way to talk to Eleanor myself, if I have to fight my way past every blasted guard in this castle.”
“Eduard—no!” Ariel gasped, grabbing at his arm. “If you are caught—!”
“Leave go of me, woman,” he snarled, yanking his arm free. “It may be all I can do to find the right cell in the right tower, and if that proves true, then so be it. But I must do something. Surely you can see … I must do something!”
Ariel saw. She saw the rage and anguish in his eyes, put there by the challenge issued against the strength of his love for Eleanor of Brittany. There was nothing she could say or do to ease it; nothing she could do to fight it, and she stepped aside, clearing his path to the door.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
But he was gone.
Eduard nearly missed the first junction; would have if he had not heard a faint sniffle echo along a dimly lit passageway. They were in the labyrinth of tunnels carved beneath the keeps and towers to join each building to the next. It was almost pitch dark, with torches kept alight and smoking blackly at each exit to mark a flight of steps upward. He had to watch where he placed his feet so as not to scrape a heel on a loose bit of earth, and he kept his hand on the hilt of his sword to guard against the tip of the blade striking stone. Once he had to stop and flatten himself into a niche in the wall as two guards laughed their way through an archway and up a flight of stairs. One of them saw Marienne and shouted an invitation for her to join him in his bed later, but she ignored him and kept walking, and the two guards moved on, discussing what they might like to do with her should her nose ever come down from the ceiling.
Eduard pushed away from the shadows and made swiftly after Madeline’s ghostly shape far ahead. He was vaguely surprised he had not encountered any sentry posts between one building and the next, but then, on further reflection, he understood the reason why. Where was the threat? Corfe did not support a sprawling, bustling community like Amboise. It was a prison, a barren and self-contained stronghold populated by soldiers, whores, and wretches who would have nowhere to go even if they did escape their chains.
Eduard stopped again. He heard voices and tried to see through the gloomy smudge to identify the source. There was a table up ahead, outlined by the weak glow of a horn lantern. A guard sat on a three-legged stool, his arms folded over his chest. Beside him was a half-eaten loaf of black bread and a leather costrel of some unwholesome elixir that had rendered his eyes glazed and his mouth wet and slack.
Whatever Marienne was asking him was met with a belch and a thumb jerked over his shoulder. She passed under a low archway and through a narrow door, closing it behind her with a muted thud.
While Eduard debated what to do next, the guard stood and scratched vigorously at his crotch. He belched again and waddled like a penguin to where a crack in the stone blocks rose black and jagged through the slime. A hand groped beneath his tunic a moment and he leaned against the wall, grunting with relief as he aimed a jet of liquid into the crevice.
Eduard used the sound to muffle his approach and while the sentry was still occupied with shaking and tucking, he struck out hard with the heel of his hand, driving the man’s head into a violent meeting with the stone wall. Eduard caught the body under the arms and dragged him back to his stool propping him in place between the table and wall. After giving the contents of the costrel a wary sniff, he tipped a quantity of the sour-smelling wine over the guard’s chin and down the front of his tunic. It was a makeshift tactic at best, but he was fairly certain the sentry had not seen or heard him and would waken to suppose he had stumbled and knocked himself out in a drunken stupour.
Eduard opened the door a crack, half-expecting to see another guard on the other side. But the passage was empty, black as sin, and he retreated long enough to search the table-top for the stub of a candle he had spied beside the