CHAPTER 4: OLD WOOD, OLD STORIES

  Those sealed doors in the main hall were exactly as she had left them. A steely bulwark, blackened by time. They were remarkably forged, the grain of what would be wood clearly rendered on their surface, with iron bands sunk deep into them, as if they were any normal door, not crafted from sheets of metal. An arc of pale stones was embedded in the walls, encircling it, each one etched with sigils, some shattered, others whole.

  Irena stood in front of them with her arms folded and her jaw set, as if glowering might have any effect at all on the ancient magic here.

  It didn’t.

  She’d told herself she was just “making a round of the tower” this morning. Checking the shutters. Learning the layout. Getting a sense of her new domain.

  Somehow, her feet had brought her right back here again.

  Irena reached out and laid her fingertips against the false wood. It was cold in the same way that the ward outside had been cold, the chill sinking through skin and muscle into bone. The sigils embedded around the doorframe gave the faintest of glimmers at the contact, like old coals stirred beneath ash.

  “Open,” she said, because she had to start somewhere.

  Nothing happened.

  Irena tried the handle again. It did not move at all. There was a sense not of resistance, but of an absence of a mechanism altogether. As if the door’s hinges and the handle’s latches had been reduced to solid decoration. That the surface merely pretended to be a door.

  “You are infuriating,” she told it.

  It did not disagree.

  She set her shoulder against it, braced her boots against the flagstones, and shoved. The door absorbed her weight with the momentum of a cliff face, of unyielding bedrock. There was no give. Not a single creak. Not even the satisfaction of rattling something. Shoving and shoving, by the third attempt, an improper sheen of sweat had formed along her hairline, her shoulder ached, and absolutely nothing had changed.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself before you break that open,” a small voice said behind her.

  The princess turned. Lira hovered at the foot of the short stair leading up to the dais, clutching a bundle of folded linen to her chest. She had that look again: wide eyes, tense mouth, torn between wanting to flee and wanting to stay close in case something terrible happened. The laundry she held was almost as big as she was; her big ears stuck up through the wisps of hair around her braids, pink at the tips with cold and worry.

  “It is just a door,” Irena said, as if it wasn’t obvious enough. “I shall figure it out soon enough.”

  “It’s not just a door,” Lira said quietly. “My grandmother used to tell us such stories when we were small. About doors that wizards made. She said some of them opened to other places. Other worlds. And some of them—” She hesitated, fingers tightening around the linen. “Some of them were shut for good reason. Because things were on the other side that shouldn’t get out.”

  “I rather suspect that she also told you the Moon drank the sea and cried it back out as rain,” Irena said, putting her hands to her hips.

  Lira made a little, embarrassed noise. “That part is a story. This… feels different. Can’t you feel it?”

  Irena turned back to the door. She did feel something and, pushing aside her anxiety, she changed the subject.

  “This is what is keeping us here,” she said. “Or a good part of it. They would hardly drag priests all the way up here and have them scribble on the foundations just for fun. They must have patched up whatever spells Archmage Thalen left behind and muttered a few prayers on top. The outer circle stops me from leaving down the mountain. This one stops me from seeing what is hidden under my very feet.”

  “The baron said the lower levels are dangerous,” Lira murmured, eyes turned down. “That they were already sealed in Thalen’s time. That even he didn’t go down there. That’s why they were still warded when the priest came.”

  “Then we’re in luck.” Irena pressed the flat of her palm against the faux wood again, ignoring the prickling sensation that bit into her fingers. “Mad wizards are, generally speaking, a greedy bunch. They do not seal empty rooms. And they like to keep secrets.”

  Lira’s expression twisted. “Or they do,” she said. “If the emptiness is the dangerous part.”

  Irena snorted. “Very poetic.”

  “I’m not trying to be,” Lira said, exasperated. “I’m trying to keep you from blowing yourself up, too.”

  “I am hardly blowing myself up… there is just this odd ticklish feeling,” Irena said, marvelling, unable to suppress the smile that crept onto her lips.

  She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on it. The chill was more than mere cold. It was structured somehow, layered. The chill of the steel was run through, as if by a winter draught through a crack. There were patterns to it. Texture.

  There were, however, no words, no meaning she could discern, and no obvious trick to getting it open. No convenient inscription reading “Push Here To Escape Your Miserable Fate.” Just the quiet hum of old magic doing exactly what it had been asked to do untold years ago and not caring in the slightest that she wanted to get through.

  Irena’s fingertips started to go numb. She pulled her hand back and flexed it until the feeling returned in a painful rush.

  “Fine,” she muttered. “I see how it is. You have chosen obstinacy. I respect that.”

  Lira nervously shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the linens wobbling in her arms.

  “Can it hear you?” she whispered. “When you talk to it?”

  “I hardly know.” Irena gave the door one last lingering glare. “But if it can, I want it to know that I am not finished with it yet.”

  The steely threshold remained serenely indifferent.

  Irena sighed and stepped back, rubbing her shoulder.

  “I need to understand what I am dealing with first,” she said.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying!” Lira said, relief loosening her shoulders. “We should leave it alone. Some things aren’t meant for hands like ours.”

  “That sounds exactly like something a priest would say,” Irena pointed out.

  “It’s what my Grandmother would say,” Lira replied, bristling a little. “She saw a wizard in Briartop once. They floated over the village on a cloud of light, and when they looked at her, she said it felt like they weren’t seeing her at all. Like they were looking right through her. Like she was a smudge on glass. She said it made her bones cold. And a week later, the old grain tower caught fire from the inside and burned without smoke, and no one ever found the cause.” She hugged the linen tighter. “She used to say it was wizard madness. That it’s infectious and leaks from everything they do.”

  Irena thought of the cold in the door and the way it had seeped under her skin.

  “If wizard madness truly leaks,” she said. “Then this whole place is one big cracked jar filled with the stuff. Pretending we are not standing in the spill will hardly help.”

  Lira’s eyes slid to the stone under their feet. “I liked it better when I thought it was just a draft,” she admitted.

  “So did I,” Irena said. “However, if we are going to be living in a dead man’s house, I would rather know what precisely he has left behind.”

  She turned away at last, because glaring at the door any longer would just make her feel useless. “Come on,” she said. “Let us eat, before we both faint, and the baron has us without so much as lifting a finger.”

  The stew was thinner tonight. Lira had stretched it admirably. A few more peas, a few less chunks of dried pork. A handful of some bitter green from the weed-choked patch of earth by the tower that she swore was safe to eat. It tasted of resignation and determination in equal measure.

  They sat across from each other at the scarred table, the candle between them casting an uneven halo of light. The flame had gone out once already, only to relight itself with an offended little pop, as it now seemed inclined to do with some frequency. Irena had stopped flinching at that. Mostly.

  “What else did your grandmother say?” Irena asked when the silence became uncomfortable. “About wizards…”

  Lira’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

  “That they always want more than they have,” she said after a moment. “That they don’t see people. Just… pieces on a board. Ingredients for their spells. That if one ever offered us a gift, we should run, because it’ll have a price, and we’d only find out after we’ve paid.”

  “That sounds like half the royal council, except worse dressed,” Irena said dryly. “Duly noted, I suppose.”

  Lira’s lips quirked. “Councilmen don’t turn people into newts,” she said. “Or fly. Or build magic towers. Wizards do.”

  “They definitely build towers,” Irena said. “The rest of the time they argue about… grain tariffs, or what have you.”

  Lira considered that. “Are you…defending them?” she asked tentatively.

  “I am simply suggesting that they are people,” Irena said. “Not just… curses that put on robes and wander hither and thither. Dangerous people, no doubt, yes. Eccentric. Self-absorbed to the point of religious experience. But not… some other species.”

  “Everyone in Low Market says they’re half-spirit,” Lira said. “Not properly of the world anymore. That’s why they vanish off on their own. My uncle says there used to be one who lived in the old tower by the leatherworkers’ gate. He’d fix broken things for food. Then one day he just walked into the river and didn’t come out.”

  Irena shook her head. “That’s what happens when no one tells a man with that much power ‘no’ for his entire life,” she said. “Eventually, he becomes unable to distinguish between the sensible and the ridiculous. If you let a lordling do whatever he wanted, he’d probably walk into a river, too. Out of boredom, if nothing else. I assure you, I have had to deal with enough of their prancing and peacocking…”

  She thought of her father standing in the palace solar, hands clasped behind his back, jaw clenched as his advisers — such as Baron Caldar Brennec — murmured in his ear. You must see, Your Majesty, this is the only merciful course… She pushed the memory aside with a scowl.

  “Magic does not make people mad,” Irena added quietly. “People make themselves mad and then blame whatever they can get away with at the time.”

  “You sound very certain, for someone who’s never used magic,” Lira said.

  “I have spent my life watching men wield power they did not earn,” Irena said. “Magic. Land. Titles. The name changes; the pattern does not. Wizards are hardly special in that sense. They just write more complicated contracts.”

  Lira digested that as she poked around her stew, brow furrowed. “You seem to know a lot about them,” she said.

  “I know what the histories say,” Irena corrected. “And what the bards sing. And what the old counsellors mutter when they think I am not listening… Which, to be fair, is most of the time.”

  Lira blinked, sneaking a glance at Irena at that. The princess twirled her spoon between her fingers, watching the candlelight reflect on the dull metal.

  “House Vaudrin owes its crown to a wizard,” she went on, unable to resist the familiar tale. It had long been a part of her life, her education, repeated at every birthday feast and embroidered into tapestries. “You know that, do you not?”

  Lira looked uncertain. “Only that your House has always ruled, Your Highness,” she said. “And that you’re blessed by the Sun.” It came out as something recited at worship, more than something she had ever had explained.

  Irena huffed. “That is the short version. The church does enjoy the short version. They leave out the difficult parts.”

  She set the spoon down and leaned back, speaking the words in a cadence she’d heard a hundred times from tutors and cantors alike.

  “Once,” she began, “before the Bough’s own crown was forged, there was a septem of kings, six and one, and twice as many warlords that cleaved this land apart. Every valley had its own tyrant. Every bridge had a fort and a toll. Every town had a banner of its own and a grievance with its neighbour. The rivers ran red with blood, and the roads were never safe.”

  Lira’s eyes had gone round. The candlelight picked out the freckles scattered on her nose. Suddenly feeling a strangeness, Irena forced herself to look instead at a spot on the wall past the halfling’s shoulder.

  “You sound like Master Hegal reading from the chronicles,” Lira said.

  Irena allowed herself to smile and said, “I learned it from him.”

  She let herself enjoy it for a moment, the telling. There had been a time when this very story had filled her with uncomplicated pride. When it had seemed proof that she belonged to something greater and nobler than herself.

  “In those days,” she said. “There walked amongst those quarrelling lords an Elfmaiden, Vaudraelen of the White Branch. She was taller than any man and fairer than any queen. Her hair was silver like moonlight, her eyes were the colour of the winter sky, and in her hands she held the power of storm and root and river. She was a sorceress without equal… so the tales say. A statue of her still stands at the heart of my family’s court to this very day.”

  Lira’s mouth was slightly open. “An… elf,” she breathed.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “An elf,” Irena confirmed. “You have heard of them, I trust?”

  “Only in stories…” Lira stammered. “M-my brothers used to pretend to be Elves in the alley, amongst other things, when they’d play swords and arrows. The priests said they went away when the world was young. That they…” She shrank in her seat. “That they couldn’t bear the ugliness of men, so they strode across the silver sea and never came back. I thought they were just… fancies.”

  “They probably are,” Irena said. “The sea part, at least. No one has seen a true elf in generations. Some scholars say they never existed at all, and that ‘elf’ is just a mistransliterated word for a sorcerer, or something similar, that got dressed up with pointed ears somewhere along the way.”

  Lira mouthed the word ‘mistransliterated’ for a moment, seeming confused, before she said, “But your house—” Her spoon clattered into her bowl as she leaned forward. “You’re saying you’re descended from one. From Vaudraelen.”

  “That is how the story goes.” Irena lifted one shoulder. “Vaudraelen grew sick of watching petty men tear the land apart. She walked into a battle between three rival kings and struck the ground with her staff. Lightning sprang from the earth, shearing their banners in half, and threw the riders from their saddles. Then she declared the fighting would stop. That the land would have one ruler, or none at all.”

  “And they just… listened?” Lira asked, sceptical despite herself.

  “They tried to cut her down first,” Irena said. “Obviously. Men with swords hardly enjoy being told what to do by anyone, let alone a woman who does not even bother to wear a dress. She turned their blades to crows mid-swing and sent them flapping away. After that, they listened very carefully, indeed.”

  A reluctant little smile tugged at the corners of Lira’s mouth.

  “So she chose the first King, Vaudrin the First,” Irena continued. “Not because he was the strongest, or the eldest, or the most wealthy, but because he took orders well. That is how my tutors put it, in confidence, anyway. The official version is that he was wise, and virtuous, and loved the land. The less embroidered version is that he knew how to take advice and keep his sword hand steady.”

  “And she married him,” Lira guessed.

  “That is what the tapestries show,” Irena said. “Vaudraelen of the White Branch, oath-bound to a mortal king, her power woven into the Crown of the Brough, that so long as House Vaudrin ruled justly, the land would prosper, the fields would be fertile, and the people well contented.” She grimaced. “The Concord likes that image. It suggests a tidy chain of legitimacy. The Sun, the Elf, the King. All hand in hand.”

  Lira’s gaze drifted to Irena’s bright blonde hair. “So you have her blood,” she murmured. “Elf blood. Wizard blood.”

  “If so, it has been watered down to nothing,” Irena said. “We hardly sprout leaves in spring or shoot lightning when we sneeze. No Vaudrin in living memory has lit a candle without flint…” She glanced to where the candle sat on the table. “My father’s power comes from tax ledgers and pikes, not spells.”

  “But if she was real…” Lira’s voice had gone soft with something like awe. “If a true sorceress chose your house, if she is the mother of your line… You must be blessed. That’s what it means. The Sun chose you. Old powers favoured you.”

  “Or we told a very convincing story about it until everyone believed it,” Irena said. “Including ourselves.”

  The words did not comfort her the way they once had. There had been a time when she’d taken that blessing for granted. When it had seemed obvious that being born a Vaudrin meant she was meant for great things, and that the world would make a place for her in it.

  Being shoved into this dusty old tower with a halfling and a dragon had put a stop to that conviction.

  Lira frowned, evidently thinking. “You don’t believe it anymore?” she asked.

  “I believe that Vaudraelen, whoever she was, was very clever,” Irena said slowly. “And tired of wars. I believe she used every tool at her disposal to make the world a place without strife. Maybe that included marrying a man she could influence. Maybe that included letting him believe she was a gift from the Sun… Maybe it was love. Maybe it was politics. Maybe it was both. It hardly matters now. She is gone. Whatever she did with her magic has not trickled down to my fingers.”

  She flexed her hand, remembering the chill that clung to the sealed door.

  “If I ever figure out how to open Thalen’s door,” she went on, “it shall not be because my great–great–many–times-over-grandmother once turned swords into crows. It will be because I spent my blood, sweat, and tears to prise my way inside. And that, I fear, is the part that no one ever writes ballads about.”

  Lira’s eyes were bright. “I still think it’s… something,” she said. “That you’re of her line. That you’re here. In a wizard’s tower. It feels like a story.”

  “Yes, well, then it is someone else’s story, and they must be celebrating that they locked me away in here,” Irena said. “Still, if the original elf wants to send me a helpful vision about which sigil to kick, I am definitely listening!”

  The candle popped again, brighter for a moment, as if in an offended rebuttal. Both of them snapped their gaze towards it.

  “You see?” Lira whispered. “You talk like that and things hear you.”

  “If that candle is sent by my illustrious ancestor, I shall eat my boots,” Irena said.

  The candle guttered back to its usual steady flame, as unimpressed by Irena as the sealed door had been.

  They slipped into a routine without meaning to. Pale morning light crept in begrudgingly through the arrow-slit windows. Lira was always up first, bustling around the hearth in the kitchen with determination that seemed at odds with her smallness. At first, Irena pretended not to notice her in those early hours, as was proper with house staff. After a few days, she had stopped pretending. She found that if she came down early and helped carry a bucket or stir a pot, Lira stopped looking at her like some fragile doll that might crack at any moment. It was also… strangely restful, to do something with her hands rather than sit in her room and fret.

  And so, their days fell into uneven thirds: chores, exploration, and the inevitable boredom that punctuated it through.

  They scrubbed more of the hall, focusing on an old bench whose intricate carvings of birds grasping stone fruits had been hidden under a film of grime. Lira patched a tear in Irena’s cloak with tiny, precise stitches. Irena tried to darn one of Lira’s stockings in return, but she made such a tangle that she ended up unpicking it. Irena turned red-faced with embarrassment, while Lira pretended not to notice as she started over again.

  Sometimes, when Irena would ramble and say something particularly cutting about the baron or the Concord, Lira’s mouth would twitch, almost against her will. When Irena doubled down and remarked that the prelates’ hats looked like squashes that had given up on life, Lira actually snorted. She immediately clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes horrified, and although Irena pretended to be unaffected by the maid laughing in her company, she actually found herself incredibly pleased that it happened.

  At night, the tower creaked around them as it settled and sighed. Intermittently, the dragon’s distant dreaming came as a low rumble through the bones of the mountains. Throughout it all, Irena’s sleep came in fits and starts, filled with feverish images: Elene’s face framed in torchlight, the stinging chill of the wards surrounding her, and her father’s eyes when he signed the decree sentencing her to seclusion.

  Once, whilst lying half-asleep on her lumpy bed, Irena heard a muffled cry through the floor. Lira’s room below was little more than a repurposed closet with a pallet and chest on the landing below her own. The sound carried, waking Irena from her dozing with painful clarity. Afterwards, she lay there, staring at the ceiling. Her hand twitched on the coverlet, as if she might throw it back, go to the door, and do… something. Say something. Yet she stayed where she was. Pride and uncertainty pinned her in place. It was not a princess’ job to check in on her servants at night, and she did not know what she’d say, even if she went.

  Lira’s eyes were a little redder than usual that next morning. Neither of them mentioned it.

  “Have you ever gone up there?” Irena asked after some days in the tower, peering up the spiral of worn stone steps that encircled the central towershaft as they climbed. She then turned her gaze down over the balustrade, into the entrance hall below. Lira shifted an oversized basket of linens and tools from one hip to the other.

  “No, Your Highness,” she said. “I’ve been through the servants’ quarters and the kitchens below, the hall, of course, and as high as our rooms.” Her voice had that anxious edge that she had whenever she seemed to think Irena was about to suggest something entirely reasonable. “The baron’s men said there was no need to go higher. That the upper levels are just bird droppings and dust. And bad floors. So…”

  “Bird droppings and dust,” Irena said. “A fine state for my new tower to be in. Still, when in a dead wizard’s tower, one supposes such things to be a promising sign, indeed.”

  “Promising for what?” Lira asked. “Cobwebs in your hair? If the floors are rotten, we should stay well away. There’s enough to be done without a nasty fall.”

  “There is always something to be done,” Irena groaned, aggrieved. “That is what all the court tutors say when they want you to stop asking questions.”

  Lira sighed. “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she muttered.

  The admission felt strange between them. Irena pretended not to hear the naked worry in it as they continued up the stairway.

  “I am not made of glass,” she said. “And if I am to be caged here, then I am at least going to know every bar and hinge of the place.”

  She climbed faster. Lira followed, muttering under her breath what might have been either a prayer or a string of inventive halfling curses.

  The stairway narrowed as they rose, its centre worn into a shallow dip from the passage of countless feet long ago. The air grew cold and damp. The tang of old birds' nests and guano crept in under the ever-present stone dust. They passed one landing where a door hung ajar, leading to what had once been a library or sitting room — empty now, save the pale rectangles on the walls where the shelves used to be, and a single overturned stool abandoned in the corner. Irena quickly moved on; the chamber clearly had nothing interesting.

  Then, only one level higher, the tower's character changed suddenly. The corridor that opened off the stairway was lined with wooden boards instead of bare stone. Or, it had been, once. Now the planks had warped and bowed under untold years of neglect. Some were dark, rotting with old water damage; others had split, splintering and curling at the edges. In two places, entire sections of the floor had completely given way, collapsing inward. Gaping holes yawned, exposing a shadowed space beneath them.

  On the far side of those gaps, a pile of furniture lay huddled against the tower wall. A narrow desk. A chair with one broken arm. A squat cabinet. A slender stand that might once have held a globe or sphere. All of it was draped in sheets that had long since surrendered to mould and mice, sagging with age.

  Irena’s heart hammered. “There.”

  Lira made a noise that was half groan, half protest, putting down her basket. “Of course,” she said miserably. “Of course there’s something up here.”

  “Did the baron’s men not take this?” Irena moved to the edge of the first section of collapsed floorboards, peering down. The drop was a steep one, but it can’t have gone far. The next floor, perhaps, but the space below was more void than room. A tangle of beams and darkness. A hint of the fragile false ceiling below.

  “They must not have wanted to break their necks,” Lira said. “They stripped the lower rooms first. Anything they could reach… but these floors are bad. Look.” She pointed at the obvious holes. “If they’d tried to drag a desk over that…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

  Irena eyed the distance. It was not far. Perhaps ten long strides across a stretch of dubious planks, and then the promise of the far side.

  “Whatever they were too cowardly to seize might be exactly what we need,” she said.

  “Or it might be mildewed nothing,” Lira said. “A nest of rats in an old desk. Or—”

  “You have very little sense of romance,” Irena said, which made Lira emit a scandalised little squeak. “A tower, a sealed door, an unreachable study…”

  “It’s not unreachable,” Lira pointed out. “It’s just… not reachable safely.”

  “Safety is for people who have options,” Irena tested the most intact floorboard with the ball of her foot. It creaked but held. She put more weight on it. It complained more loudly.

  Lira made a strangled sound. “Your Highness—”

  “If these break under me, I will die with the satisfaction of knowing Baron Caldar Brennec lost a few silvers worth of furniture,” Irena said.

  “You could break your legs!” Lira looked at her wits' end. “Or your spine!”

  “Then you may tell the priests I was taken by wizard madness,” Irena said. “It shall save them the trouble of inventing a new story.”

  Before Lira could argue any further, Irena stepped out. The first two boards held. They bowed alarmingly, but they held. She felt them flex under her boots, heard the tiny protests of ancient wood and failing nails, but the structure didn’t give way. Yet.

  Irena took another step, unable to reach the walls for a handhold. She had to keep her arms out for balance, fingers spread. Behind her, Lira shuffled as close to the edge as she dared, small hands twisting in her apron.

  “You’re too tall,” she blurted out, then clearly wanted to swallow the words. “I mean— you weigh more than— it might hold me, but—”

  “Are you calling me fat?” Irena asked through gritted teeth.

  “No!” Lira squeaked. “Just… elongated.”

  “Wonderful! I shall add that to the list of insults.”

  Irena made it halfway across before she reached a point where the floor had surrendered completely. A broad section where three or four planks were entirely missing. Someone had put a beam across it at an angle at some point, perhaps as a makeshift support or an aborted attempt to make a bridge. The far side beckoned. The desk, especially, under its grey shroud, might as well have been piled with gold the way that her curiosity lit up.

  She took a breath.

  “Don’t do it…” Lira whispered.

  Irena stepped onto the beam. It wobbled under the heel of her boot, threatening to tip her into the dark. The narrow wood shifted beneath her weight. She threw her arms wide, windmilling to catch her balance, then forced herself forward.

  The beam cracked. It splintered with a sharp, ugly sound that shot dread up her spine.

  Irena flailed and screamed as the wood gave way beneath her. She dropped. I am going to die in this damned, rotten tower! flashed through her mind just before she slammed down onto her hips and ribs.

  Pain flared, then shock smothered it as dust exploded around her in a choking cloud. Coughing, half in and out of the wreckage of the floor, she scrambled to hold on. She had twisted mid-fall and caught the boards she had crossed, and now her upper body sprawled across their jagged edge. Her lower body dangled down, weight threatening to pull her off the floor as her feet kicked uselessly in empty space. One boot thumped against a beam below and slipped.

  “Your Highness!” Lira’s scream sounded much too far away. “Irena! Oh saints oh saints oh saints—”

  “Stop squealing and grab my hands,” Irena wheezed.

  The dust made her eyes stream. She blinked grit out of her lashes and tried again to hook her elbows over the boards, taking as much of the weight as she could. Her shoulders protested. The boards protested more loudly. She did not listen to either of them.

  Small hands clamped around her wrists.

  Lira threw herself flat at the edge, belly on the safe boards, legs spread wide to try and anchor herself. Her face was white under the smears of dust, and her eyes looked enormous. Despite everything, she had a grip like iron.

  “I’ve got you,” she gasped. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got—”

  “I can tell,” Irena grunted. “Try not to tear my hands off in the process.”

  “Sorry,” Lira squeaked, her fingers loosening only to reposition by the smallest degree. “Can you— can you get your leg on something? Is there anything—”

  “There’s a beam,” Irena said through clenched teeth. “Somewhere. I kicked it.” She took a deep breath and forced her legs to stop flailing. Daring to peer back, the space below wasn’t pitch black. Enough light filtered through the broken boards and the haze of dust to pick out the skeleton construction of the tower: crossbeams, old ropes, and fragments of fallen planks.

  She flexed her foot and felt wood, precarious and narrow, under the sole of her boot. Pressing against it, it held. Barely.

  “Don’t let go,” Irena warned.

  “I wasn’t planning to!” Lira protested.

  Using the beam as a brace, Irena shifted her weight inch by inch, easing the pressure off of her hips and onto her feet and hands. Everything hurt in a diffuse, bruised way, but she was reasonably sure she hadn’t badly hurt herself. Yet.

  Glancing back again, she became aware, in that absurd way the brain has of noticing the wrong details at the wrong time, of another shape in the gloom. Something cylindrical lay wedged between two beams, a little to one side, down by her dangling feet. It was half-buried in dust, but it was recognisably not rubbish or debris.

  She squinted, blinking grit from her eyes. It didn’t look like a pipe or a broken furniture leg. It was some kind of tube. A case, perhaps.

  It was about the length of her forearm and as thick as her wrist, carved from dark wood gone grey with age. Bands of tarnished metal ringed it at intervals, etched with patterns that might have been decoration worn smooth by time. One end had a cap slightly wider than the body, its edge dented as if it had struck something in a fall. There was nothing else like it down there. It looked like it had been dropped, or knocked aside, and then forgotten.

  “Irena?” Lira’s voice was high and thin. “Say something, please. Anything… Even something rude.”

  “I am not dead yet!” Irena said. “You may revise your estimation of wizard madness accordingly.”

  “That’s not funny!”

  “... It is a little funny.”

  “Not to me!”

  Irena shifted again, gritting her teeth as the boards dug into her chest. She wriggled one hand free of Lira’s grip and slid it down beneath her.

  “What are you doing?” Lira yelped.

  “Trying to get us a reward for my idiocy,” Irena said. “There is something down here…”

  “Your Highness, this is not the time for—”

  “Everything we have eaten this week came from decades-old crates!” Irena said. “If there is so much as a half-rotten book within arms reach, I am not leaving it lodged in a crack because I became nervous.”

  Ignoring Lira’s strangled noise, Irena reached down, stretching her arm as far as it would go. Her fingers brushed against the tube. Dust smeared its surface. She flexed, groped blindly, and found purchase around a metal band. It was heavier than she expected. Heavier than hollow wood had any right to be. As she lifted it, something inside slid with a muted thunk as the weight shifted. Not empty, then.

  “Got you,” Irena muttered, holding it tight.

  “What— what is it?” Lira gasped, still clinging to her other hand for dear life.

  “Some sort of case,” she said. Dust clogged her throat; she coughed, nearly losing her grip on both Lira and the tube. “Help me out of this hole, and we can take a look at it!”