Dennet enjoyed riding on horseback. When he had time, between business outings, he liked to engage in riding as a sport, taking on several of the nobles in the area in a bit of a race through the northern forest. That was how he had met his lover, and he was more than mildly disappointed that she was unwilling to leave her husband to be with him. He wasn’t the sort to get heartbroken, not when they still slept together often enough, and he certainly wasn’t interested in revenge or any other unwise activities. But riding did bring back thoughts of wild sex and holding her, naked and sweating, in the woods.

In his own mind, he blamed that for his willingness to entertain Roan Egrethore’s foolishness with the assassin. He knew the drive, the desire that came from practicing your skills to the limit, and in your exhaustion as you seeing your success laid bare, all those intense feelings fold together into lust, as long as there is a willing target.

And for spellcasters like himself and Roan, “willing” was a very malleable trait.

His horse picked her way down the mountain pass slowly, and he let himself be lost, for a few more minutes, in thoughts of lovers and secrets and guilty admissions made after it was too late to turn back. She had been furious, but she had come back. That chase, that drive, and that guilty, sweaty sex had taught him a few things about intense, addictive feelings. It was the kind of thing that his accounting-brain and his business-brain didn’t understand. But his enchanting-brain, and his horseman-brain, those understood all too well.

When a person discovers what they are meant to do, and what they are best at, the mixture of drive, need, and acceptance was something simply amazing.

Dennet turned off the main road for a bit, and followed a low swale towards an unassuming set of rocks. His horse he would let go, in hopes that she would get home on her own. She was good at that. If things went sour at the Egrethore estate, he wouldn’t likely be able to come fetch her before she died of thirst. Most likely, she would stay here for a bit, then head off north into the hills, and would either die there or turn up again some weeks later, as she had a time or two before.

So he dismounted and loosed her saddle and bags, and with gentle pulses of magic, conveyed might come back; home is a safe place to go. He gave her a good brushing before concealing all the things he didn’t need to carry, and then crawling into a space between the rocks.

The Egrethore estate had many secrets, and this was a choice one.

It was, regrettably, not terribly practical. Roan had only admitted its existence when a project needed a lot of extra work, in secret. This tiny crack in the rocks opened up into a space just large enough to crouch in, which was flooded some times in the year, and other times housed some grasslands animal or other. Roan or someone else had put just enough of a mark there to discourage animals from staying, but it still smelled of wet fur almost every time he came.

Once there, he pressed a finger against an unpowered wardwalking glyph, giving it just enough essence so that he could pass into it.

The wardspace had a thin rail where it curved, and was otherwise dead and empty. He tried not to think about the damaged space all around him, and simply passed through the center, trusting that everything was fine. Whatever would happen next, he didn’t intend to lose his life here. As long as he didn’t do anything stupid, wardwalking was safer even than travelling on horseback, even for him.

When the wardspace got close to the Egrethore estate, the walls of the space smoothed, until eventually he entered a section of stone built into the estate itself, and the walls seemed almost flat. It must have cost Roan an absolute fortune to extend a wardspace right up through the center of the mansion itself; or perhaps, it was an older piece from the time when the estate had first been built some generations ago, and Amon had simply not known about it when he assigned these rooms to Roan. In either case, this thin channel of carefully prepared stone didn’t end in the basement, as a Wardwalker would have expected.

Instead, Dennet appeared in an uncomfortably narrow stone-lined room hidden in the walls of the estate, and specifically just behind Roan’s own quarters. He didn’t move for long moments, barely even daring to breathe, just listening to see if the sound of his exit had been noticed--because that sound was loud, and distinctive.

A moment passed where he decided it must not have been, and he moved his hand away from the ward glyph, taking a few quiet breaths.

This was Roan’s secret exit and his smuggling path. To hear him tell of it, he had conducted some truly awful business out of this room, mostly drugs of a nasty sort, some of which Roan seemed to enjoy himself; he had also, though, done his own slave-trading, distinct from the kidnapping of peasants and unfortunates that the family paid him an occasional fee to not reveal.

A careful selection of materials had made this narrow room almost immune to scrying, but that also meant he could not easily see out of the room, even with his many magical senses. However, Roan’s adjacent bedchamber was not where he needed to be, and as long as he wasn’t detected, he had no need to pass through it either.

Whether Roan himself had made the wardwalking exit, he certainly had not shaped the network of tiny, hidden-in-wall corridors in the house. Some were even used by the guards, and probably had been there from the start. None of them were scry-proof, but then, they were there expressly to let someone snoop on the house, and especially, to let someone sneak into each and every bedroom, if he so chose.

Dirty secrets were not something unique to this generation of the Egrethore family.

Dennet carefully slid a piece of thin stone out of the way, giving him the ability to leave Roan’s bolt-hole and enter a slightly larger wall-space. When he slid it shut, it seemed to him to vanish without a trace, and only a quick test with his hand proved that it would still open for him. Carefully placing his feet to not step on the empty winebottles Roan had left here, Dennet made his way into the darkness, not really sure where he was going or why.

It wasn’t a thing where he was trusting his instincts; he simply didn’t know for sure that he had not been heard, so he needed to get far away. He didn’t dare let Roan find him, or anyone from the house. He had to hurry and find Chandra.

Finally, when he decided he was well and truly lost, he tried to extend his senses through the stone of the house. Nearly all of it had been pieced together by earth-mages, and so it carried his earth senses far and wide, giving him simple impressions like noisy or dirty or polished as well as conducting some sense of the life moving through the house.

Then, in a place he did not quite expect, he sensed magic.

He of course felt the presence of other magic users throughout the house. The dark magic swirling around Amon infected the stone everywhere he walked, and that made it easy to avoid him. The stone around Roan’s room felt like him, too, but more faintly than he expected. There was also a stink of his sister’s aura on the room, and in other places around the house.

But Chandra’s aura was odd.

Of course, Dennet knew that she was a mage-assassin from the great Northern Ocean, and probably one of the most dangerous creatures he had ever tried to ensorcell. She should have been under his spell, and she was, though it showed signs of strain. But she also bore signs of raw essence, taint, wardwalking, the Holy Lands, and her native people’s magic.

What’s more, she noticed his sensory thread, in the same moment that he found her. She was sharp, where the whole point of the conditioning was to dull her mind, and change her from a complete person into an obedient thing. Roan ought to know better; she had to be kept from thinking too much, or it would unravel in time. But she was also happy, and healthier than she had been even when Dennet had first met her.

She rose and pounded on the door the moment she sensed his presence.

Dennet recalled his senses immediately. He tried to think. Certainly, if he failed this mission for the King, he would not be punished, just not rewarded. Getting caught was probably the worst outcome. Yet, escaping back down the wardwalk and into the night was an unpleasant thought. That cave was small, and he had to very carefully align himself so that he would not seriously injure himself trying to leave the ward. Roan might have gotten used to it, but Dennet didn’t like the thought of trying to make such a fussy exit while he was already bordering on panic. If he got it wrong, there would likely be nobody to find his body any time soon, let alone reach him in time to save him.

Settling it with himself, he followed his own footprints in the dust back to Roan’s bolt-hole, settling the dust with a just a trace of magic behind him. There, rather than powering the glyph and diving back in, he simply settled against the wall and waited.

This room was scry-proof, and would be hard for anyone to find, unless they knew it was there. And Roan, at least, was confident that nobody knew. He had betrayed his family several times using this path, and several secret things were still stacked in the corner. So unless Roan led them to him--unlikely, as he seemed not to have been here recently--it should be safe.

So he just closed his eyes in the darkness and waited.