Ch11: Until They Happen

Vibe: Run — Hozier | Get Out Alive — Three Days Grace

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Oswin did not return at once. He had no right to.

The annex stood apart from the main body of the palace — across the courtyard, behind a hedge once trimmed into a perfect line, now grown crooked and thick, as if it had chosen to wall itself off. The building was small, two storeys, its windows facing west, toward the long, late sunsets. Outside: render peeling away, weeds pushing up through the foundation, plaster cracked in long stripes like skin after a long illness. But the doors were new. Not aged to match the rest — plain fresh wood, and a lock that still caught the light.

Oswin noticed it at once.

He did not go in through the main entrance. He circled the building slowly, hands loose at his sides. A fresh scratch caught the light on one of the ground-floor windowsills — small, almost nothing. He stopped and ran a finger over it. The metal was clean, but beneath it an older coat of paint had chipped, and the chip ran from below. No one had opened that window for air. Someone had used it to leave. Or to check whether the courtyard was empty first.

He withdrew into the shadow of the hedge and waited.

People still drifted nearby — extra eyes, extra ears. The talk started later, once the worst of the tension had passed, once those who understood nothing began explaining things to those who understood even less.

"...they say the attacker came in from the back..."

"...no, he was already inside..."

"...they found the head housekeeper by the kitchens..."

Oswin did not move, folded into the shrubs.

"...and the prince's nurse was here too..."

"...she was bringing the midday meal..."

"...he comes here often..."

"Who?"

"...the Crown Prince."

"...but why here?..."

Oswin shifted his weight, barely, onto the other foot.

"...they say he holds meetings here..."

"With whom?"

"...you think they'd tell us?"

Quiet laughter. Nervous — the kind born of discomfort, and of a fear better left unexamined by subjects who knew their place.

Oswin dissolved back into the dark without a sound.

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He returned deep in the night.

The annex door had been left unlocked, not quite closed — the heavy bolt drawn back but not seated. As if whoever left last had been in too great a hurry to think the lock worth the trouble. Or had wanted it left easy to return to.

Inside, the dark was total. Oswin did not strike a flame or light a candle. He moved slowly, one palm held at hip height — not near a weapon, only to feel the walls and place himself in the space.

Dust. But wrong. Not the even layer that settles over years and never shifts. This dust had been disturbed, and recently. Even in the dark, the floor showed clear tracks: faint, worn paths cut by feet that had walked them for years.

A table. A chair. Empty.

A single plate, never cleared. Oswin stopped beside it. He studied it a long while, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. Only one place setting. Not for a meeting. Not for a conversation. For someone who ate here — not with anyone else, but alone.

He moved further. The wall looked like any other wall — nothing marked it. But the space did not match the building's outer dimensions. Oswin ran his palm slowly over the dry plaster to the right of the hearth until his fingers caught a flaw too small to see, barely there at all. He pressed.

Silence first, then a low, heavy scrape in the half-dark — the sound of dense wood sliding against stone worn smooth over centuries.

The panel shifted.

Darkness poured out of it. Deeper and denser than the shadows already in the room, it carried the particular subterranean chill. Not merely the absence of light — a physical presence, stagnant air pressing outward. Damp. Old, wet stone. And beneath it, at the very edge of perception, the smell of iron.

Oswin did not step through at once. He stood at the threshold and listened. Nothing living.

Then he began his descent.

He counted the stairs going down. One. Two. Three... Seven... Twelve. Too deep for an ordinary 'hidden room'. This was not a cellar. This was a true dungeon — an underground level that existed on no architectural drawing of the annex.

At the bottom: empty.

But the stone floor had been worn smooth — not from a recent struggle, not from one or two visits. From time. From the same short path walked day after day. Someone had lived here. Not merely hidden for a few days — stayed, for months, if not years. And whoever brought the meal down here had walked these stairs. Regularly.

In the corner, a heavy iron hook was driven fast into the stonework. Nothing hung from it now. But the stone around it had been rubbed smooth — worn by hands that had touched it again and again.

Oswin exhaled slowly, heavily.

"Got it."

He climbed back up as silently as he had come down. He slid the panel back into place. He walked out into the night.

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He reached the ducal estate near dawn.

No one noticed. Or pretended not to — within these walls, the two often amounted to the same thing.

The Duke was already waiting. The study sat in half-dark; Christopher never cared for burning many candles for conversations no servant needed to remember. The light through the tall window fell narrow and cold. Oswin did not bow.

"The annex," he said, without preamble. "There is a dungeon beneath it. Someone was kept there. It stands empty now."

"For a short time."

Oswin paused briefly.

"For a long time."

The head of the Order let his gaze drift toward the thin morning light at the window. The Duke exhaled slowly, heavily — the breath of a man whose suspicions had just been confirmed, despite every desperate hope of being wrong.

"The Prince?"

Oswin did not answer directly.

"He came there. Regularly."

The silence in the study grew heavier still. The particular weight that settles once the words have been said, but their consequences have not yet found the ground.

"And that meal..."

The Duke tilted his head slightly, urging him on.

"...was not for a secret meeting," Oswin finished. "It was for whoever was kept below."

The Duke said nothing further. It was enough.

Oswin turned and left. Alan was already waiting in the corridor, one shoulder against the wall, his face arranged into indifference, playing at a man who had simply been passing and happened to stop.

"Well?"

Oswin did not answer at once. He studied him carefully.

"He was not searching for her. He knew where she was."

Alan's brow drew down, working through it.

"And now?"

Oswin turned his gaze to the window, toward the forest beginning far past the tops of the garden trees. The distance hid it from view, but its presence pressed against the senses regardless — a dark mass along the very edge of the horizon.

"Now — he suspects. Did they try to go in again?"

"Yes."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. They lose themselves. The moment they cross the boundary, they lose all bearing and cannot push in any farther."

Oswin gave a small nod.

"Then she managed it."

Alan's head snapped up, his stare fixed on him.

"You honestly believe she is... in there? Among the monsters?"

"Otherwise they would have found her already."

There was no certainty in the words — only the absence of any other explanation. Oswin knew that well: the absence of alternatives was not the same thing as the truth.

Alan let out a breath.

"That is impossible."

Oswin turned his gaze to him, calm.

"Many things are. Until they happen."

Somewhere beyond the estate's windows, the morning went on in its ordinary, unhurried course. Servants moved briskly back and forth, dishes clattered in the kitchen, someone laughed in the rear courtyard — loud, unguarded, for no particular reason at all. As if the world had stayed exactly as it was. As if the Crown Prince were not, at this very moment, combing the thickets with an armed company. As if there were no dungeon beneath an abandoned annex, plainly built within the past year.

As though all of it... was simply how things were meant to be.

Alan's jaw tightened.

"He will not stop."

The corner of Oswin's mouth lifted, barely.

"Certainly not."

"And his next move will not be here." Alan frowned. "Do you think—"

Oswin cut him off before he could finish the thought.

"If he cannot find her, he will make her to come out."

Alan fell silent. He looked at Oswin, and something in his eyes made clear that asking 'how' now would only bring an answer he did not want.

Oswin added nothing more.

And somewhere far off, the forest stayed quiet, guarding what they were so desperately trying to find.