Chapter 13: Through the Floor

Linxia had her shoulder against the oak door before the steward's footsteps faded.

The wood shook, but it did not give.

She stepped back and struck it twice with the flat of her sword, then once with her boot.

The iron lock held.

"He picked an old door," Linxia said, breathing hard. "Oak, three fingers thick, banded on the outside."

"Can you cut it?"

"Eventually. Not quietly."

Zhaoxue stood in the dark with the black banner still bunched in her fists.

Above their heads, through the stone, she could hear nothing at all.

The east terrace lay directly over them, and somewhere across the courtyard her father was asleep.

"He wants noise," she said slowly. "He locked us in, and he didn't take our swords or the lantern."

"Because he thinks nobody will hear us."

"Because he thinks it doesn't matter. He has until the festival to decide what to do with us."

"Then we don't give him until the festival."

Linxia swung the lantern around the walls.

Rice towers, fish casks, twelve open crates.

The floor of the cellar sloped gently toward the back.

Zhaoxue followed the slope with her eyes, and something inside her chest went quiet.

"There's a drain," she said.

At the low end of the cellar, set into the flagstones, lay an iron grate as wide as a washbasin.

It had been there since before she was born, to carry the melt of the ice store out under the terrace.

"I know where it goes," she said. "I hid in it when I was seven."

"You hid in a drain?"

"My father was teaching me the sect's sword forms, and I was very bad. It comes out in the north ditch, behind the wall, below the compost heap."

"How wide is it?"

"I was seven."

Linxia crouched beside the grate and looked at it for a long moment.

Then she looked at her own shoulders, and at Zhaoxue's.