Chapter 4 Soren

Hollis says her name, and the woman beside me grabs my sleeve hard enough to bruise.

I peel her fingers off the wool one at a time. She puts them straight back.

"Miss Bell," I repeat. "Who gave you that, Hollis?"

The last time I saw Severin Hollis, he was seventeen, losing three hundred crowns to me at King Aldric's treaty table and sweating through his collar. He paid in silver borrowed from his cousin's governess. He didn't have the scar then. He didn't have the manners either.

"Your gatehouse, Ravelle." He draws off a grey glove, finger by finger, a man undressing for an audience. "A woman fell out of the sky into the Duke of Duskryn's roses this morning, in her nightclothes, and the duke let her live. My coachman had the tale before the horses were watered."

It's possible. Pell was in the garden. Pell would sell the gate my smallclothes for half a cup of ale and throw in the laundry marks for free.

"I said my name in the garden," the woman says. "To four people. One of them was a slug."

"Then one of the four can't hold his tongue." Hollis folds the glove into his palm. "Castles leak, Miss Bell."

"Not this fast. I've been here three hours. I haven't even found out where you keep the good towels."

Someone in the gallery sniggers. I'll learn who later.

"I look forward to knowing you better," says Hollis.

"I bet you do," she mutters, and her nails go through my sleeve to the skin.

Bramble chooses this moment to arrive.

He shoulders through the Caravel servants like a grey boulder rolling downhill, scattering pages, and sits down on my left foot.

Bramble is my wolfhound. He's eleven years old, grey to the eyebrows, and weighs about as much as Fenwick. His dam was Thistle, my father's hound. She whelped late, at nine, and the litter killed her, and I was eighteen with nothing left of my father in this house but a bitch dying in the straw. I kept the runt. I've kept him alive for eleven years out of spite. He's sat on my left foot every day of it.

Since the thaw he's had a cough. I've told the kennel master that if the dog dies, the kennel master can share his grave. The kennel master has been extremely attentive.

Bramble coughs now, wetly, onto Hollis's boots.

I've never loved him more.

"Oh, poor thing." Princess Evelina of Caravel is on her knees on my flagstones in sky-blue silk before anyone can stop her, with her hedgehog's basket abandoned and both hands buried in my dog's ruff. "Your hound rattles."

"He's old."

"Old creaks. Old doesn't rattle." She presses her ear flat to his ribs in front of my entire household. "That's lungworm. How long has he been coughing?"

"Since the thaw."

"And nobody's treated him?" She looks up at my face for the first time since she walked into my house, and she gives it the expression Mrs Pratt saves for a rat in the flour. "I'll want garlic, honey, a bucket of warm water and someone he won't eat."

Women look at me. They look across ballrooms, over fans, through confessional grilles, and once, memorably, over the lid of their husband's coffin. The Princess of Caravel has been under my roof a quarter of an hour and has spent all of it gazing into my dog's gums.

"Fenwick, here." My steward materialises at my elbow, wig straightened. "Give the princess whatever she needs for the dog. Put the Caravel party in the east wing."

"The whole east wing, my lord?"

"Every room of it." It's as far from my study as the house allows.

"Generous," says Hollis.

"Thorough," I tell him.

The woman doesn't wait for him to answer. She hauls on my sleeve, drags me two steps sideways, lifts the bottom corner of the Battle of Gallow Fen, and shoves me behind it.

There's an alcove behind my great-grandfather's tapestry. I hid in it from my tutor until I was ten. I've never told a living soul it's there.

She found the right corner first time. She didn't even grope.

It's black as the inside of a boot and smaller than I remember, or I'm larger. She's against the stone. I'm against her, because there's nowhere else to put me. She smells of soil and my lavender soap.

"Right," she whispers. "Some rules. Rule one, don't eat anything he gives you. Rule two, don't go riding alone with him. Rule three, and this is the big one, never let him walk behind you on a staircase."

"Is there a rule four?"

"Rule four is stop looking at me like that."

"I can't see you. It's dark."

"I can feel you looking. It's the look from chapter nine. You're about to say something devastating and then ravish me against a tapestry, and I'm telling you now, it's not happening, I've got standards, and also there's a tassel in my ear."

"I'm about to say something devastating."

"Well, don't."

"What does Hollis do?"

She opens her mouth and shuts it. In the crack of light from under the tapestry, her eyes slide off mine to somewhere over my left shoulder. She did the same at breakfast when she started on Evelina and stopped. I'm beginning to know that look. It's what her face does when she's deciding what to leave out.

"He's the bad guy," she says.

"Half of Duskryn thinks I'm the bad guy."

"You're a different kind. You're the kind they make candles of. Cedar and black pepper. Thirty-two dollars plus shipping. It sold out twice."

I don't know what a dollar is, and I resent being sold.

"You say you made me," I murmur.

"I did. I'm sorry about the ears, they're bigger than I meant."

"Did you make my father?"

Her breathing stops.

"Big man," I say. "Red beard. Sang in the bath, badly. Did you make him?"

"Soren..."

"And the fire?"

The east wing burned the winter I was nine. My father went in for me and the roof came down, and a groom carried me out across the snow under his arm like a sack of meal. That's all of it. I've never needed more.

"It was backstory," she whispers.

"Backstory," I repeat.

"It's when... a character needs a wound. It's the first thing they teach you on every course. Readers have to understand why you're like this." Her voice cracks. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know you'd be a person."

She burned my father alive with a pen, and now she's apologising in a whisper behind a tapestry, as if she's trodden on my toe in a reel.

She'll be dead before supper. I'm almost sorry. She's the most entertaining thing to happen in this house since the fire, and I'm aware of how that sounds.

I lift the tapestry and step out. "You'll be tired," I say. "I'll show you to your room myself."

She comes out after me blinking and narrows her eyes. "Is this the bit where you show me to my room and we accidentally end up in yours?"

"My door bolts on the inside. Yours bolts on the outside. Nobody has ever confused them twice."

The quickest way from the hall to the Rose Room is the Widow's Stair. My great-grandmother had it built the year her husband took his third mistress. The thirteenth step is hollow, and under it a shaft drops sixty feet into the old cistern, and at the bottom of the cistern, according to family tradition, lies my great-grandfather. Every spring Fenwick begs me to mend the step. Every spring I refuse.

Never let him walk behind you on a staircase, she said.

I walk behind her on the staircase.

She talks the whole way. The tapestries are prettier than she imagined. The portrait on the turn is my aunt Hester, and she's appalled to find she gave the poor woman a goitre. The windows have more lead in them than she remembers, and the light's better than she wrote it, and she hopes I appreciate how hard it is to describe a stained-glass window without using the word "jewelled", because her editor bans "jewelled".

Her avocado trousers are level with my eyes. I've followed a great many women's backsides up a great many staircases, but never one with fruit on it.

Step nine. Step ten.

"...because honestly, a castle this size, you'd think somebody would have put in a handrail..."

Eleven, then twelve.

She steps from the twelfth stair to the fourteenth without breaking stride.

"Mind the thirteenth," she tosses over her shoulder. "It's rotten. You want to get that seen to before somebody..."

She stops on the fourteenth and spins round. "Hang on, why haven't you ever...?"

I've already lifted my boot to stride the gap. Her spin puts her face level with mine, her mouth a hand's breadth away and still open on the question, and I jerk back from it.

My heel comes down on the thirteenth step.

It doesn't creak. It simply leaves.

Cold air comes up the shaft, wet and old, and I go into it feet first. The last thing above me is Mara Bell lunging with both hands out, and for once in her life she isn't talking.