There were places under the castle where a soul could be lost, let alone a nosy princeling. What was he doing down here anyway? He should be upstairs, up in the royal appartments, warm and wrapped in his bed of feathers and Failend's feisty embrace, not down in the deep places, beyond the dungeons. He shivered again. There were still prisoners from the úa Connel rebellion, and those men were not comfortable, if a man could still produce that piteous wailing. Maybe it had been the assassin the king had mentioned.
The hooded lantern he'd filched cast just enough light to see by, not enough to avoid trailing a hand on the slimy corridor wall, however. His foot... squidged... in something. He had a fairly decent idea what it was on account of the foul odor that wafted about. This could not be Minister Oissine's route. He'd seen the man emerge on at least one occasion from the tapestry of Eamon the Great, Lorcan's own ancestor, but try as he might to uncover it, the secret of that route eluded him. So, the uttermost dungeons.
He imagined all manner of horrors lurking in the dark about him, for surely this was the realm of trolls and nixies. It would be just his misbegotten luck to stumble across a dullahan. He absently fingered the gold pin jammed in his tunic for just such an event. Even darker rumors of Norse svartalves or dvergar rattled around with heathen witches and worse. Any moment now, Finn was going to decide to peek in on his charge in the library, and that would be that. A faint noise echoed through the corridor, from whence impossible to identify, but he could just imagine his armsman bellowing his name.
In the darkness, his mind wandered. The idea of his grandfather marrying into the Castilians' line-no that was that the other way around-rubbed wrong at the prince. He'd heard a song or two of the young Maria Ximena's beauty, but then again every noblewoman in song was beautiful beyond the ken of the fae, and the bigger the warts and more crooked the nose, the more enchanting the bard spoke. Still, King Lachlan was ancient, at least seventy years old. What right did he have to get married at his age? There had to be something more to it. And who better to know than the king's spymaster... or the master of assassins, he supposed.
Master of assassins… Put that way, this seemed like an even worse idea.
Another right, another flight of stairs down... and a wall of cobwebs straight in the face.
He gasped in surprise at the sensation as the dusty mat coated his face, then seized up and proceeded to try to cough his lungs out of his chest. His stomach heaved. When the stars cleared from his eyes and he wiped the acidic spittle from his chin, he realized he could not see. In the least. Somewhere in the tumble he'd dropped the lantern. The flame had guttered. He could smell the pungent lamp oil as it seeped into the corridor's stones.
"Damn it," he complained. His voice boomed in the enclosed hall. He almost clapped his hand over his mouth. For long moments he remained still, painfully so as the cough threatened to take him twice more. Noise did strange things beneath the castle. Some animal chirped somewhere, and it could have been behind him, beside him, or a half a league away.
"Caution is for cowards," he muttered and pushed on into the darkness. It was the only thing he could do, he reasoned. Even if rescue would come to this place, he didn't want to be found by it. He laid his right hand on the narrow corridor's wall and pointed his left forward, fingers outstretched. Periodically he would lick his fingers to better feel breezes. The gunk of the corridor floor remained a constant foul taste in his mouth when he did so, however, no matter the amount of scraping of hand against trouser.
In the dark his senses became confused. More than once "up" seemed to be different directions than the top of his head, and the floor would seem to tilt. When echoes faded all that remained was the beating of his heart and the scrape of his boots. The sound of his heard confounded him. If it was this loud it should be audible at all times, and yet this was the first time he could clearly remember ever hearing it.
