The wild hope died at once. If my mother had ever been here, to this strange castle, she would have told us, or at least my father. She would not have left us without some sort of warning, nor would she have doted on those roses. Pinks and reds, never whites, I remembered, now. I never saw a white rose in her garden. Not like the ones that bloomed here.

The rush of feeling faded, but it had banished the lethargy that had borne me through the morning, and I crossed the floor to the door, listening with my ear pressed hard against the crack. When I was sure that nothing breathed beyond, I opened it. A tray lay just outside. I glanced around, but nothing stirred in the hallway. My stomach grumbled as I took a cursory inventory. Bread, and another bowl of stew with the fat congealing on the surface. A pitcher of water and a small tin cup. Food fit for a prisoner.

After eating, I tried to drift back into the warm place between despair and nothingness where memory came and went like waves, but the food had roused me. It was good bread, full of the taste of summer. I fingered the crust. Wheat did not grow on this mountain, nor did the Huntress strike me as the sort of woman who would willingly mill her own flour, which could mean only one thing: the bread came from elsewhere, and any contact with the outside world was an opportunity I could snatch if I kept my wits about me.

I soaked up the cool stew with the heel of the bread and took a closer look at the room. The first thing I noticed was the lack of dust. I had spent the last year shouldering the burden of the departed housekeeper, and I knew what it took to keep a large house clean. A few cobwebs hung in the highest corners, but the drapes on the bed looked clean, if faded, and the floor was smooth and free of debris.

Maybe the Huntress had an army of servants at her command, I thought, hope rising in me again. Human servants, instead of beasts. A human could be coerced into compassion.

My eyes scanned the room for further proof of human hands. The floor bore no marks of broom or mop that I could see, but good servants left no evidence of their passage.

At the foot of the bed I found a chest. I ran my hand over the curved top, thinking of chests full of silk sinking to the bottom of the sea. The metal bindings were cold to the touch, but the latch lifted easily, revealing neatly folded clothes and the smells of lanolin and old perfume.

I hesitated before touching them, suddenly afraid. The room echoed with half-heard voices, the former occupant watching me from the shadows behind the drapes.