Page 28

Outside, she thought. I only need tae find outside. I'll think more clearly once I’ve found my way to it.

The corridors did not cooperate.

She turned down one that should have led toward the courtyard by every instinct she had and found instead a narrow stair going up. She turned back, tried another, and found a storeroom smelling of tallow and old wool. A third opened onto a corridor she didn't recognize at all, doors on both sides, none of them marked, the stronghold's architecture apparently designed by someone with a personal grudge against anyone trying to leave it in a hurry.

Of course it is, she thought, breathless, furious at the walls now as much as at him. It's a fortress, nae a bloody inn. It's built tae keep people out, and tae keep people in. And I am, apparently, the only person in it who doesnae know where she is going.

Voices, somewhere behind her, not close, but not far enough either.

She tried a heavy door on her right, more from urgency than judgment, and found it gave.

The room beyond was dim, shuttered and cold. It must have beensome manner of store or old solar, she registered dimly, with shapes of covered furniture.

The smell of dust and cold stone hit her as she stepped all the way inside, some animal instinct had chosen hidden over found in the half second before thought caught up with her.

The door swung shut behind her.

It was not slammed or violent. Just a softclick of old iron finding old iron, and she turned toward the sound with her heart already sinking before her hand had even found the latch.

It didn't move.

She tried again, both hands now, throwing her weight into it, and the door held with the unyielding solidity of something built to hold a great deal more than one determined woman.

"No," she said aloud to the empty room. "No, no⁠—"

She pounded on it. Once, twice, her fist against old oak, and she called out, her voice sounding strange and thin against the stone.

"Help! Is anyone there? I'm locked in…HELP!"

She got nothing back but the sound of her own voice dying into the dust and the cold.

What if no one comes here? She pressed her ear to the wood, straining for any sound beyond it. Why would they? Who locks themselves in a room by accident, except apparently me?

She held her breath and listened again.

Nothing.

There is always another way, ye simply havenae found it yet. She turned, made herself breathe, made herself think the way she'd thought in MacRath's chamber and searched the room properly this time. There were several shrouded pieces of furniture, a cold hearth long swept clean, and a single shuttered window. She crossed to it immediately, throwing the latch, shoving it wide—and gasped. A sheer drop of stone fell three floors down. The sea wind hit her full in the face, no ledge, no vine, no mercy of any kind in the architecture below.

She shut it again, more carefully this time, and stood in the center of the dim, dusty room with her back against the covered shape of some old chair and felt the fury that had carried her this far begin, slowly and against her will, to curdle into something colder.

I've locked myself in a stronghold I was trying tae escape, she thought, and heard how absurd it was even as the fear climbed steadily up under it. I stormed out of a room tae prove I wasnae a woman who could be contained, and contained myself more thoroughly in a quarter hour than either Cailleach or Marcas managed in two full days.

The light shifted at the shutter's cracks, slow, the unhurried movement of afternoon becoming evening.

She pounded on the door again. Called again. Heard nothing again.

She sat, eventually, on the dusty floor with her back against the cold stone wall, arms wrapped around her knees, and made herself breathe slowly through the panic instead of warring with it, because panic solved nothing and she had solved a great many things in her life by refusing to let it drive her.

Someone will find ye, she told herself, someone will come looking. She believed that, mostly.

Mostly was doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and as the light kept fading and the cold kept climbing up through the stone floor into her bones, she found herself thinking, with a clarity she resented, of his voice at the postern gate and his hands binding her palm by firelight, and the certainty in him that had gone looking for her twice already this week without being asked.

He'll come, she thought, and hatedhow much she wanted that to be true.

Marcas waited a quarter hour before deciding someone needed to check on her.

That was longer than he'd wanted to wait. He'd stood in the doorway of the hall watching her walk out with her chin up and her hands shaking, and every instinct he owned had told him to go after her immediately. He’d made himself sit instead, made himself finish the sentence he'd been in the middle of to his council, because a laird who chases a furious woman out of his own hall in front of thirty witnesses handed his enemies a story they'd tell for a decade.