Spring was coming. Slowly, hesitantly; but it was coming. Alys saw little signs of it when she ventured out of the castle. Snowdrops were pushing through the whiteness on the south side of the castle, splashing the drifts with their cheerful purples and yellows. Hibernating rodents ventured out of their burrows. The number of birds visible or audible at any given time tripled, and V-lines of migrating geese began to cross the sky, heading north.

She wandered outside one day when the air was still and the sun had had time to warm the courtyard. Birdsong drew her to the castle gate, and she stood there looking at the view.

The castle was situated on a rocky spur of the mountain. The spur plunged steeply down into dizzying valleys on every side except in front, where a spine of rock connected the spur to the rest of the mountain. Other mountains folded into the sky nearby, mountains that would be green with pines when the snow covering them finally melted.

A causeway stretched away in front of her. Once, it had offered a way across the tributary that wound around three sides of the castle; now, it was collapsed, cutting the ruin off from the path that led down the mountainside and eventually to St. Michael's. Only the birds and Selendrile could come here now.

There was a whisper of sound behind her.

"Sel."

"Mmm?"

Alys smiled to herself. She hadn't been sure he was there, but she might as well follow up with a real question. "I thought only gold dragons had magic. But Stelera can transform."

There was a long enough pause that she thought Selendrile wasn't going to answer. "Stelera doesn't come by her powers honestly."

"Meaning...?"

"It's not a pleasant subject."

Human sacrifices, maidens tied to stakes, dark rituals involving blood and torture -- all kinds of scary ideas flashed through Alys's mind. She was sure that Stelera would be comfortable with all of them. She let the subject drop.

They watched a pair of scarlet cardinals chase each other around the ruined support pillars of the causeway. With the warmth of spring only a hint in the air, the animals were already getting frisky.

"What did she say to you?"

"What?" Alys, distracted by the birds, had to backtrack mentally to realize what he meant. "Oh, like that's a pleasant subject."

Selendrile waited. Alys blew out a reluctant breath. It wasn't a nice thing to think about. "She said -- she said --"

She broke off, trying to remember. It had been dark, and her head had been killing her, and she wasn't sure she'd heard everything Stelera'd said. Though Alys doubted she'd missed anything important. "Umm... it was just unimaginative gloating, really." She changed her voice, mimicking Stelera's melodic tones. "That I should watch my step, and that ou-oubliettes were much slower than disembowelment." She stumbled over the big word. Selendrile had said it was from another language, which was why it looked completely different than it sounded. The statements didn't sound sinister at all, coming from Alys.

Selendrile raised a brow. "She threatened to disembowel you?"

"Not that time." Alys crooked a finger backward, into the past. "At the bookshop."

He snorted. "She must be desperate for my power, to dirty her hands on a human..."

Alys fingered her throat. The bruises had faded, but the memory of Stelera's iron grip remained. "Is it that bad, conversing with humans?"

Selendrile shrugged. "It is for a dragon."

"Oh." Her insides withered. Does that include me, Sel? "What about the man with her? Is he a dragon too?"

Selendrile looked at her sharply. "If there were another dragon around, I would have smelled him."

"Well, she had a tall man with her, and if he's not a dragon then he must be human. She called him her pet."

Selendrile looked back at the cardinals. "I see."

Another long silence passed. Alys pushed her hurt into a deep corner of herself and admired the blueness of the sky, the clean puffiness of the clouds passing overhead. It was so nice to be able to see the sun.

"Were you frightened?"

"In the oubliette?" Alys shivered. "Yes."

He stepped close. Alys tensed as his arms encircled her, but didn't pull away.

She did close her eyes. "Please, Selendrile. What am I to you?"

He didn't answer right away. "I don't know what you mean."

She elbowed him lightly in the ribs, and he let her shake him off. "You'd better, if you're going to touch me like that," she said, and stomped back into the courtyard.

X X X

With the air warming up, Alys began exploring the no longer frigid castle. It was fun, and a little scary.

She got to know the library, for one thing. During the winter she'd been limited to quick searches for books; generally, ten minutes was all she could spare before her extremities went numb and she had to retreat downstairs to thaw them out by the fire.

Now, though, she could browse to her heart's content. Selendrile got cranky if she cloistered herself in the library while he was home, but she spent hours among the shelves while he was out hunting. It was a long room on the third story with a barrel vault ceiling and many high windows; these were still glazed, protecting the many books from damp. White plaster, a little discolored to be sure, still covered most of the walls, reflecting the sunlight and making the room pleasantly bright during the day. During the evenings she had to bring a candle. She was careful to keep this last away from the books.

On the second story were several bedchambers. Furniture in the chambers that had broken windows had not held up well to the damp. These looked like ghost rooms; decomposing tapestries hung in tatters on the walls, curtains leprous with moss and rot holes draped over bedposts bedecked with wood mushrooms, and lichens grew merrily on the chamberpots. After one glance into these, Alys left them alone.

Two of the bedchambers were still in good shape. Alys gasped on first beholding their splendor. To her peasant eyes, the simple four-post beds with linen curtains and goosedown pillows were luxury incarnate. Timbered ceilings relieved the harshness of granite walls, and the fireplaces were still in working order. She thought about moving her things into one of them, but Selendrile would object to having her out of sight and, more importantly, out of range of his verbal games. Worse yet, he might offer to come with her. With a straight face, of course.

Besides, nice as the beds were, she could see that rats had nested in the mattresses. The castle rats were huge, grown fat from shelter and the absence of cats, and they might carry plague. She felt safer sleeping close to the dragon.

The kitchen she already knew. A huge hearth, wide enough to roast an ox, dominated the east side of the room. It shared a heat-retaining iron plate with the hearth in the great hall. From the top of the hearth hung a chain on which to hook pots. Alys herself had appropriated the huge pot for bathing. She'd found that after boiling a few inches of water in the bottom, she could take the pot off the hook and dump in well water to get a very nice batch of warm water. Dirty water could be thrown down a grate in the floor that connected to a rain drain, which exited outside the castle.

The north side of the kitchen boasted four glazed windows and a stone sink in the deep recess created by the windows. The indoor well was nested beside the sink. Selendrile had said indoor wells were rare in castles of this age, but Alys had found it very handy. Various pots and pans clustered on a set of shelves on the west wall, next to the arched opening leading to the great hall.

On the west side of the kitchen were more cooking utensils, hooks for meat and other consumables, and a narrow door leading to equally narrow stairs which terminated in the pantry downstairs. The pantry was always cooler than the kitchen. It was also plagued with rats. Alys stayed out of it unless she absolutely needed more soap. Selendrile hung the meat they didn't eat right away up high, out of reach of the vermin, which also meant that he had to be the one to get it down.

The south side of the kitchen was occupied by trestle tables, some dusty wooden stools, cupboards for dishes, and a polished granite counter for cutting up food.

The great hall was familiar enough, but Alys enjoyed walking around the three-quarters of the room outside the heat-trapping tapestries. It wasn't hard to visualize the banquets that Selendrile had said great halls were used for. The west wall held the hearth and Alys's tapestry-boundaried 'hearthroom,' along with the sofas and tables she and Sel used every day. To the south were the iron-reinforced double doors leading into the entrance hall with its murder holes in the ceiling and the gate that opened to the courtyard. The guardhouse was above the entrance hall and could be reached via a flight of steps from the southeast corner of the great hall. The courtyard held a tumbled-down barracks of modest size and a chapel that had seen better days.

The north side of the great hall had a slightly raised platform, where the lord of the castle and his family and guests had once dined while the serfs ate on trestle tables that were dismantled between meals. When she'd asked Selendrile about the curious holes in the wall -- holes set above the height of her own head -- he'd said that they'd been used to hold support beams for curtained wooden platforms where minstrels played during special events.

A door in the east side of the hall opened onto a spiral staircase. The bedchambers were up on the second floor, the library on the third. To reach the dungeons, one went down.

The dungeon she explored not out of desire, but because the dictionary had gone missing again. The dungeon had precious few windows, since it was mostly underground, and due to being nestled in the rocky ground it was always colder than the rest of the castle.

She didn't look in the oubliette. If Selendrile had been cruel enough to hide the dictionary there, she would live without it. She checked the various cells one by one, finally coming to the last cell in the northeastern corner. This was slightly larger than the rest and sported a hanging cage on a chain.

She rolled up her sleeves to grapple with the rusty chain and unhooked the heavy links from their wall mount, taking care to first wrap the slack around the studded wheel set in the wall. Even with leverage on her side, the weight of the descending cage almost yanked her off her feet. She jumped back as the iron cage crashed into the stone flooring.

She waited like that, hands over her ears, for a few minutes. The crash echoed up the stairs and back down, and she thought all the rats and bats in the province must be scrambling for safety. But the ceiling didn't come down, and Selendrile didn't appear demanding to know what on earth she was doing. And her persistence had been rewarded; there was the dictionary, wrapped in oilskin in the bottom of the cage.

She pried at the rusty locks with the equally rusty keys and eventually got the contraption open. She pondered whether or not she should try hoisting the cage back up, but decided that it wasn't worth the trouble simply to hide her activities from Selendrile. She put the heavy dictionary down by her feet so she could lock the cage closed again, lest some future (and incredibly stupid) explorer somehow make it here and get himself stuck inside the device. She could name three boys from her own village who would have wedged themselves in in a trice, with no thought as to how they'd get back out again.

The scraping noise behind her was masked by the scraping and grumbling noises she made herself as she tried to get the locks to cooperate. When she finished and turned around, she almost fell down the hole that had opened in the floor behind her.

She gasped and stumbled backwards into the cage. It creaked and jangled as she caught her breath, one hand over her heart. Yes, there really was a dark square opening in the floor. No, she had definitely never seen it before. She crouched by the edge and lifted her candle high. A flight of steps spiraled down out of sight, beckoning.

She sat back on her heels, considering. Secret passages within a castle should be no surprise; whoever owned the place doubtless wanted a bolthole in case a siege went south. Her concerns were more immediate. If she went down there, there was no guarantee that she could get out again. She wasn't the heir of the lord; she didn't know if there were traps or dead ends.

Then it ocurred to her that Selendrile might not know about the secret passage, and that if he did he hadn't told her about it. The thrill of knowing something Selendrile didn't -- or at least, of discovering one of his secrets without his leave -- was her undoing.

She had enough presence of mind to dash upstairs and fill her pockets with candles, three bits of chalk, and a chunk of bread. Part of her warned that what she was doing was dangerous, but it was evening; she didn't have much time before Selendrile came back, and she didn't want to wait another day to act on her discovery.

When she came back down, the opening was gone.

Puzzled, she lifted the dictionary and laid it back down. To her relief, the passage door cooperated and slid open again.

Curious, Alys marked the flagstone the dictionary was laying on with chalk. Then she lifted the dictionary. As she'd expected, the opening slid shut with a faint grinding noise. She put the dictionary down; it slid open again. Pleased with herself, she left the dictionary in place and went down the stairs, candle in hand.

She'd only made it a few steps when the opening slid shut above her head. She smothered a rush of panic and went back up the stairs to prod at the slab of faux flagstones.

The mechanism must be on a timed release of sorts, she realized, so residents fleeing down the passage could punch the trigger and run without worrying about closing the secret entrance behind them so pursuers couldn't follow. That was why it had closed while she was upstairs getting candles. If she hadn't been so excited about one-upping Selendrile, she would have realized that.

Sweat trickled down her brow as she considered her options. She could stay here and push at every stone within reach, hoping one was the magic trigger to open the passage door above her head. There was no guarantee that there was one, though; the passage had probably been built for exiting, not for entering, and she could waste valuable time and candle length looking for a trigger stone that wasn't there.

Or she could continue downwards. If it was a secret passage that led out of the castle, why then it must lead out of the castle at some point. Hopefully nothing had collapsed and blocked the passage. If something had, she was really stuck, the more so if Selendrile did not in fact know about the secret passage.

She compromised and tried a dozen likely-looking stones, marking a chalk X on each when it proved unresponsive. When none worked, she wrote her name on the slab. Then she turned around and began descending into the darkness.

It was a long way down. She counted her steps, as much to keep herself calm as to keep track of how far she'd come. When she reached one hundred, she stooped and wrote her name on the steps again, along with the number 100.

Two hundred steps. Alys, 200. Three hundred steps.

By four hundred steps, her candle was low. She lit a new one, not wanting the flame to go out, and put the old stub in her pocket in the event that she got desperate later.

Five hundred steps. Six hundred steps. Her legs ached. She wondered where Selendrile was, and whether having secrets from him was worth the trouble this lark was turning out to be. She was thirsty. She hadn't thought to bring water.

Seven hundred steps.

At eight hundred steps, she saw light.

She forgot to count. Her steps quickened as the stairs leveled out and became straight tunnel. Soon she was running.

Her haste was rewarded as she burst out into the sunlight. She laughed with relief, twirling round and round, not caring that she extinguished her candle. Then she flopped on her back in the grass, breathing hard, and savored success. I made it. I got out.

She was in a meadow -- a beautiful, brilliantly lit meadow. She'd never seen anything as lovely as this green grass under the blue sky. All she could see of the castle from here was one of the curtain walls, hundreds of feet above the meadow. Trees ringed the flower-studded grass, and she wondered if getaway horses had ever been tied here, waiting under the moonlight while battle raged around the castle.

Her romantic visions were interrupted by a melodic voice.

"Well, well, well. What have we here."

X X X

Alys sprang to her feet, as though it made any difference whether she faced a hostile dragon standing up or lying down. "Selendrile said he'd kill you if you came back here."

"He can't kill me if he doesn't know I'm here." The dragon woman smiled and put her hands on her hips. She really did love that pose. And her crimson furs, too, if she was wearing them on a warm spring day. "And if you don't tell him, who will?"

"He can smell you too, you know."

"Oh, I'm counting on that." Stelera's smile turned into something more primal. Alys blushed as she realized what it was. "Once you're out of the picture, he won't be able to resist me any longer."

"I wouldn't count on that." Selendrile had displayed zero interest in Stelera thus far. Alys didn't think that would change because a peasant girl he'd never shown physical interest in was out of the picture.

"You're wrong," Stelera argued, too loudly.

Alys rolled her eyes. Really, in a great big queenly dragon, that kind of desperation was just sad.

Stelera didn't like that expression. She frowned and switched topics. "Go on, now. Beg. Better yet, run for your life."

Alys felt the brush of death, cool against her heart. "If you're going to kill me, just do it."

Stelera stepped close. Alys knew that at any instant, she would become a huge gray dragon with many, many teeth. "Foolish girl. Run, and I might kill you quickly."

Alys shook her head. "You won't."

Stelera's eyes snapped. "Who are you trying to impress? Selendrile? He's not even here to watch you die."

Selendrile.

Alys said nothing. There was no point in explaining herself to Stelera. She knew, somehow, that to run would be to surrender her dignity. And after Selendrile, Stelera wasn't nearly so scary.

"Selendrile doesn't care about you!" Stelera hissed. "You're a toy, a pet, a plaything! Humans are insects to him. You know that. Stop pretending you mean something to him!"

Alys's lips parted, but the hurt shooting through her was too deep for words. It wasn't Stelera's tirade that was hurting her; it was hearing her own deepest fears, out loud.

Those she couldn't face. She turned and ran. Not away from Stelera, but away from herself.

"Now," Stelera said, her voice rich with satisfaction.

Alys didn't have time to wonder what she meant before a bolt of pain struck her heart. She caught herself on her hands as she fell, gasping, and stared at the cruel arrowhead protruding from her tunic.

Of course; the tall man. The tall man and his bow.

And after all this, Alys thought, she's made it look like I was killed by another human.

The cries of two dragons and the rushing of wings were the last things she heard before darkness took her.

X X X

"You can turn and pursue me," Stelera taunted, and transformed. Her wings pumped, lifting her clear of the ground. "But if you do, your pet will die."

Selendrile's head snapped round as he spotted Alys's crumpled form. He ignored Stelera, nosediving to the grass.

Stelera flew away as fast as she could, mindful of the golden dragon's rage despite her triumph. And she laughed as she flew, knowing that the little she-human was already dead. The fresh powers she craved were almost within reach.