Marissa Day (27 page)

Then Summerfields bent and whispered, “I know a place we can be alone, Daphne. Say you’ll come with me.”

“I’ll come with you,” Mother answered immediately. In Miranda’s vision, she felt hollow—no, blocked. Isolated. Miranda had felt just that way after leaving the dance floor. She had known something was wrong but could not understand what it was.

Stay with her, Miranda
, Darius’s voice sounded in her mind.
The way you stayed with Corwin when he was taken.

Miranda reached. This time the vitality, the magic, answered her command. Corwin and Darius were both with her, and she felt their essences meld with hers, reaching inside, shaping and binding. She felt the shining thread stretch out toward her mother, as if unraveling from her hem.

Corwin led them. Miranda couldn’t see clearly. Her mind was filled with the vision of her mother tripping lightly down deserted corridors on Mr. Summerfields’s arm. It was early. Everyone was at the dance. The house might as well have been empty.

She felt herself being lead forward by Corwin and Darius, felt carpets beneath her feet and walked forward by reflex. Mr. Summerfields drew her mother into a darkly paneled sitting room. It must have belonged to Lord Thayer, decorated as it was with books and stuffed heads. He backed her up against the wall and Mother tipped her head back to receive his kiss, and Miranda’s stomach clenched with nausea as she felt a wash of greed and hunger flow from Mr. Summerfields.

The thought went out utterly unbidden. Mr. Summerfields’s head snapped up, and his smile grew sharp as a knife.

And the vision was gone.

It was like being struck blind, and Miranda cried out, and fell, toppling sideways. Corwin barely caught her before she fell headlong down the stairs.

“Damnation, woman!” cried Darius. “What did you do that for!”

“I’m sorry!” Miranda covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry ...”

“No time for that,” Darius snapped. “We need to find that room. Can you do that much?”

“Darius ...” began Corwin. But Darius ignored him.

“Well?” he demanded.

Miranda lowered her hands. “Yes,” she said, but her voice was hollow. “Yes. This way.”

She gave no thought to subtlety or maintaining appearances. She just snatched up her skirts and ran. This was not a modern house. The corridors were a maze of turns and little side passages and little stairs up and little stairs down again. But she knew her way now, through the door on the left, down the four stairs to the blue-carpeted hallway, past the main stair, into the east wing.

“Here.” Miranda stopped in front of one particular door.

“I’ll check farther down,” said Darius. “You search here.” And he hurried on before either Miranda or Corwin could say anything.

Corwin laid his hand on the door. “Empty,” he announced. He tried the knob and the door came open. He and Miranda hurried inside, and he locked it behind them.

The room was dark. Corwin snapped his fingers and a waiting candle flared into life. The sudden light glimmered on the glass eyes of bison and antelopes, and, terribly, the snarling head of a Siberian tiger.

Miranda circled the room, straining, trying to sense something, anything. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. It was as if Mother and Summerfields had vanished off the face of the Earth.

“Not yet, not yet,” murmured Corwin. “It’s too soon, and they don’t have all they need ...”

A soft scratching sounded at the door, and Miranda knew it was Darius. Corwin let him in.

“Nothing,” he reported as Corwin again locked the door. “Damn it! What do we do now?”

Miranda’s mind was awhirl with a thousand thoughts, none of them to any purpose.

“Call your maid,” said Corwin suddenly.

“What?”

“Your maid. These grand houses are warrens of back passages for the servants. Your maid will have been shown at least some of them by the house staff. Summerfields might have taken your mother down one of those.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Miranda ran to the bellpull and tugged hard. After a long, anxious moment a knock sounded on the door. Darius and Corwin both pressed themselves against the wall so that the door hid them as it opened to reveal the liveried footman.

Miranda drew herself up straight, remembering one never explained oneself to servants. “I need my maid, Louise,” she said. “Send her here.”

The man bowed and retired. Miranda knotted her fingers together and began to pace. Darius prowled the edges of the room, running his hands over the paneling, stretching his awareness, even as she had stretched hers.

“Where is it?” he muttered. “Where?”

“Stop it, both of you,” commanded Corwin. “You’re doing no one any good.”

Darius clenched his fist against the wall. “There must be
something
.”

But it wasn’t just the frustration of inaction Miranda felt from him. It was something more, something worse. It was distrust. Distrust of her mother, and distrust of her.

Her eyes widened and she stared at him. Darius did not flinch. He let her see. He wanted her to see. He wanted her to be aware of the question that flickered through his mind.

If her mother had so easily betrayed them, what might Miranda do when pressed?

“Darius!” snapped Corwin. “That is beneath you!”

There was no chance to say anything else, for good or ill. There came another knock, and Miranda recognized it as Louise’s.

Miranda went to the door. The men did not bother to hide themselves, and as Louise dropped her curtsy, her eyes slid sideways to Mr. Rathe and the golden stranger.

Miranda took her maid’s hand. “Louise, are you my friend?”

Louise blinked, and her gaze drifted to the men once more. “Always, miss. You know that.”

“I have to ask something very important and very strange. I swear when this is over I’ll give you a full explanation, but right now there’s no time. My mother’s been abducted.”

“Abducted!” gasped Louise.

Miranda nodded. “By Lady Thayer’s nephew, Mr. Summerfields.”

“But ... such a gentleman ...”

“Oh, come, girl,” snapped Darius. “You know perfectly well gentlemen are capable of all sorts of crimes.”

Louise lifted her chin. “Maybe I do; maybe I don’t. It’s not your place to ask what I know.”

Darius straightened, his eyes flaring dangerously.

“Louise, we think they went down the servants’ stairs somewhere. Is there a back passage from this room, do you know?”

Louise’s gaze swept the room. “Could be. We were told by the housekeeper to look for the Hallowgate arms. The white rose would open most doors.”

“The white rose.” Corwin smiled grimly. “They were Yorkists once upon a time, then.”

Darius said nothing. He just strode over to the fireplace. A coat of arms had been worked into the center of the decorations on the front of the hearth, its paint now faded and chipped. He pushed the white rose in the lower-right corner of the shield.

Slowly, a panel beside the hearth slid open. Darius touched it, and winced.

“Cold iron. That’s why we couldn’t tell where they went.”

Louise was drawing breath to ask another question, but Miranda cut her off. “Thank you, Louise. You should go.”

For once, her maid failed to obey. “I’d rather not, miss.”

“Go. I am well looked after,” said Miranda with more certainty than she felt. “I promise I’ll tell you all when I get back.”

Louise didn’t budge. “We were warned not to go through any of the black doors, miss. We were told they were family business ...”

“I’m sure you were,” said Corwin. “Go, Louise. If we don’t have your ladies back by midnight, you may summon the police.”

For a moment Miranda thought Louise was going to refuse, but the mention of police seemed to convince her that Mr. Rathe took the matter seriously enough. “Yes, sir.” Louise curtsied and left them there.

“What will the police be able to do?” asked Miranda as Darius took two more candles from the mantel and lit them.

“Nothing.” Corwin took a candle from Darius. “But it will get her out of the house if things go badly for us.”

Miranda clamped her mind closed against the fear that boiled up from her heart. She took her candle, hiked up her skirts once more and followed Corwin and Darius through the black iron door.

“There’s iron here too,” said Corwin, laying his hand on the rail that ran along the side of the descending stair. “I suppose it’s some small consolation that this must have been an extremely uncomfortable walk for our Mr. Summerfields.”

Miranda didn’t answer. She had no ability to make light of this. It was her fault they were all in this danger. She should have recognized that her sudden affinity for Mr. Summerfields was not right. She had seen and felt enough of magic by now. She knew the touch of it, inside and out.

She had been careless, and now others would pay for it.

Whatever Mother had done, whatever Miranda had felt about her treatment in the past, she did not deserve to be so enchanted and lured away.

The stair was narrow and splintered. The only light came from their flickering candles as they hurried down deeper. The walls were unfinished here, and the rail was furred with cobwebs and dust. Corwin went first, Darius followed after, and Miranda was caught between them, wishing desperately that they would go faster.

“We will find her, Miranda,” said Corwin. “With this much iron about, he cannot have spirited her away.”

“Why would a Fae bring his captive into an iron cage?” murmured Darius.

Corwin didn’t answer out loud, but Miranda felt him closing a kind of door between them, shutting his fear away from her.

The walls around them changed from splintered wood to stone. Miranda could tell by the damp weight of the air that they were descending into the Earth. She should have been glad. It meant she was that much closer to the source from which she drew the power she would need to meet any challenge, but instead her unease intensified. The walls seemed to draw close around her. The darkness gained weight and substance from the damp air and threatened to smother her puny candle.

“Careful. We’re at the end of the steps,” said Corwin.

He was right. The splintering staircase ended abruptly at a narrow corridor with a flagstone floor. Miranda lifted her candle. The walls were old, undressed stone, but there were narrow rectangles of newer brick set at regular intervals along the whole length of the cramped hall. The pale, flickering light also showed that the edges of the floor sloped toward the center where a narrow channel led to an ancient, rusted drain.

“Gods,” whispered Corwin.

“It was a dungeon,” muttered Darius, kicking at the channel.

“It still is.” Corwin nodded ahead of them. At the end of the hall waited a door. No inviting portal, it was old and scarred and heavily banded by black iron.

Miranda tried to breathe, but the cold air choked her.

“We need to get out of here,” said Darius. “It’s a trap.”

Miranda clung grimly to the end of the rail. “I will not leave my mother here.”

Corwin turned to face her. “Miranda, it’s what they want,” he said. “They took her to draw us down here, among all this iron. We cannot use our magic to any great effect here.”

“They took her, or she went with them,” muttered Darius.

“Stop it,” snapped Miranda. “My mother is many things, but a traitor to her own kind she is not.”

Darius just cocked his head and looked at her. The whole strange, sordid scene of Corwin’s holding out a bribe to her mother came rushing back.

Darius’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing, and Miranda drew herself up to her full height.

“I am going forward,” she told him quietly. “What you choose to do is your own affair.”

Gathering up the trailing skirts of her ball gown, Miranda Prosper started down the dungeon corridor.

Damnation.
The curse came from both Corwin and Darius. She did not need to look back to know that they both followed her.

The corridor was ice-cold and suffocating. Even her dancing shoes made echoes ring against the walls. It was quite plain now that the bricks filled what had once been doorways. Doorways to cells. Nightmare flashes tugged at the edges of Miranda’s mind, of men and women slumped in the dark, too exhausted to even rattle their chains, all of them weeping as the last brick was pushed into place.

It took forever to reach the end of the corridor. It took no time at all. The door was black and pitted with age and Miranda could see the bolts for the bar that had once been laid across it to prevent anyone from leaving the chamber beyond. Since then, a modern lock had been fitted to the ancient wood, and warm firelight gleamed through the keyhole.