when a mad king slaughtered two princes and stuffed their bodies under a stairwell. The evil pretender king from the west had wanted to clear his own way to the throne.
Ernald said all kings were tyrants. Alice would say, at least they were our tyrants.
And with that thought, I crossed through the damp grass, and slipped into a dark stairwell. Dark and silent as a grave in here. I pressed my ear to the stone, listening for the sound of movement. I didn’t hear a thing.
I pulled the candle from my pocket, along with the matches. I lit the candle, and the little flame cast a wavering glow up the winding staircase
As I moved up the stairs, cold air rushed over me. It smelled of moss and stone. Had Alice climbed this same stairwell once?
I pictured her as Finn had seen her: carrying red silk, her pale hair gleaming. Maybe she’d made it out … She could scale walls as well as I could.
Wind whistled through faint cracks in the walls. I shivered. This was the very stairwell where the dead princes were hidden—somewhere beneath my feet.
Everyone in Dovren said this place was haunted. And right now, it felt like they were right.
19
Lila
On the left side of the hall stood six wooden doors. On the right side, tall windows let in dim light. The rain was picking up again, and a spear of lightning cracked the sky. For a moment, I thought I saw a figure moving across the courtyard. I stood before the window, searching for it. It was gone again in the shadows.
I let out a shaky breath. I thought I’d just imagined someone, fear getting to me.
I turned and opened the first door, revealing a small room. Two sets of bunk beds stood on each side, and an empty hearth was inset into one wall.
Definitely a servant room. Across from the door where I stood, a window looked out over the Dark River. I crossed to it, pressing my hands against the cold panes. The rain rattled the glass. In the storm, the river seemed wild, seething.
From here, I had a perfect view of its serpentine path, flowing from west to east. Bodies dumped from here might have been carried all the way out to the sea.
I knelt down, searching under the beds. My heart stuttered when I saw dried blood on the floor.
I flipped the mattresses and found a long string of red hair, a button. A bit of a fingernail. Nothing I could recognize as Alice’s.
But it was when I pulled open the wardrobe that I felt my heart kick up a notch.
The clothes were still here—the servant’s uniforms—black dresses with white skirts, white lace collars. And between them were casual clothes: flowered dresses, simple cotton sheaths. A few personal belongings lay strewn on the bottom, a compact mirror, part of a lipstick tube, scarves. Nothing stood out as Alice’s.
When I’d finished scouring that room, I ran to the next one and flung open the wardrobe. I flicked through the clothes for signs of her. I searched each inch of the drawers on the bottom.
With the candle in my hand, I ransacked one wardrobe after another, in every room. Maid’s clothes, simple dresses, a few pieces of jewelry, handkerchiefs.
All these poor mortals had been murdered for reasons no one was letting on, and the little trinkets left of their lives filled me with a sharp sadness.
By the time I got to the last room, I was starting to wonder if Finn had been wrong. Maybe someone else had been carrying the red cloth into the castle. A little relief was unclenching my chest. Alice might never have been here at all.
Among the dresses, I found a simple brown one I thought could have been hers, but nothing for certain. Could be anyone’s.
I turned to the window, and my stomach dropped. Here, the glass was cracked a little, and brown blood spatters had dried on it.
Someone must have gone from one room to another, slaughtering them.
When I looked out the window, I saw the remains of an old bridge jutting out into the air to my right—about twenty feet long, three feet wide. At one point, it would have connected to one of the lost towers. Now, the stony promontory hung over the river like an enormous thorn on the stem of a dark flower.
I turned back to the room with the growing certainty that Alice hadn’t been here in the first place.