian—”
“I’ll keep them safe.” The girl’s eyes were bright with unshed tears, but when she spoke aloud, her voice was steady as stone. “I swear it, my lady. On my grandmother’s memory. I’ll keep them safe.”
And then she was gone, slipping back into the darkness of the passages, a carving knife in her hand and the fate of more than two dozen souls on her shoulders.
Elodie stood in the grain store, surrounded by frightened children and exhausted servants, and did the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.
She locked the door.
