“What?!” Zaira drew back as if I might want hers.

I unsheathed my dagger and nicked a fingertip. Carefully, with lines more precise than the artificer’s messy scrawl, I traced new runes in one of those large, sloppy gaps in the circle. I squeezed my finger a few times to force out more crimson drops as needed.

I will open only without the key.

Simple. Smiling, I pulled out my handkerchief, wiped both the dagger and my finger, and sheathed the former. “That should do it.”

“What did you do?”

“Magic,” I said.

I opened the door.

The room beyond was high and empty. Faint, gray light angled down from narrow windows twenty feet off the floor, illuminating a dusty space. The storeroom was big enough to use for a riding ring, but only a few crates, piled in the corner, occupied it now. Water stains on the stone floor trailed to a round drain in the center of the room, suggesting a leaky roof, or perhaps a former cloth-dyeing workshop.

“No one here,” Zaira whispered. With slow, careful steps, she started toward the crates.

Something moved in the drain. Worms. White worms, lifting and wriggling. I stifled a scream.

No. Not worms. Fingers.

Small, pale fingers, reaching through the drain grating, curling around the metal grille.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Zaira,” I gasped. “Oh, Graces. Look.”

She did, and swore.

“Hello?” A child’s voice came from the hollow drain. “Is someone there?”

I crossed swiftly to the round grille. Two sets of little fingers pulled at the bars now. Large eyes stared up at me from pale, pinched faces. My stomach lurched.

“You’re not the one who feeds us.” Hope entered the clear, high voice of the little girl gripping the bars. She couldn’t be more than eight. A boy with a smudged face squeezed next to her, younger still, and more crowded in, their faces in shadow. I couldn’t tell how many.

“Are you here to rescue us?” the boy asked. “Is it time?”

I knelt down by the drain and reached out a trembling hand to touch the cold fingers that reached up to me.

“How can I get you out of there?” I breathed.

“There’s a cellar down here.” The girl waved off to the side, past the others. “It had a door, and they brought us in through it. But they bricked it up. Now they pass us food through the grating, in pieces.”

“Zaira,” I called softly. “Can you get this open?”

She didn’t respond. I turned. She stood with both her fists over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.

“Zaira!”

She shook herself like a wet dog and approached the drain.

“I can’t get that open without tools.” Her voice came out strangled. “We’ll have to come back.”

“She said it would be a man who rescued us,” the little boy said, his voice quavering. “You’re both girls.”