The maid rubbed her eyes sleepily. Obviously she had not been disturbed by the mysterious scratching noise. Now that I had stopped, I noticed I could not hear it from the hall. It seemed someone had put it just outside my window in order to annoy me. This renewed my determination.
I did not want the girl to follow me, though. As well meaning as she was, her constant attendance was not needed on this little outing.
“Uhm.” I quickly selected the best excuse. “I need to use the bathroom…”
“Ah. It’s just down the hall on the left.” She laid back down on the bench. I thanked the gods that she did not want to share that particular activity with me.
I crept down the hall and walked down a set of winding stairs. I came to a doorway flanked by two guards. I stood up straight and strut forward as if I had somewhere important to go. They did not even rotate their heads as I passed between them.
I turned and worked my way around the building, soon finding myself in part of the garden. I stopped to stare moodily at the darkness that stretched above me.
My ears rotated slowly, back and forth, until at last I heard it. The quiet scratching was coming from just around the corner of one of the building’s protruding walls.
I crept up to the wall, peering around to find someone – someone with horns and a tail – working by lamplight. My eyes narrowed. What was he doing, sitting on the ground hunched over like that? And how had he dumped his merman shadow?
I stayed as quiet as possible, moving each hoof with extreme care. As I neared, I saw the scratching sound was coming from a quill, furiously working across a tightly stretched piece of parchment. He was writing something, it seemed.
Was it a furious account of the day’s events, or a letter to some dragon-kin lover back home? He was working on it with such absorption that even he had either failed to notice me or chose to ignore my presence.
It was a few more carefully measured steps until I was standing so close I felt it was impossible for him not to have noticed me yet. I leaned over him and recognized the marks on the paper.
A tiny, quill-rendered image of the throne room, complete with a tiny, detailed King Julreus, stared up at me from the page. He was drawing. That had been the last thing I suspected.