Alistair waits until silence returns to the hall before stepping back. Hair cuts across his cheek and he rubs his mouth with one hand as I hug myself.
“Wrong question,” he says at last. “Don’t ask what she planned to do. Ask why she changed her mind. Instead of running away, ask why she ran home.”
She came home to kiss me good-bye and to drive a dagger into my chest. Nine perfect stitches and one unanswered question: Why?
We continue on, passing more turns, more twists, more gloomy halls. Stupid hope rises at each one, as if I expect to see Thaelan around the next bend with a map and a dimpled smile and an explanation for where he’s been. It’s a cruel game to play, and I suffer the bitter consequences each time I look and nothing looks back but the darkness.
Thaelan is dead, I tell myself. Pay attention, Faris.
The tunnel finally opens into a large antechamber with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and a Rook’s Eye oculus open to the world outside, far above our heads. The worn stone floor is dusted with old straw, scraps of fabric, cigarettes turned soggy with rain. An empty wheelbarrow rests against one of the walls, its frame splintered beyond salvage. Bats roost from the wooden beams overhead, chittering with indignation at our arrival.
The floor gently slopes toward an iron grate, hinged on one side, with a handle on the other. A dull roar rises from somewhere underneath, and while the air is still cold, it’s balmier. Rust spots spread away from the grate like scabs of old blood; beads of condensation flock the walls.
Bryn arches an eyebrow at our delayed arrival but says nothing, moving out of the way as Alistair bends down, unlocking the grate with a key before opening it with a screech of rusted metal. He cringes and throws a look over his shoulder, toward the half a dozen tunnels that all intersect here. Nervously, I lean forward, but the torchlight barely reaches a foot past the lip of the hole. Anything could be down there.
Avinea is down there.
A soft scrabbling echoes through the hall as Alistair rocks back on his feet. “Shadow rat,” he warns.
I spin. A shadow rat lumbers into view, its swollen body dragging along the ground, trailing sparks and leaving a line of fading embers. Wordlessly, Alistair strikes a match and flicks it toward the rat, who turns in our direction, nose lifting to the air a second before the match hits. Its body absorbs the flame before the rat implodes with a flash of light. A tiny stone clatters to the ground.
“I hate these things,” Alistair says. “They’re worse than the courtiers who lurk in the halls.”
“Won’t someone know you killed it?” I ask uneasily. “The guard who was scrying—”
Bryn snorts. “You don’t actually believe that, do you? Men who spend their days spying through the eyes of rats and birds?” She picks up the stone and tosses it to me. I fumble the catch and it rolls toward the open grate. “We don’t have enough men for that. Most of these things are just decoys.”
“You can tell by the color of its eyes,” Alistair says. “Black means it’s just smoke. Red means there’s blood running through it. A heartbeat. Those are the ones you hide from.”
“It’s not real?” I bend for the stone; it’s warm in my hand, threaded with tiny striations of silver. Of magic. They bump unevenly beneath my thumb. “I thought all the king’s golems—”
“My father won’t waste magic when he doesn’t have to,” Bryn says. She opens her palm and I drop the stone in it. “Or men. Even the king conserves resources these days.”
Decoys. The rats that chased me out of the tunnels that night weren’t even real. Smoke and a single guard were all that kept me from Cadence—that kept us from Avinea.
In that instant, I don’t need a spell or stolen magic: I’ll find Prince Corbin myself so long as he promises to burn this kingdom to the ground.
A hand falls on my arm, a sliver of clarity that cuts through my fury.
“Here,” Alistair says. He offers me a book, bound in twine. Indigenous Flowering Species of Avinea. My mother’s book, lost in the bag I abandoned to the tunnels four months ago.
“You kept this?” I ask with a frown. I wouldn’t have. Books are a commodity these days, and I would have sold it like I’ve sold everything else of any value.
“I thought you should have it back.” His lips twist in a smile. “I thought it might help you to know you’re not alone.”
My mother is the last person in the world I would choose for company, and yet, six-year-old Faris feels a flicker of yearning for the woman I might have known.
If she hadn’t tried to kill me.
My thumb skims the cover and I hesitate. The words taste, sour, salty—like dirty water that stagnates in my mouth. “Thank you,” I manage at last, tucking the book into the pocket of my coat.
“Well,” Alistair says, “your head didn’t burst into flames. I’ll consider that a good start.” He extends a hand to me, features shadowed. “I’ll keep an eye on Cadence.”
I sift through his words: Is it a threat or a promise? His earlier apology echoes through me, and for a moment, I’m tempted to believe it. This is not the boy I planned to kill, a monster who lived in the dungeons and deserved to die. This is a boy who was once friends with Thaelan. And while we will never be friends, we are something shared nevertheless—prisoners of fate who made the difficult choice to survive.
“I’m coming back,” I tell him.
He nods, mouth grim, and retracts his hand. “I’ll be waiting.”
Turning, he beckons for Bryn and blanches.
A guard stands gaping at the mouth of one of the tunnels with a torch in one hand and a small box under his arm. “Your highness?” he asks, voice hitching in bewildered question.
The answering silence shrinks the room until we all seem to breathe the same gasp of shallow, humid air. “This isn’t part of any assigned patrol,” Alistair says at length, with an authority that belies his age. “You shouldn’t be here.”
The guard takes an uneasy step back. “I was sent for the rat,” he says, darting a glance to the pile of ashes and dying embers, all that remains of the imploded golem. “Mercer wants the spell stone back, but . . .” A line carves between his brows. “What are you doing here?”
Who attacks, who reacts? Bryn reaches the guard first, but Alistair is close behind and a struggle ensues, arms and legs and rising voices that swell to the rafters and unsettle the bats.
And then, a single gasp. The sound of a knife driven half an inch low enough, pinning a man’s heart to his spine.
The guard crumples. Blood begins to pool beneath him, catching along worn tracks in the floor that spread toward the drain. His eyes are still open, glossy and dull, all fight vanished. He could be under the king’s spell, the same as Cadence.
But he’s not. He’s dead, the same as Thaelan.
Is it really that easy? That fast?
“Bryndalin,” Alistair says, choked.
“He saw us,” Bryn says tightly. The knife hangs from her hand. “I had to.”