The Mail Room

Chapter 15

The handle turned.

I stood there with my thumb still wet from scraping paint and my heart going in my throat, because I'd spent an hour telling myself it would be locked.

It wasn't locked. It was just painted shut.

The door gave with a sound like a scab coming off.

Dust. That was the first thing. A wall of it, dry and gray, and I turned my face into my shoulder and waited for it to settle.

The room was small. Nine feet by nine, maybe. No window. A single bulb hanging from a cord, and when I pulled the cord the light came on yellow and old.

It was a mail room.

Pigeonholes ran along one whole wall, floor to ceiling, each one with a little brass label under it. SILVER CREEK. RIDGE. HOLLOW. NORTH POST. COURIER. Some of the labels were so old the ink had gone brown.

Under the pigeonholes was a table. On the table was a bundle tied up with string.

I untied it.

Letters. Six of them, all in the same cheap envelopes, all going out. I flipped through them — Mill & Sons, Feed and Grain. The Ridge Post Office. Mrs. Alma Reed. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then I got to the fifth one and my hands stopped working.

Kate Vance. Silver Creek.

Same handwriting as the number on my envelope. Small. Neat. Pencil on the flap.

I turned it over.

It was sealed with wax. Not fancy wax, just the cheap red kind you buy in a stick, and the seal on it was a thumbprint. Somebody had pressed their thumb into it while it was still wet instead of using a stamp.

I stood there holding another person's letter in a mail room that had been painted over.

Open it, I thought. You already burned one letter today. What's one more.

I opened it.

---

K—

The Council sits on the fourteenth. Three days out from when you get this. She's still in the east tower but he moved her down to the west stair two nights ago. Don't ask me how I know that. It cost me.

Here's the thing you need to hear. If she's alive when that Council sits, he's going to name her. There's paperwork being drawn up right now in the steward's office and I've seen the bottom of the page.

If he names her, it's done. She's untouchable. You can forget the whole thing.

Karl says he can put a man on the ridge road before the fourteenth. Three miles out, past the mill, where the trees come right up to the shoulder. It has to look like she ran. A girl with no wolf and no pack out on that road at night, nobody's going to ask a single question. They'll say she was scared and she bolted and the rogues got her and that's the end of it.

Tell Karl it has to be before the fourteenth. Not on. Before.

Tell him the King doesn't sleep. Tell him there's a guard on the east stair now, and a different one on the west, and one of them goes off at midnight for a smoke and comes back at twelve-twenty and that's twenty minutes of nothing.

I'm not doing this because I hate her. I'm doing it because a cursed man with a dead bloodline gets no heirs and this valley needs an Alpha who can shift.

Don't write me back here again. Use the other address.

Burn this.

There was no signature.

I read it twice. Then I folded it up and put it in my apron pocket, and I stood in the middle of that little dusty room with my hands flat on the table.

Three miles out, past the mill, where the trees come right up to the shoulder.

I knew that spot. I'd walked that road to school for eleven years. There was a bend right where the trees closed in and you couldn't see twenty feet in either direction.

Twenty minutes of nothing on the west stair.

Somebody in this castle knew which guard took a smoke break and when he came back.

I was breathing funny. I made myself stop.

The light flickered.

Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened.

I went still.

Footsteps. Not heels. Soft shoes on stone, quick, and they were coming toward me.

I looked around the room. There was nowhere. No closet, no second door, no space behind anything except the pigeonholes and a shelf of old mail sacks.

I grabbed the light cord and killed it. The room went black.

I got down behind the table.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

A long pause. Then a hand on the door, and the door opened, and yellow hall light spilled in across the floor and up the table leg and I pressed myself against the wall and put my hand over my mouth.

A woman. I could hear her breathing. She came in and she didn't turn the light on and she didn't fumble for anything, which meant she knew this room in the dark.

She went to the pigeonholes.

Paper. A rustle. Then another rustle. Then a small sound of something being pulled out and folded.

Then she came back across the room. She stopped at the table.

Right above my head, she stopped.

I could hear her breathing. I could smell her — soap and clean cotton and something under it, something sweet, like the inside of a bakery.

She stood there for four seconds.

Then she said, quietly, to nobody at all:

"You weren't supposed to find this yet."

And she walked out.

The door pulled shut. Her footsteps went down the corridor, quick, and then a door closed somewhere far off, and it was just me and the dark and my own blood in my ears.

I stayed behind that table for a long time. Long enough that my knees went numb and my feet went to sleep.

Then I got up and pulled the light cord and looked at the pigeonholes.

The bundle was still on the table. The letter to Kate was still in my pocket. Two of the pigeonholes were now empty.

I went back to the door and tried the handle and it turned, and I got out into the corridor, and then I noticed my hands.

There was dust on them. Gray dust from the table. And on my right hand, across the knuckles, there was something else.

White powder. Fine. Chalky.

I looked down at the floor of the corridor.

There was a line of it, faint, going back down the hallway toward the east stair.

I hadn't walked that way yet.

I bent down and touched it and rubbed it between my fingers and it was flour.

I put my hand in my apron pocket and felt the folded letter there, and I stood up straight.

Somebody in this castle had just walked into a painted-shut room and taken something out of it and told me — told me, out loud, in the dark — that I'd found it too early.

That meant it wasn't over. That meant there was a later.

I went back to the west corridor and picked up my bucket and poured the water out in the sluice and carried the bucket back to the kitchen and put it away.

Mrs. Crane looked up from the onions.

"You're done early."

"Yeah."

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Not yet." I wiped my hands on my apron. "Hey. The room at the end of the west corridor. One-oh-four. Who's got a key to that?"

She put the knife down.

"Nobody's got a key to that," she said. "It's been painted shut since before I got here."

"Somebody's got a key."

"Then somebody's got a key I don't know about." She picked the knife back up. "Which is a problem, because I'm the one who's supposed to have all of them."

I looked at her for a second.

"Mrs. Crane. Who does the flour order?"

She blinked at me.

"What?"

"The flour. For the kitchens. Who orders it and who brings it up from the store room?"

"Nobody brings it up. It comes in on the ridge cart and gets stacked in the dry store and the girls carry it up in sacks." She wiped her hands on her apron. "Why?"

"Who carries it up?"

"Whoever's on the list."

"Can I see the list?"

She looked at me the way she had on the first day.

"You want to see the flour list."

"I want to see the flour list."

She reached up over the door and pulled down a clipboard and held it out.

I took it. Ran my finger down the names.

Thursday. Friday. Saturday.

D. Ash.

Chapter 15 Ends