I protested. “The only secrets that place holds are rotting branches and dead creatures.”I tried to tug him back to our walk, but Alasdair was steadfast.“You mean to tell me no one ventures back here?” he asked, rooted in place and staring at the labyrinth as if it held the secret entrance to the fairy realm. “Not even the children? It would be the first place I would go, were I still a child.” He chuckled ruefully. “I’ve been sorely pressed not to enter it myself, and I’ve been here but a few days.”“If you were a foster child here, you would not enter it, no. Not if you wanted to stay at Marion Hall,” I said levelly. “We’ve made the rules quite clear. No one but the servants are allowed back here, on pain of being removed from the house entirely. If there were a few additional stories planted about children being spirited away in the night from ghosts awakened in the labyrinth, well—there’s naught I can do about that.” I grimaced, thinking of the same stories that my father had told to frighten me.
