Eventually Liya found herself climbing down another ladder, having to feel around with her foot at the end to find the ground below. This tunnel, with unfinished, grooved stone walls, got smaller and smaller before ending abruptly in a pile of bricks beneath a ceiling from which moss was hanging. Liya had to crouch to fit herself into to this space, which she did, because there were shafts of light coming down around the edges of what turned out to be a thick metal door set in the ceiling. She pushed, and it swung upwards easily.
She was outside the palace now, somewhere behind it, in a less kempt area with very tall grass. The land was sort of craggy, rising right up against the walls that circled the palace; green was beginning to grow on the ridges, but snow was still sitting here and there in the crags. Above the closest wall--which was still quite far above where Liya stood--she could see another large white statue. This one, with bat-like wings and large eyes was crouching on the hill itself and leaning on the wall, and seemed to be growing moss on the surfaces that rested on the hill.
The palace itself rose crookedly above the highest terrace. She could make out the shapes of the trees she'd been climbing earlier, jutting out of the top on one side.
"Cool," she said, kicking the trap door shut; it closed with a muffled noise, disappearing into the grass.
Some more wandering found her in a better-kept area of the grounds, descending a shallow stone staircase that ran alongside a shorter white-with-orange-tiles wall. There was still snow here, too, in small piles on the steps, in the shade of the wall. At the bottom she almost passed a crude doorway that was set in the wall next to a little pool filled by water that was pouring out of the wall itself--something inside caught her eye, though, and she paused.
There was a smithy inside, lit by the fire roaring in the kiln. The blacksmith was hammering a sheet of metal on a table-like thing to one side of the kiln. They had their hair up and wore a long leather apron--but nothing else besides a pair of underwear and some flat shoes, seeming totally unconcerned about burns and much more about the heat in the smithy.
They had quite muscular arms, and sported a jacket of tattoos, though it was hard to tell what they were of, from where Liya stood. As they brought the hammer down on the metal sheet, a spray of red hot sparks shot off from the impact, not seeming to bother the smith in the least; the motion caused the leather apron to move, giving Liya a glimpse of their chest, for just an instant.
Liya wheeled around immediately and trotted on down the path, flushed, with the clanging sounds from the smithy following her as she went.