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Bella didn’t open the door first, Ragi did.

He spent a minute or two peering at the courtyard and assessing the lay of the land before gently closing it again. Andre easily peered over top of his head but he struggled to make out any details in the shadows of dusk. The only thing that was clear to him was that they were, indeed, on the opposite side of the keep’s courtyard. Ragi apparently wasn’t as challenged by the dark. “It looks like the guards are doing a loop of the courtyard. I’m not sure if they’ll look up but if they do I don’t think they’ll see us on the walls, the beacon is lit and it makes the keep’s roof throws some very deep shadows. Once we’re on the roof we’ll need to keep low so we don’t do that ourselves.”

“How can the guards avoid the cat?” Andre asked.

“According to our friend in their midst, someone in the Magistrate’s family has a Gift that lets them control it, although I’m not sure how. I’ve never heard of a Gift that influences animals.” Ragi glanced at Andre. “What about you? A travelling theater group has a lot of opportunities to encounter the strange and unknown.”

“I’ve never heard of goblin cats before today, much less a Gift that can control them.” Andre tapped his chin thoughtfully. “It could be an Invoker, though. In which case that’s not a real cat, goblin or otherwise, but rather an elemental someone’s bound with their Gift. Wind spirits sometimes show themselves as cats and we are on the ocean. It’s not impossible.”

“No. Elementals look like animals but they don’t act like them.” Bella gave him a flat look. “Have you ever met a cat?”

“You’re right,” Andre admitted. “It was definitely a real cat of some sort.”

“Then we won’t worry about how they control the thing unless we learn something new,” Ragi said. “We all saw it turn invisible, yes? Well, at least I wasn’t hallucinating that part. Unfortunately it leaves us with no way to know it’s coming ahead of time unless by some chance it smells bad. I don’t suppose you noticed anything like that, Andre?”

“Sorry, smell was the last thing on my mind.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have helped us that much anyways. The air is very still tonight.” Ragi nodded towards the door. “Bella? Would you do the honors?”

She did, rapping a quick pattern of knocks on the door before yanking it open and motioning them through. Once again she clung to the door, holding it open while Andre and Ragi hustled past her. Then she moved through herself and closed it with a firm but painfully loud thump.

Andre gritted his teeth and conjured a ladder. It felt much harder this time compared to the last, like he was starting to run out of something essential to the process. Never in his life had he conjured so much in one day. He wasn’t sure how much more he might be able to make before his Gift failed him entirely.

At least while he was bracing the bottom of the ladder so Bella and Ragi could climb up he got a moment to catch his breath before making his own ascent. Bella went first and Ragi passed her their short spears and his crankbow before joining her. Once Ragi was firmly on the roof Andre began his own climb, the other two holding the top of the ladder in place as he did. Ragi apparently thought he wasn’t moving fast enough because the older man grabbed him under the arms as soon as he was able, pulling Andre up onto the roof with little effort. He felt a twinge in his side as the other man lifted him.

Andre let the ladder vanish as they hustled across the roof, stooped nearly double, and down into the prison tower. It was a short trip down the stairs to the locked doorway on the floor below. Ragi got there first, grabbed the knob and gave it a vicious twist. There was a metallic snapping sound and the door came open, a bit of the door’s latch tumbling out as it did so. Ragi had broken it, though Andre couldn’t guess how.

Ragi rushed in, one hand on the hilt of his sword, but there was no one on the other side other than Charissa, who jumped up and ran over to him as soon as she realized who it was. It was a touching reunion but Andre didn’t pay much attention to it. The room where the Magistrate had kept her was more comfortable than Sophia’s cell by quite a bit. There was a bed on one side, a small table with an oil lamp on it and a chair with a cushion for sitting near an open window.

The chair seemed to draw Andre in with some otherworldly power and he found himself collapsing on top of it, exhaustion overwhelming him. Once there he realized he was very uncomfortable. Every few seconds he would shift position, trying to pay attention to what the others were saying but unable to focus. Instead, he found himself yoyoing between dozing off and wiggling in discomfort.

“Ah, he’s so pale!” Charissa said, her voice breaking through the fog filling his head. A cool hand pressed against his forehead. “And he’s bleeding! What happened to him?”

“A goblin cat got him by the shoulder but it didn’t look like that broke the skin,” Ragi said. “Besides, that’s on the wrong side. Maybe it swiped him with its claws.”

Andre jerked upright, fully aware once more, as something prodded his side and sent a burning bolt of pain running up and down it. “Careful!”

“Looks like a light scratch.” Charissa pulled the sheet off her bed and the knife from her husband’s belt, quickly slicing the fabric into strips. “We’ll take care of that, dear. Go find Sophia and bring her here, we should probably leave once this is handled.”

“Right.” Ragi propped his crankbow against the wall and turned to Bella, drumming a pattern on the stone not that different from the one she used on doors. “If someone comes through the door without this signal, loose that bolt into them.”

She nodded understanding. As Ragi started to leave Andre said, “She’s on the next floor down. Last cell in the hall.”

Ragi nodded. “Is the door locked?”

“Just a bar across it.”

“Then I’ll only be a minute.”

Andre wasn’t sure how long he was actually gone but it must have been more than one minute because by the time he got back with Sophia the other two women had stripped off his tunic, applied a compress dampened with a bit of wine to his scratch and bound it in place with strips of cloth. He was in the process of wriggling into a new, black tunic when Ragi got back. Sophia swept in behind him and hugged her mother fiercely.

“We’re all here,” Ragi announced. “Andre, are you ready to move?”

He didn’t feel ready to move but he knew if they stayed it was only a matter of time before Captain Phillipe came to check on Charissa again. So he struggled to his feet and said, “Of course.”

Charissa pushed him back into the chair with one hand, saying, “Of course not. You’re going to pass out on the stairs. When was the last time you ate anything?”

“Breakfast.”

She took a plate of half eaten chicken off the table and shoved it into his hands then poured some more wine into a wooden cup. Andre wolfed the meat down in a few bites. It was cold but also one of the most delicious things he had ever tasted. He emptied the cup of wine when it was offered to him then belched when it was all gone.

Once he was done Ragi gave him a critical once over. Frowning, he said, “Raise your right arm as high over your head as you can without pulling your wound.”

Andre did as instructed but barely got his hand over his head before wincing in pain.

“Why is this an issue?” Sophia asked. “Can’t we just head back to the walls and take the door there back underhill?”

Bella shook her head. “The Queen Below wasn’t happy that I brought Andre with me on my last trip and she closed the door there to me for a year and a day. Even if she hadn’t, I’m not sure she’d let Andre leave a second time.”

“Which means we need to get out of here under our own power,” Ragi said. “I don’t suppose you ladies saw anything that would help us get out when they brought you to the keep?”

“We were thrown in a covered wagon,” Charissa said. “We didn’t see much until we arrived in the main courtyard and from there they brought us straight here. I haven’t left this cell since.”

Ragi glanced at his daughter. “Sophia?”

“The same.”

“The keep has a secret canal that leads out to sea,” Andre said. “The Fair Folk let me out from underhill there.”

“A bolt hole, is it?” Ragi rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Splendid. They probably keep some kind of boat there for emergency escapes, as well. The Magistrate’s insurance policy will play in our favor today.”

“Uh…” Andre shifted uncomfortably on his chair. “There was a rowboat at the docks but there isn’t anymore.”

“What happened to it?”

“The guards used it to row some blind man out to sea. I overheard him telling the guards they planned to move Charissa elsewhere using the channel to row her out to a ship at sea so I burnt the docks. So they couldn’t have brought it back.”

“That was shortsighted.” Ragi’s words were harsh but his tone was gentle. “However, I’m not sure I would have done any different given the circumstances, especially with the Blind Man in play. By all accounts he’s a ruthless character. And given our situation it still might be the best way for us to get out of the keep.”

“What about the door?” Sophia asked, glancing at the entrance behind them. “Is there anywhere you could take it, Bella?”

“No. I think the planks it’s made of are a mix of different kinds of wood or something like that, plus the iron bands are held in place by a mix of steel and bronze nails. There’s no door remotely like it anywhere close enough to matter.”

“I’ve never heard of the Gift of Doors,” Andre said. “How can this whole keep have doors that she can’t use?”

“It’s not as rare as you might think,” Bella said. “There’s been one of us every few generations of the Vinoverdes. I know the Doomsman for the King of Dawn is one as well, he taught me how to control my Gift when I was young. There’s probably a half a dozen others scattered around the country but we don’t speak about it much. Even if you settle for something as simple as nailing a carving to a door it’s impossible to defend every door in a city against the Gift. There’s a great deal of sabotage you can do with nothing more than normal doors.”

A thought occurred to Andre. “What if you had two identical doors, made to be identical to each other and totally different from others?”

She met his gaze evenly. “Then they would be very easy to join together with the Gift.”

“Even if one of them was moving around?”

“Yes, Andre,” Ragi said. “That’s why all we need to do to get out of the city is reach the ship the Prince sent to meet us and have Bella open the door to the captain’s cabin.”

“I see.”

“We can’t do that until we get out of the keep,” Charissa pointed out.

“We can use the barrels.” Everyone in the room stared at him and Andre hastened to add, “The entrance to the bolthole is in the keep’s wine cellar. If we dump the wine from a few and lash them together we can make a raft. A bad one, but it will work.”

After two seconds of consideration Ragi nodded. “It doesn’t have to take us far, just to one of the canals or a beach nearby. So long as we can make landfall inside the city we’ll be fine. Take us to this wine cellar, Andre.”

They left Charissa’s cell and started down the stairs. Just as they reached the entrance to the hallway where Sophia had been kept the door at the base of the tower slammed open. Ragi hesitated, then waved them upwards again. “Back to the roof,” he whispered. “We’ll find another way down.”

“What about the goblin cat?” Bella whispered back.

“Guards!” Phillipe’s voice echoed through the tower like thunder. “Check on those prisoners!”

Ragi scowled. “Believe me, the cat is less dangerous. Go!”