…But the Blood Witch saw not the queen’s true intention: to search for a year for the witch's black heart. For not even an Old One could work such fell magic if she did not first tear the heart from her breast: tear her heart from her breast and keep it still beating, hidden away where no person could find. As long as her heart kept up its beating, nothing could kill her, neither dagger nor fire. So Queen Boemia searched while the Blood Witch entrapped her, entrapped and entrapping, our queen true and strong.

The Blood Witch’s heart close at hand must be hidden–this Boemia knew, so she searched high and low; from the grisly, dank dungeons to the tallest of spires, she searched through the castle, the witch unaware. She searched in great peril, with threats all around her, for no pain would be spared her should the Blood Witch find out. Tortures untold and torments unfathomed would await she who sought for the enchantress's heart, for the Blood Witch knew well that her heart was her weakness; whoever did hold it held her life in their hands. Boemia searched with spies all around her: the beautiful servants who were spirits most foul. But she used greatest caution to outwit and avoid them, and her heart pure and noble made her purpose blaze strong.

No villainy could taint her nor temptation ensnare her, though the Blood Witch sent many to try if they could. And each morn the witch gave her a new task to debase her, treated not as a queen but as servant or thrall. Our queen strong and true mucked dung from the stables, swept ashes from hearths and churned butter from milk. She scrounged low in the forest for herbs so malignant that they curdled and hissed in the witch’s fell brews. Lower than low the Blood Witch did cast her, till Boemia served even beasts of the wood. She plucked briars from bears’ paws and salved wounds of great fanged cats, though she knew at glance that they longed to consume her, tearing muscle from bone and limb from limb.

But worse than her servitude, worse than this labor, were the vile delights sent to tempt her from good. For when work grew too weary and relief seemed the sweetest, then the Blood Witch would craft poisoned pleasures for her. When the queen’s mind grew dull from the drudgery endless, the Blood Witch gave her books bound with leather and jewels. But the stories within them were lies and distractions that lured innocent minds from the truths eyes could see. When the queen’s spirit grew stifled with the bonds of confinement, the Blood Witch showed her the view from the highest tower of all, the endless horizon of land spread before them, an illusion of freedom in the expanse down below. For what the Blood Witch wanted was to bind the queen to her; she cared not if she did so through honey or gall. So the witch schemed malignly but our wise queen resisted, and still she searched on for the Blood Witch’s heart…

Britomart woke up with a gasp, grasping for her sword. Her hand closed on nothing but blankets. She frantically sat up and looked around until she saw her sword propped against the wall beside the head of the bed. The pounding of her heart slowed. She remembered scanning the room for her sword in just such a manner the day before: that horrible moment when the fight through the roses came back to her and she fully realized her danger, unarmed with a blood witch at her side. As if summoned by the memory, all of her residual aches and pains came flooding back. A small, treacherous part of her wished that Amoret had not removed the healing spell.

Britomart flopped back down on the bed with a groan. Snippets from her dream still lingered in her mind–Queen Boemia’s servitude, her search for the witch’s heart–but they were fast giving way to the all-too-real captivity that she was facing with a blood witch of her own. A captivity that she could walk out of at any time, true, but one that was no less real for that. If she wanted Amoret to wake Alfrick, then she would have to stay until the blood witch decided to help her. She wondered how long that would be. One more night? Two? A week? A month? She could not bear to think of staying a year, even if Boemia had done so. What would Smudge do if she were gone that long?

Britomart disentangled herself from the covers and got out of bed. The rug beside the bed was soft under her feet. Sunlight slanted through the chamber window, cutting a swath across the rich colors of the rug and plucking tiny silvery glints from the stone walls. A small fire was burning in the hearth, keeping the morning chill at bay. Britomart wondered who had lit it. She did not like the idea of somebody having been in her room while she slept. Then she remembered that the castle seemed to do most things for itself.

Britomart made her way to the window, squinting against the light. The castle windows were finer glass than Britomart had ever seen, clear enough for her to make out the details of the scene below without the haze or distortion common to even the costliest windows in Boemapolis. She wondered, as she had wondered about so many things lately, if they were merely an illusion. But the glass felt cool against her palm when she laid her hand against it, and her fingers left small smudges on its surface. She tried to wipe smudges away with her shift but only succeeded in spreading them. “Sorry,” she muttered to the castle, half-hoping it would not hear her. She could not believe she was talking to a mound of stone. The glass gave a shiver and cleared. Britomart scrambled back, eyeing it warily. After a minute passed without it making any further signs of life, she approached again, careful not to touch it this time.

Her chamber was on the third floor, and the window looked out on a side of the courtyard that Britomart had not glimpsed during her fight to the doors. ‘Courtyard’ was not quite the right word, Britomart realized. ‘Castle grounds’ would have been more accurate. The space enclosed within the walls seemed much larger from the inside. Another trick of the castle’s enchantments? Or had she merely misjudged the area inside the castle walls? Below lay a wide stretch of green lawn that gave way to a small orchard as it neared the castle wall. The comparative chill of the North made Britomart half-expect to see the trees’ boughs bare, but they were still heavy with foliage and autumn fruit.

Britomart craned closer as she saw movement amidst the fruit trees. At first she thought it might be a deer, but it was too furry for that, and its coat looked more black than brown. Her eyes widened as the creature stood on its hind legs to reach for a fruit, and she recognized it from the Brun family crest. A bear. She had heard a great deal about bears from the Queen Boemia stories, enough to know that they were creatures capable of tearing a person limb from limb and then devouring even the bones. Yet this bear seemed no larger than one of her father’s hunting dogs, which could not be right. It must have been a young one. She had the fleeting thought that it was rather cute, and promptly chided herself for her stupidity. Even if it didn’t eat people yet, it would grow up to be a killer–a killer under Amoret’s thrall.

The light from the window had the quality of mid-morning, and Britomart realized that she would be delaying breakfast if she lingered any longer. She might be a captive, but she was also a guest, and there were certain proprieties to be observed. She tore her gaze away from the small bear, who was now happily munching on what Britomart guessed to be an apple.

A note on the dressing table caught her eye as she turned back to the room. When she picked it up, she found that it was written in a bold and slanting hand that must have been Amoret’s:

Good morning, princess. I have gone to tend to my business. Breakfast will await you in the great hall when you awake. The castle and grounds are yours to roam as you wish, save only the east tower. I shall expect you at dinner an hour after dusk. Try not to break anything.

P.S. Before you work yourself into a state about me having been in your chamber while you are sleeping, you may as well know that I had the castle deliver this.

“What does she mean ‘tend to her business’?” Britomart muttered to the chamber, tossing the letter back down. “What business does a blood witch have, anyways?” For once, the castle gave not the slightest stirring in reply.

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Twenty minutes later, after heated negotiations with the wardrobe, Britomart made her way down to the great hall. She was dressed in a red tunic emblazoned with a crest of two white stags rearing on either side of an oak, and she had the uneasy feeling that she was wearing the heraldry of Morgwynna’s line. It was, however, the only tunic that the wardrobe had deigned to give her after she refused a steady stream of highly impractical dresses. It would have to do.

The great hall looked far more mundane by daylight. A low fire still burned in the hearth, warming Britomart’s back as she sat at the place laid for her beside the head of the table. She raised the cover on a large bowl of what turned out to be porridge. She wondered for a moment if it was meant as a snub–in Boemopolis, only the poor ate porridge–but she thought of Amoret’s wistfulness at having forgotten mead at dinner and decided that serving porridge to guests must just be a strange custom of the North.

As she ate, she thought. She was free to roam the castle and the grounds, all except the east tower. She would have to find out what Amoret was hiding up there, of course, but not yet. First, she would search the rest of the castle–the very same castle that Queen Boemia had searched centuries ago–and find its weaknesses. Maybe she could find some leverage that would force Amoret to wake Alfrick. Maybe she could find some vulnerability that could defeat Amoret if the blood witch ever became more of a threat to Galbrica. And maybe, if the legends were true, she could find the blood witch’s heart.

Britomart began her search with the cellars. In truth, she had been looking for the dungeons, but the musty staircase led to a low, long room filled with shadowy shapes. She squinted into the gloom, but it was no good. The shadowy shapes remained no more than shadowy shapes. Feeling very foolish, she laid her hand against the wall sconce and whispered, “Castle, light.” The candle in the sconce flickered to life, as did candles in sconces all down the room, illuminating crates and barrels stacked against the walls. Britomart opened one or two of the crates experimentally, hoping to find some sort of dark artifact that would confirm Amoret’s evil nature. She was disappointed to see that they contained only onions and some kind of root vegetable.

The chill grew as she followed a short flight of stairs down into a second chamber off the back of the room. It was cold and dark, and she had high hopes for it as a haunt of dark forces. But when light flared in the sconces, the room proved to be filled with barrels of beer and jugs of mead. Refusing to be fooled, Britomart shifted several conspicuous-looking barrels and pressed on many suspicious looking stones, but no secret passages opened. She made her way back up the stairs.

At the top of the staircase, she found a large kitchen with heavy iron pots hanging above the hearth and a huge wooden table in its center, scarred from years of chopping. She thought she saw a scattering of oats on it and wondered if they were from her porridge. A small nook off of the kitchen turned out to be a larder. The only sign of evil in it was a foul-smelling wheel of cheese. Unfortunately, Britomart was fairly sure that some cheese was supposed to smell that way.

From the kitchen, a hallway led Britomart behind into a corridor of bedrooms not unlike her own chamber, and from there to the south tower. She ventured up. More bedrooms. How many people had this castle once held? At the top of the tower she found what must have once been servants’ quarters. So there had been human servants once. She had the horrible image of the castle simply absorbing them. She hoped that was not what had happened. She quite liked the castle, and she did not want to think of it as evil, even if its owner was. Perhaps the servants had simply become unnecessary when the castle’s population sank to a single inhabitant.

The next corridor turned out to be much the same, as did the other rooms in Britomart’s tower, though she was delighted to find that the tower’s topmost room contained a small study with an immensely comfortable chair and a stash of well-worn books. The books were in a language she could not read, but there was something comforting and familiar about them nonetheless. She promised herself that she would come back there, temporarily forgetting her resolution to leave the castle as soon as she was able.

The room that she truly had trouble leaving, though, was the armory, which she found halfway down the corridor towards the north tower. It was the strangest armory she had ever seen. It looked less like a proper armory and more like the historical collections that some of her father’s more eccentric nobles had amassed. There was armor of all types–studded leather and chainmail, splint armor and full plate, even what seemed to be armor fashioned from polished wood and bone–but it was also from all historical periods. The weapons were equally varied. Before she knew what she was doing, she was weighing one of the longswords in her hand. It was a beautiful blade: whisper-sharp and perfectly balanced. A glinting black stone was set into the pommel, and a pattern of vines twined around the crossguard. Britomart had the absurd sense that the sword was happy to be in her grip. She forced herself to put it down. Who knew what sort of dark enchantments these weapons might hold. Of course, Britomart told herself, if there might be dark enchantments, I had better investigate carefully. She happily settled in for a long session of examining the arms and armor. Britomart finally had to admit that there was nothing obviously malevolent about the armory–apart from the fact that it showed that Amoret was equipped for war, which was bad enough. But even that wasn’t quite right. The armory showed no fresh preparations for war, nor did it hold enough arms and armor to furnish an army. What it showed was a record of past conflicts, or perhaps simply of times when the Shadowed Wood had been home to more inhabitants, some of whom were warriors.

The north tower yielded the greatest surprise of all. It was a library. All of it. The stone walls had been carved into bookshelves that stretched all the way to the ceiling. A staircase spiraled up the inside wall, set at regular intervals with balcony-like platforms that circled all the way around the tower’s interior. Tall ladders stretched up on each platform, giving access to row after row of leatherbound volumes and neatly rolled scrolls. Britomart felt very small looking up at it all. She had the feeling that if she wanted information about the blood witch’s secrets, she had found a very good place to look.

Unfortunately, it might take her approximately a decade. That is, if any of the books were in her language.

Britomart began to climb the spiral staircase, studying the spines of the books that she passed, looking for something recognizable. Most bore titles in the Old Tongue; some bore only designs along their spines, or nothing at all. She tried to puzzle out what some of the titles might mean, as if staring at them intently enough would make the language resolve into words she could understand, but they remained resolutely obscure. She stepped onto the first platform and began to make her way around it, still scanning titles for a language she recognized. She was so focused on her task that she blinked in surprise when the bookshelf abruptly stopped at the edge of a large window. Britomart peered through it, wondering what part of the grounds she would see now. She judged that she must have been looking northeast, on the opposite side of the castle from the orchard. This seemed to be where the stables were, along with a handful of other outbuildings.

As Britomart watched, a figure in red appeared from around the back of the castle and strode into one of the outbuildings. It was unmistakably Amoret, with her dark hair and confident grace. Amoret’s note had said that she had gone to tend to her business. Perhaps if Britomart were sneaky enough, she could creep after her and find out what exactly that business was. Amoret had not even closed the door properly behind her. It would be easy to slip down and peak in. Britomart had just resolved to do so when another figure appeared below. Britomart’s heart skipped a beat. It was a bear, and not a young one this time. This one was much, much bigger. She had no trouble believing that it could crunch through bones.

And it was headed towards the building that Amoret had just gone into. The building whose door Amoret had so foolishly left half-open.

Britomart forgot all about the fact that Amoret was a blood witch. She forgot all about the fact that the bear was probably Amoret’s thrall, and that Amoret probably sent it out to eat her enemies for breakfast. She could think only of the fact that bears ate people, and that a bear had apparently just selected Amoret for its afternoon snack. She was scrambling down the staircase in less time than it takes a bear to roar.

Britomart sprinted down the hallway, skidding to a halt outside the armory to grab a sword before she was off again, running towards the castle doors. She did not have time to worry about the roses as she heaved the doors open and ran for the outbuildings. There was no bear in sight when she rounded the corner of the north tower. It took only a moment for Britomart’s relief to turn to terror. If the bear was not in sight, that might mean it had already gotten through the door to Amoret. Britomart ran on, expecting to hear the screaming start at any moment, scared that she had arrived too late and the screaming had already stopped. Her sides were burning by the time she flung open the door, sword raised–

And stopped as if she had hit a brick wall.