“I wanted to show you this place,” the laird said. “In case you ever need to shelter here.”
“What is it?” Adaira asked, studying the hill with narrowed eyes.
“Come closer so you can watch how I find the door.”
Adaira moved forward as Innes touched a large stone protruding from the hillside. A blue light flared in the rock, winking like an eye, and the stones on the ground began to vibrate in response. Adaira stepped back, alarmed as the stones rose and gathered into a lintel on the hillside. A door appeared next, made of smooth pale wood, and Adaira almost laughed, disbelieving.
“Is this a spirit portal?”
“It’s a burrow,” Innes replied. “A wind shelter made with tools forged over magical fire. There are ten spread out across the west. Most are easy to spot, with their south-facing doors, but some are meant to be difficult to locate. This one is such a burrow. My grandmother personally built it in her time as laird, and if you’re ever stranded by a northern storm, or perhaps need a place to hide, you should come here.”
Adaira was quiet. They didn’t need wind shelters in the east, and the idea was strange but intriguing to her. She nodded, sensing Innes wanted some physical reaction from her.
The laird turned and opened the door. She stepped into the burrow, but Adaira hesitated, stiff with reservation. How did she know Innes wasn’t fooling her? How did she know that Innes hadn’t brought her to an underground lair to be imprisoned?
Adaira couldn’t deny that she had been expecting imprisonment as soon as she arrived in the west. Her twin brother was shackled in the Tamerlaines’ fortress, so it was natural to assume Innes would do something similar to her. Adaira had, after all, agreed to be the Breccans’ prisoner, and they could do with her whatever they saw fit as long as peace was upheld.
But her time in the west hadn’t gone quite in the way she expected.
Innes had given her a comfortable bedroom in the castle that overlooked the “wilds,” a term for land that was under protection and that no one could claim. No hunting and no building and no harvesting whatever grew there. Breccans who wanted to travel across the wilds had to remain on deer trails and approved pathways. It seemed a strange list of requirements to Adaira, but for a land that struggled to thrive, it made sense that the laird would need to enforce laws to protect it.
In her first week, Adaira had scarcely left her room. She had stood before her windows, watching the mist descend over the wilds and listening to the bell that chimed in the castle turret every hour, keeping time. She had thought the west beautiful in a strange, sad way. Its lines were harsher, its colors muted, and its overall feeling was one of desperation. The landscape reminded Adaira of a dream, or a lament. It was both familiar and new, and she found it difficult to draw her eyes away from it. She wondered if that was part of the land’s few but compelling charms—its brutal honesty, as well as its untamed aura.
When she realized that Innes wasn’t going to lock her in her chamber, Adaira had begun to test her new boundaries.
She learned that she could move through the Breccans’ castle without a guard. Some places, however, were off-limits to her. She could bathe in the underground cistern so long as she told Innes when she planned to go, and Adaira had come to love the dark, warm waters of the large cavern. But the cistern, though a communal place, was always deserted when she went, making it apparent that Innes didn’t want her meeting other clanspeople. Adaira swam alone, save for a female guard who watched over her. As if Adaira might attempt to drown herself.
She could also read in the library. She could visit the gardens and the stables, but she couldn’t leave the castle grounds without Innes or David, Adaira’s father and the laird’s consort. She couldn’t wander to the southern or eastern wings of the fortress, or down to the hold, where prisoners were kept. She was permitted to take her meals in the privacy of her chamber or with her parents in theirs. She could write letters, but she always had to deliver them to David first, and he also brought the letters that arrived for her.
It hadn’t taken Adaira long to notice that the wax seals on Torin’s, Jack’s, and Sidra’s letters had been tampered with. Her father was reading her post before he gave it to her, which meant he was also most likely reading the words she sent east. She wanted to be angry at this revelation and knew that her fury would have been justified.
But she was no fool.
Of course they would read her letters to ensure that she wasn’t plotting their demise with her eastern family. Of course they didn’t trust her yet. It was best for her to pretend that she didn’t know about the interference with her mail, and also to keep her correspondence as nonthreatening as possible.