Page 95 of The Iron Dagger
Feeling sick with himself, he spoke to the wooden door.
“Hara . . . I’m so . . . I’m so very sorry,” he said softly.
There was no response from within the room. His mother’s eyes bored into his, urging him to continue. Then he remembered that Hara’s life depended on him convincing her to make gold.
“Please, just . . . just use your power this one time. It will save your life. Please, Hara, you have to do this.” He couldn’t keep the raw desperation out of his voice at the end, but there was still silence. He turned to his mother. “I need to go in there and see her.”
His mother hesitated for a moment, then she nodded. She produced a heavy key and unlocked the iron bolt on the handle. Gideon opened the door trepidatiously, not wanting to see the despair and betrayal on Hara’s face.
He lifted his head, but other than massive piles of rock, the room was empty.
Then a flash of gold caught his eye. He stepped forward and picked it up.
A tiny stone, probably the smallest in the room, had been transformed into gold. His mother came into the room behind him and gasped.
“What trickery is this?” she said in a shrill voice. She saw the small piece of gold Gideon held, and she snatched it out of his hands. After inspecting the weight of it, his mother knelt tothe ground and began to siphon through the stones, trying to find any other bits of gold among the rubble. Gideon glanced around the windowless room, and that was when he realized that the walls were draped in a forest tapestry.
He barely stopped the smile that threatened to break across his face as his mother made an impatient sound and dashed from the room, no doubt running to show his father the gold piece. Hara’s insurance. They would never kill her now, even if she was caught.
Gideon turned and left the room, ignoring his mother and father’s angry shouts as he made his way out of the Commander’s chambers. While they were occupied with organizing a search and trying to understand how a witch could escape a locked and windowless room, Gideon surreptitiously made his way to his bedchamber.
As his father had promised, there was a guard posted outside his chamber door.
Gideon hid his outrage with a nod, and the guard stepped aside. Good. Perhaps it was all the better; now there was a witness to assure his father that the last anyone had seen of Gideon was him returning to his rooms.
He closed the door, hoisted himself into his tapestry, and tread the familiar path to Hara’s room. He half hoped that she would be there, but it did not surprise him to find that it was empty except for Seraphine, who paced agitatedly before the window ledge.
Hara’s writing table was bare, and there was no sign that she had packed a satchel or had even returned to this room.
Then he saw a glint of silver from the corner of his eye.
He stared at the support in the center of the window frame, and then he saw it again. In a few long strides he went to the closed window and knelt, studying the silver knot wrappedaround the base of the support. Quickly, he shoved the window open and leaned out.
A long silvery thread swayed in the wind, stopping just before a rocky ledge that jutted over the plummeting depths of the valley below. The ledge was just wide enough for a foothold, and as it wrapped around the outside of the palace, it widened slightly. Gideon studied the thread and discovered that it was made of several smaller strands, like yarn. He tested it—the knot was secure and the steely yarn was as strong as a rope.
Seraphine meowed at him, and he glanced at her. He could not let this line stay here. Any sign of Hara’s escape had to be destroyed. He untied the bonds, working around the tough metal fibers. At last it came loose, and Gideon let it fall down into the rocky chasm below.
The cat stared at him plaintively, and he said, “Now, why would she leave you behind?”
The cat returned to its pacing at the window, clearly longing to follow wherever Hara had gone. Understanding dawned on him. The cat could find a way to escape on its own without detection, but it had been waiting for him.
He crossed his arms.
“All right. Lead the way.”
SEVENTEEN
Angharad
Her right ear still burned where she had ripped out the black bead and left it in the room of stones. It was as raw and aching as her heart.
When she made the short climb from the ledge outside her room to the top of the cliff, she felt an uncanny sense that she had done this before. There was the stream that tumbled over the cliff in a wispy waterfall, and her steps led her to it.
Walk in the water.Her mother’s voice came back to her from long ago.They cannot track us if we stay in the water.
Hara removed her boots and stepped into the stream. It was cold but bearable, and Hara was relieved that it was early summer. Her steps were slow as her feet slipped over rocks, but hopefully, no one would begin looking for her until dawn’s light when they opened the door to the stone room.
Soon thick spruce trees gave her cover, and the city in the valley at her back became obscured. The only sounds were the chuckling of the stream and the sleepy sounds of birds as they came to roost.
