Page 16 of Legacy Ascended

"She's bleeding through the dressing," Elise says. "I'm redoing it before you take her downstairs."

"Do it down there."

"I'll do it where the light is."

Neither guard questions her. Apparently the first aid box is explanation enough.

We go left at the stairs. The corridor narrows and the stone gets older, and the air moves against my face — the draught I noticed when they brought me in. I was right. There's another way out.

The passage runs behind the kitchens. They're still warm, still smelling of supper, and somebody in there is washing up and singing the same unfinished line over and over.

At the end, a guard waits beside the door.

"You're relieved," Benny says.

The man looks at him, and at me, and at the box in Elise's hands.

"Klaus wanted her in the storerooms."

"Klaus wants a lot of things tonight. Go up and get something to eat."

The guard hesitates, then nods and heads back toward the kitchens.

Benny puts the key in the lock.

"Once this is open, we don't stop until the trees," he says. "Elise first. I'm behind you. If you go down, I pick you up, and we keep going."

"Understood."

He turns the key.

The cold hits me like water. After hours in that overheated room, the air burns all the way into my lungs.

I'm outside. There's nothing over me but sky.

There's a strip of trodden ground and then the slope falls away into black. Somewhere beyond the track and the road, all three bonds pull hard enough that I can feel them between my shoulder blades.

"Go," Benny says.

The ground is worse than it looks, frozen in the ruts and soft everywhere else. My side pulls with every step down, and not far from the wall I put a foot in a dip and go onto one knee, and Benny has me up before I've finished swearing.

We're into the first of the trees when a torch comes on behind us.

"That's far enough."

Benny turns and steps across in front of me.

The man at the top of the slope has a light in one hand and a pistol in the other, and he's already pointing it, and he isn't pointing it at me.

"Back up the slope," he says. "The heir goes inside. You two walk in front of her."

"On whose order?" Benny says.

"Mine."

"You don't give orders in this valley."

"Tonight I do."