But while he worked, long before he had loosened the knot, he heard the troll returning, in faintest light now, from some distant source. Unfair, he thought resentfully, if after all this time it wanted its supper, please the god it did not, and that it would not test the ropes. He knew now that it had the power of speech, and he asked it, "How many goblins?" —to gain what knowledge of his situation he could, perhaps to distract it, or, most improbably ... even to befriend it and escape this place, if trolls could reason, if it conceived of itself in danger from the goblins.
But it hissed at him, then lifted his head as it had before, and put a cup to his lips as it had before, with no answer to his question.
He would not drink this time. He kept his mouth obstinately shut. But it shook him sharply, one snap that rattled his brain in his skull, and offered it again. He drank, flashes of color still hazing his eyes. It let his head down afterward, and sat close to him, waiting.
He tried again. "What happened to the others?"
"Ssss." It might be asking him to be quiet. Or it was an expression of its anger. He whispered faintly: "I can lead us out of here." But he was already feeling a numbness in his hands and his feet and a frightening confusion in his wits. His tongue was going numb. "I could help you." He was not sure it could even understand him.
It hissed at him, more intensely. He thought it might be answering him after all—if one had goblins upstairs, one certainly might want quiet in the cellar.
"I wouldn't bring them," he argued with it.
It said, "Not now."
There were drums, Yuri could hear them from here, the whole mountain echoed them crazily, and one had no choice but hear. He hunkered down on a flat stone in this concealing bend of the road, with Gracja's reins in his lap, holding her out of sight of the tower, waiting—because the more he considered knocking at that dreadful gate, the more he was afraid. It was not a tower where farmers came and went, it was a martial tower, where it was set and as simply as it was built, with no other possible use for it but border watching and bandit hunting. Whatever men might live here, if they were men at all—might be little better than bandits themselves, for all he knew. He was only waiting for moonset, hoping for clouds, and shadow—him with a yellow dog and a pony with a wide white blaze and a white foot. He had muddied up Gracja's blaze and her white stocking, with water from his canteen; but that was small good—he could not lay a hand on Zadny, who had gotten restless and run off on his own business, to bark at the tower, for all he knew, and rouse everyone in there.
Probably something had caught the dog. Or he was going to come back chased by a hundred bandits, and run right up to him. And the wind was getting colder or he was growing shivery with thinking about it and listening to the drums in the night.
He left Gracja tied to a cindery tree trunk for a moment to stretch his legs, and went far enough to steal a look down at the tower. It was lit up on top, torches all about.
No sign of Zadny.
"Stupid dog," he muttered to himself and to Gracja, and paced and shivered, and paced, and sat down and waited, and finally told himself that he had to go. The moon was setting and if he was going to try to pass the tower in the dark, he had as well do it while there was still noise and they were busy, not while they were sleeping—with the sound of a horse passing right under their walls. He started to get up, teeth chattering with the thought that he was really, truly about to try it.
Suddenly a pale shaggy shape came barrelling off the hill and into his lap, licking at his hands and his face and making his heart skip a dozen beats. He sat down hard on the stone, the hound a flurry of paws in his lap and on his arms. He shoved to protect himself, he flung anxious arms about what was warm and safe and alive in this dreadful place, and tried to hold on to him, for fear of what had sent Zadny running back to him.
"Where have you been?" he whispered. Zadny's pale shape, cavorting down the road, had been plain for any eyes to see. "What's down there, what do you know?"
But the hound jerked about of a sudden, braced and staring wildly up into the rocks, toward a dark shape and a gleam of metal.
A troll, Yuri thought, frozen as Zadny was frozen, expecting it to spring.
But it skidded down among the burned trees, human looking, and slid down against the rock right in front of him, saying, "You damned fool! What are you doing here?"
"Master Nikolai?" he said faintly, and, holding Zadny's collar fast, hugged him tight. "Master Nikolai?" He did not intend his teeth to chatter when he spoke: he tried to stop it. "Where are my brothers?"
Tamas waked with his arms free beside him, with a warm cloak over him, and blinked in a wild hope that he was miraculously rescued, that Nikolai or Karoly had found him, or that Bogdan had—
But it was the same dank, dreadful place. He hauled himself painfully onto his knees, felt about him in the dark, and up against the iron bars that he had lain next to. They made a wall, and a gate, and that gate—
—was chained shut.
He sank down with his shoulder against the bars, and leaned his head there until his heart had settled and the despair that welled up behind his teeth had found a bearable level again.
It was no worse than before. It might be some better. He bestirred himself to search the dark, and, feeling around him, discovered a slimed wet water-channel, carrying water that smelled and tasted clean. He washed his hands and face and drank and drank until he was chilled through, sure at least it was not drugged.
But when he had felt his way about the rest of the space of his prison, and found masonry walls on either side and the ceiling lowering at the end so he had no hope of squeezing further, he went back to the bars and sank down against them.
He could move; he had his cloak to wrap in against the chill; and when time passed and nothing threatened the silence or his solitude he crept back to the water-channel and washed at his leisure, although he was sore down to his fingertips and the cold and the effort hurt. Papa would not die in filth; mama would never tolerate perishing like this; Bogdan had not had to, he hoped that much for his brother, and for all the rest of them. And in the increasing cohesion of his aching and battered wits he told himself if once the troll opened the barred gate, if it once gave him the least chance, he was going to run for it, find his way out or find a weapon. If he did not make it, well—he had seen worse waiting for him, in this very cellar.
So he waited, nursing a headache and rubbing his chilled limbs to keep them from stiffening, and passed his time remembering good things, his home, his family, playing up and down the brook, sailing leaf boats.
Master Karoly's lessons—the tower room, the cluttered shelves with then-dried leaves and books and curious objects; learning their letters, and their insects; and the name of the birds that built nests under the eaves. . . .
When Bogdan and he were boys together they had gotten bored with indoors and played pranks on the old man, turned the pages in his lesson book when he was out of the room, put live frogs in his tackle basket, rearranged every single book on his shelves, and never understood that they were doing wrong. Master Karoly had always seemed different from serious grown-ups, both wiser and more childlike. Master Karoly had kept his own counsel regarding the mischief they did; and derived his just amusement and his revenge (as they had duly expected) by posing them long, long cipherings or particularly arduous errands the next day. That always seemed fair, in the balance of things. And it had never once occurred to them that master Karoly should mind looking foolish, because dignity was not the province of young boys.