stand guard.
Kate could hear people moving on the floors above and below, but despite all of the distant sounds of life around her, she had never felt more alone.
She turned her back to the door. Thoughts like that would get her nowhere. There had to be some way out of this room. All she had to do was find it.
Driven by new purpose, Kate stuffed the eyehole with a rag she found on the floor and decided to explore her prison. It did not take long. The walls were bare stone, enclosing a bed, a tiny fireplace, and a washstand with soap, towels, and a jug of hot water. Next to the bed was a table with a lit candle upon it and a tray covered with a white cloth. She lifted the cloth carefully to find a glass of water, an apple, and a plate of sandwiches underneath. Food could wait. She had to get out of her freezing clothes, and that water was not going to stay hot forever.
She undressed quickly and put her boots and clothes to dry in front of the fire, before rinsing her hair and scrubbing her skin clean. When she was finished, she wrapped herself up in a towel and found a pile of dry clothes folded in a box at the end of the bed. She pulled out a long skirt and a red sweater and tugged them on, before throwing a blanket around her shoulders and running her fingers through her clean hair.
Dawn was still a few hours away. It was time for a plan.
She tested the window. Locked. Even if she could break the glass, she was at least three floors up, overlooking a guarded courtyard, and she could see no way down. The walls all looked solid enough, but she inspected them anyway, feeling around for secret doors or loose stones. She found none. Even the chimney was too narrow for her to squeeze through, and a grille had been fitted over it just in case anyone was desperate enough to try.
It was not long before Kate was forced to accept her situation. There was no way out and nothing she could do to help herself escape that place. She ate some of the food to keep her stomach quiet and curled up on the bed, determined to check the entire room again in the morning, before finally giving in to the comfort of the fire and letting its warmth carry her into a restless sleep.
Kate woke some time later to the sound of a key turning in the door. She grabbed one of the bed blankets, flung it around herself, and pretended to be asleep. Then the door opened and someone stepped into the dark room.
The candle on the bedside table had burned out, and her hand tightened around its wooden candlestick as the door clicked shut. Footsteps crept across the floor. The intruder skirted the bed, fingered the blankets, leaned over, and—“Kate?”—the candlestick struck the intruder’s head with a sharp crack and Kate squirmed away. He flopped onto the bed, groaning in pain.
“Ow! What was that for?”
Kate stopped halfway to the door. “Edgar?”
“Of course it’s me. Did you have to hit so hard?”
“What are you doing here?”
Edgar sat on the bed, rubbing his sore head, and Kate threw open the curtains to see him more clearly.
“No! Wait!” he said, as the moonlight streamed in. “I have to explain something first.”
It was too late. He smiled nervously, and Kate stared at him in disbelief.
Edgar was wearing the long black robes of a warden.
He was trying to act relaxed, but he was sweating. Kate gave him what was left of her water and he gulped it down at once, the glass shaking in his hand.
“I told the wardens I’d been sent to check on you,” he said. “To be honest, I thought I’d be rat food by now. This is going a lot better than I hoped.”
“But how did you get out of the holding cell?” asked Kate. “I saw Silas lock you in!”
“Not so hard really, when you know how. All the collectors put a dead-switch inside their cells, just in case a prisoner turns the tables and locks them in instead. Not all of them are as tough as Silas, you know. He’d probably never need something like that, so it’s a good job he’s just as paranoid as the rest. Took me ages to find it, but it was there.”
“How could you possibly know that?” demanded