Socia drifted down, looking for sentries. She did not see a one. Stephan of Bley was not fierce enough to make men stay out in the cold when their enemies were content to starve them out. In fact, the defenders could be under orders not to man the walls at night. The castle had not been provisioned for a siege. Men on night duty might be tempted to climb down and run away.
Socia considered a parapet on a tower that rose twenty feet above the rest of Arngrere. Definitely no lookout. She landed there.
She changed shape. The wind was so biting bitter she nearly screamed. Her fingers would not stop shaking. She fumbled fastenings repeatedly as she dressed. She thought longingly of the cozy off-kitchen at home where she ate with Bernardin and Brother Candle. Oh! Had Guillemette been found out yet?
Dressed sloppily, the best she could manage, she took up her bag and crept down the stairway that ran round the inside wall of the tower. She could see nothing. The steps were wooden. She tested each carefully before putting her weight on it. She stayed hard against the wall. No point exploring the axis of the tower. There might be nothing there but a long fall.
The tower existed only to provide a high place from which to observe the countryside. Socia counted steps till she was sure she had descended twenty feet. No change. She descended another twenty before she heard the slow, snorting breathing of someone who, likely, was the man supposed to be in the parapet. Two steps more and she spied a hint of pumpkin-colored light.
Socia entered a small landing watch room, oozed toward a sleeping soldier. The pumpkin light leaked from a lantern turned so low its flame barely remained alive.
Maybe the proximity of human warmth made the soldier stir. Like Aaron d’Fitac, he was just a boy. He sat up straighter, groggily.
Socia’s hand darted to her lips, then to her necklace. She fingered the stones. Their touch soothed her. She prayed that the boy would drift off again so she need do nothing dire.
The soldier shuddered, shifted slightly, and began to snore.
Cause and effect?
Probably not. In case, though, she set her bag down, moved the necklace from around her neck into the pocket of the peasant apron she wore. Sack over shoulder, hand in pocket gripping stone beads, willing the boy to sleep till his relief arrived, she slipped out of the watch room and continued downward.
She reached a deserted residential level. There were neither doors nor door-masking hangings there. Nor were there any people. She suspected that she could beat a drum if she wanted.
She did find people in the great hall. They were crowded around one large fireplace, sharing body heat more than the warmth coming off a dying fire. There was coal light enough to reveal two dozen crowded bodies and just a few sticks of firewood remaining.
She entered not far from that fireplace. Though disoriented she thought the main entrance should face the castle gate. She drifted that way, staying near the wall.
One of the sleepers surged up. She froze. He stepped over, around, and on his fellows to get to a tin bucket. He urinated noisily. Done, he looked around. Seeing no one watching, he chucked the last firewood onto the coals. Socia gripped her necklace and willed herself to be a shadow amongst shadows.
All the while she contemplated the probable layout of the castle. She was at ground level now. The other Arnhanders must have been elsewhere. She did hear snoring from the kitchen beyond the big fireplace. Some might be in the stables, where the horses and any livestock or poultry would generate heat.
Socia started moving again, looking for an exit. She wondered where they kept Kedle. She no longer meant to look. Those fantasies about slipping around assassinating captains and sowing chaos had perished. The cold reality was, there would be no sneaking Kedle out while the Arnhanders brawled with one another.
She was too cold. Or thought she was because of stress. Intellectually she knew the cold had been worse during the winter when she was fleeing from the Captain-General with Brother Candle. This time she was operating alone, with no margin for error. Willful choices had created a potential for catastrophe. If she failed, if she ended up in chains with Kedle, the struggle for Connecten independence would collapse.
That realization struck her immobile. For some while Brother Candle’s voice muttered in the back of her mind, possibly about willful children who refused to consider possible consequences.
She found a door that would let her out the side of the great hall. She pushed out hoping the gust she admitted would not waken anyone. She shoved her right hand into her apron pocket, fondled the stone beads. Her fright and nerves receded. Winter backed off its fury.
A touch of moonlight slipped through the overcast, not enough to help her avoid a pile of frozen horse apples but sufficient to show her the shapes of general features. She was in a courtyard that crossed the front of the keep and stretched along its left side. She was in the foot of the L. The stables were to her left. She moved to her right. More moonlight came down briefly, painting the world in ghostly shades. This might fit some religion’s notion of hell, a cold, dark place where you would be all alone forever.
She approached the gatehouse almost incautiously. Had the Instrumentality cast a spell to put the garrison to sleep? This was going awfully easy.
She found the gatehouse manned by two shivering youngsters, huddled for warmth in a corner, behind a single fat, smoky tallow candle. One boy was crying. He was terrified even before he saw Socia.
“Get up. There’s work to do.”
They clambered to their feet, stiffly. Neither glanced at their weapons, pole arms standing in a corner beside the entrance.
Socia asked, “You. What’s the matter?”
She got no answer. The other boy said, “He doesn’t understand your dialect. He’s scared of what Stephan of Bley will do when he finds out that we let more than thirty men get out tonight.”
Socia considered his open face, his wide, frightened blue eyes. She saw no guile. “Why didn’t you go with them?”
She received no answer but a downcast look. And that, she supposed, told the tale. Going would have been worse than staying.
“Time to open up again.”
The spokesman said something to the other boy. Socia did not follow but felt no threat. The two began a reluctant drift toward the doorway. Socia stepped in front of their weapons. “You will be protected. There will be work for you.”
These days most soldiers were in the martial life because they needed some way to support themselves. Common folk suffered ever more as the ice advanced.
Arngrere’s gateway was just wide enough to pass two horsemen abreast. The gates themselves were heavy oaken doors in need of replacement. They could not long resist the advances of a determined ram. They would have been broken long since had Kedle been in charge outside.
There lay the weakness of charismatic leadership. The worshipful followers were too accustomed to having the messianic one do all their thinking. They froze up once the genius was removed.
“How wide do you want them opened, ma’am?”
“Six feet should do.”
The gates creaked and shrieked but no one came to investigate, evidently for the second time tonight.
“Six feet, ma’am.” Voice quavering with fright and cold.
“Step through, please.”
They did so.
The moat was empty, its sides caving in. A bridge spanned it. It was made of planks meant to be taken up in time of siege. That had not been done. The fugitives from Vetercus had been too hard-pressed when they arrived.
“Move to the end of the bridge.”
The boys did that, too. The one who did not understand Socia said something softly, scared. His friend said something reassuring.