"I might," Gwyna replied smartly, not betraying by so much as a blink that the guard had just told them something they hadn't known-when the change of guard was. "Then again, I might not!"
"Ah," Lerson growled playfully, faking a swat at her with his halberd. "Get along with ye!"
She scampered up the stairs behind Rune, who'd waited for her. They giggled together all the way up to the next landing-which was unguarded-where they opened and closed the door twice, to make it seem as if they'd gone to their quarters.
But instead of leaving the stairs at the servants' floor, they continued quietly, carefully, to the top, and the seldom-used storage rooms for old furniture.
Talaysen had been here before them, in the guise of a dim-witted fellow assigned to carrying up barrels of summer clothing, and he had made certain that the door at the top of the stairs was well-oiled. Nevertheless, Rune held her breath as he opened it, they all filed through it, and he closed it behind them without a betraying creak.
The darkness in this hall was total, and the air was thick with dust. She suppressed a sneeze.
This part of the plan was pivotal. She waited as Talaysen felt his way past them; then took Gwyna's hand at his whispered command. Gwyna held Kestrel's hand, and Kestrel had hold of Talaysen. Careful questioning of palace servants on Talaysen's last visit had told him of the existence of a spiral stairway that went straight from the Royal Suite to the attics, with no doorways out onto any other floors. It was guarded-but by only one man. It came out in a linen closet at the end of the hall, and had been built so that bedding and furniture could be lowered down the hollow center of the stairs by means of a block and tackle. That had been Talaysen's second job here-lowering down the boxes of warming-pans and featherbeds for winter. With no landings in between, the stairs could be made as narrow as feasible and still be used by men to guide the burden up or down. There was, however, no railing. And the stairs were bound to be just as dark as these attics.
Talaysen found the door and opened it, a little at a time. It did creak, and Rune just hoped that the guard at the bottom would attribute the tiny squeaks as Talaysen moved it, bit by bit, to mice.
She tried not to think of the drop that awaited her if she missed her step, and waited until it was her turn to follow Gwyna into the stairway. She felt her way along the wall, and inched her foot over the doorframe.
There. Her hand encountered the rough brickwork of the inside of the staircase, and her foot found the first step. And the abyss beyond it.
She pulled her foot back, and began the agonizingly slow progress down.
There was no way of telling time in the thick, stuffy darkness. She thought she heard Gwyna breathing just ahead of her, and the occasional scuff of a toe against the stone of the stair, but that was all. She couldn't have seen her hand if it was right in front of her face, rather than feeling the wall. She counted twenty steps-thirty-began to wonder if there was going to be an end to them. Maybe this was all a dream-or worse yet, maybe they were all really dead, killed protecting Kestrel, and this was their own private little hell, to descend this staircase forever and ever and never come to the bottom of it-
But before she managed to give herself a case of the horrors, her questing foot found only a flat surface, and she bumped into Gwyna.
Talaysen held his breath for a moment, and pressed his ear against the crack that marked the door into the linen closet. He heard nothing.
Good.
The King never expected any serious threat from above-so the guard on this stair was really one of the guards that patrolled the hallway beyond. And if what he had been told-under the influence of a "trust me" spell on another of the guards-was true, the guard stationed here was more in case someone broke in through one of the windows. He never checked in with anyone, from the moment he went on station, to the moment he turned his watch over to the next guard.
Talaysen eased the door open, slowly-this one, thank God, had been better taken care of than the one above. It opened with scarcely a squeak.
Now there was light; outlining the door at the other end of the closet. He motioned to the others to stay where they were, and eased himself up to kneel beside it, pressing his ear against the gap between door and frame.
There-there were the steps, slow, and steady, of the guard. He began to hum under his breath, timing his magic so that the guard would begin to feel sleepy just about when he reached the door to the linen closet.
The footsteps receded-then neared, and began to falter a little. He heard a yawn, quickly stifled, then another.
He hummed a little louder, concentrating with all his might. He would have to overcome the will of a stubborn, trained man-one who knew his duty was to stay awake, and would fight the magic, although he didn't know what he was fighting.
Another yawn; a stumble. A gasp-
The sound of a heavy body falling against the wall beside the door, and sliding to the floor.
He flung open the door, quickly, squinting against light that was painful after the darkness of the stairway. A man in guard-uniform sprawled untidily on the dark wooden floor, his brow creased as if he was still trying to fight off the effects of the spell. With a quick gesture, Talaysen summoned Kestrel, and together they pulled the guard into the closet.
In a few moments, as the women sent him deeper into sleep, they had stripped him of weapons, bound and gagged him, and muffled him in a pile of sheets and comforters. Talaysen took his sword; while he wasn't an expert, he knew the use of one. Kestrel, who hadn't held a sword since childhood, seized the knife. With a quick glance up and down the hall to be certain they were unobserved, they stole out and headed for the King's private study at the end of the suite-the one place they knew they had a chance of catching the King alone. That had been the last bit of information they'd gotten on their scouting foray. No one entered that room without Rolend's express permission, not even servants-and Rolend always went there directly after dinner.
It was a rather ordinary room, when they finally found it. Talaysen had been expecting something much grander; this place looked to have been a kind of heated storage closet before Rolend had taken it over. A single lantern burned on the desk; the rest of the light came from a cheerful blaze in the tiny fireplace. There were no windows; the walls were lined with bookshelves, and the only furniture was a scratched and dented desk, and three comfortable-looking chairs. It was an odd-shaped room as well, with a little niche behind the door, just large enough for all four of them to squeeze into without having the door hit them in the faces when it opened. Which was exactly what they did.
Rune tapped his shoulder once they were in place, with Kestrel, as the youngest and most agile, at the front of the group. He leaned over so that she could put her lips right up against his ear and whisper.
"It would be just our luck that he decided to go straight to bed, wouldn't it?" she said.
Silently he begged God and the Gypsy's Lady that Rune wouldn't prove to be a prophet.
They huddled there long enough for him, at least, to start feeling stiff and cramped, and more than long enough for him to begin to think about all the possible things that could go wrong with the plan. . . .