Page 15 of Seducing the Sorcerer
Good morning, sir,
To get to the bathroom, go through green door at far end of stable yard. Cross covered walkway and enter tower. Turn left. Bathroom is third on right. For hot water, press dragon’s nose. Please remember to attend the Master in the hall (ground floor of tower) at eleven o’clock as directed last night.
Yours sincerely, Jasper Conrathian, Esq.
Fenn’s gaze lingered on the word “dragon”. Surely it wasn’t a real one? Weren’t the dragons all dead hundreds of years since? He wasn’t poking any dragon on the neb. Not even for a hot bath. He glanced down to the far end of the yard. The door was a shade of green so dark it was almost black. Still, it was clear enough which way he ought to go.
He sorted through the clothes. The hat was black silk, a truncated cone with a very narrow brim, bound with a black and red striped grosgrain ribbon. He’d feel a right noddy in it, but perhaps it was part of the tower uniform. The boots were stout, black, not new, but carefully polished and in far better nick than his own. There was a pair of black trousers, white linen, a black neck-cloth and a red waistcoat. There was also a black jacket with red frogging and an emblem on the sleeve showing a black tower against a red background. Livery. Though he hoped he’d made it plain he was no footman or indoors type. But grooms in really fancy houses did wear livery sometimes, so perhaps that was all this signified.
Although, how Morgrim expected him to fix this broken spell, Fenn had no idea. He’d have to say he couldn’t do it and hope Morgrim wouldn’t take umbrage.
Fenn clapped the hat on his head and bundled everything else under his arm, then he closed the stall door and latched it.
“Going for a wash,” he said to the horse. It flicked an uninterested ear at him.
The rain had eased to a fine drizzle, though now a mist was coming down. The tower, which loomed over the stable yard wall behind him, was still half lost to view, but a light shone out weakly from the second floor. Was that the same window he’d peered into last night? Probably. So, the long-haired figure who’d been slumped over his desk—could that really have been Morgrim? He’d looked like a man sunk in the depths of despair.
Fenn began to walk across the gloomy yard toward the green door.
Must’ve been someone else last night. Because why would Morgrim have the morbids? The sorcerer had immeasurable power, a whole tower to live in, with stables. Not to mention a beautiful saddle horse and grazing close at hand, at least one servant and plenty to eat. Maybe he was sad about Aramella not caving to his marriage demands immediately? Or, if he was as wicked as people said, maybe he suffered torments from a guilty conscience? Whatever, it felt to Fenn that he’d glimpsed a private, personal moment he oughtn’t to have seen.
He was reaching for the brass handle of the green door when the back of his neck prickled. He was being watched. By Morgrim? Glaring down from his tower? Fenn whirled, to find the worple horse at his shoulder. It blinked and licked his face with its rough dry tongue. He pushed it away.
“This again, eh? Suppose you hopped over the stall door.”
He led it back to the stall, put the clothes on the table, took the halter and lead rope off the peg and put the halter on the horse. He tied the lead rope to a bit of twine looped through an iron staple in the wall that had clearly been put there for the purpose.
“Right. Stay.”
He picked the clothes up again and trudged back to the green door through the mist that now filled the stable yard. But no sooner had he put fingers to handle than he again sensed a dark bulk over his shoulder. He turned, without much surprise, to find the horse again, the chewed end of the lead-rope swinging just above the ground. The horse cocked its head at him and jigged in a jaunty little circle.
Fenn thanked his stars the yard was deserted.
But what to do? Tying it up again would clearly be pointless. There was a whole row of stalls, but they all had half-doors and there were no top doors to close as there sometimes were.
He peered through the mist to the outbuildings opposite. These had ordinary full-length doors, sturdy dark wood bound with iron, like smaller versions of the great double doors of the tower. If this had been any other stable yard, he might have risked poking about and trying to find a room he could shut the horse into. But who knew what horrors a sorcerer kept in his sheds? And anyway, best not get caught where he wasn’t invited. When you were ragged, people thought you were angling to pinch stuff whether you were or not.
Like it or not, the horse was coming with him.
He opened the green door and was suddenly none too sorry for the horse’s company because the covered walkway led off to the left, over misty nothingness. It must curve around to a back door in the tower, but from this angle it was impossible to be sure because the stable blocked his view.
The walkway was fashioned from black wood, sodden with rain. Carved faces leered from the posts that held up the roof: grinning goats and smirking owls and hairy gloating fish-things. Their eyes were inlaid with white stone that gave them all fixed stares. Fenn looked over the edge and his heart lurched in his chest. They were at least two hundred yards up above the sea and the whole walkway seemed supported by a single spindly strut that was bolted onto the wet rock below.
“Death trap,” he muttered to the horse.
If only he were allowed through the tower’s front door, but presumably that was for visitors and for Morgrim himself and not for the likes of Fenn. And the note had definitely said “cross covered walkway” and also “yours sincerely, Jasper Conrathian”. Fenn tried to imagine young Jasper as a double-crossing murderer out to do him a mischief, and failed. That Morgrim, though. He might not be above such an underhand trick.
With that cheerful thought, Fenn started along the walkway. True to form, the horse tried to push past him. Fenn took a tighter grip on the clothes, flung his free arm over the horse’s neck and clung onto the lead rope.
“Carry on, mate. And if this thing collapses, hold me up, eh?”
The walkway shivered and wobbled with every step. At one point something vast and dark and spiky loomed out of the mist on the right and Fenn shied like a nervous pony and let out an oath before realising it was only the palace, its sunlit halls and buttresses and gargoyles suddenly visible through an eddy in the mist. The palace was only a hundred yards away, but across a yawing abyss.
Finally, he reached the back door to the tower. The door was iron, streaked with rust, but it opened easily enough. Fenn went through it with a sigh of relief and the horse pushed along with him into the tower passage. The door clanged shut.
The passage was hacked out of living rock. Arrow slits let in a small amount of light and a large amount of mist. It felt very crowded with the horse looming beside him. He could try shutting it out on the walkway, but it’d block the way and he wasn’t sure who else might be along. He’d just have to take it to the bathroom and hope they met no one coming or going. At least he wasn’t likely to run into Morgrim in the bowels of the tower. This felt like servants’ territory. He shouldered past the horse and began counting doorways.
“Don’t hold with this,” he muttered to it as they walked. “Ain’t proper. Horses aren’t house pets. You and me are going to have to sort out who’s boss one day soon, and I can tell you now, lad, you ain’t going to find it’s you.”
