Page 46 of Red Dragon
As she backed away from the door, the moon-mark on her hand tingled and glowed a slight silver.
Syla stared at it. When that happened, it was typically because she was drawing upon her power, but she wasn’t trying to do that now. If anything, with the men walking into the basement, she didn’t want to risk the glow giving her away.
She started to clamp her other hand over it, but as the mark tilted slightly, the silver glow illuminated a few books on a case near the door. The filigreed title on the spine of a tome bound in leather reflected the light.
The Secret Life of Queen Erasbella.
Goosebumps rose all over Syla’s body. She wasn’t shocked that such a book existed but wondered by what whim of the gods her moon-mark had guided her to it.
“Check over there,” came a whispered voice from the bottom of the stairs. “She wouldn’t have left a lamp on if she’d departed.”
Syla grabbed the book off the shelf, a cloud of dust that accompanied it wreathing her face. She backed out of the room, her nostrils tickling, and looked for a nearby place to hide while the men searched inside. But the aisles were such that they would be able to see down them.
A sneeze surprised her, and she barely kept from swearing.
“Princess Syla?” one of the men called, footsteps heading straight for the room. “Is that you? General Dolok sent us to deliver a message.”
The other man snorted.
A message. Right.
Syla took several steps down an aisle, leaned the book on a shelf, then started climbing. The wood groaned, threatening togive, and she wished she were athletic and lean instead of curvy and plump. If the entire bookcase collapsed… the men would find her easily.
Worse, her nostrils were quivering as badly as the shelves. She worried she would sneeze again.
“She must be in there,” one of the men said, lantern light bobbing on the walls as he approached the special room.
Of course they’d brought a form of illumination.
Syla reached the top of the bookcase and eased her body onto it, lying parallel to the ceiling.
“Is that a secret room? I didn’t know it existed.”
“What if there’s a hidden door back there, and she disappeared into the tunnels? I don’t want to go down there again. Roxin and a bunch of others got killed under the castle by stormers.”
“They’ve been cleared out.”
“Wethink. The stormers never should have been able to get in there to start with. If she’s down there, she’s on her own.”
Syla kept her body hidden and didn’t dare peek down, instead listening to their voices and footsteps, trying to gauge by their sounds when they went into the room.
“There might not be a secret door,” one said.
He was inside. Syla risked peeking over the edge. Neither man was visible from her perch. Had they both gone in?
“They’re all over the castle,” the other said. Yes, he was inside too.
Willing her descent and her nostrils to be silent, Syla eased off the bookcase. A faint creak made her wince.
“Did you hear something?”
She reached the floor, heard something bump in the room, and gave up on silence. She lunged and pressed the back of her hand to the plate by the open door.
Both men turned to look at her. They were toward the back of the room, and one had been peeking behind a bookcase.
“Princess Syla,” the other blurted, lunging around it and jogging toward her.
The door swung to close, but would it do so quickly enough?
