The Scythe and the Blade

Chapter Five: The City Walls

A gentle yet worried hand ushered Frankie and Aldrea from the scene. George did not know the way out, but he'd enough sense to go whatever way took them farthest from the spectacle below.

"What... what was that?" asked Frankie, clinging to the arm of her older brother with one hand. Her voice sounded rattled, but she cleared her throat and spoke more confidently. "Is she our sister?"

"I think so," replied George in a softened voice. He didn't usually speak so tenderly to his sister, but she seemed more fragile now. "Though I only remember stories of her."

"But she died," said Aldrea, more in disbelief of her own eyes than in protest of George's statement.

George reverted his attention to Aldrea. "Yes. She died."

The three children walked in silence for a good while, then Frankie took the lead when they reached a fork, followed by many more. The dark entanglement of confusing corridors posed no challenge to Frankie; she knew each wall like the back of her hand.

"How much time do you spend down here, Francesca?" asked Aldrea, well-intentioned, but her question seemed to strike a small nerve in Frankie.

"Frankie," she corrected. "And I don't live down here, if that's what you're asking. It's the one place that connects to every hidden passageway in the castle. You can learn a lot, you know."

"And what do you learn from way down here?" prodded Frankie's older brother.

"I've seen you two ogle at each other from just about every room."

George scoffed and shied away.

Aldrea tasseled her hair and blushed. "He was only helping me get my bearings on the Cardinal," she said in their defense.

Frankie looked back up at Aldrea and grinned. For a moment, she thought she could almost see Aldrea grinning back from behind her shining golden hair.

"Frankie, where are you taking us?" asked George concernedly as Frankie took them along a sharp turn they'd not yet been along.

"The guards are after that..." Frankie hesitated at what to call this necromancer. Man didn't seem quite right, though neither did beast or sorcerer. She was reluctant to admit to his ability of necromancy, either. "Heretic," she concluded. "And while they're after him, those halls we came through will be swamped with guards."

George flashed her a look of disapproval. "We aren't supposed to be down here, are we, Frankie?"

"Did you ever receive a formal invitation to that spectacle?" Frankie paused for that thought to resonate. "Maybe we shouldn't tell the guards where we were."

"I agree with her, George." Aldrea turned to Frankie. "Lead the way."

Nothing about this sat right with George. Regardless of his willingness to admit it, he did agree with his little sister's plan—but they shouldn't have been there to begin with. If Frankie had just listened to their father and avoided the catacombs, the problems beneath their feet would be nothing more than that.

On the other hand, perhaps she was right. He'd be damned to admit it, but perhaps. What was his father's true motive for telling him to avoid the catacombs? "At all costs," his father had told him. "You are to avoid it at all costs, by all accounts. You are never to set foot beneath the floors of this castle, nor to tell anyone of its existence."

Such a serious proclamation from a not-so-serious man had stricken George as more than peculiar. Besides the typical rules and expectations of a prince, that was his one rule—his only unorthodox, self-implemented rule.