“We’re almost there,” she reassured the girl and wrapped one arm around her cold, shaking shoulders.
The heat hit Gandrett like a blow in the face.
“You’ll be fine, Miss,” the servant girl kept repeating as she led her into the empty kitchen, her light-blue eyes spilling worry as she spoke. “You’ll be fine.”
She sat Gandrett down on a three-legged chair, which she had pulled up to the stove where a pot of something hearty was steaming along.
Gandrett tucked her dagger between the folds of her skirt, wrapped her arms around her torso, and watched the fog rise. “Thank you.”
The girl started but smoothed over her expression fast. She hadn’t commented on the weapon nor attempted to take it away. “Maybe you should eat something,” she suggested, eyes still a little nervous.
Gandrett scanned her head to toe. She wasn’t wearing anything better than rags sewn together into a dress. She hadn’t spotted a servant in the Brenheran household or here who was dressed like that. “You’re probably right,” she said to the girl, waiting for her reaction, which was similar to when she had thanked her.
Shaking her surprise, the girl hurried to a cupboard and pulled out a bowl then picked a spoon from a drawer.
“Here,” she handed her the bowl after filling it up just enough that it didn’t spill in Gandrett’s shaking hands. “This will help.”
Something in the girl’s eyes told Gandrett she knew exactly what she was talking about.
She eyed the girl over her bowl as the hot scent of Sivesian spices and bothenia stew filled her nose, easing some of the shudders.
“It’s not the fish they serve upstairs.”
For a fraction of a second, Gandrett was tempted to tell the stranger that she had no interest in the fish they served upstairs. That it still sat in her stomach like a salty lump that had frozen in the tunnels.
“What was that?” she asked eventually, deciding she’d let the girl reveal what she knew first.
The girl shifted her weight, exposing poorly made boots under the hem of her skirts. “I have never noticed a door there.” She looked to the ground as if following Gandrett’s gaze. “It disappeared right after you closed it. As if it was never there.”
They both kept silent for a while, Gandrett stirring her stew and sipping from the spoon in regular intervals as the girl stood, pretending she wasn’t there at all.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Gandrett mused.
The girl remained silent.
“What’s your name?”
“Addie.” Her voice was low as if she didn’t want to speak.
Gandrett asked anyway, her limbs slowly warming by the stove, “Who else knows about those corridors?”
“If anyone knew, they would surely not tell me.” Addie averted her gaze, scanning the polished surfaces of the kitchen with weary eyes instead.
Something in her demeanor told Gandrett that Addie had little to gain in this court and little to lose in her life. A kindred spirit.
“My name is Gandrett,” she offered and found Addie blinking at her in surprise.
“The trophy,” she whispered, then clasped her hand over her mouth, eyes turning wide.
Gandrett didn’t know if she even wanted to understand what had been done to the kind girl that she was so afraid of speaking wrong.
“Armand’s trophy?” Gandrett asked, more to clarify the meaning of Addie’s words than because it was outrageous to call her that.
“Well… the lady he brought home from the hunt, I mean.”
Gandrett smiled at Addie, imagining how Armand must have spread the news in the castle about the lady in need to whose rescue he’d so bravely come. No need to add that it wasn’t Armand who had saved her. It had been the annoying, brooding Fae male who might or might not have kissed her while she’d recovered from a blow to the head.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Addie added, fear now plain in her eyes. “Please don’t tell the young lord I said anything.”
Her reaction made Gandrett wonder yet again if she had misread Armand. If he was indeed the evil the Brenherans thought him to be and not the hurt boy seeking his father’s attention.
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” Gandrett whispered, glancing at the kitchen door. “No one can know I wandered through hidden corridors in the wall.”
Addie nodded in silent agreement. And who would believe a servant girl in rags if she told that the young lord’s trophy had stumbled into the hallway through a door in the wall that was no longer visible? Sad as it was that Addie’s word wouldn’t hold against that of a lady was to Gandrett’s advantage.
However, she herself knew exactly how not having a voice felt. At the priory, she hadn’t had one until she’d become Vala’s blade. And before, as a daughter of farmers, a child…
She finished her stew in silence. All the time Addie waited, standing on the side as if taking leave was even scarier than staying.
And all that time, an unspoken question hung in the air between them: how could Gandrett have been half-frozen on a mild spring night in a castle with hearth fires in every chamber?
Gandrett didn’t let herself think about it too much. She had no idea how long she had been down there. Only that Armand had sent her in.
Had he known he was sending her to her potential death? Was that why he brought home another girl every second day—if she trusted what she’d pieced together? Was Armand even more dangerous than she could have imagined?
“I have no clue where we are in the castle, Addie,” Gandrett said with a smile, forcing any thought about the icy cold and the whispering in the tunnels from her mind, “Would you mind showing me how to get back to my rooms?” She went through the maps in her mind. The servants’ kitchen wasn’t anything that had been displayed in the plans Nehelon had laid out. Just a general servants’ area on the ground floor between the north and the east tower. She must have been several levels underground in those tunnels. A shiver crossed her shoulders, and she shook her hair over them, hoping to hide the goosebumps that rose on her back and neck. “My rooms are in the west tower, I think, somewhere near Lord Armand’s chambers,” she added, attempting to look lost but wasn’t sure Addie bought it.
The girl took her empty bowl but didn’t give a sign of whether she would help.
“I would go on my own and ask the next guard I can find to escort me back, but somehow I think that would raise more questions than it would be helpful.” She glanced at the dagger in her lap, and Addie’s gaze followed her.
“Were you running from someone?” she asked lowly but not weakly. “The young lord? Is that why you are carrying that?” She gestured at the blade.
Gandrett shook her head. “I thought I saw something behind that door,” she explained as truthfully as she could without giving away any bit about her mission or what had happened with Armand or in the tunnels.
The girl pursed her lips, eyes still on the blade.
Gandrett picked it up, pulled up her skirt on one side to sheath the dagger, then smiled. “I won’t need it when I’m with you.”
Addie’s face relaxed, and she nodded. “Come,” she picked up her bucket and gestured for Gandrett to follow her. “I’ll show you the way.”