Clearwater Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

summoned, he forced himself to think. He slowed his racing thoughts, tried to refocus. That was the easy explanation. The princess up late, attending to correspondence, not yet to bed when the knock came at the door. Some emergency that had seen her escorted to her father or the chamberlain. Gone for a short while, back imminently. Or perhaps she was simply spending the night talking with her father. In two weeks, she’d be gone, he thought. What father wouldn’t want a daughter’s company by the fire in those last days?
    And then, even as he slipped through the curtain for the antechamber and the door, he heard the alarm ring out. Three strikes from the tower that might have been third nightbell if they hadn’t come so soon after the second. Then a silence that seemed much longer than it was before the next three strikes rang out.
    Through the door, he found the corridor still thankfully empty, slowing only long enough to turn the lock back, instinctively hiding his entrance. He cursed silently as the alarm rang out again, telling himself that it should have been he who raised it the moment he found the princess gone. He’d have to move fast, head back along the prince’s court and through to the armories, then around to the great hall with the rest of the garrison where they would have already been racing from the barracks. It would have been faster to have simply followed the prince’s court where it turned, its five-sided perimeter marking the area of the throne room and the boundary of the prince and princess high’s quarters to the south. However, the extra distance seemed more than a fair trade for not having to explain his unauthorized presence beyond the warden’s door this night.
    But even as he slipped the picks into their pocket within his sleeve, he stopped. Stared.
    In the shadow that spread from where the evenlamp shone behind him, his eyes caught a subtle change of contrast on the corridor stones. Barely visible, even to him, so that he hadn’t noticed it with the light facing him before.
    Running from the door where he stood, heading southward along the route he’d been about to take, he saw a regular alternating pattern. Bare footprints, spaced at a walking pace. Smaller than his foot by a half-hand where he crouched to inspect them, low to the corridor floor. Breathing gently on the stone, he saw one outline take sharper shape, the moisture of his breath chilling just slightly on matte-finished marble, highlighting the trace marks that bare skin left behind.
    The leather of the shoes she’d gone without would have been nearly silent, he thought, but leather could slip if one found the need to run on the well-soaped Bastion floors. Barefoot on stone gave the best balance of silence and speed.
    As he slowly followed, he saw that she was walking, not running. Careful steps, high on the ball of the foot, trying for silence like those who didn’t know how to walk silently did. No one with her, no other footprints alongside or following except his own.
    Then halfway along the corridor, the tracks stopped. He marked where she’d turned to the left, stood to face the blank expanse of wall there between the doors of the younger princess and the twins. Beyond that point, nothing.
    Chriani carefully fished his mother’s pick from his sleeve. Along the smooth plaster of the wall, moldings of dark oak were spaced at regular intervals, the steel spike scraping carefully along the two seams to both sides of where the footprints vanished. No gap there that he could see.
    Along the floor, though, he felt the slender steel point slip into a narrow depression. A space within the wall itself, accessed through the hair’s-breadth gap between baseboard and floor.
    It took him precious moments to find the catch, three times fishing in that narrow space with three different picks before he felt the wire, pushed it carefully to one side, then the other. There was a faint click that he only heard because his ear was