Page 109 of Into the Heartless Wood
“I took the wrong stair.” I duck my head. “Forgive me.”
She frowns and shuts the door in my face.
I go and deliver the food to the nobleman’s wife, who shouts at me because I took so long and her dinner’s gone cold. Then it is back down to the kitchen, where I expect Owen to still be washing dishes, but he is not—one of the regular girls is at the sink.
The remainder of the day passes slowly. Heledd gives me real tasks again, because I have not done anything too disastrous today, and there is no one else to do them. So I scrub floors and deliver food and polish silver with a stinking paste that lingers even when I have washed my hands four times.
At last I am given my own dinner, and when I am finished, I step into the courtyard to dump the potato peels in the slop bin to be brought to the pigs in the morning. Owen is there, leaning against the wall. I yelp when I see him, and drop the bucket of peels.
He laughs as he bends down to help me pick them up. “I’m not trying to scare you, you know.”
My face warms as I scoop peels back into my bucket. “The moon is not even out yet.”
The sun hangs low on the horizon, the last orange rays slanting through the courtyard. Owen shrugs. “If I had crawled into my bunk I would have fallen asleep and not come at all. Did you find her?”
I dump the rest of the peels into the slop bin. “How do you even know I had a chance to look?”
“Just a feeling.”
The setting sun swathes him in orange light. He is so beautiful it makes me ache. “She is shut in a room on the top floor. There is a woman with her.”
“Can you bring me there?”
“I can, but the woman will not like it. She won’t let us in—she will probably call the guards and—” My eyes flick to his shoulders. He’s wearing another clean shirt, and there is no red seeping through anymore.
Owen waves his hand like he is batting a fly. “We’ll find some way around her. Can we go now?”
“Now?”
“Might not have another chance.”
He is right. The woman might be suspicious of me; if she tells the Soul Eater, he might move Awela somewhere else—or worse. Fear pulses sharp beneath my breastbone. “Come with me.”
I lead him through the kitchen, then up the servants’ staircase to the main floor of the palace. We duck behind a wall to avoid another maid, then skitter up a staircase.
Two staircases later, and we have to dart into a random room when we hear footsteps coming toward us down the hall. The footsteps approach the room, and we exchange frantic glances and dive under the couch on the back wall.
We stare at each other in the musty semi-darkness. I take quick, shallow breaths. I am suffocating, too far from the earth and the sky. I shake. I swallow a scream. Owen takes my hand, his fingers warm overtop of mine. Our mingled heartbeats pound together in the soft underside of my wrist.
The nobleman sinks into a chair opposite the couch, a book in one hand, a glass of wine in the other. He drinks and reads, and does both things maddeningly slow. I grow stiff and sore as we wait for him to leave. Owen never lets go of my hand. His presence calms me, keeps me tethered to my human form.
Beyond the palace the last of the sunlight fades. Shadows swallow the room piece by piece. At last, the nobleman lays down his book and goes back out into the hall.
We wait one heartbeat, two, three. Then Owen squeezes my hand, and we crawl out from under the couch. He pulls me to my feet. We wait by the door another excruciating moment, but we do not hear anything outside of it. We leave the room behind us and barrel on down the hall and up the last few floors.
Owen is laughing again, a wheezy, breathless noise. But it is choked off when he sees the violets, spilling from their pots. Anger tightens his face. “Hewouldhave these cursed flowers up here.”
My pulse throbs in my throat. I have no answer for him. “What now?” I say quietly.
He takes a breath, tears his eyes away from the violets. “We have to get the woman to leave. Can you tell her she’s wanted downstairs? Or that you were sent to relieve her?”
I nod. “But there is nowhere for you to hide.”
He glances at the flowerpots again. They are fairly large, and there are no lamps burning in the hall. The shadows should conceal him.
He grabs my hand, squeezes once, then crouches between two of the pots at the far end of the corridor. I would not know he was there if I had not seen him hide.
I step up to the door. Knock.
