The Autumn Castle (52 page)

Up through the forest and past Hexebart’s empty well she found the garden wall. The lock on the gate had been smashed to pieces.
A shiver of trepidation. The gate was never locked; in Ewigkreis there was no need to bolt intruders out of the castle. The
only person who didn’t know that was Mandy, and he’d struck this lock with a violence that betrayed the brutality in his heart.

Prepare yourself for the worst, Christine.
Mayfridh might be dead, Eisengrimm might be dead—hell,
everybody
might be dead. She steeled herself as she passed through the garden and into the long shadowy corridor of the Autumn Castle.

On tiptoe, careful not to make a sound, she checked the rooms off the corridor and the great hall. The birch outside appeared
sad and bare, but leaves still grasped its branches in many places. Soon, very soon, winter would be here. But not today.

Christine moved toward the staircase. The strange emptiness of the castle was magnified by her fear. Dark, silent shadows
gathered in corners, a hollow cold rose from the kitchen, and her footsteps echoed around the narrow turret as she made her
way up to Mayfridh’s chambers. No sign of anyone. From Mayfridh’s bedroom window she gazed down on Ewigkreis. Out in the fields,
people were scything and gathering and tying bundles onto carts. Even though it seemed very distant, the bustle of activity
heartened her. Mandy hadn’t killed everyone. Mayfridh and Eisengrimm might still be alive.

She turned, and noticed the brass bear lying on the floor. She crouched to pick it up. There was blood on it. A veil of frost
stole over her heart. “Mayfridh,” she whispered, pulling herself to her feet. But where was she, what had Mandy done with
her? A burst of frantic energy seized her. She raced down the stairs and across to the other turret. Nothing. Through the
kitchen. Nothing. The spell chamber. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And then she paused at the stairs.

Christine knew where she had to go. Christine knew where Mandy had stashed her friend. Yet, here she stood just above the
dungeon, and she couldn’t make her feet move, not even an inch.

Underground. A bad place. Bad things happened there.

She took a deep breath.

Couldn’t move.

This was ridiculous. She’d had Jude hit her with a mallet to get here, and now she was balking at a short walk in the dark.

Not just the dark. The weight. The silence. The dread finality.

Christine pressed her palms into her eyes in frustration. Her fingers were trembling. Why was she even here? Why suffer so
much pain and trauma to rescue a woman whom Jude had fallen in love with? Perhaps Christine had fallen a little in love with
Mayfridh too, with her warm breath and her soft fingers and her childlike eyes.

One foot, then, onto the stairs. And another. Descending slowly. Into the dark tunnel.

Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe.

Christine stopped. Turned. Saw the faint light spreading from above the stairs. Breathed. See, not far from the air, not far
at all. She clung to the wall and began to back up the tunnel, keeping her eyes focused on the light above her. The wall was
cold and rough beneath her fingers. Gradually, the floor sloped away, and the square of gray light narrowed to nothing. Slowly,
so slowly, she turned her back on the exit and faced the path to the dungeons. The light of a burning torch illuminated the
bars of the first gate. No going back. Her trembling hands reached for the gate. She was awash in memories.

They had been coming home from a party. Christine had won a stupid bet with Finn, and so she sat in the front passenger seat
beside her mother. Finn sat in the back, singing a silly song. Alfa was laughing. Christine was pretending to be embarrassed.

She pushed her legs forward, one then the other. Her breath was short and she could feel her shoulders hitched up so hard
that the bones in her chest compressed.

It was very late, or very early. The black night and the lights of the city and the abandoned streets. Alfa and Finn bantered
about the route to take home. Finn changed the words of the song to be about Alfa’s shortcut; how it was really a circuit
to another dimension where men were always right.

Next gate. The dim tunnel seemed to constrict in front of her. Her windpipe felt as if it were closing at the same rate.

And then the bang and the jolt and the bewildering dislocated suddenness of pain and horror, as though a switch had been thrown:
in one second the world had integrity and in the next it was broken to pieces. The car had been clipped, had hit the wall;
her father was crushed, her mother had been thrown through the windshield and had returned in ghastly fragments. Christine,
the only one wearing a seatbelt, could feel something hard and sharp bent into her back. Her head was swimming and life had
taken on a surreal, dimly colored cast.

Deeper and deeper in she moved. A third gate. The squeak of its opening was wrapped in cotton wool, coming from a long way
away. Sweat on her top lip, hands clammy, nerves shrieking.

The sounds were awful. Wheezing and groans and metal fatigue and the engine screaming in horror. The headlights caught his
taillights. He had stopped. The letters and numbers of his license plate burned themselves into her brain. (She still remembered
them today. She had not really needed to write them down.)

One more gate. Christine’s lungs shook with the effort of breathing.

And as he sped away, the weight of the tunnel and the dark crashed down on top of her, pushing her deep inside herself, certain
she would suffocate in death’s black tunnel. And the light receded from her forever. There was only heavy, grinding pressure,
endlessly descending on her brain and her lungs and ears and . . .

She hit the ground before she’d realized the dizziness had stolen over her. She cried out, a girlish shriek that sounded both
desperate and distant.

Then, not far off, she heard Mayfridh’s voice.

“Who’s there? Is someone there?”

“Mayfridh?” she managed.

“Christine? Is that you, Christine? Come quickly. I don’t know when Mandy will be back.”

Christine stumbled and stood. Only a few more minutes and she could be out of here. She forced herself forward.

Mandy hadn’t breathed properly in hours. His weight pressed on his lungs, and his legs were growing numb. One small triumph:
he had managed to work free his cleaver, which had been pressing against his belly uncomfortably. Now he hefted it in his
left hand and wondered if it could be of any use to him in gaining freedom.

In this uncomfortable, twisted position it was difficult to find any leverage, but he tried to chip away the log from around
his legs with the blade. A few splinters of bark flew away, and he wriggled forward a half-inch. He tried to twist more onto
his left side, to take the pressure off his stomach, but a sharp pain in his right thigh told him that he had become stuck
again, even less comfortably. His legs were squashed against each other and his hip pressed into something hard and sharp.

He slumped forward, closing his eyes and groaning with frustration. How long was he destined to be stuck here? Would he die
before anyone found him? Mandy was perfectly certain that he didn’t want to die, especially not smelling like a faery. Then
that thought shocked the breath from his body, because if he became a faery and faeries lived a long, long time . . . Could
he be stuck here in this log, under this deadfall, for hundreds of years? Could faeries starve to death?

Mandy opened his eyes and every morbid imagining fled because he saw something so amazing, so incredible, so wonderful that
there wasn’t room for anything else.

Green.

He had heard that grass was green, so that must be the strange sensation in his eyeballs that wasn’t what he normally saw.
Color. The grass was colored. It was colored green.

And then his astonishment and delight were ruined by the repulsive, sick knowing that this too was a product of his becoming
the very thing he despised. His bones were transforming into faery bones, his eyes into faery eyes.

He gazed around him. Spots of warmth were growing among the gray and black and white. Colors forming. He couldn’t bear to
close his eyes. He watched the green as though it might escape from him, crying and crying in happiness and in horror.

Mayfridh was roused from numbness by footsteps. Mandy returning? She scrambled to her feet and leaned against the door, ears
straining. No rattle and clank of bones in the sack. Was he coming back to kill her? Her heart raced and she felt dizzy with
fear.

But then there was a loud gasp and the sound of someone falling. A woman’s voice, not a man’s. She called out and Christine
replied.

“Christine?
Is that you, Christine? Come quickly. I don’t know when Mandy will be back.” The footsteps came closer, and in a moment Christine
was leaning on the cell door, panting and pale in the dim light.

“I’m so glad to see you,” Mayfridh said. “How did you get here? Have you seen Mandy?”

No answer, just the panting.

“Christine? What’s wrong?”

“I . . . I . . .” Her top lip was sweating and her eyes were glazed.

“What’s wrong? Are you sick?” Then Mayfridh remembered Christine’s phobia of tunnels. She reached her fingers through the
bars and stroked Christine’s hair. “Shh, shh, be calm.”

“I can’t . . . I need to get out . . .”

“I’m locked in here. I don’t know when Mandy is returning.” Then a thought struck her. “Christine, Hexebart was in the neighboring
cell. She may have left spells. If you fetch me one, I’ll try to calm you down with it.”

Christine swallowed hard and nodded.

“That one,” Mayfridh said, indicating the next cell.

Christine nodded again, pulled herself up straight and disappeared from sight.

“Can you see any?”

“No.”

“Look behind the door. She hides them.”

“Okay. Yes, there are eleven.”

“Grab them all. Stuff them in your pockets.”

A moment later, Christine was back. She passed a spell through the bars to Mayfridh.

Mayfridh rolled it between her fingers. “Lean your head against the bars. Take a deep breath. It might not completely dissolve
your fear, but it will help.”

Christine leaned her head against the bars. Mayfridh reached out gently with her fingers and stroked Christine’s forehead.
“Be
calm,
” she said. “Be
calm.
”

Christine expelled a long breath and her shoulders fell.

“Better?” Mayfridh asked, touching Christine’s hair.

“A little, yes. But I need to get out of here, really quick.”

“So do I. Christine, I think Eisengrimm is dead.”

“What?”

Mayfridh indicated the cage, hanging still in the sputtering firelight. A sob stopped up her speech. “He’s . . .”

Christine went to the cell, eyed the rope above her and pulled it to bring the birdcage close to the bars. She tied a knot
to hold it there. “Mayfridh, he’s breathing.”

Relief leapt into her heart. “Breathing?”

“I can feel his heart. He’s alive.”

“Eisengrimm? Can you hear me?”

“He’s not conscious. Is there someone in the village who can tend to him?”

“Klarlied. If you get us out of here . . .”

Christine was trying the door.

“But . . . Mandy has the keys.”

Christine turned on her heel and gazed across at Mayfridh. “Mandy has the keys.”

“That’s right.”

“You can’t use a magic spell to get out?”

“The locks are all enchanted. Only the keys will open them.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I dread to think what he’s doing. He hasn’t been back for a long time.”

“It might take forever to find him. What if he’s hiding in the Eternal Woods?”

“You have to find him. I can’t do anything in here.”

“What if I miss him and he comes back here to kill you?” Christine approached the cell door and pulled a spell out of her
pocket. “Can you find him with one of these?”

“I don’t . . . well, yes. Yes, I could. I can locate a foreign presence, and that’s exactly what he is. Here. Hand it to me.”