Page 33 of The Captive's Curse
I turned in the doorway and took one last glance around. Everyone completely ignored me.
Fine. I’d turn that to my advantage and spend what was left of the day exploring the castle after all.
I began by retracing my steps the same way I’d gone when I’d been in search of Enzo that morning. The hall felt far more echoingly empty than it had earlier. My magic had detected Enzo’s nearness before; now it sensed his absence, though I still didn’t understand how.
No matter. I’d ignore the unpleasant gaping hole in the edge of my magical sight, and the frisson of unease in my abdomen, and carry on without a thought for Enzo or what we’d donejust on the other side of that door over there. My cheeks went hot.
The ones on my face, anyway. The ones being rubbed so uncomfortably by the fabric of my drawers had been warm and pink all day, smarting from Enzo’s slaps and bruised from the force of his hips.
No, I still couldn’t face rummaging through Enzo’s study, even though it might be an excellent place to begin my investigations. That stained chaise would taunt me.
Instead, I turned away from the big double doors at the far end of the hall and made for the grand staircase at the other. Enough light filtered through the high windows to show me theway, although the two branches of the stairs curled up into a daunting obscurity in which any number of monsters could lurk.
I hesitated with my foot on the bottom stair, peering up and craning my neck one way and then the other. Several versions of the legend, including the one considered most complete, insisted that Mad Lord Vincenzo’s ghost had remained to gibber about the halls. Others were unpleasantly and unhelpfully ambiguous about whether he’d politely buggered off to the afterlife.
Finn’s condescending solicitude about my possible fear of the dark popped into my mind.
Ugh. Well, no choice but to go on whether I liked it or not, then.
And anyway, the stairs were grubby, but the centers of the steps had the reassuring sheen of frequent usage by a living person. There couldn’t possibly be any inhuman monsters—and Enzo, the only real monster, had left the castle. He couldn’t frown and scold and put me over his knee as punishment for trespassing if he didn’t know about it, could he?
At the top of the stairs, a corridor connected both flights of stairs and stretched in either direction, wide and open but for the occasional scrap of dusty furniture. A set of windows on the outer wall overlooked a cluster of nondescript woods.
I glanced one way, and then the other. Nothing at all to tell me which way to go.
Nodding briskly, so as to show any spectating specters that I’d come to a determined decision—one that owed nothing whatsoever to the fear that if I stood here any longer I’d grow the sort of black mildew I could see creeping along the window panes—I strode off to my right.
An hour of wandering up another flight of stairs, down again, and along creaky corridors turned up nothing but endless, uninhabited neglect. Every room appeared to have been lootedin a hurry and then left untouched for decades. It supported one part of the legend of the Mad Lord, at least: the bit where his departing servants had taken everything with them that they could carry.
As material for my song went, though, the thieving footmen of the distant past didn’t inspire me much.
Damn it, I’d achieved nothing but desperate thirst, aching legs, and paper-dry, disgusting hands from rifling through rotting old furniture in search of—gods, what had I so optimistically thought I might find, anyway? A casket of jewels? The Mad Lord’s diary? An ancient skeleton with a helpful card pinned to its chest bearing the name, date of birth, and cause and date of death of the deceased?
If I were being strictly honest, I’d imagined that the skeleton would also be cradling a casket of priceless jewels in a bony hand, one finger of which would bear Mad Lord Vincenzo’s signet ring.
What a fool I’d been. I put my hands over my face, remembering too late that my palms were caked with grime. I blinked away filth and swiped at my face to dislodge a clinging bit of ancient cobweb.
The temptation to find my way back to the bathing room and soak myself all night, reheating the water as necessary, nearly overwhelmed me. And if I really yielded to despair, I could drown myself. That’d serve Enzo right, wouldn’t it? To come home from his ill-conceived attempt to take on the Calatrian army by himself and find me all limp and dead and pathetic, like the tragic subject of an elegy? Although I hadn’t really lived enough to provide material for a proper elegy. Perhaps not.
Fine. No drownings today.
Instead, I backtracked past the stairs and down the other corridor. The walls in these rooms were bare and relatively cleanstone, and the oaken floorboards appeared to have been swept during my lifetime.
Some of the doors were locked, too, which suggested modern usage.
My magic might’ve enabled me to jimmy them open with only a small amount of collateral destruction, but I refrained. Enzo and his men were probably using these rooms as private bedchambers, into which I had no reason to pry, or storage for their ill-gotten loot. And I didn’t give a fig for their money. If I thought I could’ve gotten away with stealing enough of it to ransom myself, that would’ve been one thing. But that wouldn’t work. Enzo knew I didn’t have a penny to my name.
Except…I paused, considering. It might be worth it just for the look on his face when I tried to pay him off with his own gold.
He’d almost certainly spank me again for my impudence.
My hand twitched toward the lock on the door, and I jerked it back in horror. No, I wouldn’t be examining that thought process too closely, thank you.
At the end of the corridor, I picked my way up the uneven stairs to the next floor.
A couple of hours before, I’d been on edge, nervous, peeking around corners like a frightened hare. But an endless afternoon of dust and loneliness had left me resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t find anything interesting in this useless pile of a building.
I’d even started to yawn.
