Chapter 8: The Second Bell
The second night's feast was venison, and shorter. Edran Vosk kept the talk to ledgers and let them eat, and the household drank to the King and Queen with the ease of a thing done once before. Amber counted the courses. Two. Three. The honeyed pears again, from the same hillside orchard, and she set down her knife before Ray had finished his.
"The household will forgive us," she said, loudly enough. "We'll retire."
Edran rose with the hall. "The girl Mara is set to attend you again, Majesty. Same arrangement. She's punctual to the minute; I have noted it."
"I don't doubt it," Amber said.
They climbed the stair at a Queen's pace this time, letting the doors boom behind them, and then Amber was pulling the little cord by the service stair and ringing twice, sharp, before the echo of their goodnights had even died below.
The answer came fast. Too fast. Mara stood in the corridor still in her serve dress, apron on, breath fogging, one hand pressed flat against the doorframe as if she'd run the whole flight.
"Your Majesty. Your Majesty, wait." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Before you ring for anything. There's talk."
Ray bolted the door behind her. "What kind of talk?"
"Edran." Mara's cold fingers twisted in her apron. "Tom the under-steward told me in the buttery. His Lordship was walking the east corridor this afternoon. Counting. He stood at the eastern door a long time, Tom said, and then he walked the path to the grove and back, and he counted his own steps aloud the whole way. Twice." She swallowed. "He wrote something in his ledger after supper."
Amber untied her collar with two fingers, unhurried. "Did he speak to you?"
"No. But he looked at me when Tom said it, and he asked Tom how many steps it was from the buttery to the cistern." Mara's ears went red. "Tom laughed and said he didn't count, and His Lordship said that was the whole trouble with Tom."
Ray looked at his wife. "He's measuring the route."
"He's measuring everything. It's what he is." Amber shrugged out of the outer gown and let it fall across the chair. "A man who counts footsteps is a man we can feed. Let him count. We'll give him something ordinary to count."
"You want to go out anyway," Mara said. It came out half hope, half horror.
"I want the lake." Amber pinned her hair up plainly, no jewels. "We paid for your silence, love, not for your opinions on our walking. Though I'll hear them. Quickly."
Mara bit her lip. "The door creaks at the turn. He knows it creaks. But Tom says the watch changes at the bell after midnight, and the new watch comes up from the west, so the east passage stands empty for the length of a prayer." She stopped. "I know that because I carry the watch their supper."
"You carry the watch their supper," Ray repeated, "and you know the rotation of a garrison guard."
"I listen, Majesty. It's the same as keeping secrets. Only beforehand."
Amber laughed, low, and pulled the plain wool cloak from the trunk. "Ray. We keep her."
"We agreed on that already."
They went down through the cold passage with Mara leading, past the turn where the door gave its one dry groan, and out into the pines. The moon was two nights thinner than before and the air had a knife's edge to it, but the lake lay glass-still and silver, the reeds stitched bright against the black water. Breath smoked. The wall rose behind them, one lit arrow-slit marking their own chamber window.
Mara unclasped her cloak and stood clutching it, shivering, watching them undress with that quick hungry shyness she hadn't yet learned to hide.
"In first," Amber said. "All the way in, or you'll freeze standing here."
The water took them gasping. It was warmer than the air by half, spring-fed, and Amber swam out a few strokes and rolled onto her back, hair fanning silver, breasts breaking the surface. Ray stood chest-deep near the rock with the moon full on his shoulders. Mara clung to the shelf of stone, chin just above water, eyes moving between them.
"Come here," Amber said. "Not to me. To him."
The girl pushed off and crossed to Ray, and he caught her waist as she reached him, lifting her easily against the deep shelf where her feet left the bottom. She wrapped her legs around him on instinct, and he laughed, low, the sound carrying flat across the water.
"Amber."
"Tonight I want to watch." Amber drifted closer, treading water, her voice gone husky. "You've had my instruction in everything, Mara. Now I want to see what you do with it when nobody's guiding your hands. pleasure him. Your mouth. Here, in the open, where any of the watch could have eyes." She paused. "That's the thrill of it, love. That's the lesson tonight."
"The watch," Mara whispered, but her thighs had already tightened around Ray's hips.
"The watch changes at the bell. We have a prayer's length, and you know it better than I do." Amber lifted her chin. "Well? Show me what my King tastes like when his Queen isn't touching him."
Mara's fingers went to the laces of nothing at all; Ray was bare. She slid down his body in the water until her shoulders broke the surface, and he reached back and braced his hand on the rock shelf, watching her face come level with his cock, which had hardened the moment her legs closed around him. The cold air steamed off the water around them.
She took him in hand first, working him once, twice, gathering her courage, then bent and drew the head into her mouth. The heat of her mouth against the cold water made Ray hiss through his teeth. His hand found her wet braid and held.
"Slower," Amber said, drifting to his side, her lips at his ear. "Let me see your cheeks hollow, girl. Take him deep."
Mara glanced up, eyes wide and bright in the moonlight, and obeyed. She pushed down until her throat met him, gagged softly, backed off, and went down again with more swallow than fight this time. Her nose pressed the hair at his base. Ray's hips flexed under her and the water slapped against the rock.
"Look at her," Amber breathed. "Look how proud she is. She'll be showing the whole kitchen stair that trick if we're not careful."
"Amber." His voice had gone rough. "Come here."
"In a moment." But she came, closing the gap, pressing her naked body along his side in the cold water, her hand sliding down his stomach to feel where the girl's lips were stretched around him. "Oh, that's deep. You've gone past her tongue entirely, Ray. She's fucking you with her throat."
The bell for the watch change rang faint across the wall. None of them moved. Somewhere above, boots started their long walk from the west, a prayer's length away, and Mara moaned around his cock at the knowledge of it, and the vibration ran up his spine.
Ray's hand tightened in her braid. His breath went ragged.
He pulled Mara off his cock with a wet sound and reached for Amber with the same hand, closing both fists in braid and hair. Two women, one grip. He hauled them toward the flat top of the rock and they came laughing, stumbling over the submerged shelf, water sheeting off their bodies into the cold night.
"Onto your back, Mara," he said, and set her down on the moon-warmed stone. "Knees up."
The rock's surface was still faintly warm from the day, slick with lake water and moonlight. Mara lay back on it, small and pale, her ribs like a fish's under the silver. Amber climbed up beside her, dripping, and knelt at her hip.
"The watch is walking," Mara whispered. "They'll be at the turn."
"Then no one will hear you," Ray said, and knelt between her thighs.
She was open to him in an instant, his cock head dragging through her folds, and she arched off the stone with a hiss when he pressed in. He took her with long slow strokes, watching her face twist, her hands scrabbling for purchase on the smooth rock. Amber reached over and put her palm flat on the girl's sternum, holding her down, feeling the heart hammer under it.
"Keep your eyes open," Amber told her. "Look at the wall while he fucks you. Anyone leaning from a slit could see your cunt split around the King's cock. Isn't that a beautiful thing to be caught at?"
Mara made a broken sound and her eyes rolled up to the black stone bulk of Ravenshold, the arrow-slits dark, one lit, their own. Her hips came up to meet him harder.
Ray looked at his wife over the girl's body. "Her mouth's empty."
"I noticed." Amber swung her leg over Mara's face, facing him, and lowered her dripping cunt onto the girl's mouth. Mara's tongue found her immediately, eager, and Amber gripped the girl's wrists and pinned them to the rock. "Hold her down, Ray. She squirms when she comes."
He did, one hand spanning both her wrists above her head, and fucked her through it. The sound was obscene in the still air: the slap of his hips, the wet suck of her mouth on the Queen, the lake lapping the rock like a third body. The moonlight turned all three of them into pale sculpture, except where they joined, where everything shone.
"Harder," Amber said. Her head had fallen back, her breasts lifting with each breath. "Make her scream into me. I want to feel it when the watch reaches the door."
"The watch reaches the door and finds it shut," Ray said. His strokes went deep enough to make the girl's whole body jerk on the stone. "It's us the door remembers."
Amber laughed, then stopped laughing, because Mara curled her tongue against her clit in exactly the way he had taught the girl. Her breath left her in a sharp white ribbon of steam. She rocked her hips down onto the working mouth, riding the face beneath her, and the rock under all of them rang faintly with the rhythm of it.
"God, she's good." Amber's voice had frayed. "Ray, I'm going to soak this poor girl's face on your cock. Don't you dare slow down."
"I wasn't going to."
He drove into Mara until the water in the shallows churned, until the girl's muffled cry buzzed up through Amber's flesh, and Amber came first, her thighs clamping the maid's head, her nails raking the stone, shouting something into the night that the pines carried away over the water. The clench of it tore through Mara a breath later; her back bowed off the rock, her cunt seizing around Ray in hard rapid pulses, and he buried himself and spilled into her with a groan that echoed off the wall.
He stayed in her while the last of it drained. Then he pulled out, and his seed ran down over the girl's slit onto the rock, silver-white in the moonlight, pooling in a shallow dimple of the stone.
"She'll drip on His Lordship's geology," Amber said, sliding off the girl's face, boneless.
"Let him count it," Ray said.
Mara lay gasping, lips swollen, cheeks bathed. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and stared up at the sky. "My ears are still ringing," she managed. "Or that's the bell. I can't tell."
"That's me," Amber said.
Then Amber surprised him. She straddled Mara's hips and bent, and licked her own spend and his off the girl's thigh in one slow stripe, then higher, gathering the white trail up to the girl's used and gaping slit. Mara whimpered. Ray watched his Queen clean his come out of their maid with the flat of her tongue, thorough and unhurried, while the moon poured over the three of them.
"Why," Mara breathed.
"Because a Queen wastes nothing." Amber sat up, licking her lips. "And because watching you two nearly emptied me. I need another go."
She rose on her knees, turned her back to Ray, and put her palms on the rock. "In me. Now. She'll hold me up."
Ray moved behind her, one hand at her hip, and pressed into his wife in a single stroke that made her moan at the sky. Mara knelt facing them, and Amber pulled the girl's hands to her breasts. "Hold them. Squeeze. Whatever you like, I'm not particular tonight."
Mara weighed her breasts, thumbs finding her nipples, pinching until Amber hissed. Ray fucked her with long measured strokes, watching over her shoulder as the maid's small hands moved on the Queen's body, and the lake kept its perfect silence around them, and somewhere up on the wall the new watch finished its prayer's-length walk and heard nothing at all.
The reeds stitched silver at the black waterline. The lit arrow-slit watched. And the rock held three bodies' heat into the cold night, the way old stone keeps everything.
Ray's strokes deepened until Amber's arms shook on the stone. She pressed back into him, spurring him with her heels against the rock, and Mara's hands kept working her breasts, squeezing in time to the slap of his hips. Amber came with her head thrown back and her mouth open to the moon, and Ray followed with a groan, driving in hard enough to lift her knees off the stone. They stayed locked together, breathing steam, until the cold made itself felt again.
"The water," Mara said finally. "Before we freeze."
They swam back washed and numb and dressed in the dark of the pines, fingers clumsy on laces. Mara led them up the passage, past the turn where the door groaned, and they slipped into the warm chamber and bolted it.
Amber shook out her wet hair and stopped. She looked at the girl standing dripping by the service door.
"You're not going back down tonight," she said.
Mara's face did the thing it always did, half fright, half hope. "Majesty?"
"Edran counted his steps to the grove twice. He'll count yours next. A wet kitchen maid on the stairs at this hour is a number he'll write down." Amber pulled the cloak off her shoulders and threw it at the chair. "You fell in the cistern once already tonight. Falling in it twice would be careless. So you'll stay here until morning."
Mara looked at Ray. Ray looked at the bed. "Where does she sleep?" he asked.
"Wherever you can't reach," Amber said, and smiled. "Under the furs, at the foot. You'll be warm, girl, and if anyone knocks, you'll be a shape in the bedding, and shapes aren't counted."
"Shapes aren't counted," Mara repeated, and her ears went red again. She stripped off the wet gray wool without being told this time, shameless in the firelight now, and climbed to the foot of the bed and burrowed. Only her head stayed out, brown hair loose on the black velvet, watching them.
Amber came to Ray, still damp, and put her mouth against his ear. "She's in our bed, Ray. Ours. I'm not wasting that."
He didn't waste it. He took his wife slowly in the warm dark, her thighs around him, their rhythm quiet as breathing, and Mara watched from the foot of the bed with her chin on her folded arms and her eyes shining, learning them the way she learned everything, by watching. When Amber peaked she buried her cry in Ray's shoulder, and the girl at their feet made a small envious sound that neither of them pretended not to hear.
Afterward, when the fire had guttered low, boots came down the corridor. Heavy. Slow. Counting.
Ray heard them first. He put one hand on Amber's arm and the other on the fur over Mara's head, and they lay still. The boots stopped outside the door. A full stop, the weight of a man settling on both feet.
"Your Majesty," came Edran Vosk's dry voice through the wood. "Forgive the hour. The watch reports the eastern door groaned again tonight, at the turn past the second bell. I wished only to say I will consult my grandfather's record in the morning, as promised. Good night, Majesty."
The boots moved on. Four paces. Five. Six.
Under the furs, Mara was not breathing at all. Then she came up for air, wide-eyed, her face pressed hot against Ray's ribs.
"He knows," she whispered.
"He knows a door creaked," Amber said. "Doors creak. Kings walk. Tomorrow he'll find a number in an old ledger that says King Aldric liked the water, and he'll file us under history, where nothing frightens him." She reached down and found the girl's hand and squeezed it. "But you stay. All night. You'll slip down with the breakfast trays when the stair is busy, wet-haired, and tell the kitchen you fell in the cistern."
"Again," Mara said.
"Always again. It's your story, love. Wear it out."
The girl settled deeper into the furs at their feet. Her breathing slowed against Ray's leg, small and steady, and Amber drew the blanket up over all three of them and pinched out the last candle.
In the dark, Mara's whisper came up the bed once more. "What if the morning count doesn't add up?"
"Then we'll teach His Lordship a new number," Amber said, and closed her eyes.
Dawn came gray through the shutters and Ray woke to an empty warmth at his feet. Mara was gone. A folded scrap lay on the pillow she had used, torn from a kitchen slate, with three words in a round careful hand: fell in cistern. He huffed a laugh through his nose and slid out from under Amber's arm without waking her, dressed in the dark, and let himself out with the bolt drawn slow so it made no sound.
The great hall smelled of last night's boar and cold ash. Two kitchen girls were sweeping the far end, and at the head table, alone with a loaf and a ledger open beside his cup, sat Edran Vosk.
"Your Majesty rises early," Edran said, not rising at all. "Or didn't sleep. I have recorded both possibilities."
"I slept. My wife sleeps later than I." Ray took the chair across from him. A serving boy set down bread and small beer without being asked. "You walked my corridor last night."
"I did. Fourteen paces past your door, to the stair, fourteen back. My knees know the number before my head does now." Edran buttered his bread with geometrical neatness. "The watch says the eastern door groaned at the second bell. I said I would consult the record in the morning. It is morning."
He turned the ledger around and pushed it across the table. The hand inside was older than the binding, brown ink gone the color of dried blood. Ray read it by the gray window light.
The eastern way kept unbarred by the King's own wish. He goes down to the water at night, alone or with company, and returns before the third bell. The door is oiled quarterly so it need not be heard. By command, no guard is set.
"King Aldric," Ray said.
"My grandfather's own writing, dated the summer before the old King died." Edran tapped the line about the oiling with one dry finger. "Your grandfather's grandfather liked the water, Majesty. The record accounts for the creak. A door oiled quarterly that creaks is a door whose oiling has lapsed, which is a matter for the steward, not the crown."
"And yet you walked to my door at the second bell."
"I walked everywhere at the second bell. I walked the east corridor, and the path to the grove, and I counted my steps each way." Edran folded his hands. "Forty-one down. Forty-one back. The ground is even. I found no second set of prints worth the name, but the pines shade the dirt and the moon was thin, so the ground is a poor witness this time of year."
"You're telling me the ledger clears us."
"I'm telling you the ledger clears the door." The old man's eyes came up, mild as milk and twice as patient. "What it does not clear is arithmetic. Two nights, two creaks, both past midnight, both followed by a quiet morning in the royal chambers. And a maid who fell in the cistern twice running, in a month when it has not rained."
The beer had gone warm in Ray's cup. He drank it anyway, unhurried, because Edran was counting the unhurry too. "Say what you came to say, my lord."
"What I came to say is not about doors." Edran closed the ledger and squared it on the table. "It's about the third bastion. The crack. I told you at the feast it has not widened in sixty years, and that is true of the surface, which I measure every spring and autumn with calipers and a plumb line." He paused. "Last week I dropped a probe into it. Three fingers of iron rod, jointed, made to my own order. It went deeper than it should have. Deeper than stone."
Ray set the cup down. "How deep?"
"I don't know. I ran out of rod at four feet." Edran rose, joints cracking, and gathered the ledger under his arm. "The hollow behind it is dry, no water comes out of the crack, and the wall above shows no sign of settling. Which means either the bastion is hollow by some mason's design, or it is coming apart in a way my calipers cannot see, and I would rather know which before the winter frosts get into it."
"You said last night the numbers don't move."
"The numbers on the surface don't move." He looked at Ray steadily. "Something behind them might. Kings have been told the walls are sound for sixty years because I only ever measured the face of them. I would rather a King be told the truth early than a lie twice. Will you walk with me and see it, Majesty? The morning is dry and the light on the east face will be good for another hour."
Ray looked at him a moment. The old man had come to his door at the second bell and said nothing of maids or cisterns, had opened a ledger sixty years old and closed it again on his own discretion. Whatever the counting eyes had filed away about marks on a Queen's throat, they were not in the ledger.
"Walk, then," Ray said, and stood.
Edran bowed, shallow and precise. "My grandfather showed your grandfather's father the spring under this rock. I begin to think the rock keeps more than water in it." He led the way down the hall past the sweeping girls, past the cold hearth, and out into the bright raw morning where the wall went up and up against the paling sky, the third bastion squat and gray at the corner with its hairline crack running from the base of the parapet down into shadow.
The old man stopped beneath it and unwound a cord from his fist, at the end of which hung a plumb bob that swung once and stilled. He held it against the stone and looked up along the line, then down at Ray, and his dry voice dropped as if the wall were listening.
"Now, Majesty. Watch the string, not the stone. My grandfather's record says the crack is a flaw." The bob hung dead plumb, and Edran's finger moved to a point a hand's width off the wall, where the shadow of the crack fell crooked across the line. "The stone disagrees."
"Disagrees how?" Ray stepped closer. "The crack runs true enough from here."
"Look along the line, Majesty. Not at it." Edran lifted the cord to eye height and held it steady with the patience of a man who had held it six hundred times before. "The bob hangs plumb. The wall leans off it. Now watch what the bob does when I set it against the crack itself."
He moved the string in until the bob kissed the stone at the parapet, where the crack began. Below, at arm's length, the line hung clear of the wall by a finger, then by two, then by four, and where the shadow swallowed the base of the bastion the gap was wider than Ray's spread hand.
"Sixty years of calipers say the crack doesn't widen," Ray said slowly. "The face doesn't move."
"The face doesn't. The face is a skin." Edran drew the cord back and wound it around his fist. "The stone behind it is bowing outward, a hair each season, and the hair adds up. My grandfather measured depth with a rod and called the rod insufficient. I have had sixty years to improve on a rod and I did not, because the surface told me nothing was wrong. That is the fault, Majesty. Not in the wall. In me."
Ray put his palm flat on the stone. It was cold even in the morning sun, and when he leaned his weight against it there was a give, so faint he might have imagined it, like pressing on the flank of a sleeping animal. He took his hand away.
"You said dry inside."
"Dry." Edran crouched at the base with a creak of knees and traced the crack's beginning with a fingertip. No damp, no lime bleed, no crumbled mortar dusting the foundation. The stone was clean as a hearthstone. "Water comes out of cracks. Frost gets into water. This crack has nothing in it to push it wider, and it widens anyway. Which leaves one thing behind it that moves."
"Air."
"A hollow with air in it that breathes." The old man stood, joints crackling in sequence. "I probed it again last night after the second bell. The rod goes in four feet and then it stops against something, and when I drew it out the last joint was warm."
Ray looked at him. "Warm."
"Stone warm at dawn in shadow, Majesty, on the north-corner face. There is a fire under this rock or a spring, and the spring I know of is on the other side of the foundation entirely." Edran squared the ledger under his arm. "My grandfather's record says the eastern way was kept for the water. It does not say where the water came from."
"The hot spring. The one under the keep."
"The one that feeds the bath the kitchen swears has never needed heating." Edran's eyes were mild and entirely awake. "Springs run in channels. Channels hollow out. And a hollow directly behind a load-bearing bastion, four feet from daylight, under sixty winters of frost loading, is not a curiosity. It is a schedule."
They walked the face of it together. Edran counted aloud as he went, paces and courses of stone, and made Ray hold the plumb line at four points while he wrote the numbers in the ledger with a pencil worn to a stub. At the parapet the crack ran down through eleven courses before shadow took it. Edran pressed his ear to the stone at the eighth course, stayed there a long moment, then straightened.
"Put your ear here."
Ray did. The stone smelled of cold granite and old limes. Under it, so faint he had to stop breathing to find it, was a sound, not water, not wind. A slow swell, like a wave arriving from a long way off, and a retreat.
"The lake doesn't reach here," Ray said. "The lake is thirty feet below and outside the wall."
"The lake is outside the wall," Edran agreed. "Whatever that is, it is inside it." He wrote three more figures without hurrying. "I have a proposal, and it is not a small one, so hear it before you answer. I want to open the crack. Cut it wider, course by course, from the eighth down, with masons I choose and pay from my own purse, on a day I set. No household tells, no watch reports, nothing in any record but mine."
"You're offering to break my wall in secret."
"I'm offering to know what is behind it before the frost is, and to keep the knowing between the crown and the ledger." He closed the book. "A wall that bows out a hair a season is a wall that falls in a night, Majesty. Sixty years of my family kept this rock standing on numbers. I would rather not be the Vosk who stopped counting at the right depth."
Ray thought of the lit arrow-slit. Of a night swim past the second bell, of a door that creaked and a ledger that said King Aldric liked the water. Of warm rod, four feet deep.
"How long to open it?"
"Three days of cutting to reach the eighth course. Two more to probe what we find." Edran looked up at the gray bastion, and for the first time since the feast his face had something in it besides arithmetic. "I will need your word that no one goes through the eastern door until it is done. The cutting shakes the whole corner. If there is a hollow, the door path sits on top of it."
"The eastern door is closed," Ray said. "By the King's own wish, from this morning."
Edran bowed, exactly as deep as the last time. "Then I will begin tomorrow at first light, and I will bring you the first number I find." He paused at the corner of the bastion, ledger hugged to his chest like a grandchild. "One thing more, Majesty, and it is freely given, no record of it. King Aldric's entry says alone or with company. My grandfather wrote it down the way he wrote everything, exactly as he heard it. The old King did not swim alone. Someone walked that path with him, and my grandfather kept that in the ledger and nowhere else, for sixty years."
"He kept the King's secret."
"He kept the King's company is what I think." Edran's mouth made its twitch. "Doors creak, Majesty. Records don't. Good morning."
He went, counting his paces down the wall's shadow, and Ray stood alone under the third bastion with his palm resting on the cold stone, feeling the slow warm swell arrive and retreat, arrive and retreat, like something below breathing in its sleep.