My hands were steady as I moved the lamp to the cloth. The cloth took it slowly at first, then with conviction.
The passage connected back toward the far end of the hall. I pressed into the shadow at the junction and waited, and I did not have to wait long.
The smell reached them before the smoke did.
“Smoke, there’s smoke.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“If one of your servants set this, you’ll suffer for it.”
“I didn’t! It’s my home. I wouldn’t burn it!”
“Durgan, watch the knife.”
Two shifters raced past me, and I moved steadily anyway, once again clutching my armful of potential treasures. I was an enthralled mortal, too dull-witted with enchantment to save my own life from the flames without being ordered.
In the great hall, one Obsidian shifter remaining. He stood near the door despite the command to watch the knife, one handon the frame, not fully committed to the emergency, enjoying the owner’s expression too much to go anywhere yet.
The owner still sat at the table. The mortal still stood at his side. The kitchen knife still rested against the old crow’s throat.
“This is what you get,” the Obsidian shifter said conversationally, “for a century of service to our queen.”
Nez’s hands tightened on the table’s edge.
The Obsidian tilted his head, and I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely curious or cruel or both in equal measure. “What did you think she was going to give you that was worth betraying your own kind? Is this what you expected at the end?”
Get the knife,I told myself.Get it and go.
I was past the door and moving before I finished the thought, angling toward the table. I set my armful of treasures down on the table. The Obsidian shifter glanced at me and then away with disinterest. Just another enthralled mortal.
Nez looked up sharply, his eyes widening. He did not know me.
And as he reacted, setting himself forward, his mouth opening in alarm, the blade caught.
A line opened across the old crow’s neck.
The Obsidian shifter cursed and started forward, and I caught the knife up and concealed it, already moving. The mortal did not see or care. Nez was too involved in bleeding all over the table.
I went through the door. Back through everything, eager to reach the storeroom and then the dark beyond it and Fear and Kiegan, waiting to haul me out.
There was chaos behind me. Blood and fire and screaming left in my wake.
I was almost through the kitchen when a satyr came around the door. A bucket of water sloshed in her hands. She was oldand smaller than me, a worn shawl pinned at the shoulder, her hooves loud on the stone floor.
She saw me and stopped. My heart raced, expecting for her to send up the alarm, already planning my route.
Then she set the bucket down and reached for my arm. “While he won’t know you’ve escaped—go, now—stick to the road and hide during the dark.”
Her hand closed warm and callused around my wrist, and she took half a step toward a side passage I hadn’t seen.
She had taken me for one of the enslaved mortals.
Then her eyes found mine.
She froze. Understanding moved across her face: that my eyes were awake, that I was holding something hidden against my ribs, that I had walked into this place with a purpose and not under enthrallment.
Her hand left my wrist as if it had burned her.
