A long slow time passed then. I measured it in the small ways I could. The torch Regal had left burned out. The guard changed. Someone came and put food and water through my door. I had not asked for it. I wondered if that meant a very long time had passed since I had last eaten. The guard changed again. These were a chatty pair, a man and a woman. But they spoke in low voices, and all I heard were the murmurs, and the laughter. Some sort of a ribald flirtation between the two, I surmised. Interrupted by someone’s arrival.
The friendly chatter suddenly ceased. Low murmurs, in a very respectful tone. My stomach roiled cold inside me. Quietly I came to my feet, crept to my door. I peered through the doors toward the guards’ station.
He came like a shadow down the hall. Silently. Not furtive. He was so unobtrusive, he did not need to worry about being furtive. This was Skill as I had never seen it used before. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck hackle when Will stopped outside the door and looked in at me. He did not speak and I dared not. Even looking at him was giving him too much of an opening to myself. Yet I feared to look away. The Skill shimmered around him like an aura of awareness. I coiled deep inside myself, tighter and tighter, pulling back everything I felt or thought, slamming my walls up as swiftly as I could, but knowing, somehow, that even those walls told him much about me. Even my defenses were a way for this one to read me. Even as my mouth and throat went dry with fear, a question hovered. Where had he been? What had been so important to Regal that he had set Will upon it rather than using him to secure the crown?