A door waited at the top. The wood was dark with age and bound with iron. I paused before it, catching my breath, and traced the metal with my eyes. It was worked into the shape of a vine, but the work lacked delicacy, as if it had been made by human hands instead of sorcery. Only the lock showed real craftsmanship, and that too was heavy-handed, putting more emphasis on the bolt than the design. I placed my hand upon the metal, my heart sinking.

It was locked.

I’d climbed halfway up the mountain for a locked door.

The pup wiggled, and I set her down, resting my forehead against the door. Whatever was beyond it remained out of my reach.

Unless . . .

Sara had taught me a thing or two about locks.

I slid a pin from my hair, grateful that I’d thought to put it up out of the way today, and slid it into the chamber. The pin grew cold to the touch, then shattered. Frost bloomed across the lock. A shard nicked my neck as I stumbled backward, and I barely caught myself on the uneven stone wall. The pup whimpered, a feeling I echoed wholeheartedly, and I raised a hand to my cheek to feel the place where another piece of shrapnel had grazed my skin.

Sara had said nothing about how to pick spelled iron.

I tucked the pup under my arm and fled, whipping past the roses and the library until I was back in the comparative safety of the kitchen where the only things that bloomed were dried herbs.

“Damn,” I whispered into the crackling hearth fire. Then, when there was no response and the emptiness of the keep sagged around me, I said it louder. “Damn, damn, damn you all.” My scream startled the pup but I did not care. I slammed my hands on the table, the screams building until the words jumbled into one long wordless sound, at once high and low, raw and shrill, shredding my throat and battering against my teeth until the world was subsumed in sound. I slumped against the hard wood, my lips sore and stretched and my throat ragged. I didn’t know what exactly I had expected to find. A person perhaps, another prisoner like me. A hope I hadn’t realized I was holding on to died with my screams. I was alone here. Truly alone.

I can’t do this, I thought, staring around the deceptively docile kitchen with its pots and herbs and pleasant fires. I would not spend the rest of my life here, chopping vegetables and enduring the mood swings of a woman who could order her beasts to eat me without so much as a moment of warning. Her library was no substitute for companionship. All the books in the world could not replace what I had lost, but I still had one way out.