"Of course," he says, "thank you very much, I must have gotten turned around with the surprise." He turns and walks back the way he came, towards the exit -- and the dungeons, when he turns left instead of right (after making sure the maid isn't looking). Is one of his people on duty today? He's not sure, he only pays attention to the roster when it's important, and well, it wasn't important an hour ago. If only the princess would stop being so nosy and difficult. Then everything could be going according to plan. 

The princess is a silent bundle of furiously angry feathers.

Well. If one of his people aren't on duty, Reed supposes he can always find another solution, even if one isn't immediately coming to mind. Reed descends the stairs to the slightly musty-smelling dungeon, and peeks carefully around the corner to see who is on duty at the moment. 

There is a single guard, in a slightly unkempt uniform, staring off into space with a bored expression, shifting slowly from foot to foot as he stands there. 

Is now the time to yell? No—she should yell if Reed starts to turn away, as though he expects interacting with this particular guard to go poorly for him.

Reed does not in fact expect the interaction with this guard to go poorly for him.

The guard on duty is Spade, who is one of his. 

Spade is probably one of the luckier options, honestly, though in retrospect a hardly surprising outcome. He had been, well, rather easy to suborn. His obvious boredom at his postings and inherent laziness meant that he had a clear and obvious desire to be a part of something bigger, or more interesting, which Reed had exploited quite handily. He would likely have to go after the balance of power shifted, but for now he was an eager lackey, even if he occasionally asked a few too many questions. 

He rounds the corner with a smile. "Spade," he says, "I have a job for you." 

Spade, who has been slouching and shifting from side to side, straightens to attention. "Reed!" he says, then sees the swan in his arms, covered in glowing magic and stares at it, confused and interested. "What are you doing with that swan? What do you need me to do for you?" He smiles keenly at the prospect of taking part in whatever plot Reed has going on this time. A magical plot, at that!

"Nothing you need to worry too much about for now," says Reed with a sly wink. "There was a spy in my room digging through some things they shouldn't have been, and I don't have time to deal with them properly at the moment, not with everything I have happening during the Springtime Festival." Reed watches Spade's eyes gleam at the hint of goings-on and smirks inwardly at the fool. "I just need a safe place to put them for a little while. I'll put them in a cell towards the back, and make sure no one notices unless they're actually looking. I just need you to make sure they don't get out. Who else is on duty this week?"

Spade carefully hides his excitement. Reed turned someone into a swan! And there's something going on during the Springtime Festival, he knew there had to be something, no matter how cryptic Reed sometimes is, Spade is clever enough to have figured that much out. One day soon Reed will realize Spade is clever enough to be let in on the whole thing, he just knows it. 

"It's mostly just the people who the Captain thinks don't deserve to enjoy the festival being stuck down here," Spade says. "Elm is on after me, I bet he could be convinced to keep an eye on your... prisoner for a few extra coin," he says, eying the swan up and down. "And Crane has been staring off into space and distracted ever since you had me start slipping that powder into his drink, and the Captain has him doing the night watch down here this week for 'discipline'. I don't know if--"

"I'll handle Crane," Reed interrupts. "Don't worry about him at all." Crane had been a rather ripe opportunity -- the captain had paired him with Spade half a year ago to try and have Spade learn from his example, and where Spade had chafed under these restrictions, Reed had seen an opportunity. After a month of Spade putting the potion into his drink, Crane became quite suggestible with the proper stimulus. The fact that this highly-trusted guard is now less trusted due to the effects of his insomnia and daydreaming is an unfortunate side effect (he really needs to improve the balance in that formulation) but it's still another guard in the palace that belongs to him.

Elm has been known to take bribes to take on extra odd jobs, or look the other way, but nothing bad enough that that Reed can use to use to blackmail him. Yet. Perhaps, if he plays his cards right, he'll be able to use this little mishap to start implicating him in something bad enough to blackmail him for it. "And pass the word to Elm. Tell him to keep an eye out, and he can come to me for payment later." The unspecified payment and the prospect of being able to haggle the payment up should hopefully make Elm greedy enough to make a mistake this time. "Now open the dungeon, please, so I can secure the prisoner." 

"Understood, of course," says Spade. "Right away, Reed." He takes the key ring off of his belt and fiddles with the lock for a moment, opening the dungeon door with a rusty squeak. The dungeon is small -- only a half-dozen cells, all of which are empty. The dungeon hasn't seen much use in years, and as such has been neglected, with the bars rusty and patches of stone floor covered with small growths of lichen and moss. 

There are three smallish cells on each wall, all made of metal bars embedded into the stone floor, the bars too close together for a swan to fit through. The cells are separated by metal bars as well -- the walls of the cells are made of stone only against the wall, and the cells furtherest from the door. Each cell has a mattress stuffed with of straw and a wooden bucket, but no other accommodations. The cells against the right wall each have a high barred window to let in some light during the day, drawing a striped patch of sunlight on the dirty and moss-patched floor.

"Which cell did you say you wanted opened?" 

"That one, in the far back," Reed says, pointing to a dark cell in the back left corner, currently devoid of light. 

Spade leads Reed and the swan to that cell, and opens the door set into the middle of the wall with a jangle of keys. 

Reed tosses the paralyzed swan into the cell, and closes the door behind her with a clang. He has Spade lock the door closed once more, and, finally, he turns off the paralysis on her, and takes a harried breath. Maintaining that had been taking a bit more effort than he thought it was. But given her behavior, such measures are necessary to keep her in line. Reed has little desire to leave much up to chance at this point. Not when he has to go report to Nightingale about this afterwards. 

Very quietly, but with immense venom, she utters the Terrifying Swan Hiss.

Reed is hardly perturbed by the noise (Spade is, but Reed isn't paying him any mind at the moment and doesn't even notice him taking a couple nervous steps back), and instead stares at the cell carefully for several seconds. 

"Open that door," Reed says, pointing at the cell adjacent to Iris'. When it's open, he paces a quarter circle around Iris' cell, and then waves his hand and mutters a couple sentences in a strange language. The air shimmers and wavers for a moment, and as it does the swan disappears from view. 

"There," he says. "Now anyone doing a cursory inspection should be able to see or hear them. Try to keep people away anyways, just in case, but I doubt we'll have a problem." 

He pauses and thinks for a moment. Should he go report to Nightingale and the rest of Autumn Hills? No, he needs to come with something a bit more concrete, an exact accounting of everything to make sure there aren't any further disturbances to their plans. "Go back and guard the door," he says, "I'll be back in a dozen minutes or so, I have to go fetch something so I can interrogate her properly." 

Spade has been waving his hand through the barrier a couple of times, watching his fingers disappear with amazement, but Reed gives him a look and he stops. He follows Reed out of the room and locks the door behind him as Reed leaves, standing guard with renewed purpose and energy. 

...so... Reed just locked her in a dungeon cell... and then made her invisible???

'You absolute twit,' she doesn't say, because she can't use human words anymore. Instead she makes a few preparatory grumbling noises and then bellows as loud as she possibly can, just to check that nobody will come running.

Nobody comes running.

Right then, time to start working on escape plans.

First, a preliminary survey of the bars: are there any that are rusted enough that she could chip away at them and maybe get through that way? Next, if that doesn't pan out, she can turn her attention to the lock.

Silver Lake's dungeon exists as more of a necessity than anything else -- it's the sort of thing that kingdoms should have, even if they don't tend to use them for much of anything. Silver Lake has not any open wars in quite a long time, nor has it arrested anyone for treason or crimes agains the crown -- and the outlying villages and fishing communities have their own ways of holding or imprisoning criminals and the drunk and disorderly. As such, the dungeon has been left unused for many years, and only cursorily maintained. 

There are signs of weathering on the ground where the windows have occasionally let in rains or snows over the many years. While the windows aren't large enough to let in very much water at a time, Silver Lake, being adjacent to a large body of water, has wet and windy weather rather often. Clearly often enough to allow for a more than sufficient amount of liquid to make its way into the dungeon to allow for the formation and growth of lichen and moss where water tends to flow and collect. Most of those places are on the side of the dungeon with the windows themselves, but the large stone blocks of the palace are filled with cement together, and several of the cement pathways have been worn by rain and time to allow for the flowing of water to one location or another on the other side of the room. 

Some of these locations where water clearly pools are spots where the bars were driven imperfectly into the rock, but wherever these bars are adjacent to the outside, they have been cleaned of rust and other growth to keep them stable and whole. But for the barriers between the cells the maintenance has been rather more lax.

There is a bar between Iris' cell and the adjoining one where the hole in the rock for the metal bar has clearly been drilled far too wide, and filled with mortar in an attempt to repair the damage. The weak mortar has mostly broken away under the effects of water and lichen and moss, of which the latter two are growing quite healthily in the widening gap between metal and stone, and an increased and irregular rust formation on this particular bar. 

None other bars of the cell Iris is in are as damaged or potentially corroded as this one. 

Perfect.

She rips up a little of the moss and lichen in other areas of the cell, and throws it around as though having a princessly tantrum; and then, under cover of the lichen that's already there and using some of her torn-up material as extra cover, she starts working on that rusty bar.

The moss and lichen have partly broken down the rock surrounding the bar which makes it easier to chip away at that, but the bar proves a bit more of an issue. Most of the rust on the metal has formed a protective layer, preventing further corrosion, but there are some areas near or under where it meets the stone where chipping away the rust reveals threads of rust running deep into the metal bar. 

Iris does not have too much time to investigate this, however, before she hears the sound of Reed returning and ordering Spade to open the dungeon once more. 

Botheration. She quickly double-checks that all her work on loosening and eroding that bar is successfully concealed by the moss strewn around it, then hurries across the cell to lurk just inside the door. It's a long shot, but if Reed doesn't take down the invisibility barrier before he has Spade open the door for him, she might be able to rush them both and escape.

Reed does not take down the spell, but he does stand a foot or two back from the cell door as he has Spade open it.

Jump him or don't...?

Jump him.

Spade gets a faceful of angry swan, hissing ferociously. She doesn't try to hurt him directly, though; she's mostly trying to get him to stagger back in surprise and get out of her way so she can break Reed's arms.

While Spade acts pretty much as she expects him to, jumping backwards with a shout of surprise and wheeling his arms to keep his balance, Reed, by now, is already expecting such foolish and futile behavior. Moments after she escapes the cell, Iris finds herself surrounded by a familiar green sparkling aura, as paralyzed as before. 

"As uselessly as persistent as ever, I see," Reed says with a sigh. He reaches down and picks her up and steps through the spell barrier, depositing her unceremoniously on the mattress. "Was that really your plan? Did you really think you could escape? The best you can do at the moment is annoy me... and tear apart your cell, apparently, at the moment." He sighs, and removes an object from his pocket. "Why waste the effort? Spade, go guard the door like you're supposed to be, so I can interrogate them without being disturbed."