Grace tried to ask Ruidic where they were going, but he wouldn't even look at her. He kept his head down, and where she had hoped that he might be sympathetic, he seemed to be furious instead. She began to be a little afraid of that fury as she saw that his hands were squeezed into fists. When she caught a glimpse of his eyes, they were boiling storm-clouds. She stopped asking him questions.

They travelled downwards on the winds, and Grace imagined a Dungeon where there were soldiers waiting to obey orders. Her heart was pounding again. They couldn't just kill an innocent girl, could they? She was only fifteen, and she hadn't done anything to harm them, though if they could read her mind somehow perhaps that would be enough to condemn her.

She had to do something. She had to think. How could she get out of this, aside from just running? And she didn't think running would do her much good; not against the sort of power she knew Ruidic must be able to wield.

They stopped before she had come up with anything at all. They had only come a few floors down, after all. The fear she felt seemed to be stopping any thoughts from forming, and it stepped up as Ruidic walked off the disc of the intention wind and into a prettily decorated corridor.

But her eyes were working, and as he went ahead of her she saw that his belt had a loop through it in which rested a small, carved stick of wood.

For a moment she wasn't quite sure why she was staring at it, and then, slowly, her mind began to grind into movement and she realised that it was a wand. It was just like the staff, but smaller, and she was willing to bet that it was made of rowan-wood.

Ruidic turned for a moment, that fury still in his eyes.

"Come on!" he snapped, and she took a few stumbling steps to catch up.

As he turned away again, her eyes were on that wand. How could she take it? At the speed he was moving, it was difficult to keep up, never mind to slip it out of his belt.

And then he was slowing, stopping. Through an archway Grace saw another door, but it was a beautiful, carved door set with jewels and metal details. A dungeon shouldn't be beautiful, and yet Grace had a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. Somehow she knew that there was something awful behind there.

"You don't want any harm to come to me. I'm sure you don't." she said, urgently.

Ruidic made a noise of disgust and went to move forwards.

"You loved Ma, didn't you?"

He froze, and Grace stepped towards him, her heart hammering. She took his arm with her left hand and with her right, she slid the wand out of his belt.

"You did, didn't you? And she knew about me before she left."

He said nothing for a long time. She let go of his arm, and with shaking hands slipped the wand into the waist-band of the baggy trousers. She tugged the top down over it and wondered if he would be able to see the outline of it.

"So did I," he said, eventually. "I knew. But the Queen promised you'd be allowed to grow up normally, like the two of us."

Grace's mind was fractured. Half of it was consumed with worry about the wand. The other half was trying to accept that she had been right. She was Ruidic's daughter, and it was a sickening thought, even though she had begun to suspect that he wasn't as hard and awful as she had first thought.

"I don't think Ma believed her."

Ruidic turned around, and his eyes were stormy, writhing things again. "No, and she was right. And I should have left you with her. But it's too late to regret that."

"You can help me," Grace told him, urgently. "You don't have to do what she tells you."

"Don't I?" he asked, his voice echoing off the walls, amplified until it seemed to be thunder and the sea hammering against the shore. "What choice have I? Without her, this kingdom will fall to the cold, and everyone in it will die. I've seen what will happen, and it's desolation."

Grace stared at him, with the feeling of having been lashed by a real storm. Was it some illusion, or was Ruidic's power really pouring out in his anger? She could see danger in every line of him, and yet she knew that she had to try to persuade him.

"It's falling already," she said. "Can't you see it? But I think you can. You can see that desolation coming. But you have power. You could stop it."

She didn't see any blow coming, and she realised as she flew through the air that he hadn't moved. It was power that struck her, raw and terrible.

Grace tried to break her fall with her arms, but her back slammed into the wall unprotected. She fell to the floor, gasping for air, and it was almost as terrifying as when the Cold Mage had hold of her. But perhaps it was worse. She had known how to hurt him, but Ruidic? She didn't know if he was even human enough to feel pain.

While she gasped, she heard a hammering sound and then voices. Lifting her head, she saw Ruidic's back as he strode away. Approaching her instead were two women, one elderly and one perhaps ten years older than Grace, dressed in long scarlet robes threaded with gold.

"Help her up, Merrily," the older one said, and the young woman bent to lift her, gently but with surprising strength.

"Just breathe, from your abdomen," she said, soothingly. "You've had the air knocked out of you, and your muscles just need to take control back."

Grace nodded, and tried to do as she asked. Her breath began to come more easily, and the panic receded. Merrily began to lead her gently back down the corridor.

They're looking after me, Grace thought. Why are they doing that if I'm going to be executed?

With the thought came the tiniest bit of hope that she might have a chance to get away. She still had the wand. She could feel the point of it digging into her thigh as she walked. If she had any time at all, she would use it.

They brought her to the carved door, and the fear flooded back a little. She could sense something wrong here, even now. She leaned a little more heavily against the young woman as the older one opened the door, readying herself to use the wand if she had to.

But she couldn't see anything wrong when she looked inside. It was a beautiful place, circular and light and airy, richly furnished, with cushions in extraordinarily vivid colours here and there. Lounging on them were a dozen young women and girls, and they looked up at her curiously as she approached the door.

They were markedly different, some stout, some slim, some beautiful and some plain; some with long dark hair and others with hair that was blonde and shorn short. All of them bore the same decoration, though. A circlet which sat on their heads, with a little black jewel set into it so that it rested on their foreheads.

Are these the vanished girls? She thought, with shock. Did the Queen not kill them, then? Has she just been keeping them prisoner?

She stepped through the door between the women, and then everything in her revolted as she suddenly understood what was wrong here.

"No, I don't want to go!" she told them, but those strong arms held her while they barred the door.

She understood the name of the room, too. It was full of everything – except possibility. A feeling she hadn't even been aware of shut off the moment she crossed the threshold. She realised, bitterly, that the carefully stolen wand could do nothing to help her.

They gripped her by the arms as she struggled against them. Even the elderly one was strong.

"Now, my dear, there's no sense exhausting yourself for nothing," she tutted. "We're well used to resistance."

            But Grace still kicked the little silver circlet out of her hand when she brought it towards her.

            The woman shook her hand, and glared at Grace. She ignored the circlet, and turned to a set of shelves. She picked up two loops of cord, and Grace could see that she intended to tie her legs and arms. Well, she wasn't going to let her do it easily.

            She pushed back against Merrily where she stood behind her, making her crash into the door with a heavy rush of breath. And then as the older woman came towards her, she used Merrily's strong grip to swing against and lifted her legs to shove her elderly companion hard in the chest.

            The elderly woman staggered and fell with a big whoosh of air out of her mouth. It wasn't a kind thing to do to an old woman, but Grace had used the manoeuvre before in kick-boxing and she knew that it gave her the advantage of time. She threw her feet downwards, after that, clenching the muscles in her stomach so that her torso levered off them.

            Merrily was flung over her head to land on a heap of cushions, and Grace wasted no time in turning and lifting the bar away from the door. There was a lock, too, complete with a key, but Grace smiled to herself as she pulled the door open. They hadn't gotten around to locking it yet.

            She ran.

            As fast as she had run from those Evanescents, she ran, down corridor after corridor, past one intention wind disc and then another and another, hunting and hunting for a stairway.

            She remembered Benjamin in her dream, and she gritted her teeth as she told herself not to try to use the winds.

            There must be stairs somewhere. There must be.

            But corridor after corridor brought her nothing, and then she heard sounds of pursuit. She stopped, gasping, at a junction in the corridors, trying to work out where they were coming from. There were voices, and lots of them. So not just the two women from the Empty Room.

            And then, thinking about that room, she realised that she still had the wand. Her leg was painful where it had been digging in, but the strong elastic of the trousers had kept it in its place. She pulled it out and then moved a few paces down one of the corridors and flattened herself against the wall.

            Concealment, she thought. Come on, Grace! You read the page. It was after the symbol of turning.

            Slowly, sluggishly, Grace conjured the page in her mind.

            The mark was to the left, she thought. With an s-shape to it...

            And then she remembered. A shallow s-shape with a crescent like the moon to one side.

            The voices were close now, and the running feet sounded loud. She heard a woman call out, "In there, Churt and Valda!"

            Grace looked around, frantically, for something to draw on, and then paused, remembering how the magic had worked in the past. She wanted to turn herself invisible, not the wall or the floor.

She held out her own arm. She made the shape against her skin with the wand, and as she finished the crescent, her arm vanished before her eyes.

She stayed pressed against the wall as the group of guards jogged past her. There were only ten of them, far fewer than she had imagined, and she was surprised to see that they were all of them women. So they did have female soldiers here, despite the male-only group who had guarded the gate.

It was lucky that there were so few of them. Grace flattened her feet against the wall and still felt one of them brush her slippered foot with her boot on the way past.

And then they were gone and Grace was alone. She stood against the wall for a few seconds, waiting for her heartbeat to slow while she tried to think rationally.

She didn't know where she was, except that she was still reasonably high up in the tower. They hadn't travelled downwards on the intention winds for nearly as long as they travelled up.

She wavered, feeling two different draws. From here she could try to go and find Benjamin straight away. She was probably close, whereas Afi and her items would be a long way down. They would also be looking for her on other levels soon. She was grimly certain that the Queen would have magics that could dispel her invisibility, whereas if she went now, she might arrive there before the word had spread.

But even if she found Benjamin, now, she had only the wand, and she quailed at the thought of facing him with that alone. The symbol of concealment had taken too long to remember, and she wasn't confident she could recall many of the other symbols she had used, and without a map, she might wander here for hours. She wanted the true-seer, too. She wasn't going to fall victim to any illusions the Queen cared to conjure.

And more than all that, she realised, she would need money and warm clothing if she was ever going to get Benjamin home. She wouldn't last five minutes outside in what she was wearing, and she would need to buy food and clothes for Benjamin too.

At the thought of food, she suddenly realised that she was starving hungry. She guessed Afi had dropped the food he fetched before those dog-creatures attacked, and before that, the last thing she'd eaten had been at Afi's a whole day ago.

So that meant going to find Captain Roschan, and her things, and taking them. Which meant she really needed to find those stairs.

She started to pad through the corridors again, deciding that if she turned right each time she met a junction, she would at least be able to retrace her steps easily. But as much as half an hour later, having passed dozens of doors and come across curved walls that must have been the edges of the tower, she still had found no stairs. She felt as if she'd travelled miles, and two pairs of palace guards, clearly on the look-out for her, had passed her by too. With a sigh, she realised she was going to have to open some of the doors.

This was more of a problem than walking through corridors. Nobody watching a door open on its own would miss that something strange was happening. But there had to be a staircase  somewhere – in fact, there were probably several given the size of this floor - and if they were in some of these rooms, she needed to go and hunt them out.

She chose the first door on her left to start with. It was a plain, simple thing in wood, and like many of the doors here, it had no handle.

She put her hand on it, and it swung quickly and silently open.

Grace jumped, and cringed back against the wall, convinced she was about to hear a shout go up. But after a few minutes of nothing, she steeled herself and crept around the door-frame.

It was a library, but like no library Grace had ever seen. It was circular, and there were no shelves, just books joined together to make stairs, or slopes, or landings. There were books hanging down from the ceiling in clusters that reminded her of bananas, with no sign of anything to hold them like that; and there were books to form tables and chairs, though the one sign of ordinary furnishing was the cushions scattered on the chairs.

It was difficult to take it all in. She looked upwards, and saw that the height of this place was enormous. It must have been a hundred metres at least, with walkways of books spiralling the whole way around it.

At the very top, there was a light, soft but bright, like daylight on an overcast day.

Grace saw that the room had doors all around it at ground level, which meant that a lot of the doors she had passed all led to this one place. But there were no steps anywhere which led down. She was at the bottom of the library and looking up.

She had to work hard to persuade herself to close the door and leave. The thought of all the magic that might be in those books was hard to abandon, and Grace's favourite place in the world – outside her home – was the library.

But she left after no more than a minute, and continued onwards, watching the wall curve around to her left and then choosing to open a door to her right.

This room was much more ordinary. It was simply a little office, with a desk and chair and inkwell, and light provided by a glowing orb in the ceiling that flicked on as soon as the door finished opening. But a fine film of dust covered everything, and the air smelled stale. Whoever had worked here hadn't visited in a long time.

She found four more offices like the first one, with a few variations but the same theme. All were deserted, and Grace began to feel a gloomy sense of somewhere that was crumbling from within.

She turned off at the next corridor to her right, away from the library, and quickly met a broad, wide corridor with only one door at its end.

She almost turned away from it. The carvings were similar to those on the door of the Empty Room. But this door was twice the size, and not concealed by any archway, and logic told her that if there were going to be stairs, they would be in a main room like this.

She crept over to it, and raised her hand, jumping for the hundredth time as it failed to come into her vision. She had only realised since turning herself invisible quite how much she relied on her sight to tell her what her hands were doing. In this instance, her knuckle knocked painfully into the edge of one of the carved panels in the door.

But the door opened, slowly and smoothly, and she stepped inside.

For a moment, Grace froze. This place looked so much like the Empty Room that she almost turned and fled. But then she realised that she was seeing, not girls asleep on couches everywhere, but boys – all of them in a trance and all of them with a shimmering web of magic over them.

She drew in a quick breath, realising that she had found Benjamin.

All of her previous plans forgotten, she moved quickly into the room, hunting for her brother. She had found where they were keeping him, and she was going to take him home now.

            Close to the door, her gaze flicked over one of the boys and stopped. She felt a glimmer of recognition, and then realised that this was the boy from her dream. His hair was the same raven colour, his skin as pale, and his narrow face and lips identical. But he was older, she thought. This boy was a teenager, not a child. Perhaps her dreaming mind had forgotten the details.

            Remembering that Benjamin had tried to tell her something about him, she stepped around him warily and then carried on looking. She was so concentrated on searching the faces of the sleeping boys that she didn't notice at first that there was someone else there. In fact, she only realised when she heard a voice muttering, and she froze again.

Her eyes found him quickly enough now that she was looking. Across the far side of the room, Ruidic was sitting with his back to the wall. His head was bowed, and he seemed to be talking to him.

Curious, Grace approached, silently, thankful that her slippers were so quiet and that she hadn't removed the spell of invisibility. As she drew closer, her heart gave an aching lurch.

It was Benjamin that he sat beside. He was talking to him, quietly and continuously, and as Grace came closer, she heard his whispered words.

"...but I've hurt all of you, and I start to think that's all I can do. Even while I'm entertaining, all I'm really doing is dazzling with one hand while I steal with the other." He gave a long sigh. "I used to pretend, Benjamin, that this was all just temporary, and that I'd free all of you... all of them. The first boys we took. But by the time each one had been drained of power and driven mad by this and then replaced, I should have admitted it to myself."

He reached out a hand, and rested it gently on Benjamin's curly mop of hair. "We're all here to stay, for as long as she wants us to, and we're all of us in chains."

He stayed like that for a moment. Then he raised his head and looked straight at Grace with those eyes that Grace should have known could see through her newly-learned spell-casting in a second.

"I'm so sorry, Grace," he said, and raised his hand. A swathe of darkness closed over her in an instant.

**I'd love to hear who your favourite character is now that you've read to this point! If you have a moment, comment on this chapter - and if you're feeling social networky, on twitter with hashtag thefragiletower! I'm @thegyth :-) **