‘Thank you, cousin,’ said Clariel to Salleniel, who smiled and waved.

Clariel followed Yan along the corridor, but instead of turning left to go back into the hall, she stopped at the end and stood in front of a large painting, a hunting scene, that had been done directly on the plastered wall. For a moment Clariel wondered why her aunt was just standing in front of it, before she saw her move a horse’s head in the painting, sliding away a cunningly matched lid of paint and plaster to reveal a tiny keyhole. Then she extended an equally tiny key from the ring on her finger and turned the lock. The whole wall, painting and all, pivoted inwards as she pushed against it, revealing a narrow stair. Not a dusty, unused stair, Clariel noted as she climbed up. It was lit by Charter marks, and was as clean as the rest of Hillfair, so it was perhaps not meant to be all that secret. At least not to whoever mopped the floors. Yan, as Clariel had come to expect, did not explain why they were taking this stair.

They climbed up past several other doors, two of which looked ordinary enough and one like the painted wall below, though on this side Clariel could see the faint outline in the stone wall and the grooved arc cut in the floor where the wall slid back. Then they went along another enclosed corridor, around a corner and up again, this time a larger, straight staircase of polished wood.

Finally, five or six levels up this stair, Yan opened a door onto a long veranda or wide balcony. Heads turned as they came out – the heads of half a dozen message-hawks, their fierce yellow eyes fixed on the arrivals for a moment before they lost interest and looked away. Message-hawks, bred and trained with the help of Charter Magic, were never hooded, and they stayed on their perches without the need to be tethered by jesses. These ones, on their perches out on the veranda, were ready to go at a moment’s notice, as soon as they had a message imprinted in their minds.

There were a dozen more message-hawks on their perches inside the mews behind the veranda, a large, fairly dim room that looked like it had been added onto whatever building they were in – which wasn’t the hall, because she had seen the roof of that from the veranda. Despite that, Clariel wasn’t sure which end of the hall she’d been looking at. Hillfair could prove just as easy to get lost in as the city, she thought, and she liked it no more than she liked Belisaere.