prudent moment, but for now—” Alaric nodded toward the trembling but steadfastly upright young squire. “Here is your son: Eduard. Nicolaa de la Haye birthed him, but I trust you will not hold it against him. It seems he gave a good account of himself trying to step between the Dragon and Lady Servanne.”
The Wolf’s eyes flicked up from the wound on Eduard’s thigh and turned to Alaric. “Servanne … you know where she is?”
Friar glanced up at the arched doorway, his neck prickling with an unmistakable warning. “We were, ah, hoping you could tell us.”
“What?”
“According to Biddy, she was taken to something called the eagle’s eyrie. Do you know what it is, or where it is?”
The Wolf frowned. “The eagle’s eyrie? The eagle’s—” A gasp of shock cut the words short. “That bastard! How could he do such a thing to her? I will kill him, by God. I swear I will kill him if it is the last thing I do!”
“Yes, well, we would be more than willing to help you fulfill your vow … providing we solve one small problem.” He gazed pointedly at the stone walls, the crisscross of solid beams overhead, and the single door representing the only way out. “Unless of course, you think we have a good chance to fight our way past a blockade of guards?”
“Was that your plan?”
“My plan was to get us in. Since I did not think we had a hope in hell of succeeding, I must confess, we made no contingency for getting out again.”
The Wolf barely heard him. “The monk’s wall,” he murmured. “I wonder—”
He searched the row of cells until he came to the one he thought served memory best, then crouched in front of it. “The story goes … a monk was once imprisoned down here and used his crucifix to wear away at the mortar in his walls. His cell was next to the shaft of an old well that went dry, and when it rained, he could hear the water leaking down. Mind you, it was a long time ago that I found the loosened stones. They could have been discovered by others since then and resealed.”
The men exchanged a glance, then looked up at the doorway as the sound of fighting grew distinctly clearer.
“We will not know until we look,” Alaric said, plucking one of the torches out of a wall sconce and following the Wolf into the small, slimy cell behind them. At first there was no noticeable difference in the feel or texture of the mortar, but as the Wolf began scraping and scratching the seams around the middle block with one of D’Aeth’s iron pokers, it began to crumble and fall away. In no time at all they were able to shift the stone and drag it forward to the centre of the cell.
The Wolf took the torch and thrust it through the opening. Bits of broken mortar were pushed inward and fell a long way into utter blackness before rewarding the two worried faces with a distant splash of sound. Craning their necks upward, there was nothing to see beyond the glare of the torchlight except for more blackness.
“An enterprising monk,” Alaric muttered. “I presume his bones lie at the bottom somewhere?”
“No. No, he escaped. He escaped up the well and, by God, so shall we. Look there … and there, above!”
Alaric slid his hand up the wall over their heads and felt the step carved into the hard surface. In the flickering torchlight, he could see the shadow of another step above, and another above that until it climbed into darkness.
“The damned fool must have been mad! It would have taken months to cut such a ladder into the stone … years!”
“What else had he to do with his time?”
“True. But where does it lead?”
“Up,” the Wolf said succinctly. “Which is all I care about for the moment.”
They backed out of the cramped cell and hastily explained the escape route to the huddle of wounded men. Gil and Sparrow exchanged a dubious look, but Sparrow, being the smallest and nimblest, agreed to at least see where the ladder went. He was back in a trice, coughing and spitting up dust through an impish grin that stretched ear to ear.
“Never shall I call a monk a fool again for wearing out his skirts in holy pursuits. The ladder leads up to a grate, and the grate covers a hole in the garden overgrown with bushes and hawthorn. An