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As Andre ran terror focused the mind to a razor sharp point and at that point he foresaw his own death. The giant cat was going to catch him and eat him. Or not eat him, cats could be wasteful like that. Either way, there was no chance he could outrun that thing even if he was well rested. Tired and hungry Andre might as well sit down and wait for the inevitable.

Instead he spun around, hands held palms together as he conjured, and met the cat’s eyes. The giant feline leapt straight up in the air, killing its forward momentum entirely, then landed noiselessly, its fur standing straight out from its body and making it look the size of a fully loaded wagon. It watched Andre, its two tails lashing violently behind it.

Two tails?

Yes, definitely two, though he had no idea what it needed the second one for.

The cat lowered its head almost all the way to the ground and lifted one paw, reaching forward to prod at Andre. In response he whipped his hands apart, the huge cloud of smoke he had been conjuring between them exploding outward. The cat jumped back in shock and slipped off the top of the wall.

As it fell Andre watched it disappear from view.

One moment it was twisting as it tumbled towards the ground, the next moment it was turning transparent and then finally it faded from sight entirely. Andre turned back towards the battlement in the far corner and started running again. He made it maybe another ten feet before something slammed into his left side.

The cat’s paw looked like little more than a shimmering blur in the air but it hit him with all the force one might expect from such a large creature. It knocked Andre face first into the wall’s crenellations. Then the creature’s hooked claws snagged into his sleeve and yanked him backwards, out over the courtyard. Before he even realized he was falling the cat’s teeth clamped around his arm and shoulder and hoisted him back up over the wall.

The world around Andre jerked and spun as the cat thrashed him back and forth then he was thrown down onto the wall again with a punishing thump. Dazed, he looked up into the cat’s eyes. It had turned visible again at some point. In any other situation it would have been a beautiful sight, for the creature’s eyes had a kind of patient understanding to them that seemed both wistful and profound. Then it stretched its lips back and opened its mouth with all its daggerlike teeth and the beauty vanished.

Andre was scrambling away from the feline when it suddenly vanished before his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. There was a slight gust of air as the invisible cat leapt away. A split second later a crankbow bolt shot over Andre’s head, passing through the space the creature had just occupied without resistance. He followed the bolt back to its origin and saw Ragi, standing in the doorway to the keep.

Bella was standing behind him, holding onto the door itself like her life depended on it.

Andre was already on his feet, running towards them, before Ragi could toss the crankbow aside and motion for him to come. It felt like the longest thirty feet he’d ever run in his life. By the time he crossed the threshold the energy his burst of panic had brought was long gone and Andre dropped to the ground like a sack of grain once he was safely inside. Bella slammed the door shut behind him while Ragi watched the opening the whole time with a new, loaded crankbow cradled in his arms.

Once the door was closed he set the loaded weapon aside, picked up the discarded crankbow and started reloading it. While he did, Bella helped Andre to his feet. “Good work,” Ragi said as he finished his task. “I’m impressed you escaped from underhill, much less found us up here.”

“It was more adventure than I was expecting when I woke up this morning,” Andre admitted. He looked around the room and guessed they were in an armory. There were four loaded crankbows, including the one Ragi had just set down, on a table nearby. A rack of half a dozen spears stood against one wall and three tall, scale shaped wooden shields hung from the other. A small fire burned on the hearth. “Where are we?”

“The second floor of the keep’s gatehouse,” Bella said.

“Is that safe? What if the guards find us here?”

“The guards don’t use it at night,” Ragi said. “That creature has free reign of the courtyard and walls after the sun sets so most of the Magistrate’s men avoid being out during those hours if they can.”

“You knew about that thing and you didn’t tell me?” Andre slapped his hands to his head in a mix of disbelief and frustration. “I nearly got eaten by that thing!”

“Goblin cats don’t eat people,” Bella said. “It’s just that sometimes they play with people until the people break.”

Andre stared at her, mouth agape, mind grasping for any kind of sense to make of those words. “You know what that thing is?”

“We were told,” Ragi said, his face suggesting he wasn’t happy to be talking about it. “We have a friend or two among the Magistrate’s men.”

“Friends? How do you get friends among the Magistrate’s guards?”

Ragi sighed. “Andre, I don’t want to seem ungrateful but there’s-”

“He deserves to know.”

The older man pursed his lips and stared at Bella, weighing something in his mind, then he nodded and said, “Tell him all you like, then.”

She moved to one of the room’s chairs and sat down, moving with a prim grace that should have been out of step with her sweat stained and ill fitting apprentice’s garb. Yet somehow, now more than ever, she cut a refined, dignified image. “My name is Belladonna de la Vinoverde and my family has long tended the best vineyards in eastern Nerona.”

Andre dragged himself into one of the other chairs and stared at her. On the face of it the idea that the daughter of the Marchese Vinoverde was wandering around a port town in disguise was absurd. Yet it was hard to believe the Magistrate would send his guard captain to personally search the outskirts of the city for anyone less important. “If that’s true, why are you here? Vinoverde is a two week journey to the south and as far as I know there’s no reason for you to want to go overseas. They grow their own grapes over there.”

“I’m engaged to marry Lucas del Torrence next year, to bolster his claim to the throne of Torrence.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Magistrate of Fionni is in the pay of Grigori Borgia,” Ragi said. “The Borgias have long looked for a noble sponsor to help spread their tendrils into Torrence’s territory. Who better than the Prince himself?”

“What?”

“Grigori most likely intends to use me as a hostage -”

“I don’t care!” A fresh wave of energy drove Andre to his feet. “I found Sophia and Charissa in the keep, by the way, they seem fine but the Magistrate plans to turn Charissa over to a blind man sometime soon, we might want to go get them before that!”

Bella got to her feet and grabbed his hand, a pleading look on her face. “Andre, you have a right to know why you’re here.”

“I already know that, Bella.” He stabbed a finger in the general direction of the keep. “Two women – your friends – came to me and asked me for help and I haven’t gotten it to them yet. Why should I care about the rest? I’ve never met a Marquese before, the closest I’ve gotten was the Conte who sacked Oliviamonde and left my mother dead in a gutter. If all you can think about is succession, thrones and hostages when two people right there need your help, maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

She let go of his hand, her face pale, and she swallowed hard. Before she could say anything Ragi pushed a short spear into Andre’s hands, saying, “You’ve got a remarkably firm picture of the part you play in all this, don’t you?”

Andre prickled at his words. “I’m not playing a part, Ragi.”

“We all are, in our ways,” the older man replied, wadding his scapula up and shoving it into Andre’s pack. “I, for one, am grateful for yours. We weren’t sure until just now that the Magistrate would keep my wife and daughter here. It was possible he would immediately quarter them elsewhere. It’s an ill omen, hearing Grigori sent the Blind Man here, by all accounts that one is particularly ruthless but now we can act before he does.”

“Yes.” The sudden change of direction in the conversation had disoriented him but now he was beginning to catch up again. “Yes, but we need to get back to the keep and I’m not sure how we’re going to do that with that cat thing out there. It’s too fast to outrun and too big to fight. I don’t know how to use this.”

Ragi chuckled and pushed it back when Andre tried to hand him the spear again. Instead he pointed one of his beefy fingers at the head of the spear. “Do you see this?”

“Yes?”

“Keep it between you and anything that looks dangerous. I’ll take care of the rest.” To emphasize his point he shoved a sword into his belt and grabbed a spear of his own. “As for the goblin cat, they’re wiley beasts but we can avoid it entirely now that you’ve changed the doors.”

“What does that mean?” Andre glanced at Bella, who had been very quiet for the last few minutes. “Sophia mentioned the doors, too. Is that how you got underhill? The Fair Folk let you use their doors?”

“Not directly,” she said. “I was born with the Gift of Doors, which is hard to explain to anyone who doesn’t have the Gift. What matters is that two doors that are very similar to each other are actually one door, so long as you have the Gift, and you can open both of them at once, passing from one to the other.”

“How similar do they have to be?”

“Ideally the same size and material, though if they are the same size and different kinds of wood, or the same kind of wood with iron bands, I may be able to open them. If they are close to each other.”

Andre fished the mouse carving out of his pocket and held it up. “What if this is on one door and the other is plain?” An incredulous look told him Bella using her Gift then was absolutely impossible. “Then we have a problem. I took this off a door into the keep but I don’t know where that door leads. I was out on the walls when I found it and I pried it off because Sophia mentioned carvings but I didn’t know why it was important. So it never occurred to me to look on the other side of the door.”

Ragi frowned. “Do you know how close to the prison cells that door is?”

“Not close. I went up the entirety of the prison tower and the only entrance to that tower from elsewhere in the keep was on the ground floor. You might be able to enter the watch room from somewhere else but I didn’t get a good look inside it so I can’t be sure.”

“How did you get out of the prison tower onto the walls, then?” Bella asked.

“The tower leads to the roof, I conjured a ladder from the keep’s roof. If you open that door,” Andre gestured to the gatehouse door, “just like you did for me earlier we could go back to that spot on the walls. From there it would be easy to climb back up onto the roof the same way.” Though he wasn’t looking forward to conjuring something that large in his current state.

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Ragi said. “Maybe we’ll be able to get it all done before the goblin cat spots us and comes calling.”

“What if we can’t?”

He handed Bella his spear and picked up a crankbow. “We’ll deal with that when it comes to it.”