“I wouldn’t chance it. There are owls out there.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t like the snow anyway, Lucky.” She placed the small kitten on the couch, but he promptly jumped off and skittered away into the corridor.
“He’s been doing a lot of exploring inside,” Eliot said.
“He hasn’t been bothering you, has he?” Brynn said.
Eliot shook his head, thinking of the kitten clawing his ankles while he tried to work on his math, then meowing for more food as soon as he had finished eating the leftover bits of turkey Eliot had given him.
“Not at all,” he said.
They walked out through the gardens in the back of the estate. Eliot had been through the paths so many times before that he could have walked through them blindly, but Brynn stopped every few feet to examine the different plants that had frosted over in the winter. She found a spider’s web sagging with the weight of frozen dewdrops, the spider nowhere to be found. With every turn of the path came a new treasure for Brynn to muse over, and Eliot soon found himself engrossed in the minutiae of the walk, seeing the trail in a way he hadn’t seen it in a long, long time. With someone else to see Budapest for him, he was beginning again to fall in love with his homeland.
“Come,” he told Brynn, once they reached a fork in the path where the snowdrifts rose before them. “I want to show you something.” He clambered up the side of one snowdrift, feeling utterly awkward and ill-equipped for such exertions. But when he got over the snowbank and squeezed through the rock passage, he found the spot just as he had left it. A bed of rocks overlooked the pool of a small stream, now frozen over. The pine branches overhead drooped with a thousand tiny icicles off of its needles. Moss partially covered the rocks, creeping green and alive even under the frost, and he brushed the snow aside to sit down.
“This is beautiful,” Brynn said. She stood beside him, looking down into the frozen pool. Under the glassy surface, dark waters still roiled, fed by an underground river. Eliot felt his heart swell with the love of a place that can only come about through a long and intimate familiarity. He knew this bank better than he knew his bedroom.
“I used to come here all the time when I was a child.”
“You grew up here? In a castle?”
Eliot paused. He didn’t know how much to tell.
“It’s my family’s.”
“Did you ever have to defend the castle from marauding hordes?” Brynn grinned, and Eliot breathed a sigh of relief that she had not not pushed further back.
“Of course,” he said. “We just poured boiling hot oil on their heads, though.”
“No archers from the roof? Or a moat?”
“This is the only moat on the property,” Eliot said, nodding to the small stream.
“Aw,” Brynn said. “What about a torture chamber in the basement?”
“No torture devices in our basement, at least none that I knew about. We do have the baths, though.”
“Baths?”
Eliot pressed his lips together. He should not have mentioned them.
“They’re just bathing rooms, fed by hot springs that run underground.”
“No way! Like a hot tub?”
“Yes, like that.”
“How neat! I’d love to see them!” Brynn caught his eye and blushed, her skin turning a sweet pink color even in the cold. He thanked heaven inwardly that she had been the one to commit the fatal blunder and not him, but it was his fault for bringing the idea of the baths up in the first place. He turned away mercifully to stare at a branch heavy with the weight of snow.
“And there is an oubliette,” Eliot said, trying hastily to change the subject. “I suppose that can be called torture.”
“An oubliette?”
“It’s a hatch in the floor that opens up into a room underneath,” Eliot said. “Where you would keep prisoners, if you had any.”
“Like a dungeon?”
“Yep.”
“Then why don’t they just call it a dungeon?”
Brynn’s nose shone with a speckling of snowflake and Eliot had to restrain himself from wiping it off with his thumb.
“It’s from the French oublier—to forget. It’s a place you put people to forget about them. An oubliette doesn’t have any other doors or windows except for the one hatch.”
“So you could only get out if someone lowered a rope or ladder or something?”
“Only if you’re lucky; if someone remembered you.”
Brynn shivered and stood up. A jackrabbit, startled by the motion, jumped out of the low bank on the other side of the stream and darted over the snowdrift. They watched the snowflakes that had been kicked up from the jackrabbit fall slowly to the ground.