THEY LEFT THE CASTLE A NIGHT EARLY. Even though Hector had given them two days, Belemast had never intended to use the second day for anything but insurance. If the Hakken were watching the mountain closely enough to notice movement, better they notice it early in the dead the night rather than in the frantic moments when the real fighting began. Making their exit early and giving themselves a twenty-four-hour head start increased their odds of escaping and getting away from the big wolves that were hunting them. Alfred was concerned about leaving everyone else in the castle behind to do their fighting for them. The idea of sacrificing others to save his own hide didn't sit well with him. Belemast laughed at the statement.
"My people know what to do," he said, leading them down into the wine cellar by lamplight, one hand steady on an iron ring set into the floor. "When the attack comes, they'll hold the gate just long enough to be convincing and then fall back through the north passages. They'll have access to different tunnels and different exits which are nowhere near where we'll be going. By the time Hector realizes his army has stormed an empty castle, my people will be safely out of the way, and we'll be at least two valleys away."
"What if they don't fall back in time?" Calissa asked.
"My people know this mountain better than any Hakken ever will," her uncle replied, "I am confident they'll make it out."
Belemast hauled the stone slab open, revealing a black throat of a passage beneath it, cold air breathing up out of the dark.
"I've trusted them with worse than a distraction," He informed those following him below. "Now… quiet! All of you! From here on the sound carries strangely down there, and I'd rather not learn the hard way what is listening to us."
The tunnel swallowed the lamplight almost as fast as it was offered. Belemast led with one hand trailing the wall, counting turns under his breath the way another man might count paces. Calissa understood within the first hundred yards that this was not a route so much as a memory her uncle was walking through like his father did many times before him. Twice Belemast stopped them cold with a raised hand and nothing else, and twice she saw why only after he'd already skirted it. Once a section of floor that gave a hollow, wrong sound under his boot before he stepped around it entirely. The other was a side-passage identical to their own but for a single scratch mark at eye height. It was low enough that torchlight would miss it and a hand wouldn't.
"My father lost an apprentice stonemason down that one," Belemast said to no one in particular. It was all he offered by way of explanation, and nobody asked for more.
Calissa found she didn't need the lamp the way the others did. In the pitch dark her nose did more work than her eyes. She could sense the wet stone, old smoke, and mineral tang of water somewhere below them. More than once the young girl caught herself a half-step ahead of Belemast's light before she remembered to fall back in line. Miyamoto noticed it, as he had always noticed things before anyone else ever did. He said nothing about it, but she caught him watching her navigate a blind corner without slowing down, and there was something in his face that wasn't quite worry but also wasn't quite pride.
Alfred, for his part, said almost nothing at all. He walked with one hand near his sword and his eyes on the dark behind them more often than the dark ahead. Only once in a stretch narrow enough that they had to turn sideways to pass, did Alfred mutter something about preferring an honest battlefield to a confining belly of a mountain.
"You'll get your battlefield," Belemast reassured him, not unkindly. "Just not tonight."
They'd been walking the better part of six hours when the tunnel opened into a wide, low cavern with a black pool at its center. The water was as still as glass, and Belemast finally called the halt Calissa hadn't realized she'd been waiting for.
"This is the halfway point," Belemast announced to them. He crouched at the cavern's far wall and ran his fingers along a seam in the rock that looked, to Calissa's eye, exactly like every other seam they'd passed. He pulled a coil of fuse and a squat clay charge from his pack, working with the unhurried precision of a man who had clearly done this before, or at least imagined doing it many times.
"You're going to bring the mountain down on us!" Alfred said, looking worried.
"I'm going to bring a very small, very specific piece of the mountain down behind us," Belemast corrected him, as he was setting the charge into the seam and unspooling the fuse as he backed away. "This is enough to turn this whole route into a dead end that goes nowhere for anyone who comes along. We're deep enough now that nobody above will hear it happen. Once it's done, there is no path back to that castle from here. Not for them, and not for us."
He said the last part lightly, but Calissa heard the weight underneath it anyway. There is no path back for anyone, which made this the point of no return.
Belemast lit the fuse from his lamp, herded them around the bend at a near-run, and put both hands over Calissa's ears a half second before the world thumped once. The ground shook hard, deep in her chest rather than her ears. The sound was felt more than heard, as a distant cough of rock giving way to more rock. Dust rolled around the corner after them in a slow grey wave and then settled, and that was it. No collapse chasing them down the passage, and no roar. Just a door, closing very quietly, very far behind them. Nobody spoke for a while after that.
It was at least another six hours before the air began to change, as the mineral staleness had begun to thin. It was replaced by something green, colder, and unmistakably outside. The tunnel narrowed and then angled upward. Then without any particular ceremony, it opened into a curtain of hanging roots and pale early light. As they stepped out of the mountain into a dense forest, Calissa couldn't help but simply stand there and breath it all in. It hasn't been that long, but the long walk made it feel like days instead of hours. The tightness of the tunnels made time drag, which made the new air they were taking in taste so good.
Behind them, the tunnel mouth was little more than a crack in the hillside, choked with roots and moss. That made it the kind of thing a person could walk past a thousand times and never notice a single time.
"Nobody finds this side by accident," Belemast reassured them, reading her thought. "That was rather the point of it."
Ahead, a game trail wound down through the trees. It was faint but unmistakably a path, and Belemast studied it the way he'd studied every fork in the tunnels that now laid behind them. He was like a man confirming what he already knew rather than searching for new answers.
"This will take us down to the coast road inside two days," Belemast announced, "From the coast road it will take a day to walk to the fishing port. From that port we can procure a boat and pay them well enough to look the other way about who its passengers are. From there it should take three or four days by water to reach the island, and another day to ride into the capital. That place has more people, more noise, and more places that make it easy for a hunted girl to disappear. It's the last place they'll expect us to run."
"You're coming with us that far?" Miyamoto asked.
"Not to the capital," Belemast explained. "I'll see you onto that boat myself. After that I plan to turn around, collect every able body I can find between here and the border, and then head back to reclaim my castle from those mangy beasts."
"Alone?" Calissa asked, as she missed the part about getting able bodied men.
"Not alone." Her uncle replied. "Just not with you."
Belemast said it gently enough, but there was no room left in it for arguing. After walking through all those tunnels, she didn't have the strength to try.
"You're the one they want, little lady." He reminded her. "Every mile you put between yourself and that mountain is a mile my home gets to stop being a prize worth fighting for. That makes my job easier. I am going to pay every adventurer and mercenary handsomely, and they will all know what they're getting themselves into. Don't fret, Calissa. I am going to take back my castle, and that's my duty… not yours."
Nobody answered that. Miyamoto looked like he wanted to, but Alfred looked like he already knew better than to try. Calissa shouldered her pack instead and started down the trail, because it was easier than standing still with all of that unsaid between them. She also knew that somewhere behind her, the mountain had just swallowed the only home she'd had seen in months, and that made her a little sad.
Belemast fell into step beside her without a word, and the others followed. The forest closed in quiet and green around all four of them as the trail bent toward the sea and their next destination.