“Shut up!” Treila cries, feeling for the edges of the hole, pushing her clothing inside. The milky blue light of the trickle of a stream is dim, but the unnatural color scrapes at her eyes, making them sting and water. Or perhaps those are the fumes, whatever fumes she’s inhaling that are making her hear—this. This impossibility.

This useless impossibility, because even if that voice belongs to a person, and that person does not itch to kill every soul in Aymar castle, there is still no way to get through the stone.

Whoever, whatever the voice belongs to does not speak again.

Her chest aches with the fierceness of her gasping breaths, but slowly, in the silence, she calms herself. Her fingers shake against the rock, but soon it is with exhaustion, not fear. She looks at the stream again, considers a drink before she remembers how terribly it had hurt, when she’d sipped at the foul water before the Priory had clarified it. She doesn’t need that again.

With one last cautious look at the whispering crack, Treila forces herself back into the earth. She stretches out on her belly and begins to climb.

As she ascends, she finds each scrap of clothing she left behind save for one; a single stocking, the first thing she had abandoned to mark her way. But there’s nowhere it could have gone; she makes it from the second stocking to the entrance back into the keep in barely more than two minutes, her path entirely illuminated by the daylight that seems to have arrived too early.

But there is no stocking. She frowns at her bare foot once she is dressed again, then shoves it into her shoe.

She was down there longer than intended; there’s a good chance she is missed. She hurriedly covers the gap and moves her chair in front of it, grabs up work, sits. Fiddles with thread and needle.

It’s a way to get her breath back and to think, and if anybody comes in search of her, it gives her a ready excuse; she wanted to use this first light of day, while the air is still cool, to get a little piecework done.

Nobody comes in search of her.

The day grows warmer, and sooner than she expected, she hears the bells of the Priory ring out. She forces herself up then, and her body protests. Her joints ache. Her head spins. She pitches forward, catches herself on the wall just beside where her cache hides. She needs sleep, but won’t get it until night; the heat and her chores will make sure of that.

First things first. She hurries up the steps and out into the yard, notably behind her fellow servants. When she takes her place at the back of the line, Denisot, the chamberlain, has already taken his blessing. He shoots her a glare for her tardiness.