The Traitor's Heir by Anna Thayer Page A

doorway yawned blackly before him.
    He went forward to the threshold and stopped for a long time there, peering inwards.
    Why had he come? Staring at the unfamiliar black he wondered whether he should leave.
    Tugging his jacket closer over his shoulders, he stepped inside.
    A shred of moonlight followed him through the doorway, glancing off the remains of the inn. Night lay like iron sheets over the tables and chairs, which lay strewn over the floor amid pools of cracked ceramic made slippery by spilt food and drink.
    As he passed the bar Eamon saw Telo’s wiping cloth laid carefully over three tankards; the struggle had not come from the innkeeper. He stopped and took the rag in his hands. It was the tool of a diligent man.
    Swallowing, Eamon laid it back.
    He followed the bar to the doors in the wall behind it. Some led into the kitchen; he smelt the fire burning itself to ashes in the grate and saw an open sack of flour spilt over the floor.
    A slim corridor led to the stairs, which creaked beneath him. The Star had upstairs rooms for guests – he had sometimes played in them as a child – but the innkeeper and his family had also slept there.
    Eamon’s curiosity led him to Telo’s room. Though small and sparse, it was comfortable enough to receive a weary man at the end of each day. The bed, Eamon knew, had been one of Telo’s prized possessions, handcrafted years before by a carpenter who worked in the city. Not many people in Edesfield slept in a real bed, rather than a motley assortment of hay and blankets, but Telo had been one of them.
    Shredded linen lay everywhere, pitchers and basins had been cracked on the floor, and the great bed was out of place, wrenched to one side. Eamon was not the first from the Gauntlet to have been there that night. The room had been ransacked.
    But he knew something they did not: as a child Aeryn had often boasted that her father’s bed could be used to hold secrets. After he had repeatedly refused to believe her angry assertions she had triumphantly shown him the secret compartment that her father had had built into the bed. If Telo really had something to hide, it would be there.
    What could Telo have had to hide?
    The bedposts were thick and sturdy, the grain majestic in the moonlight. He leaned over to look at the base of the bed and accidentally banged his elbow, hard, against one of the posts. In the split second before he leapt away to nurse a numb bone he heard the reverberation of a hollow.
    Shaking his arm to coax it to forget its hurt, he knelt by the post and ran his hands over the smooth wood. In the back of the fourth leg there was a small groove about the size of his thumb. Just as Aeryn had shown him a decade before, Eamon pressed it hard and listened to the answering click. A portion of the bedpost swung open against his hand.
    He had to crawl under the frame and peer awkwardly up into the gap to see, but, straining his eyes, he made out the slim shape of a piece of parchment in the hidden hole.
    Getting his hands into the compartment was difficult; the bed was only about a foot off the ground, and he had to slide under it on his back before he could take his prize. After several awkward attempts, parchment touched his fingers. He groped at it in the dark before threading it out.
    It was as he seized the parchment that he heard a step on the landing.
    He stilled his breathing to almost nothing and tuned every sense to the noise. His Gauntlet uniform would protect him from looters and other Gauntlet, but if there were more snakes about…
    He held himself still. Another step. His arms were heavy where he held them suspended; he could not risk resting them. A step came closer. He hoped that he might pass unnoticed by the pile of blankets.
    The pressure of a bladepoint rested sharply on his unguarded midriff.
    â€œUp,” a voice demanded. It was thickly muffled. He didn’t move.
    â€œUp, now ; keep your eyes closed.”
    For a few