Now she wished she could take it all back. Her father might still be alive and her stepmother nothing more than the baker’s daughter who had married an Elven King and worked with the sick and injured. But Phryne guessed that she was dreaming. Events would still have turned out somewhere close to where they were. The Drouj would still have found their way to the valley, Isoeld would still have found a way to murder her husband so that she could make herself Queen, and her own sorry state of affairs would still have come to pass.

Of course, there was no way of knowing for sure and nothing to be gained by speculating. You lived the life you were given, good or bad. She let the matter drop.

Ahead, the tunnel began to narrow. She hurried a bit to see what was going to happen and soon found that it tightened into a much smaller passageway that branched in three directions—one each to the left and right and a third between the other two that became a stairway leading down. She hesitated a moment before choosing the middle path. She couldn’t have sworn to it, but it seemed to her that something was tugging her that way. Not a voice or a presence or anything quite so substantial; it was more instinct than anything, and she decided to heed it.

The stairway descended in circular fashion, the walls close enough that Phryne could feel the cold radiating off the stone and could see the damp glistening in broad patches. The dripping continued as well, droplets falling on her head or striking her face in icy splashes. The tunnel was windless, the air stale and damp to the taste. She had to duck to avoid low spots in the spiraling underside of the stairs. But she pressed ahead, determined to find an end to her journey.

She found it almost before she was ready. The stairs ended in another tunnel, this one as narrow as the passageway leading down, and she was forced to proceed in a crouch. Water ran all along the floor in tiny rivers and dripped steadily from the ceiling. She was soon very wet about her head and shoulders and shivering with the cold.

Then, suddenly, she heard a faint, dry hissing, a sound flat and empty of life, as if snakes held imprisoned might be pleading for release. It was vast and endless, and it grew in strength the farther down the passageway she went. She tried to make sense of it, but failed. It might have been snakes, but she knew it wasn’t. It might have been the sound of water falling in a thin, soft sheen from a great height, but it wasn’t that, either. It might even have been a dying breath, the sound of life leaving the body, but she knew that was wrong, too.