Wynn heard a slow, shaky breath in the silence that followed, and the duchess stepped onward. Suddenly Osha slipped past, and Shade came up beside Wynn. Osha was the first to reach the passage’s end, though he didn’t stop at that door leading outside. Instead he ducked to the right and vanished into a side way. Wynn did stop briefly at the door—for she could hear the waves below the keep’s back side more clearly through the door’s small window bars.
On an impulse, she tried the door and found it locked, as Sherie, followed by Shade, stepped past through the right arch. Wynn joined them and found Osha standing before another heavy door two steps down a short stairway that led the other way, parallel to the passage.
Osha crouched before the door and eyed its iron lock plate.
“I don’t suppose you can open it?” she whispered.
He shook his head without looking back as he answered in Numanese, “I not learn ... not time.”
At this, the duchess frowned, looking between them.
Wynn was not about to explain Osha’s past, what he had been, or that he had never left his people’s land until she had gone there. But she understood that he’d never had a chance to learn skills such as picking locks.
However, Osha gripped the door’s handle and twisted it slightly until it stopped—probably just to be sure it was locked.
Wynn flinched at the soft click, for the last thing they needed was anyone below hearing someone at the door. She waved everyone back up to the passage, where they could talk more easily.
Aupsha’s device had led her and Jausiff here, and soon after, guards had come this way, caught Chane, and forced Osha to hide.
“Whatever you are going to do, do it quickly,” Sherie whispered.
“You should leave, as this will take a little time,” Wynn countered. “It is one thing to be caught walking about the keep with the lady of the house ... but something else entirely to be found lingering near that door by your brother or his men. Anyone caught here might need someone in authority still free ... who wasn’t involved.”
“Exactly what are you going to do with a locked door in your way?”
Wynn faltered, for she certainly wasn’t going to explain the curse of her mantic sight. Even if the duchess believed her, it would take too long and raise more questions—and possibly suspicions. And in a silent war with an opposition seeking the same secrets as she did, Wynn had learned never to share any secrets of her own with anyone until necessary.
Sherie still watched her, and Wynn didn’t answer the question as she waited.
“Very well,” the duchess said. “I will expect to hear from you ... soon.”
As the duchess turned away, she offered the lantern. Wynn shook her head and held up one of her cold-lamp crystals. She waited until Sherie was fully gone from sight.
“Osha, I’m going to do this while sitting,” Wynn said, and she handed him the crystal. “Do you remember how to use it?”
He nodded and brushed it once with his other hand. A soft light rose inside the crystal.
“Don’t make it too bright. Too much light might be seen under the door ... or interfere with what I’m going to try. If I start to topple, catch me before I hit the floor and make any noise.”
Osha looked up from the crystal, asking in Elvish, “What do you mean? I thought you had been honing your ability while at the guild.”
“Yes ... but once I start, it can be difficult the longer I go on,” Wynn answered. “Shade may have to help me end it, if I can’t do so myself.”
Even Shade rumbled in displeasure as Osha shook his head in doubt.
“No more time for arguments,” Wynn warned, hooking a finger at them as she turned to the door. “Both of you be quiet and let me focus.”
Her mantic sight was a hard-won blessing forever caged in a curse. It was not a true talent or a metaologer’s ability based on years of training and knowledge. This wild taint had been left in her from tampering with a mantic form of thaumaturgy. Once the sight was engaged, she could see the presence of the Elements, one at a time, in—and through—all things. So far Spirit was the only one that she could see well, but that was the one she needed to see now.
She went down the two steps and knelt before the door, leaving herself a little room. Osha dropped to one knee behind her on the left as Shade settled near to her right. Extending the first finger of her right hand, Wynn traced the sign for Spirit on the floor and encircled it.
At each gesture, she focused hard to keep those lines alive in her mind’s eye, as if they were actually drawn upon the stone. Then she scooted forward to sit atop the pattern and traced a wider circumference around herself.
It was a simple construct, but it helped shut away the outer world as she closed her eyes to seek out the elemental essence, rather than presence, of the world and let it fill her. Starting with herself, as a living being in which elemental Spirit was strongest, she imagined breathing it in from the air as well. Then she felt for it, as if it could flow up into her from the floor’s stone.
Wynn held inside her head the first simple pattern she had stroked upon the floor, as she called up another image. Chap—Shade’s father—appeared in the darkness of her closed eyes, and she held on to him as well.
Shade huffed once beside her, and Wynn’s concentration faltered at the sound. She managed to pull both pattern and image back into focus. She envisioned Chap as she’d once seen him before with her mantic sight.
His fur shimmered like a million silk threads caught in blue-white light, and his whole form became encased in white vapors that rose like flames from his fur.
Vertigo rose inside her.
“Wynn?” Osha whispered.
She threw out her hands to support herself against the stone floor. When she opened her eyes, nausea lurched upward from her stomach.
Wynn stared at—through—the door.
Translucent white, just shy of blue, dimly permeated the old wood. The door’s physical presence still dominated her sight, but there was more, something beyond it. Pale and blue-white, the ghostly shapes of stairs continued downward.
Shade whined so close that the noise was too loud in Wynn’s ears. Without meaning to, Wynn glanced aside at the dog.
At first Shade was as black as a void, except for too-bright crystal-blue eyes staring back. A powerful glimmer of blue-white became clear, permeating Shade more than anything else in sight. Traces of Spirit ran in every strand of Shade’s charcoal fur and burned in the dog’s eyes.
Shade was aglow with her father’s Fay ancestry, and Wynn had to look away.
“Are you all right?” Osha asked, again in an’Cróan Elvish.
“Yes,” Wynn choked out as she stopped herself from looking at him.
Because Osha was one of the an’Cróan, an Elven people associated with the element of Spirit, it might be nearly as bright in him as in Shade. She couldn’t break her focus again, and instead concentrated on what was beyond the door.
At the stairs’ bottom, a straight passage ahead was no more than inverse shadows, as though she was looking into a space where all edges and corners were outlined with a blue-white glow stronger than that on the surfaces. Farther on was a large chamber, though deeper and farther than her sight reached. The layers of bluish white made any details difficult to pick out.
She spotted six tall outlines, three to each side, inside the chamber. In focusing on those, she found them a little brighter than stone as they sharpened into upright rectangles. They had to be doors, perhaps made of wood. And there were three blurs, almost as tall as the doors, of an even brighter blue-white positioned about the chamber.
One shifted slowly, moving a short way to join the other two. Those had to be living beings—Suman guards, most likely. And that one stopped near the other two before the second door on the right.