understood too late.
“Stop him!”
Orlan struck the nearest candle stand with his cane. Wax and flame toppled across the altar cloth. A woman screamed. Smoke bloomed upward. In the confusion, Orlan seized the lever and wrenched it down.
Stone groaned behind the altar.
A narrow door opened in the wall.
At the same time, somewhere below them, a bell began to ring.
Not the great chapel bell.
A smaller, cracked bell.
The old warning bell beneath the hospice.
Fire.
Or flood.
Or a door opened from the wrong side.
The guards rushed Orlan, but he slipped through the narrow opening with the speed of a man who had planned every step. Cassian went after him.
Elian caught his sleeve again. “No. He wants time.”
Cassian stopped.
Her face was pale, but her eyes had gone clear.
“He told his men that if anyone opened the passage before the final hymn, they were to move her,” she said. “There is another way down. Through the choir stair.”
Cassian looked at his mother.
The queen mother had already turned to the captain of the guard. “Take ten men through the sacristy after Orlan. Take him alive if possible. If not possible, take him anyway.”
The captain bowed and ran.
Cassian turned to Elian. “Show me the choir stair.”
She looked down at the silk gown tangling around her feet. Without ceremony, she tore the lace overskirt up to her knee. Several nobles gasped again, as if a torn dress were more shocking than kidnapping.
Elian ignored them.
“This way.”
They crossed behind the altar through smoke and candlelight. Cassian heard the court behind him breaking into frightened clusters, heard his mother ordering the doors guarded, heard the archbishop praying under his breath. But Elian moved with the certainty of someone who had survived by memorizing servants’ routes no noble ever noticed.
The choir stair was hidden behind a carved screen of angels. It spiraled down into cold darkness. Cassian took a torch from a wall bracket and followed her.
Halfway down, Elian stumbled.
Cassian caught her elbow. “Your wrist.”
“It can hurt later.”
The words were so plain, so practical, that something in him ached.
At the bottom of the stair, the air changed. It smelled of damp stone, old incense, and lamp oil. A corridor stretched beneath the chapel, low and narrow, with pipes running along the ceiling. The warning bell clanged somewhere ahead, each strike shivering through the walls.
Elian slowed near a split in the passage.
“Left goes to the crypt,” she whispered. “Right goes to the bell room.”
Cassian lifted the torch.
On the floor near the right passage lay a pearl.
Small.
Cream-colored.
The same kind sewn onto the bridal gown.
Elian bent and picked it up. Her fingers closed around it as if it were a pulse.
“She fought them,” she whispered.
They moved faster.
At the end of the passage, a wooden door stood half open. Beyond it, voices argued.
Cassian pressed himself against the wall and signaled Elian to stay behind him.
Through the gap, he saw a round stone chamber beneath the old bell shaft. Two lanterns burned on the floor. A young woman sat tied to a chair near the center, her copper hair loose around her shoulders, her white underdress
