Three chairs. Her brows drew together. The tales told of no one here but the Wolf, but then again, the tales also hadn’t said there was more than one Wolf, and the current one was a tall young man with scarred hands and a sour disposition. It seemed the tales weren’t exactly reliable. Really, she had no idea who else—what else— might be lurking in the Keep.
One of us will burn it, the Wolf had said when he saw her torn cloak. Implying there was more than one inhabitant of this ruin.
As if in answer, there was a sudden clatter, like a dropped armful of pots and pans. Red heard a brief, muttered curse from behind that smaller door at the back of the room, and then a laugh from another voice, light and musical.
Her courage wasn’t quite steeled enough to investigate. Red’s mind crowded with thoughts of twisted poppets made of sticks and thorns, crafted from the Wilderwood and set to servitude by the same strange magic that kept the vine unburning. After the fanged trees, nothing seemed out of the realm of awful possibility.
She backed away from the broken arch, not stopping until the small of her back hit the staircase rail in the main foyer. Her shoulder jostled the dark coat hanging on the knob of the newel post, sending up a faint whiff of fallen leaves and coffee grounds.
Red turned, peering upward. The landing at the top of the staircase was still hidden in shadow, a darkness that had scared her away before. Now that she felt somewhat less skittish, the upstairs seemed more intriguing than foreboding.
Despite being partially covered in moss, the stairs looked sturdy enough. She placed her mud-caked boot on the first step.
The moss moved under her feet like she’d stepped on a snake, seeping farther up the stairs, collecting toadstools and thin roots in its wake. The greenery gathered together, an army amassing, and became a solid wall of growing things, blocking her path.
Red stumbled backward, shaking off the weed tendrils knotting around her ankles. “Five Kings,” she cursed quietly. “Point taken.”
Dirt streaked the hand that reached up to push sweaty, leaf-matted hair from her eyes. She needed a bath, and badly, though she’d have to put her dirty clothes back on afterward. She hadn’t brought more. Hadn’t expected to need them.
The thought sank into her mind with serrated teeth. The fierceness with which she’d run for her life in the Wilderwood had been gut instinct, primal force. Now the consequences: a life. Already she was hours older than she ever expected to be.
She had no idea how to start coming to terms with that.
Red pressed her fingers to her eyes until the sharp feeling behind them dissipated. Once she was calmer, she shook her head, straightened. The Wolf said her room was in the corridor, and there was only one she could see, though it ended in a riot of ruin.
The oddly lit vine provided the light here, too, though the flames were smaller and more sporadic. Moss covered the floor and grew halfway up the walls. Blooming things she couldn’t name threaded through the ruined jumble at the hall’s end, a tangle of leaves and flowers and broken rock.
It looked like the Wilderwood had broken into the Black Keep more than once, leaving most of it a ruin. Not exactly a comforting thought.
Doors lined the hallway, but only one looked like it’d been disturbed recently. A jagged line of dirt and a green stain on the wood marked where growth had been cleared away, leaving a semicircle of bare wooden floor ringing the threshold. Already moss crept over it, taking back the space it had ceded.
Gingerly stepping over the moss, Red pushed the door open.
The room beyond was small and sparsely furnished. Dusty, still, but at least cleared of greenery. The walls were bare. A large window with vines crawling up the outside looked out on another courtyard, where a stone wall ran from the back of the hallway and down a gently sloping hill to meet the iron gate. Another tower sat directly behind the one she’d entered, short enough to be hidden from the front. Small trees grew around its base, and her heart stuttered for the half second it took to realize they weren’t bone-colored. Between the trees twisting around the structure and the flowering vines threading through them, the tower looked more grown than built.
A fully made bed stood in the corner by the window, linens faded but clean, with a fireplace set into the wall by its foot, neatly stacked with wood. To the left of the door, a small alcove housed a chamber pot and wide iron tub, already filled with water. A wardrobe was pushed into another corner, an age-spotted mirror hanging next to it on the wall. Large handprints marked the dust on the wardrobe’s side. The size of them matched Eammon’s.