The ghost tiger has never been seen to drink. Trappers have waited by the water holes for weeks. They have found only tracks that go down to the water and do not come up again.

Surain's Bestiarum, third edition

Chapter 4

The Wall That Opened

The castle was bigger than anywhere I had ever been.

The corridor I was standing in stretched away in both directions and disappeared into the gloom, and there were no signs, no arrows, none of the small reassuring markers an ordinary building has to tell you where you are. There was only stone and paintings and torches burning with the same bluish glow as in the Fonté Hall, and doors that all looked alike.

I started walking. I chose left, because that direction felt just as right as the other, which is to say that it was completely random. The corridor turned and grew narrower, and then wider again, and then there was a staircase leading down, and I took it, and then there was a new corridor, and it looked like the last one, and I had no idea whether I had got closer to the First-Year Room or further away.

The paintings followed me. Not with their eyes. With their scent. I walked past an elderly woman in a dark blue robe, and lavender and ink came off the canvas so clearly that I turned my head after it, the way you turn your head after someone who passes you in the street. She was looking out over my shoulder with painted eyes. I was the one staring.

I stopped in the middle of the corridor and leant against the wall. My stomach was rumbling, and I felt the hunger and the tiredness in my legs and the small, cold realisation that came with them: nobody was looking for me. Ahra didn't know where I was. Haltora had delivered me and left. Headmaster Edrin had sent me down to a room he hadn't told me the way to. And I wasn't even sure I would be able to find his door again, or that it would be the same door if I did.

I was lost in a castle full of people, and none of them knew I was there.

It wasn't new. It was just a new version of something I had known my whole life.

I don't know how long I walked. It felt like hours, but it was probably less. The corridors changed character, as if the castle couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to be. Some were wide and light, with rugs on the stone floor and windows looking out over the river, where the last of the light was going. Others were narrow and cold and smelt of damp and old stone. I tried to remember the turns I took, but after the third or fourth I gave up.

And then there was someone at the end of the corridor.

A figure. Tall, fair hair. He was standing with his back to me, looking at something I couldn't see, and he wasn't moving. I hurried towards him. My footsteps echoed off the stone, and when there were ten metres between us, he half turned round.

Green eyes. Young, but not as young as mine. Eyes older than a student's, in a face that was hard and alert and already turned towards the next thing.

"Hi," I said. "Wait, I'm..."

He was gone.

Not walked off. Not run. Just gone. Where he had been standing there was empty air and grey stone, and there were no doors nearby, and no turnings, and nowhere to disappear to. All that was left was a faint scent that hung in the air for a moment and then was gone. Something dry and dark, like bark and ink.

"Great," I said to the empty corridor.

Nobody answered.

I went over to the place where he had been standing. The wall looked like all the other walls. Grey stone, damp in the joints, with the faint smell of a cellar. I leant against it out of sheer exhaustion, and when my shoulder hit the stone, I felt one of them give. Not much. Just a centimetre. A small click, as if something inside the wall had responded.

The wall opened.

It slid aside, silently and slowly, as if it had been built to do exactly that, and behind it was a staircase leading down into the dark. Cold air rose from the opening and struck my face like a hand.

I hadn't been looking for it. I had just leant against the wrong wall at the right moment.

That was all it took.

I went down.

The staircase was narrow and steep, and the only light came from small bluish stones set into the wall at intervals of a metre and a half. It smelt of old stone and dust, and the steps were hollowed in the middle, worn down by feet I couldn't imagine. Somewhere far ahead of me there was a faint sound of voices.

I followed the sound. After five minutes I came to a door with two small holes at eye level. I bent down and looked through.

A low room with windows set so far down that the river was right outside, black and glistening in the dark. Soft furniture that didn't match. A fireplace where an ordinary fire was burning, yellow and crackling. And lots of students my age sitting about talking and playing games and laughing, and in the middle of them stood Ahra, looking around nervously as if he were searching for someone.

Me. He was searching for me.

Something in my chest moved a little.

I put my hand on the door handle. It was iron, and cold and smooth. I pressed it down and pushed the door open and stepped inside, and the warmth from the fire and the smell of firewood and wet shoes and lots of people came to meet me. The first person to see me was Ahra.

"Chris!" He reached me in three strides and grabbed my shoulder, as if to make sure I was real. "Where have you been? I've been looking for you for an hour."

There was something in his grip I wasn't used to. Not hard. Not weak. Just there. It was the grip of someone who had actually noticed I was gone, and who was actually relieved that I had come back. I had never had anyone take hold of me like that. Hanne patted my cheek when she walked past. The teachers never touched me. Nobody had ever held on to my shoulder with that message: "You were gone, and it mattered."

"I got lost," I said. It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either. "Third floor." I had no idea which floor it had been, but it sounded like a place. "It's pretty confusing up there."

"Maka says the third floor is the hardest one to find your way around." The relief in his voice was so obvious that it was almost comical. "Come on, we need to go up to the dining hall and get something to eat."

By the door hung a blackboard, and on it someone had written in chalk in big, round letters: River: 109 m. I didn't have time to ask what it meant before Ahra had pulled me out into the corridor. It was only when we were standing out there that I stopped.

"Ahra."

"Yes?"

"I didn't find my way down here by wandering about. I found a secret passage. Up in the corridor I leant against the wall, and it opened, and there was a staircase that led straight here."

Ahra stopped. His eyes went wide. "Secret passages? I've heard about those. They're supposed to be impossible to find."

"I found it completely by accident. And just before I found it, there was someone at the end of the corridor. A tall bloke with fair hair and green eyes. He just vanished, right in front of me."

Something crossed Ahra's face. Not surprise. Something quicker, like a shadow passing over water. It lasted half a second. Then it was gone.

"Weird," he said. "It was probably just an older student. I suppose some of them can teleport."

He said it too quickly. But I was too hungry to think about it.

"Brilliant about the passage, though." He grinned, and it was the grin that reached all the way up to his eyes. "We should find all of them. All the secret passages in the whole school, before we leave this place. Are you in?"

He held out his hand.

I didn't think about it. I took it.

The second our hands met, the stones under us went cold.

It started in my feet and went up through my legs, the way it does when you stand too long in the sea in March. The torches along the corridor flickered, all at once, as if someone had opened a door somewhere, and the air grew heavy and wet and smelt of stones that have lain under water. I tried to pull my hand away, but I couldn't. It wasn't that something was holding it. It was that it didn't want to.

And then came the voice.

It didn't come from anywhere. It came from everywhere, from the floor and the walls and the staircase behind us. It was deep and old and toneless, made of stone and water and something that had existed long before either of us.

"Chris Godrand and Ahra Retonk. You have promised each other to find every way in this house before you leave it. Do you mean it?"

"Yes," said Ahra. His voice was shaking.

"Yes," I said. My voice was shaking too.

"Then the stone bears your word. Whichever of you breaks it will pay with what he has."

Something cold closed round my wrist. It wasn't visible. It was just there, a ring of cold, like a bracelet of wet stone, and I could see from Ahra's face that he felt the same. The voice was gone. The torches burned quietly again. Our hands let go of each other, and we stood in the corridor staring at each other with wide eyes and shaking fingers.

"What..." I began.

"That was a stone oath," said Ahra. His face was white and he was holding his own wrist. "I've only heard about them. My grandmother said the castle does it itself. That it doesn't listen to just anyone. It has to..." He stopped and looked down at his hand. "One of us must have something strong enough that the castle could be bothered to listen."

"Is it dangerous?"

"Only if we break it. Then you pay with Dherak." He lowered his eyes. "My grandmother knew a man who broke a stone oath. He tasted copper for a whole year and couldn't light a candle." He looked at me. "And the ring is supposed to go warm when you're close to a passage nobody has found. Then it's the ring that shows the way. Don't tell anyone. Not anyone at all."

I nodded. The ring round my wrist was still cold. Something had been put into my hand that hadn't been there before.

"Let's go up and eat," said Ahra, in a voice that was trying to sound normal. "I'm starving."

I followed him and said nothing. But inside me there was a new thought that wouldn't go away: one of us had just made a castle listen.

And I was fairly sure it wasn't Ahra.

The dining hall was the biggest room I had seen so far at Déynáir.

It was long and narrow, with windows all along one side, tall windows with small panes, and beyond them lay the river and the last blue light over the water. The ceiling was ordinary, with dark beams. Long tables stood across the hall, and between them older students in aprons were carrying dishes in from the kitchen: fish soup, potatoes in cream sauce, bread that was still steaming, fruit in colours I didn't know the names of. It smelt of dill and butter and smoke from the fireplaces at either end, and the sound of hundreds of voices and the clink of cutlery was like a wall.

"You sit by year," said Ahra. "We're at the bottom."

We found two places at the end of the bottom table. Ahra started filling his plate straight away. The panic of the last hour was already forgotten. I sat down and looked out over the hall. The older students sat in groups, and the new students sat in clusters of those who knew each other from their old schools. Laughter and half-loud conversations crossed the table like threads in a net.

And at the end of our table a girl sat alone.

She had long brown hair and blue eyes and was wearing a red jumper, and she sat looking down at her plate, as if it were the only thing in the room that deserved her attention. Nobody was sitting next to her. Nobody was talking to her. The chair on her left had been pushed out, as if someone had got up and left.

"That's the girl who went into the river first," whispered Ahra, with his mouth half full of potatoes. "The one who was braver than all the rest of us."

"Why is she sitting on her own?"

Ahra shrugged. "No idea."

I picked up my plate and stood up. Ahra looked at me in confusion. I went over to the empty chair next to the girl and sat down.

Once I was sitting, the scent came. All the people I had met in this world smelt of something. Ahra of warm bark and honey. Haltora of iron and night air. But she smelt of salt wind and cold stone and wild roses, the kind of roses that grow on cliffs by the sea where nobody has planted them. It was the first scent that made me forget to breathe for a moment.

She looked up. Her eyes were alert and suspicious and as blue as the river outside.

"Is this seat free?" I said, even though I was already sitting in it. It was a stupid thing to say. But stupid things are sometimes the only honest things, because they say: I know I'm doing something odd, and I'm doing it anyway.

"Apparently," she said. Half a smile, one corner of her mouth, gone again just as quickly. But it had been there. Her voice wasn't unfriendly, but it wasn't friendly either. It was the voice of someone who was used to people sitting down and then leaving again.

"I'm Chris," I said. "Chris Godrand."

The third time. It got easier every time.

"Retia Caritas," she said. Then she looked at me and waited for the rest. "Haven't you heard about me?"

"No," I said. "I haven't heard about anyone. I only got here today."

Something in her face changed. Not a smile. Just a small opening, a door that had been shut for a long time and came open a few centimetres.

"So you're sitting here because you want to, and not because you don't know any better?"

"I'm sitting here because there was a free chair," I said. "And because you went into the river first, and I thought that was pretty brave."

Ahra sat down on her other side with his plate in one hand and the other already busy gesturing. "Hi. I'm Ahra. Can I sit here? There's more room than over there. And Chris is quiet, but that's all right. I talk enough for both of us."

Retia looked at the two of us. She put her fork down and pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her wrists, and for the first time since I had seen her, there was something in her eyes that wasn't suspicious. It wasn't trust. Not yet. But it was the beginning of something that might become it.

"Yes," she said. "You can sit here."

It was only five words. But she said them, and she meant them, and I could feel the difference, the way you feel the water has got a touch warmer before you can say why. I had heard "yes" said a thousand ways in my life. Hanne's "yes" that meant "don't ask me any more, love". The teachers' "yes" that meant "sit down". Retia's "yes" meant: I choose you. For now, at least.

I would take that.

The First-Year Room was almost empty when we got back. The fire in the grate had burned down to embers, and a single boy was asleep in an armchair with a book on his stomach. Ahra showed me up a narrow staircase to the guest dormitory, a long room under the roof with beds in rows down both walls, and I found my bed with my name written on a little plate at the head of it.

Chris Godrand.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and started taking my shoes off. Ahra was already lying on his bed two places away, falling asleep.

"Night," he said. He was lying on his side with his face to the wall, and he pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. The wool jumper lay folded on the chair by his bed. I had given it back to him, and he had put it there, as if it were just waiting for someone to need it again.

"Night," I said.

I kicked my shoes off, pulled my legs up onto the bed and lay on top of the blanket for a moment before I pulled it up over my shoulders. The bed was softer than the one at Fjordly, and the pillows smelt of lavender and salt and a third thing that reminded me of dry grass at the end of summer. The blanket was heavy and warm, and it settled over me as if it knew I was tired, and for the first time in a long time I felt my own body let go. My shoulders sank. My jaw loosened. My hands, which were always clenched around something invisible, slowly opened against the mattress.

I lay for a long time looking up into the dark. Somewhere below the windows the river was running, and I could hear it, faintly, the way I used to lie in bed at Fjordly and hear the fjord without thinking about it.

Hanne in the kitchen window with the knife in one hand. The old woman by the fire. The Headmaster's face and the pain that came and went in it. Haltora's completely black eyes. The dream of the robed figures at the round table. The passage that had opened, not because I was looking, but because I stopped. The ring round my wrist. And Retia's voice saying "You can sit here" as if it were the bravest thing she had said all day.

Somewhere in my chest, deep down under the hunger and the tiredness and the confusion, there was a small warmth that hadn't been there when I woke up that morning.

"Somebody here knows you," I whispered to the dark.

The dark didn't answer.

But it still felt as if it were listening.