Page 23 of Gilded

Chapter 10

Serilda had barely grasped the meaning of the king’s words before the coachman had taken hold of her elbow and was dragging her from the dining hall.

“Wait! The dungeons?” she cried. “He can’t mean that!”

“Can’t he? His Darkness does not favor mercy,” said the ghost, his grip never loosening. He dragged her down a narrow corridor, then paused at a doorway to a steep staircase. He peered at her. “Will you walk on your own, or must I drag you the entire way? I warn you, these stairs can be treacherous.”

Serilda sagged, staring down the stairwell that spiraled fast from view. Her mind was spinning from everything the Erlking had said. Her head. Her father’s. A test. The dungeons.

She swayed, and might have fallen if the ghost’s grip hadn’t tightened on her arm.

“I can walk,” she whispered.

“Very convincing,” said the coachman, though he did release her. Taking a torch from a bracket beside the door, he headed into the stairwell.

Serilda hesitated, glancing back down the corridor. She felt confident she could retrace her steps back through the keep, and there was no one else in sight. Was there any hope of escaping?

“Do not forget who this castle belongs to,” said the ghost. “If you run, he will only further relish the chase.”

Swallowing hard, Serilda turned back. Dread settled like a stone in her stomach, but when the ghost started down the steps, she followed. She kept one hand on the wall for balance on the steep, narrow stairs, feeling dizzy as they descended.

Down some more.

And down again.

They must be underground now, somewhere amid the ancient foundations of the castle. Perhaps even beneath the surface of the lake.

They reached the bottom level and tromped through an open set of barred gates. Serilda shuddered to see a row of heavy wooden doors lining the wall to her right, each one reinforced with iron.

Cell doors. Serilda craned her neck to peer through the slitted windows, catching glimpses of manacles and chains hung from the ceiling, though she could not see enough to know whether any prisoners were dangling from them. She tried not to wonder if that would be her fate. She heard no moans, no crying, not the sounds she would expect to hear from tortured and starving prisoners. Perhaps these cells were empty. Or perhaps the prisoners were long dead. The only “prisoners” she’d ever heard of the Erlking taking were the children he’d once gifted to Perchta, though they wouldn’t have been kept in the dungeons. Oh, and the lost souls that followed the hunt on its chaotic rides, though they were more often left for dead by the roadside, not spirited away to his castle.

Never had she heard rumors of the Erlking keeping humans locked up in a dungeon.

But then, perhaps there were no rumors because no one ever lived to tell them.

“Stop it,” she whispered harshly to herself.

The coachman glanced back at her.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “Not you.”

A small critter caught her eye then, darting along the corridor wall before scurrying into a small hole in the mortar. A rat.

Lovely.

Then—something strange. A new scent collecting around her. Something sweet and familiar and entirely unexpected in the musty air.

“Here.” The ghost paused and gestured to a cell door that had been left open.

Serilda hesitated. This was it, then. She was to be a prisoner of the Erlking, locked in a dank, horrible cell. Left to starve and rot away into nothing. Or at least, trapped until morning, when she would have her head lopped off and hung up in the dining hall. She wondered if she would become a ghost herself, haunting these cold, dim corridors. Perhaps that was what the king wanted. Another servant for his dead

retinue.

She looked at the phantom with the chisel in his eye. Could she fight him? Push him into the cell and lock the door, then hide somewhere until she found a chance to escape?

Returning her look, the ghost slowly smiled. “I’m already dead.”

“I wasn’t thinking about killing you.”