No Unseelie monsters accosted her as she approached.
Smaller turreted towers stood some forty feet from the main tower, perhaps only twenty feet high. No guards were visible. The defenses seemed entirely unmanned.
After studying the edifice for some time, Claire decided to simply approach confidently. There’s not much else I can do, she thought. It’s not like I have a weapon or would know how to use one even if I had it.
Perhaps the guards were merely staying out of her way because they were looking for someone else more intimidating. They expected a great warrior or a powerful rescue party. Ha! No wonder they don’t bother stopping me.
She wasn’t sure if the thought was reassuring or terrifying.
The southern guard tower loomed over her as she drew closer. The stones were cleanly hewn but not polished, set atop each other with well-planned precision in lieu of mortar.
Her shoulders tingled with the sense of being watched as she passed by the nearest stone guard tower. There might have been movement behind her, or it might have been only a shadow as the clouds shifted, making the shadows dance across the grass.
The door to the main structure was perhaps ten feet high, made of heavy wood and crossed by dark bronze straps. It stood open.
Claire stood outside for a moment, glancing over her shoulder again at the guard towers, expecting some danger to present itself at any moment. The room was lit by the sunlight streaming in over the threshold. The floor was of thick-hewn slabs of stone and appeared empty but for a bit of rotting straw in one corner. An air of desolation hung over the place; the air in the room was somehow colder than that outside, with a faint, moist foulness to it that made Claire wrinkle her nose.
A bronze key hung on a hook on the wall across from the door, just beside the entrance to a dark hallway.
With a last, cautious glance behind her, Claire slipped inside, leaving the door open behind her. When her hands touched the key, the room darkened.
She whirled to see the door closed firmly, the room lit by a single lantern on one wall that she had not noticed earlier.
How can that be?
The silence was like a living thing, a dark presence waiting and watching while she tried to suppress her fear. The door had made no sound as it closed, no grinding of wood against flagstones or squeaking of neglected bronze hinges.
Perhaps the door was never open at all.
It’s like the wall when Feighlí pulled me through the hole. It’s only the idea of a prison, and what I see is just as much in my mind as in reality. She squinted at the stone walls, trying to imagine what else a prison might look like, but could see nothing unexpected. For a moment she fervently wished it was possible for her to see things as they were rather than through some filter her mind constructed, and for an instant she saw overlaid upon the stone a complex set of diagrams, seemingly drawn in the air in chalk and charcoal, a few in what seemed to be fire, and others in some blue liquid. The stone was translucent, only a result or representation of the diagrams that were reality. She mentally recoiled from this and saw the stone again with a sense of relief.
The dancing light of the lantern illuminated the hallway a few feet, and she peered down the hallway cautiously. Seeing other lanterns lining the walls at intervals, she crept forward with the key clutched in one hand.
The corridor seemed to twist and turn nonsensically; it turned left four times in a row, so that she was convinced it must have circled back and overlapped itself, but she passed no intersections with other hallways. Once, she stepped around a corner and saw a long, unending hallway, then looked back at the way she had come to see only a short hallway behind her, with no exit visible. She narrowed her eyes in irritation, then looked toward the way forward, which now turned again to the left.
It’s herding me like a mouse through a maze. She hissed out a frustrated breath. Does that mean they know I’m here, or is it always like this?
Although she refused to try to see the diagrams again, some memory of them remained. If she concentrated, she knew which turns led onward and which to a trap.
Finally she reached a door at the very end of the corridor. The door was of heavy wood and solidly reinforced with bronze straps like the exterior door.
She hesitated, and then turned to explore the rest of the corridor, hoping there was a way out.
There wasn’t. All the exits had disappeared, leaving a feeling of desolation and unnatural silence.
Claire stood in front of the cell door with a sense of trepidation. This wasn’t normal fear, with her heartbeat pounding and a chill sweat between her shoulder blades. This was something else, some sense of danger unknown and unknowable, perhaps not meant to be known.
What if he’s not in here?
What if he is?
She turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.