“So you remember Senneth, but you don’t remember me,” Kirra said lightly. “And yet, I’ve met you more than once. I even attended your wedding.”
“I remember you,” he said, sounding surprised that she would think otherwise. “You wore red the day I was married.”
“I often do. Danalustrous crimson,” she said, more lightly still. What an odd thing for a man to remember. But she had much more important matters to focus on. “Let me come in there and look around and see what I can turn to my purpose.”
“Come in here,” he repeated. “How will you—oh. You’ll change shapes, I suppose, and crawl under the door. Perhaps I shouldn’t watch.”
“Watch or not, makes no difference to me,” she said cheerfully.
But he turned away. “They left me with a candle and some flint,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll get us some more light while you—do your magic.”
Romar stepped back toward his sleeping mat while Kirra shrank herself into mouse shape, scurried under the grille, and resumed her human form. She thought he must have been watching, at least surreptitiously, because he was at her side with a lighted candle in his hand just as she was throwing back her heavy hair.
“What are we looking for?” he asked, sounding as if he was trying hard to keep any sense of marvel out of his voice. “What basic materials do you need to change something into something else?”
She paced gracefully across the cold stone floor of the cell, using the gliding step that her stepmother had taught her was proper for a lady. Absurd to even be thinking of such a thing at such a time, but she had been so eccentric already; she didn’t want Romar to think she was wholly without social graces. “Oh, ideally, the objects should have some relation to each other. We could tear your blanket into long strips and tie them together, and that would alter quite nicely into a rope, but then you wouldn’t have a blanket.”
“I can sleep cold,” he said instantly.
“Yes, but whoever brings your breakfast in the morning would notice you had a rope on your bed instead of a cover, and that wouldn’t do you much good,” she pointed out. “The next best thing might be—what were you wearing when you were taken? Does your coat have any braid?”
It turned out that Romar Brendyn wasn’t much for elaborate dress, so neither his shirt nor his overcoat sported any fancy trim that Kirra could rip free. But she was able to tear the silk lining out of his topcoat and shred that into ragged strips, and she knotted these together into a respectable length. She passed the thin, frayed cord through her fingers, touching silk but thinking about hemp, and she felt its weight and texture change against her palm.
“Rope,” she said, coiling it before her on the floor.
“That’s not even remotely credible,” Romar said flatly. “That someone can do such a thing. I watched you, and I can’t believe it.”
She smiled. “Very handy, don’t you agree?”
“Can you change anything you please to anything else?”
“No. For instance, I can’t change a bird into a rosebush. I can turn
things
into other
things.
And I have to be touching the object in order to effect the transformation. And if I try to change too many things—or myself too many times—I can exhaust all my power and have to rest for a while.”
“For how long?”
“An hour, a day. It depends on how much of my magic has been used up.” She handed him the rope. “Let’s hide this under your mattress. I’m afraid you won’t have a very comfortable sleep tonight.”
She was not even surprised when his immediate response was, “I don’t need to be comfortable.” He was as prickly as Justin, in his way, impatient of delay and scornful of comforts. Less irritating than Justin, of course, though she supposed that could change if she spent much time with him.
“Now then,” she said, glancing around by wavering candlelight. “What might we turn into a knife?”
The obvious choice was the spoon that lay by the bowl at the door, but Kirra didn’t want anyone to notice that something crucial was missing. She pulled a hairpin from the tangle of her hair and used that instead, shifting its form, its material, and its purpose.
“A wicked little dagger,” she said, handing it over to Romar, who slipped it inside a pocket of his trousers. “I wouldn’t use it if you didn’t have to, at least until the trap is sprung. If you kill off the servants before we free you, you might not get out of here alive.”
“I may not anyway,” he said. “I still don’t understand what you have in mind.”
Kirra took those ladylike steps across the room to the window and wrapped her hands around the bars. Before working any magic, she gazed out to see what she could determine by capricious moonlight. That open space right before her must be the gardens, soggy and unappealing after the rain. The dark silhouette to the left was probably the stables. There wasn’t much cover for a good hundred yards, till a line of scrubby trees hunched themselves into a windbreak along the western edge of the property.
Romar had come to join her by the window, and Kirra pointed. “There. We’ll have a horse and another rider waiting for you right past that line of trees tomorrow night. Wait till it’s full dark—wait till your last meal has been brought to you. Break the bars, climb out, run for us. We should be able to cover a lot of ground before anyone knows you’re gone.”
“If they come after us—”
“The important thing is to get you out of here and back on the road,” Kirra interrupted. “If there’s a pursuit, you and Cammon will ride for safety while Justin and Donnal and I attack the others.”
“You! And two men!” he exclaimed. “If there is a fight on my behalf, I will lead the charge.”
“You are the valuable individual here,” she said, her voice a little sharp. “Yours is the life to be protected. And, believe me, between us, Donnal and Justin and I can account for more than two soldiers and three noblemen. We’ve done it before.”
Now he turned to look down at her. He had left the candle over by his mat, so she could only see what portion of his face the moonlight chose to illuminate. He was an amazingly handsome man, she thought, though this was not the time and place to be noticing such things. He had an aristocrat’s fine features, stamped with intelligence, and his face was quick to show his emotions. Just now he seemed to be struggling with respect, protest, and curiosity.
“I hate the thought of running like a coward while others defend me,” he said in a quieter voice than she was expecting. “But I find myself wondering what in the silver hell has brought a serramarra of the Twelve Houses to the place where she thinks she can take on professional blades and kill them on the road.”
“Yes, it’s a most interesting story,” Kirra agreed. “We’ll tell it around the fire on our journey tomorrow night.”
“Something to live for,” he said.
Kirra smiled. “I imagine you have many other items on that list.”
He laughed but did not reply. “What else is left to be done here?”
Kirra ran her hands up and down the two center bars of the window. “I must turn these into something you can break easily with your hand. There—these two are old wood. You should be able to snap them without much trouble. Give me a moment to convert them all.”
“Not all of them,” he said. “I must have something to anchor the rope.”
She laughed. “Naturally. I shall leave this one on the left pure iron.”
Romar watched her more closely this time, seeming fascinated and a little fearful. “How long will the sorcery last?” he asked. “When will these items revert to their proper materials?”
Kirra shook her head. “This is what they are now. They will not revert.” She could not help but give him a look of limpid mischief. “Oh, they do say that sometimes magic dies with the mystic. So I suppose if I am accidentally killed in a brawl tomorrow while you’re in the process of climbing down the wall—well, you could find yourself in desperate straits, clinging to the end of a slip of silk as you try to find purchase on the side of the house. But I plan to live out the day, so you should be quite safe. Don’t give it another thought.”
He looked as if he wanted to be irked with her but found himself, against his will, amused. “In fact, I am happy to learn you will be alive at day’s end,” he said instead. “You have that story to tell, after all.”
Kirra ran her hands once more down the changed bars, just checking, but all of them seemed splintery and ready to break. She glanced around the room, wondering what else she could do to improve Romar’s comfort or his odds for survival, but nothing occurred to her. “My best advice now would be to sleep as well as possible and eat what you can,” she told him. “Keep yourself strong. If you hear a commotion tomorrow afternoon, that will be us leaving. But we won’t go far. We’ll be waiting for you behind the trees tomorrow night.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
Kirra glided back toward the door, and he followed her. “Wait till it’s safe,” she cautioned him. He seemed like the kind of man who needed such a warning, and probably wouldn’t heed it even then.
He laughed. “No part of this enterprise seems safe, but I will try to proceed with some care,” he promised. “Thank you, Kirra Danalustrous. It is very possible you have saved my life.”
“Don’t thank me too soon,” she said. “You’re not free yet.”
He surprised her by taking her hand and bowing over it very low, though he did not kiss her fingers as a courtlier man might have. “Then I shall thank you merely for the intention,” he said, straightening up. By the dim light, his face looked very serious. “It is what we should all be judged on, anyway.”
Ridiculous; she really didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to shrivel down to mouse size and scamper down the halls, away from him. But she would see him tomorrow, unless everything went unthinkably awry. No need to linger now.
“Till tomorrow,” she said. “Try to be patient.”
She let herself collapse, like a dress cut from the laundry line, turning a thing that was full and round and vivid into something small and uninteresting. She could feel Romar’s eyes on her, or she thought she could, as she ducked under the low iron of the grille and skittered with her tiny claws down the uneven stone floor.
“Be careful, Kirra,” Romar called after her, but she did not look back. She did not change herself into a woman again to make a more dignified good-bye from this side of the door; she did not even don her calico colors and slink along as a cat. Her small heart was beating hard enough as it was. She would not give it something else to contend with.
DONNAL was furious when he flung the door open, probably three hours after she’d left. “Where have you
been
?” he demanded, addressing his scold to the brown rat who scurried in after scratching timidly at the door. “I’ve been thinking you were dead this past hour or more.”
Kirra pushed herself up on her hind legs and stretched her curled hands toward the ceiling, feeling her body bulk up and lengthen. She took in what details she could while a slight opalescence hazed her eyes during transformation. Cammon and Justin had been slumbering on the hearth, wrapped in their blankets, but they had stirred when Donnal greeted her and now they were yawning and trying to wake up. Donnal, who had looked like Kirra when he opened the door, was now himself—a slim, dark-haired man with a neat beard and watchful, sober eyes. The fact that he still wore a maid’s simple gown meant he was ready at any second to resume his disguise.
“It must have been harder to find Romar than you thought,” Justin said. He didn’t sound as if he had been too worried.
Nor did Cammon, who yawned again though he fought to keep his mouth closed. “I told you she wasn’t in any trouble,” Cammon said, addressing Donnal for what was probably the hundredth time.
“It shouldn’t have taken that long,” Donnal said grimly. “What else were you doing?”
She grinned at him, at all of them, and perched on the edge of the bed. Donnal stood beside her, very still in his gray gown; the other two sat relaxed before the fire.
“First, I talked to Lord Romar,” she said. “Explained who I was, why we’re here, and came up with a sort of plan for getting him out. His window overlooks the western view of the mansion—”
“Stables to that side,” Justin said. He had, of course, memorized every detail of the grounds as they rode up. It was the sort of thing a Rider did automatically. “Line of trees, too. That could be a place for us to hide and wait for him.”