A Flame Run Wild by Christine Monson Page B

if only for a brief ride. Tonight, her sole desire was to escape through the castle walls and return without discovery. In the future, she would have to repeat tonight's performance.
    Liliane went up to the turret chamber and, holding her candle high, minutely examined the stones of the inner tower wall. After nearly an hour, she finally found a stone near the floor that was unlike the rest. By candlelight, its shadowed lower edge was set a little higher into the mortar than the other stones. She pressed both ends individually, but nothing happened. She gave the stone a hard blow with her hand on the right side, then the left. With a faint grind from behind its stone face, the wall developed an irregular crack from floor to ceiling. She hit the stone again and the crack groaned open until it could accommodate a body only a little wider than her own. From the look of the well-oiled leverage workings, the stairs had been recently used.
    After she changed to dark hose and a short, hooded cotehardi, Liliane took a long silken cord from her wardrobe. Before she had left Spain with Jacques and Louis, she had made her preparations. At her shoulder, an iron mantle pin was mounted with a decorative brass stud; about her waist, a heavy braided silken cord was many times wrapped with knots every span or so.
    After glancing, out the window to make sure the courtyard was empty and the guards preoccupied on the ramparts, Liliane took the candle and stole down the secret staircase. The stairs were only an inch or two wider than her body and ended abruptly against a stone wall perhaps seventy-five feet down. Assuming that the stairs continued beneath the castle wall and led to some point outside, Liliane looked for another opening, but without success; Finally, giving up and exploring the outer wall, she needed only a few minutes to find, the sister mechanism that would open the door to the courtyard. Dousing the candle, she shivered slightly in the murky darkness that filled the stairwell. Hastily, she struck the stone and the door ground open. The sweet, pungent scent of newly sprouting vegetables and flowers drifted into the stairwell from the courtyard garden. She slipped outside the door, then fumbled to close it before the guards took notice of her. She ran carefully over the stepping stones in the garden, guarding against leaving telltale footprints in the moist earth.
    Beyond the garden lay the rear wall. Liliane climbed a rubble pile to the lowest of the gaps that would accommodate her body. On the other side, the wall dropped away some fifteen feet to the craggy base of the castle. She unfastened her iron pin and angled it between two solid stones, thrusting it inward, and testing it with a hard jerk. The pin slipped and, on the second jerk, worked loose. Liliane bit her lip nervously. If the pin gave while she was dangling from the wall, her fall would be sure to break bones. She found a new spot, angled the pin until it resembled a fishhook, drove it in and jerked it. The pin held.
    Liliane smiled in the darkness. The Moors had many tricks, and she had learned several of them well. The guard watching the wall had his back turned, as he was looking for someone trying to enter the castle, not leave it. In moments, Liliane had slid down the wall. The moat was easy enough to cross, although it was smelly and unpleasantly chilly. Dripping, Liliane scaled the rocks on the moat's far side and crept toward the smithy on the edge of the small market beyond the castle gate. When Alexandre had brought her back that afternoon, she had noticed several destriers and peasant plow horses outside the smithy: too many for the smith to reshoe in an afternoon. She checked the string of horses. The destriers had been shod and were now stabled at the castle. The remaining unshod plow horses were plodders except for one likely prospect with an unfinished shoe.
    Liliane was good with horses. After wrapping woolen rags on its hooves, she had the mare