Page 3 of To Touch A Silent Fury
“You should leave,” I said, rubbing my cold hands together. “Go out the back way. It’s me they’re after.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Seth said stubbornly. “If they find you, I can defend you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “With your librarian skills?”
Seth folded his arms. His height was the only thing remotely intimidating about him.
“Fine. We’re wasting time.” I took off once more, running to the central stairway.
When I had arrived on Eavenfold island eight and a half years ago, shortly after my eleventh birthday, this wing had been a hum of constant activity. The Women’s Wing, they called it, then. Washer women, cooks, maids, and more came from all over the mainland to work here and serve the Brothers.
Now it lay in disuse, my room the only one with a hint of life left. But I wouldn’t take us there now.
As much as the boys hated coming into this wing, they hated me more, and my bedroom in the deserted dormitory was the first place they’d look. We needed to find some place worse, some place the boys would not want to go.
At the top of the stairs, I turned right, into the part of the fortress destroyed by dragonfire eight years ago. Here, the wing changed from an intentional structure to a mess of mangled metal, melted stone, and broken roofs. My route took us down the remnants of a dusty corridor covered in broken glass, the shattered panes rebreaking under our feet. I tried to keep off the glass where possible, knowing the boys would be listening out for us, but the sheer destruction was hard to avoid.
Just before the large crater in the floor was the fifth door. It was closed, even though I always left it ajar. I pushed the door open, and it didn’t creak. Seth followed me in.
The chamber was remarkable, mostly because it was the only room that hadn’t been touched in the fire. Before Skirmtold’s surprise visit, its sole inhabitant had been a young girl from the Soundlands named Sollie.
There were only a few things known about Sollie.
She was the daughter of a washer woman and had come with her mother to Eavenfold when she was an infant. She was prone to night-walking and strange fits that disquieted the other children. In her seventh year, they moved her out of the dormitory below and into this room. After the fire, her body was never found.
The rumours were something else entirely: whispered, repeated, and warped over time by the unbound boys of Eavenfold.
But I had known Sollie. Not well, and only for a few weeks in pockets of time while we both occupied the same wing. She was just a girl. A few years younger than me, with a quiet way and a sweet tooth. Her troubles were nothing more than that; hers alone, and a cause of her distress.
I stared around the room, taking in the beige single bed carved from heavy wood, still made perfectly under a thick layer of dust. Those brave enough to enter didn’tdare touch Sollie’s bed. The manacles above it, however, shone from the brushes of many oily fingers.
On the small vanity, Sollie’s music box lay open, its song long stopped. I stepped over to it and closed it once more. I recalled winding its mechanism for her in those last days, when she had been suffering one of her tempests. It had stopped playing back to me a few years ago.
“What now?” Seth asked, closing the door softly behind him with a shiver. “We just stand here until the ferry comes at dawn?”
I shook my head. “They’ll check here. We shouldn’t be in the open. Let’s hide in the dresser.”
The wooden dresser in the back left corner was huge, big enough for both of us to squat in.
Seth swallowed. “You want to get into her dresser?”
“Sollie is dead. It’s not her dresser anymore. It's just a piece of furniture, filled with moth-bitten clothes.”
Seth stared at it, and rolled his shoulders. “Fine.”
“If Harum has any sense, he’ll want off this island more than he wants to kill me. We only need to hide long enough for them to get bored and pick an easier target.”
I pulled my cloak off, and knelt down. In big swipes, I dusted the floor beneath our feet with the fabric.
“What are you doing now?”
I looked up at him and blew a long curl of white hair out of my face. “Dusting the floor. Unless you want the only boot prints in the room to lead straight to the dresser.”
Seth pulled his cloak off as a piece of glass cracked in the hallway. We both froze, looking at each other. Without a word, we finished up the dusting and climbed into the dresser. I winced at the creak of the wood as we settled ourselves amongst off-white shifts andfolded trousers.
A voice shouted in the corridor as Seth pulled the door closed with a small click.
“There ain’t nobody here, Harum.”
