Bricrui (The Forgotten: Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

on
her slender arm. When he had finished adjusting them, they fit
nicely; she could wiggle her hand upside-down without them falling
off.
    She rubbed one of the beads between her
fingers and thought of Alina. They would find her. She was sure of
it.
    When they reached the next manor on their
list, they were immediately greeted by a welcoming party at the end
of the long drive-way snaking up to the house. Their approach had
been detected.
    The staff was cordial, and the lord of the
manor seemed open in his answers. He seemed to be sincere, in
Natalya’ opinion, of having no desire to harbor any such criminals
as those they were searching for. He gave them free range of the
house.
    Natalya followed Jeremy down into the cellar,
looking around the room carefully for the signs of secret rooms and
trapdoors they had been told to watch for. The first few storerooms
yielded nothing, and Natalya followed the Knights tramping back up
the stairway.
    Halfway up, her foot accidentally clomped
down on a step rather harshly, and it made an odd echo. All the
Knights immediately stopped their movement and Natalya backed down
a step, stamping her foot on the previous one again. It connected
with a solid sound. She tapped her foot on the step above it again,
the one that had made the odd noise, and was rewarded with a hollow
sound. The steps above this one sounded hollow as well.
    The Knights swarmed back down the stairs,
holding their weapons drawn towards the cowed servants who had led
them there, and surrounded the stairwell.
    “How does it open?” demanded Jeremy, who had
taken it upon himself to be the leader of their group of
searchers.
    The servants looked around at one another
with frightened looks, but no one spoke up. Natalya joined the
Knights in searching for the secret handle. Sometimes it was a
candle-holder that needed to be pulled, a pressure plate in the
wall, or simply a hidden string that needed to be pulled to unlatch
something. A few minutes of searching still revealed nothing, and
Jeremy turned back to the servants once more.
    “Someone is going to tell me how to open
this,” he stated, fixing them each with an intense stare and
gauging their reactions.
    “We don’t know what you’re talking about,”
one stammered from the end of the line.
    Jeremy stalked over to the man and stared him
down. “How long have you been here?” he asked him.
    “Four years, sir,” the man answered.
    “Four years,” Jeremy repeated, “and you don’t
know that there’s a secret passage underneath these stairs? You
expect me to believe that?”
    “It’s the truth!” The man looked genuinely
convinced of his words.
    Something caught Natalya’s eye and she moved
forward towards it. She could feel the eyes of Knights and servants
alike watching her. The wine rack on the opposite wall held many
different varieties of the stuff in seemingly random assortment.
But on the bottom row, there were five of the same all right next
to one another. She bent down for a better look.
    There was a light covering of dust on all of
them, all of them but one. Natalya grabbed hold of one of the dusty
bottles and tried to pull it out to examine it. It didn’t budge.
She tried again, but it was quite firmly attached.
    “Those are the lord’s special bottles, you
can’t touch them!” the servant who had introduced himself as the
valet in charge of the wine said frantically. He seemed to boss
around the other servants quite freely, and Natalya could easily
imagine how no one else had ever happened upon the secret entrance
if he was the one who knew of its existence.
    She moved her hand to the one without the
dust and gently tugged. It moved a few inches and stopped. For a
moment nothing happened, then several of the Knights moved
hurriedly out of the way as part of the staircase swung upwards to
fold in on itself.
    Another staircase, this one leading
downwards, was revealed, and the Knights immediately sprang to
action. The valet tried to flee, a