Chapter 3

Chapter3

After a moment, the person carrying me ducks, and then the air becomes still and close and the world smells of old wet stone.

I stop struggling as he—I think it’s Maynard—straightens back up. I’m certain we’re inside the cairn itself, and I rack my brain for any way to use that to my advantage and come up dry. The inside of the cairn was empty when we started our excavation outside, long ago robbed of its bones and grave goods, and so there’s nothing in here remotely resembling a weapon. Nothing but earthen floor and chambered ceiling large enough to rival that of Maeshowe in Orkney.

My headlamp slides off my head and falls to the packed earth with a small thud.

Before I can wonder why they’ve brought me inside a tomb and consider how sinister a move that might be, Maynard ducks once more, and then I feel breeze and mist-kissed air, and the world smells again of autumn, turning, dying.

Back outside.

“Please,” I say. The word is practically a wheeze—I’m not a small woman, and being slung over someone’s shoulder like this has driven all the air right out of me. “Please, let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

“A vow from a mortal means very little,” the cold one says.

“It doesn’t matter, Morven,” Idalia says, seeming a little irritated at his bad attitude. “There’s no one she could tell who would believe her. How many mortals have gone back to their world singing songs and telling tales?”

I don’t like all this mortal talk. Because—well, look: after spending the past six years dissecting medieval narratives about demons and witches, I’m hardly one to jump into Satanic Panic mode, but there are a lot of the right ingredients here. I’m being carried off from a pagan tomb on Halloween night by attractive but possibly sociopathic strangers, and they’re talking about queens and mortals, and oh god—I’m going to die, I’m really going to die, and it’s not even going to be while I’m having an irresponsible but murder-podcast-worthy good time…

I struggle on Maynard’s shoulder, trying to shove off my blindfold with my bound hands, but I’m given a hard, impatient spank for my efforts. Spanked. Like we’re playing naughty French maids or something.

And I like playing a naughty French maid game as much as the next pervy grad student—particularly if there’s spanking involved—and I’m not saying I haven’t occasionally dreamed of being kidnapped and tortured with sexy shit—but this isn’t a dream, this is my real-ass Halloween night.

“Are you going to squirm the whole time?” Maynard asks.

“You won’t notice me squirming if you put me down,” I suggest helpfully.

“But then you’ll run,” Maynard says, as if he’s explaining something to me instead of the other way around. “No matter. The way to the queen is not long. In the right conditions, at least.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say. I try squirming again, but all I get is another swat, and a tug on my hair from Idalia.

“It means there is a shortcut. The castle could be merely a question away instead of a few hours’ walk away,” Idalia informs me. “But it must be a true question, a curiosity. Burning in the mind like the tongue of a flame.”

I squeeze my eyes closed behind my blindfold because I might start crying if I don’t. Nothing they’re saying makes any sense at all, and I can’t even begin to imagine where they’re taking me. I’m fairly sure we’re not heading toward the fair, given that I hear nothing more of the screams or music, but I also don’t think we’re near the loch any longer because I don’t hear the slow lick of the waves on the shore. I hear—well, it almost sounds like forest noises: leaves underfoot, branches creaking, an owl hoo-ing out a warning.

But there aren’t any wooded areas near the dig—not any properly wooded ones, anyway. There is a string of weary trees near the farmhouse and a few ancient ones near the site, and then a thin seam of woods two valleys over. But that valley is three miles away and impossible to make by foot with the steepness of the hills. Even the sheep have trouble getting over those hills, and sheep are dicks who like nothing more than to find places where they’re certain to die horribly.

And more than that, there’s nothing that can be remotely called a castle within ten miles of here, which I know, obviously, because the whole point of this dig was to find out where de Segovia had stayed after that fateful storm.

Wait.

Castle.

Maybe they know something I don’t? What if the castle survived—or its ruins survived—somewhere nearby? What if Dr. Siska got the location wrong after all?

“Ah, there it is,” Idalia says, and Maynard answers with a low melodious hum. “Well done,” she tells me, with a pat on my shoulder that feels almost fond. “I knew you’d get us there faster.”

I twist enough to tug again at my blindfold, and this time the others let me, Maynard still humming and someone playfully kicking the leaves as they walk. The first thing I see when the blindfold drops to the ground is a flutter of dark velvet. A pair of gleaming riding boots. Then—flying bugs.

Moths. Softly furred, bone-white in the moonlight.

The blood has gone to my head, I think, because when I look up, the moths are fluttering around Idalia, clustering in a thick wreath around her neck, like a scarf. No, not like a scarf, but as a scarf, because the scarf she was wearing earlier is gone, and there is nothing but moths, their wings beating, their antennae moving in the night air.

And then Maynard sets me on my feet—roughly but not cruelly—and I sway a moment as the blood returns to the rest of my body. I close my eyes as I do, hoping that when I open them again, I’ll see something I recognize. A car park, a farmer rounding up a stray ewe, a Tesco, something. But no.

There is Idalia with her ruff of moths, and there is Maynard, wearing not jeans and boots but a velvet cape, breeches, and riding boots. Morven is in much the same, although his clothes are a deep sable compared to Maynard’s crimson and buff.

I stare at them. They can’t have changed while we were walking, right? At least Maynard couldn’t have—so it follows that I must have been wrong about what they were wearing before, at the site. I must have…imagined…Maynard’s tech-friendly gloves, Idalia’s embroidered scarf…

Maynard puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me, firmly, until I’m facing the opposite direction. Until I’m facing the spires and ramparts of a castle.

An impossible castle.

There are no castles like this in Scotland. Anything this turreted and graceful would be a nineteenth-century confection, made for leisure and not for defense, and yet this was unmistakably also built with defense in mind. The deep moat, the imposing barbican. The thick walls buttressed with sloped taluses and punctured with arrow slits.

And it seems to be formed entirely out of the hill it sits upon. Not fitted together with stone, not even built so much as carved out of the living hill itself, as if chewed into existence by Sir Walter Scott–reading termites: grass and earth and rock at the bottom; sheer, fog-wetted stone at the top.

Lights glow from within; torches flicker on the walls.

“Come,” Idalia says, nudging my shoulder with hers. Moths flutter around my face and tickle my jaw. “The queen is waiting.”

* * *

The insideof the castle is even stranger than the outside, and even though I know in a distant sort of way that this is my moment for escape, my curiosity is like a leash yanking me ever forward. My feet drag as the trio lead me over bridges, and through doorways, and into the massive keep itself, and I can’t stop swiveling my head from one side to the other, trying to drink it all in.

The floors of the castle are flagged—except when they’re tiled in elaborate mosaics, and even then, half the mosaics aren’t tile at all but gleaming bits of petrified wood and gemstones. Some halls are carpeted in living grass—growing as lushly as it might outside—dotted with small wildflowers. Some of the walls are made not of stone but of curtains of falling water, and some are made of mist, trapped in place like vapor between panes of invisible glass.

There are carvings, paintings hung from sturdy rails, tapestries depicting battles and hunts. Busts sit in niches, and mushrooms bloom in corners and give off a faint silver light too dim to rival the glow of the torches and candelabra but bright enough to cast strange shadows where the firelight can’t reach.

I can’t absorb it all—there’s too much—and just that, just the thought that there’s too much, speeds my heart. I could spend days and weeks in one hallway and not even come close to finding every detail, studying every carving, exploring every corner. We pass rooms upon rooms, halls upon halls—some crowded with more people like Maynard and Idalia, beautiful and strange, and some so eerily empty and cobwebbed that they look as if they’ve been untouched for centuries.

It feels like hours, but eventually we make our way to two doors made of gray-green wood and carved into twists of ivy, and Maynard knocks once.

A woman’s voice calls from within. “Intrare.”

He opens one of the doors and, with a hand firm on my elbow, guides me inside the high-ceilinged room. Bookshelves line the walls, going up one story and then another, the very top recesses disappearing into shadow. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling, but there are mushrooms set into their holders instead of candles, tall and skinny and glowing silver. Threads of luminous mycelium wind up their chains, until they too disappear into the darkness above. The only other light comes from glassed sconces mounted on the wall, lamps that burn steadily and almost solemnly, if solemn burning is a thing. They are blue, rather than orange and yellow, sapphire at their cores and a pale sky color at their tips.

I stare open-mouthed as Maynard hauls me forward and Morven stalks behind us. Idalia’s moths flit in front of my face as I take in the sheer number of texts here—ancient-looking scrolls, tomes thick with wavy vellum pages, books chained to their shelves with fetters made of silver and gleaming gold.

I’m so entranced by the books I don’t realize we’re walking toward someone at the front of the room until we stop right in front of her. Maynard pulls on my elbow—hard—and I tumble right to my knees, which must be what he wanted me to do, because he steps back and then kneels himself, pressing his hand to his heart. Idalia does the same the next to me, as does Morven, although a bit more bitterly.

I bow my head like they do, having only gotten a glimpse of dark hair and ivory-pale skin. She wears a dress long enough to puddle around her feet on the stone floor of the room, and it’s a red so deep it looks black in its folds and creases. A silk so shiny that I wonder if it’s wet. I stare at the hem as she speaks.

Her voice is low and musical, lilted the same as the others’, rich in a way that’s intoxicating to hear. Like each of her words is a sip of a sweet ruby liqueur. “And there was no trouble?”

“None, Your Majesty,” Idalia says.

“Good. The banquet will begin soon, then. You should be ready.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

When I hear them rise behind me, the woman speaks again. “Morven, please wait outside the doors. You will be needed before you can make yourself ready.”

Morven’s displeasure radiates so palpably through the space that I can sense it even with my back to him and my eyes on the hem of the woman’s dress.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” he answers stiffly, and then I hear him leave after the others.

After the door closes, we are alone.

“Look at me,” the woman says, and curiosity still burning brighter than any other feeling, I obey.