opens slowly. I hesitate and then dash to the kitchen. I’ve read enough novels to know that venturing into darkness unprepared is a poor idea. When I return, the panel is ajar and I’ve got a candle in one hand and a kitchen mallet in the other.
Instead of a secret passage, I’ve found stairs leading down. They are stark and sharp, like razored teeth guarding the throat of the beast. For some reason, chills course through me and they just won’t stop, as if I’m in terrible danger. Possibly that should be enough to warn me off, but I don’t think it’s imminent, more like the echo of old terror. I think what I’m feeling belongs to someone else, so I shake it off and descend carefully, shining the candle to see where to set my feet.
It wouldn’t be strange if the keep had a dungeon, but it does seem odd that it’s situated directly below the great hall. I emerge in a big, dark room, and even after all these years, I still smell a faint tinge of copper. So much blood must have been spilled here. With a trembling hand, I move the candle and confirm my fears. I have no name for most of the implements and devices here, but they’re all sharp and spiked, blades coated in red-brown residue, chains attached to ceiling and walls.
And bones. So many bones.
The tremor in my hand intensifies, moving through the rest of my body, until I can barely keep a hold of the mallet. As if I’ve been ensorcelled, I move to the far corner of the room, where a skeletal corpse hangs, still chained at wrist and ankle. I take in the green scraps of her ballgown and know I’m looking at the remains of the woman I saw taken. Beside her, someone hangs in harlequin rags, skull turned toward her.
“What the hell are you doing? How did you find this place?”
12.
I startle and scream, dropping the candle as I raise the mallet.
From the shadows, Njål snatches it mid-air, so swift that the flame goes out. He radiates suspicion and fearsome energy, the most danger I’ve ever sensed from him. I don’t want to have a conversation down here, but he’s between me and the stairs leading out. There’s no way he’ll let me leave without getting answers.
“Sometimes the keep shows me things. I saw a woman being . . . taken from a ball. I don’t know why it wanted me to see that.” In fact, I wish it hadn’t shared this with me, but now I know why Bitterburn feels like a tomb.
“You get these . . . impressions often?” he asks in a strange tone.
It takes me a moment to realize that fear shadows his voice. Njål is afraid of what I’ll learn, of what Bitterburn will reveal. I should be alarmed about standing in a torture chamber with a cursed soul who doesn’t want me to learn his secrets.
“Now and then. Can we leave? I was curious if what I saw was true, but I don’t wish to linger here. There’s nothing I can do for those who suffered and it’s—”
“Of course. I’ll follow you out.” He doesn’t ask me not to look back.
Doubtful I’d see much if I did. It’s so tempting, though in the stories, that never works out well. In one tale, a man loses his beloved wife forever, and in another, curious girls are turned into pillars of salt. Women always seem to pay the price, regardless who did wrong. I feel my way out, easier said than done, and stumble a few times in the dark.
Njål doesn’t join me in the kitchen straightaway, so I have time to settle my nerves with a cup of tea, and I have dinner on by the time he catches up. He settles in the far corner where shadows gather, and I feel him watching me, not with the usual gentleness either.
“There’s something strange about you, Amarrah.”
“Now you sound like my stepmother.” My tone isn’t as light as I wish, and I break open the small scab on the finger I nicked earlier, grabbing for a pot.
“You’re injured.” Njål moves like he’ll come right to me, join me in the light, but then his steps slow.
“Nothing serious.”
“Since you arrived, I’ve had the strangest sense of familiarity, like we’ve known each other for a long time. I fought that feeling, knowing it made no sense. But . . .”
Oh no.
“It’s been so long that