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do. “What the hell do I want with a sword?” he muttered aloud, and as if in response a drip of water fell from the ceiling and trickled down the blade. It broke the spell. He jammed the paper in his pocket, and the sword, roughly, in the mesh at the back of the rucksack. He’d leave it on the table downstairs. He had enough to worry about.
    The corridor was deserted. It smelled of damp and neglect, and the carpet was gone. As he walked quickly along it his footsteps echoed, and when he came to the stairs his worst fears lay before him. The curved banister was the same, but it led down into desolation. There was no fire, no table, no chandeliers. The hall was a ruin, the roof long fallen, ivy growing inside all the walls. Cal came down and stood on the bottom step and looked at it, fear clenched in his stomach like an agony. He knew what he had seen last night. And it hadn’t been this.
    Suddenly panic-stricken, he jumped down into the rubble of bricks and plaster and shoved the great doors wide to the banqueting room. The gilt ceiling lay in pieces on the floor; black mildew coated the walls. A great thicket of weeds grew out of the chimney. He pushed his way in. The tables were gone, the luxurious feast, the dishes, the guests, the shining cup. None of it was here. He must really be crazy. Except that the sword clinked reassuringly at his back.
    And there was no door.
    It was only a small thing among all the betrayal of his senses but it caught his curiosity through the fear and bewilderment. The spear and candles and the golden cup had been taken across this room and through a door. The room was the same—ruined and aged, but the same. But there was not, and never could have been, a door. He could see the brickwork through the buckled gilt panels. If he climbed over there he could even put his hands on it.
    Quickly he turned, scrambled back across the hall, and found the entrance he had come in through the night before. The glass panels of knights and horsemen had long since fallen in; ivy choked the porch so thoroughly he had to grope for the bolts in a green, musty dimness and then shove and shudder the whole warped door to get it wide enough for him to slip through. Even then the ivy was too thick, a dusty smothering curtain, stinking of damp. After a moment he pulled the sword out and sliced through the woody stems; he found he could slash an opening, force his way out, and as he surfaced from the leaves the gray daylight was cool, and he breathed it deep. But the rotting garden made him think again of that old story, the prince, the sleeping castle. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. This was all the wrong way around.
    It was hard to get out. Great umbels of hogweed had grown down the path and he had to snap through them, seed drifting in his face, and the statues of bears and foxes were fallen or lost in swaths of bramble, decades of growth that snagged him and barred his way. He had to cut a tunnel and edge through, crouching, furious at the torn scags of his clothes.
    At the gate in the wall the latch was broken; the outer door banged in the wind. He pushed through it and looked up. There was a rusty bracket. But no hotel sign.
    For a moment he stood there in the pattering rain with the sword dripping in his hand. The castle was a shadow behind its tangled wilderness, silent, without even birdsong. There was no one here.
    He had meant to toss the sword back inside; instead he found himself pushing it into the rucksack. Then he turned. When he spoke his voice was bitter. “I’m sorry. It’s not me you need. I don’t even know what you want me to do.”
    Rain dripped. And the wind whipped the door out of his numb fingers and slammed it in his face.
    The tramp to the station seemed endless; after half an hour he was soaked and thirsty. The lanes were dripping and muddy with dead leaves, the ditches overflowing, all hedgerows bare. He had a sudden terror that too much time