I left Catrin in the foyer and followed Quinn up several flights of stairs and through a winding series of corridors. The castle was dimly lit and cold. A silence filled the halls, so deep that the echoing clicks of my and the Mistwalker’s boots seemed a violent intrusion. The halls were clean, lined with faded carpets and hangings depicting what I imagined to be scenes from House Falconer’s history.

I lingered by one such tapestry, which showed a knight brandishing a broken spear as a dread wyrm threatened her, curved teeth flickering with sickly flame. It was a strange image, seemingly not fashioned to glorify. The knight looked old, tired, and afraid. The dragon was an enormous thing, its jaws large enough to swallow the warrior — no larger than my thumb in the image — whole. Yet it was to her my eyes were drawn, and not the fell thing which dominated the wall.

That was not to say the dragon itself was uninspiring. It was captivating in a grotesque way, a thing all of cancerous scale and bursting horn, wreathed in fire and the souls of its victims, stylized — or so I assumed — by the artist as disintegrating skeletal shapes. Unlike the knight, who was simplistically portrayed, the wyrm was done in gruesome detail.

I inhaled deeply and — for a moment — found I could smell the sulfurous reek of it, hear the painful grinding of its ill-formed mass.

I had never laid eyes on a dragon. It was a memory of older knights, I was sure, echoing through the power sewn into me.

Quinn made a noise of impatience. “Baron’s waiting. You’ll have plenty of time to enjoy the art, I’m sure.”

I lingered a moment longer. “This has been here a long time.” I studied the brass workings the tapestry had been hung on. They were badly weathered, affixed to the wall for generations. “I’ve rarely seen a dragon depicted like this. The Church frowns on it.” I’d last seen something similar in Seydis, in the Gilded City itself before it burned.

Quinn eyed the tapestry nervously and shuffled, clearly eager to move on. “Imagine you’re going to see a lot of things the Church frowns on here, stranger.”

I reached out to feel the material of the hanging, but stopped just before laying my fingers against it. I didn’t want the subtle impression of realness I’d gotten from the ancient work to become something more visceral, as had happened when I’d felt the troll’s death. This wasn’t the time for that.

I turned back to the Mistwalker, who waited with a bemused patience, one eyebrow lifted. He gave me a long, appraising look. “Not going to ask your story, stranger. All the Baron’s guests got one, and they’re all fit to give me bad sleep. Still, it was odd to see Cat bringing you in. Skittish, that one, and she’s avoided getting too involved with all of this.” He waved a hand at the castle around us. “You one of her regulars or something?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

Quinn’s eyebrows lifted further. “What, you mean you don’t know?”

Before I could ask him to elaborate, the whisper of cloth drew my attention to the far end of the hall. A figure had appeared there. They were slim, short, and clad in an emerald cloak, a deep hood shadowing their features.

I recognized them. The messenger who’d spoken to Vaughn in the village.

“Who is this?” Green Cloak, as I’d dubbed them, asked the ghoul guardsman.

Quinn glanced at me uncertainly. “Honestly don’t know, Ma’am. Catrin brought him in from the village.”

Green Cloak glided forward. I meant that literally. There was no indication that feet touched the floor. The cloak, such a deep green it was nearly black in the poor lighting, slid across the ground in near total silence, a smooth and unnerving effect that made me inwardly tense.

“Hm…” Green Cloak drew within arm’s reach in the space of an indrawn breath, shadowed gaze peering up at me. I couldn’t make out even the hint of features beneath the cloak. The darkness within was unnaturally deep. An enchantment of some kind, I guessed, meant to obscure identity. I’d seen the like before. I held carefully still, forcing myself to meet that murky gaze.

Green Cloak peered at me for a short time, and then seemed to shudder. The shudder was dramatic, causing the entire concealing garment to ripple and flutter. “Human, but with an awakened spirit.” Their — her, I recalled the uncouth way Vaughn had referred to her — voice was high pitched and oddly warbling, more androgynous than effeminate. “You have come to see my lord. Why? What do you seek in this place?”

I sensed I was speaking to something not entirely human. It wouldn’t be the first time such a being had sensed my true nature, and I knew I needed to be cautious here. “I heard a rumor that the Lord of Caelfall was gathering allies to fight the Onsolain and their followers. I wanted to know if they were true.”

Green Cloak was quiet a moment. “And if they are?”

I clenched my jaw. My fear of discovery, my readiness to fight my way out of this cold, unwelcoming place, was easy to turn into something that might look like hatred. “Then he and I have a common enemy.”

“And what sins have the Children of Onsolem committed against you?” Green Hood asked.

I blinked, letting the faux anger slip beneath a more neutral mask. “That is between me and your master.”

The lines of the cloak tightened, as though the hands within were pulling the cloth more closely against them. “Very well. Follow me. Return to your duties, Mistwalker.” She turned without another word and began to move down the hall in that eerie glide.

I didn’t glance at the guardsman to see his reaction, having already put him from my mind. I followed after the trailing folds of the messenger’s dark garment as I was brought into the heart of Castle Cael. It was time, it seemed, to meet its lord.

***

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Green Cloak brought me to a tall, ornately crafted door. It opened before she reached it, seemingly of its own accord.

Old places like Castle Cael can be like that, sometimes. The stone and wood drinks in thought, dream, and intention over generations, until that weight of memory gives the place a life all its own. Doors open out of habit, and halls echo with the voices of lives long past.

It made my role as a hostile intruder, even an incognito one, particularly dangerous. The castle itself could act as its lord’s eyes and ears. The oldest of Urn’s castles were fortresses in more ways than one.

Before stepping into the chamber beyond, Green Cloak turned her shadowed gaze on me. “How shall I announce you?”

I hesitated only a moment. “Alken of Losdale.”

Green Cloak glided into the next chamber with me a step or two behind. It was a feast hall of some kind, not a throne room or an audience chamber but spacious and comfortable lavished, with a long table in the center lined with chairs. Some of those chairs were occupied.

Not everyone in that room was human.

As I entered, a silence fell over the hall of the sort that occurs in the midst of an interrupted discussion. More than half a dozen figures sat at seats around the long table, their arrangement seemingly random and casual, many of the chairs left unoccupied. A score or more could have been comfortably seated there, and the hall itself was large enough for a more formal gathering, making the room feel cavernous and empty.

Eyes turned to me as the door shut at my back and Green Cloak introduced me in her vaguely artificial voice. The chamber was dimly lit, casting many of its occupants in varying levels of shadow. No hearth had been lit, and it was cold, the only light coming from the candles of a chandelier hung from the center of the high ceiling. It made those around the table seem a council of shadow.

I suppose they were.

A figure at the head of the table stood. He was a tall man in his mid fifties, and still strong for his age. His shoulders were broad, his back straight. He was clad in a princely robe of ancient design, the garment all white and green, with flaring sleeves lined in black netting studded with small gems. They glittered in the candelight as he lifted one arm in a welcoming gesture.

“I bid you welcome, Alken of Losdale.” Orson Falconer bore himself with the grace evident in many of those born of the oldest of the noble houses of Urn. Moderately dark skinned and heavy-boned, with shortly cropped hair gone mostly to gray and very dark eyes, he seemed himself a living portrait taken from some bygone age.

Not all seemed to agree with the Baron’s welcome. One of those who sat at the table on the lord’s left hand leaned toward me, eyes narrowing. She was evidently older than Orson Falconer, clad in a similarly archaic outfit dyed all in deep bloody reds and blacks. A high collar supported by metal spikes enclosed her long neck, and she reminded me of nothing so much as a glowering vulture — heavily wrinkled, with thinning silver hair secured in an elaborate headress crafted from gnarled wood and ivory.

“And who is this?” The old woman said in a hissing, nasal voice. “We were not expecting more guests, were we Orson?” Her nostrils flared beneath a hooked nose, as though she were inhaling my scent or preparing to charge.

The Baron’s gaze never left me, but he pursed his lips. “No.” He said in a sonorous, light, and subtly musical voice. “I was not. Who brought him here, Priska?”

Green Hood replied from where she stood near the door still, behind and to the left of me. “It was Catrin, my lord.”

A snort came from a man sitting across the table from the old woman in the red gown. He was clad in simpler garb than the baron or the vulture-faced woman, all in simple greens and browns like a hunter. He even wore a tricorn low over his shaggy blond hair, shadowing his eyes. He had pushed his chair back and had kicked his feet up on the table, a gross breech in propriety for any lord’s hall I’d ever known.

The man in the tricorn didn’t elaborate on his derision, but the old woman bared tiny black teeth at me. Her eyes were huge and a very pale blue, the flesh around them dominated by dark veins. “One of the little strumpet’s toys, is it?” She waved a skeletal hand enclosed in a beautifully tailored sleeve. “Be rid of him. We have no need of that half-breed, and much less for the vagrants she beds.” She turned to the Baron then. “I told you the Keeper would cause mischief if you allowed him a voice in this affair. He sent one of his wenches to you as an insult.”

The Baron did not reply, instead keeping his eyes studiously on me. The others at the table who had not yet spoken looked between me, the red-gowned woman, and the lord, no one speaking up.

They were a strange and misfit sort of gathering. With the exception of Orson Falconer himself and the old woman, none of them looked like the sort to reside within a formal hall. Two figures made into twins by their matching black robes and cowls whispered to one another, the hems of their hoods nearly pressed together. A dark-haired, heavily bearded man in sooty armor at the far end of the table from the baron ignored everyone, focusing intently on the plate of meat in front of him. He ate loudly and messily, heedless of the hush that’d fallen over the room.

There were others. A thing out of nightmare sat in the deeper shadows opposite the table from the door. It had gray-green skin and a malformed aspect, with a lumpy head that merged with a neck that vanished into a formal aristocratic outfit very much too small for it. The ensemble was held together by crude stitchwork and ill-matched pieces of salvaged cloth. Its hands ended in four long, gnarled fingers tipped in green nails, and green were the glassy orbs of its eyes as they peered at me from the gloom.

A goblin, and one of their noble caste by the look of it. Six feet tall, or the next best thing to it, nearly a giant among their kind. Instead of buttons or lace, its bright doublet was sewn with pieces of bone.

Monsters. In that room I stood surrounded by monsters. Even, I suspected, of the human variety.

A rumbling, basso growl rippled through the room. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and my muscles went tight with instinctive fear. A heavy foot came down on the floor, large and heavy enough to make the stones of the ancient castle shudder, and something enormous emerged from the shadows at the edge of the room. This one had not been sitting at the table, but lurking between the marble pillars that supported the ceiling.

Calling it big was like calling a redwood tall. A hulking mass of muscle more than nine feet in height approached me with steady, thunderous steps. Its skin was the color of old rust, and it was clad all in heavy furs and hides, a few pieces of metal sewn here or there. They seemed more decorative than armor. Skulls, some human, hung from a heavy belt.

The hulk’s brutish face wasn’t quite human. It had a simian aspect, with a slightly elongated muzzle and a sloping forehead. Its features emerged from a neck set lower on its torso than a human’s. Deep-set yellow eyes — piss yellow, ringed in deeper orange — burned with a manic, violent intelligence.

I took a step back. I couldn’t help it. The fear I felt was primal, instinctive, woven into the fabric of my blood and bones. Prey animal fear. There were few things in all the Alderes more deadly than an ogre.

A city garrison worth of muscle and pent up rage loomed over me. Yellow eyes burned like the cores of candle flames, scorching me with malice. The ogre leaned forward and sniffed. Then it growled again.

“He smells of sun-stained groves and gilded trees.” The ogre’s voice rumbled in my chest, more something I felt than heard. Again, that rippling growl filled the room. “He reeks of elf.”

The room became very still. I became very aware in that moment of the green-cloaked herald at my back, and the closed door. Most of my attention, however, remained fixed on the monster in front of me.

I didn’t mean monster in the poetic sense. Ogres are, to put it mildly, nightmares. Bred in dark lands in dark days in distant edges of the world beyond the shores of Urn, they had been made for a singular purpose — to kill, and to do so without restraint or mercy. They were more fey than mortal, much like the goblin watching us even then, and lived for a very long time — every year of that centuries long life dedicated to the arts of violence.

Worse, some of the skulls the ogre wore belonged to its own kind. Its craggy exterior, marred by countless scars, hinted at a long and terrible succession of battles it had won. I sensed this particular ogre was old. No runt of the litter.

“Elf-friend,” the ogre accused. It bared yellowed, wolf-like teeth. “Spy.”