The basement seemed like the typical nobles’ dusty basement, with priceless art piled carelessly in corners and statues of now embarrassing ancestors looming out of the shadows. Nobles collect a lot of ridiculous, expensive things.
It wasn’t a place to jolt my nightmares to life. In fact, I’d played in the basement under my family’s home, especially when I was entertaining Hanna during her hide-and-seek years… which honestly hadn’t ended until just a year ago. Our basement had looked a lot like this one, with expensive tapestries folded neatly in canvas and trunks that had been labeled neatly by servants: solstice decorations, box 4 of 28.
I tilted my head, trying to decipher an eerie sound, like the wind teasing against the house… or maybe a scream.
In the dim light, I noticed a strange dark mark against the wall. My heart started to pound. Our basement hadn’t had a bloody smear against the stone near one wall.
I touched the rusty-colored stain, trying to convince myself it was just an old castle being an old castle. Except… it sent a jolt through me too. A memory I couldn’t quite capture teased at the edges of my mind.
It was what I’d come here for, but a chill swept through me, and all I wanted was to run upstairs and close the door on the basement. I could go to the enormous kitchen and make myself a cup of hot chocolate and shut myself up in the library and convince myself I never heard a ghost.
It was worse if it wasn’t a ghost.
I could pretend that I never learned that maybe, I wasn’t in this house alone.
But I didn’t. I searched along the stone wall, pushing away trunks, carrying those heavy folded-up tapestries, feeling sorry for the servants all over again. And eventually, I found a seam in the wall.
The door swung open in front of me. The stairs of a dungeon yawned below.
It seemed ridiculous to march a prisoner past solstice decorations and trunks of discarded baby clothes that would never be in fashion again. The thought made me huff a laugh— but it sounded so nervous that it left me on edge.
I palmed my fire—it took me two tries—then started down the long, dark stairs. My dancing fire cast busy shadows along the walls. I lifted my chin and swallowed my fear.
The steep stairs dead-ended in a rough stone wall, all the better to allow a prisoner to roll to their death, I supposed; there was a narrow right turn at the bottom, which I took, and found myself in a dank hall with half a dozen cells. A few ever-burning torches, lit by smoldering white magic, illuminated the hall.
The doors to five of the cells stood open. But there was a sixth that was closed, and the air of the dungeon didn’t feel quite still.
Something down here breathed.
“Who’s there?” an anguished voice called.
I didn’t want to tell them who I was until I knew who they were. I edged forward, raising my hand with the flames as I stepped forward.
A man threw himself against the bars, his eyes wide as they met mine. His familiar face sent a jolt of adrenaline coursing through my body.
Lucien Finn.
I’d seen his face in the mirror so many times I recognized it, even though his hair was long and wild, down to his shoulders and matted. An unkempt reddish beard surrounded that familiar generously-lipped mouth, and his green eyes were wild above that broad nose and determined chin.
“Who are you?” he said again. “Have you come to finally kill me?”
“No,” I said. It seemed bizarre that Lucien didn’t know who I was when I knew him so very well, at least in the mirror. “How long have you been down here?”
My voice came out steady, but my heart galloped.
Lucien Finn was alive.
There were two of us.
“How long?” He looked at the wall, where marks were scratched into the wall. Hundreds of marks. “The torches extinguish at night. They’ve extinguished ninety-eight times, but since last anyone came? Twenty-six torches.”
“How are you still alive?”
“Magic.” His hands wrapped the bars, and my gaze fell to his nails, which were bitten-down and bleeding.
Caldren had thought Lucien’s time in the dungeon would justify that I was not as well-built and muscular as the rest of the royals, but as I looked at Lucien, that notion seemed so… innocent. Lucien had been altered by his time in the dungeon, and it was far worse than his muscles withering.
I took a step back, involuntarily, and he raised his hand as if he’d snatch me back before I could leave him alone.
“It’s all right, I’m… here,” I said, not sure how to comfort this man. I wasn’t exactly sure I should release him from the dungeon.
He might be guilty. He might be dangerous.
He might want his identity back.
It was a selfish thought, but as soon as I imagined my royals coming face-to-face with Lucien Finn, that heavy hand seemed to fall over my mind again, reminding me of Teris’s spell, the one that denied me any action that might reveal my true nature to the world.
His gaze fell to my side. Knowing that Pend Deragon was coming for me eventually, no matter what promises he made, I’d taken to wearing Arren’s gifted dagger on my hip when I was without my men.
That moment when I couldn’t shift in the labyrinth haunted me. The Elders knew what I was; if they ever did come to kill me, they’d keep me from shifting. At the academy, I’d checked my clothes carefully every morning, searching for those cursed threads.
“You don’t need to open the door,” he said with icy calm, as if he’d read my fear. “Just give me your dagger. Let me end this.”
“I’m not going to do that, Lucien.”
“Let me have death.”
What a dramatic bastard. I cast around for something to say. “I can’t let you have death. But I can offer you… soup.”
His eyes widened in confusion. “Soup?”
“Magic keeps you alive, but you haven’t eaten?”
He shook his head.
“Have some soup, then probably you won’t want to die,” I said.
“Don’t leave me,” he begged.
“I’m leaving the door open,” I promised, before I fled the dungeon, the dusty basement, and back up the stairs to the bright, sunlit castle, to the enormous kitchen.
I wasn’t much of a cook, but the big pantry off the kitchen held dozens of jars of soup. Tomato soup. Squash soup. Pumpkin soup. Bean soup; that one was mostly for servants, royals didn’t eat a lot of beans. Passing gas while passing judgment was always tricky. Chicken and potato soup.
Potatoes are always good for the soul. I seized a jar and carried it to the stove, then shifted nervously from foot to foot as I heated the soup.
What the hell was I doing? Lucien Finn was alive. I needed to find a way to get in touch with Caldren and Damyn, because they were the only ones who could help me with this situation.