Niya did not reply, only waited.
“You ask of history from long ago, girl.”
“And you appear like one who might have lived it.”
His echoing laugh hit against their stone walls. “Oh, I have lived it and more. Which is why I know we do not speak of the banished prince or the heart of Esrom he stole.”
“Heart of Esrom?”
“Aye,” said the man with a nod, coming closer to his bars. “The Prism Stone was the last gift the gods gave our holy people before they left. It is filled with their blood.”
Niya gave him a dubious look.
“It is true,” he urged. “And do you know what pure blood from the gods is?”
“Sticky?” suggested Niya.
“Endless magic,” said the man. “And some was contained inside the Prism Stone, which our ancestors placed in the Room of Wells. All the water in Esrom eventually flows through the Room of Wells, where it washes over the stone, collecting power and mixing with the magic of this chamber, before circulating back into our kingdom once more. How else do you imagine we stay safely beneath the waves? Have islands that rise and fall with the tides? A spell of that magnitude is never allowed to grow tired.”
Niya listened like a starved child being fed her first meal, greedily taking in every word. “But now the spell does grow tired,” she pointed out.
The ex-surb’s eyes narrowed. “I can see ideas turning in your head, girl, and I suggest you abandon them. Whatever you seek here, no good will come of it.”
Niya ignored his warning, her mind digging through this history and the story of Alōs later taking such a sacred stone from his homeland.
Why?
It was the question that spun around and around and one Niya had no good answer for, besides more proof of Alōs’s dark heart.
But yet he searches to bring it back, she reasoned.
Why? Why? Why?
An image of Ariōn and Alōs in their parents’ bedchamber, Alōs’s concerned gaze as he looked upon his younger brother.
I would have suffered greater without you.
Could it be possible that such a dark soul as he could truly care for another? Sacrifice his own livelihood for another?
Niya’s chest burned at the idea, an old scar she had thought faded transforming back into a scab to pick. If Alōs was capable of such emotion, what did that mean for how he had treated her?
Niya’s magic hissed with hot revenge through her veins. Her old resolve of hatred toward the pirate captain settling like comforting coals in her heart.
None of this matters, she thought. The only part that does is the leverage I now have against him.
But now what?
Sliding her hands into her pockets, Niya pinched her brows together, growing frustrated with her next move. She could of course wait here for Alōs’s unavoidable wrath, along with the punishment that came with trespassing in Esrom, but Niya was not good at waiting. She might have agreed to leave him and his brother peacefully, but that didn’t mean she was going to lie down and let the pirate, prince, or whatever he thought himself to be walk all over her.
She was Niya Bassette, dancer of the Mousai, for the lost gods’ sake. If she was going into battle, she would meet her enemy on even footing. And that meant escaping from this prison and showing Alōs all the talents she brought to his arsenal.
You have overestimated my need for you by coming here.
Well, Niya would see about that.
Alōs needed more help than he let on, and Niya was going to use that for all it was worth.
Niya’s thoughts froze as she brushed a finger over a bump in her pocket.
Oh! Her heart picked up its pace as she removed a small pouch. She tipped out a tiny gold ball into her palm. Niya had forgotten she had stuck this into her pocket, so long ago it had been since she had changed from the soiled dress she had worn in Jabari to her current pirate’s garb.
A grin curved along her mouth as she took in her seed scoopling. Thank the lost gods!
Making her way back to the door to her cell, she crouched in front of the lock.
“No use, I tell ya,” said her prison mate, inching closer to his bars but not touching them. “Might as well sit back and share our life stories to pass the grains falling. They like to make you wait before you learn your sentencing.”
Niya ignored him. She had only one shot at this.
Delicately, she placed the seed scoopling against the door’s latch, holding her breath as the ice quickly crept around it. Right before it closed over the shell, she flicked out a flame from her finger and lit the scoopling on fire.
It gave a little puff of smoke as it caught before it grew in size, oozing black and fighting against the frost attempting to cover it. The seed scoopling won, eating right through the icy lock. A giant dripping hole sat where the latch used to be. The seed scoopling fell to the ground with a slap and began to burrow through the stone floor.
Nothing could stop a seed scoopling once activated. Not even magic.
Niya gave a testing nudge to the cell door with her boot.
It creaked open.
She smiled.
“Perhaps we can tell our stories another time,” said Niya to the old man as she gingerly stepped through. “That little guy is going to drop into the next floor soon, and who knows what, or who, might be in its path.”
“Wait!” the man called out as she walked by. “Help me. Do the same trick for me!”
But even if Niya wanted to, she couldn’t, for she only had that one. The man’s shouts faded to echoes of distress as she hurried down the hall, a distant zapping and flashes of light behind her before all fell quiet.
Niya made her way from the top floor, where her cell seemed to be, to the one beneath.
Here she passed more cells, simpler than hers, with only plain benches lining walls. All were crammed with multiple prisoners. They were an odd bunch, wearing varying degrees of expensive-looking clothes. Coats, capes, tunics, and dresses in impeccable shape. The only thing amiss was the strong odor of alcohol.
Well-bred drunks, thought Niya. How interesting.
Esrom’s main offenses seemed to fall with overindulgence.
And though she felt their gazes on her, a few calling out, she ignored them, senses instead prickling for any nearing guards.
But oddly for a prison, it was so far void of soldiers or watchful eyes.
Niya descended to another floor with little trouble. There, however, she was hit with the sensation of a figure shifting at the bottom of the stairs.
As she crept down, she caught the edge of a guard’s uniform, his hand grasping his pointed staff, fingers thrumming along it in apparent boredom.
I’ll give you a task to distract you, she thought as she curled her wrists around, gathering her magic. With a flick, she flew out her gifts like an orange fishing line, severing the thin veil of the guard’s own powers.
Her thread of magic wound around his head, latching on to his eyes and his mind.
Mine. Her gifts tugged.
Niya sensed the guard grow slack, and as she took the last steps to stand in front of him, she peered into his glassy eyes. “Follow,” she whispered, and follow he did.
Niya would be less conspicuous with a guard escorting her.
“Show me the way out,” she quietly commanded. The man complied, maneuvering them this way and that through the prison.
Niya’s heartbeat grew quick as open windows eventually appeared in a new hall. Early dawn streamed in to paint the white brick around her a soft yellow.
Niya glanced out the glass, glimpsing an empty stone courtyard fortified by a tall wall. There was no splendor here like in the palace, only a platform in the center. An execution block.
Niya did not linger on the scene, instead twisted around a new bend, only to come to a halt as a cool current hit her like a kick in the chest.
Her magic buzzed through her veins, warning bells going off.
She knew this energy all too well.
Alōs was near.
Niya rubbed her lips together, holding steady to the spell that leashed the guard at her side.