3. The Princess

Pye looked around the corner. The street was mostly dark, apart from one small lantern hanging above the door to an apothecary’s shop. There was one drunk old man mumbling to himself in the gutter, but otherwise the street was empty.

She slipped into the street, keeping to the shadows. Her soft shoes would make little noise on the wet cobbles, but they would become soaked through very quickly if she stepped into a puddle of water or of… something else. She resolved to keep one eye on where she was going and another on where she was putting her feet.

The night was cold, and she drew her cloak tighter around herself. She passed two doors on her left, three, four. The fifth door was the one she was looking for. She dropped, putting one knee straight into a puddle. She jumped, and landed on her backside, cursing herself for letting both eyes look at the door.

A little more carefully, she crouched and regarded the door lock. It looked simple enough. She pulled her hood back slightly and put one eye to the keyhole. Well, she didn’t really expect to see anything very clearly through it anyway. It was dark inside and through the narrow keyhole she could see little more than a chair and a piece of wall with a painting hanging on it.

What next? First look, then listen, she reminded herself. She held her breath for a moment and focused her attention on what she could hear.

There was the distant sound of running water – the river, but that was a block away. She thought for a moment that she could hear booted feet, but that was probably the guard patrol that she had been careful to avoid. Then…

“Here! What’s this?”

She jumped, looking frantically around her for the source of the sudden voice. She was still alone in the street, as far as she could tell.

“Tell Ari I’m not coming. Tell… Ari… Hmf… Grff…”

She realised that it was the drunk old man, talking in his sleep. She had been completely oblivious to him, and now she realised that he was quite nearby, lying in the gutter almost opposite her.

As she realised that he posed no danger to her and couldn’t possibly be aware, through his drunken stupor, that she was there, she experienced a moment of existential doubt. Just what was it she thought she was doing? Breaking in to a house, obviously. But was it really necessary? Could she not just go back to her quiet life as a princess? She was rich, she had servants to bring her fine wine, she had her dancing and fencing lessons, her studies, her needlework…

No, she decided. That life wasn’t for her. She had been unutterably bored in the palace, and her future consisted of a parade of suitors, one after the other, that she very much was not interested in marrying. Her father and mother were insistent that an arranged marriage was in her future. They at least had been considerate enough to parade young noblemen before her rather than creepy old noblemen. But Pye had been bored by all of them, and certainly didn’t want to marry any of them. Leave Bridgeport? Marry some stranger?  Sleep with him? Have babies? Ugh. Nothing was grosser than that thought.

Shuddering, she turned her attention back to the door. It looked like a pretty normal lock. She suddenly realised that she had no idea whether it was a normal lock or not. She had picked this particular house because of a rumour that it contained a particular object – a rare artefact, said to date to before the Cataclysm. Surely such a thing would not be kept behind a normal lock? It would be protected, right?

She sighed to herself quietly. Well, there was only one way to find out. Her hands moved to the pouch at her belt, drew out a felt-wrapped package. Glancing about her again, she unwrapped the keys, being careful to make sure they didn’t jingle against each other. These keys were her gift – one of them had to work.

She selected the first key and inserted it carefully into the lock. She knew the basic operation of locks. The blade of the key engaged with a slot in the locking bar, and as it was turned, it pulled the bar back, allowing the door to open. The lock mechanism had wards – protrusions in the lock’s chamber – to prevent someone from using just any old key. The wards prevented any key except those specially designed for that lock from turning. Any key, that was, except for Pye’s three skeleton keys, which as far as she knew were unique in the world.

When she had received these keys, she had carefully examined them and found that their blades had tiny movable sections. These sections would react to the lock’s wards and she would thereby be able to use them to open practically any lock.

This one didn’t work, though. It wouldn’t turn. She tried with two hands, but it was no good. As she removed that key from the lock, the other two keys on the ring jingled softly. She froze, glancing around again. The old man on the other side of the road shifted into another position.

Letting out her breath, she selected the second of her two keys, carefully, to prevent more unnecessary noise. She slipped it into the lock and tried to turn it.

Again, no luck. It wouldn’t turn. She removed it and looked at the other two keys on the ring, realising that she had lost track of which of the two she had already used. She raised one and looked at it. Was that the one she had used? She wasn’t sure.

She raised that one, still holding the key she had just tried in her other hand, and stuck it into the lock. Nope, wouldn’t turn. That must have been the one she had already tried. She released key number two and raised key number three – the one she thought she hadn’t tried yet.

That key wouldn’t turn, either.

Confused, she looked at all three keys. She must have mixed them up somehow. She had to try each of the three again, in order, to make sure.

She tried them all twice more, but none of them seemed to work. No, they had to. They were her gift! This is what they were supposed to be used for. She felt tears of frustration well up behind her eyes and she turned her back to the door and sat down.

Right in the puddle her knee had found earlier.