“No—”
“He saw us! He saw you!” Her voice rises and she shoves him back, leaving a bloody handprint on Alistair’s waistcoat before the knife sings between them, dangerously close to Alistair’s face. “I’ve come too far to turn back now! This is our only chance and I will not waste it for—for him.” Lowering her voice, she straightens. “It had to be done.”
Alistair tangles his hands through his hair, his features caught in the same play of revulsion that skates down my back. “Mercer sent him,” he says, pointing to the body—to the boy, barely older than any of us. “He’s going to notice when he doesn’t come back!”
“Just dump the body,” says Bryn. She tosses her hair back, lifting her chin. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
“How apropos,” Alistair growls. “You disappear, a guard ends up dead, and the mad scientist in the dungeons is the one with blood on his clothes!”
Bryn rolls her eyes and crouches, her dark cloak pillowing behind her as she wipes her blade clean on the guard’s tunic. “You’ll be the last one my father would blame.”
“You don’t know that, you don’t—”
“I know my father,” she says, standing, taking a step toward him. “And he knows you. The executioner who cried the first time he killed a man.” Her voice lowers and she cradles his face in one bloody hand. “My father knows you’re too weak to kill without orders.”
He stares at her. There is no remorse on her face, no regret for the boy that she killed, and this can’t be real, an executioner made of mercy and a princess with a heart as black as sin. What if after all this time, it wasn’t the beast in the dungeon I needed to fear, but the beauty who lived in the castle above him?
Blood puddles around my shoes and I move to escape the implicit guilt it carries. My heel wavers over the rusted lip of the open grate behind me, and my breath catches. I don’t know the tunnels at my back, but the water that roars below me moves with purpose. The farming terraces, I think. If the current carries me out to the irrigation channels that line the shallows, I could be at the workhouse before they’re even out of the dungeon. If I double back, if I run, I could grab my sister and take our chances. If Avinea is still out there, maybe there are magicians too, a transferent who could cut the thread that ties her back to Brindaigel. A king concerned with conserving resources wouldn’t chase after the loss of one little girl that no one will miss.
Alistair takes a step forward, eyes wide, expression plaintive. Blood outlines his jaw. “Faris,” he says.
“Don’t run,” Bryn says, the knife still in her hand.
Twisting, I drop through the grate, landing in water cold as snowmelt that rises to my thighs. My legs tangle in my damp skirt and the current pitches me forward, onto my hands and knees. Gagging back mouthfuls of briny water, I struggle to find my feet but I’m being dragged, scraped across the bottom of the channel. There’s no light down here and it’s disorienting as I grapple for purchase against the slick walls.
Someone lands with a splash behind me, their voice lost to the roar of the water. Rough hands grab the back of my coat and together, we’re dragged underwater before the ground gives way.
Bright starbursts of pain flash across my eyelids as I ricochet between narrow walls, landing in a pool of water with enough force I’m flattened on the bottom. Panicked, I begin to thrash, searching for purchase, desperate for air. I can’t swim, I can’t see, I can’t breathe—
Bryn yanks me to the surface, bearing my weight against her hip as she paddles us away from the crushing waterfall. “Breathe,” she demands. “And stop flailing, you’ll drown us both!”
The water’s not as deep as I expected, but she doesn’t release me until we’ve reached the edge of the river, framed by soft black sand. Releasing me with a grunt, Bryn lays on her back with her eyes closed and damp hair flattened across her cheek.
She saved my life.
She had no choice, I tell myself: Without me, she has nothing of any value to offer the prince. Even so, it’s a debt I don’t like hanging over me.
Cadence.
Rolling onto my stomach, I stagger to my feet, spinning a half circle to collect my bearings. The roar of the water screams at my back and I take a hesitant step toward a ribbon of light spilling through the rock ahead of me. But I falter when a staircase catches my attention, sweeping back into the mountain on the opposite side of the river. Broken chunks of rock lie scattered across the risers, but the floor leading away from the stairs is smooth, polished to a shine. Carved columns support overhead arches, almost every one of them broken, or tipped at drunken angles. The rib cage of a forgotten rowboat lies on its side, the iron bands rusted the color of blood.
I know this place.
“Don’t you dare run again,” Bryn growls, still sprawled on her back.
It hits me, like the ice of the water: a staircase carved from stone, leading to a hallway of marble and columns.
There was water, Thaelan had whispered against my throat. And sand, and sky.
Numbly, I turn back to the crevice, to the thread of dawn that bleeds through. My heart slams against my rib cage as my skin tightens in a rash of goose bumps.
I could see the stars.
It’s not the farming terraces beyond that crevice. It’s Avinea.
Thaelan made it this far. He was here, this close, so close, and then he turned back. For me.
Ignoring Bryn’s warnings, I take a step, another, hope warring with sorrow, desperate for this one last glimpse of Thaelan. But the cold water has leached into my bones and turned me cumbersome. I trip in the thick sand, over the white stones that litter the shore. Landing hard on my hip, I bite back my profanity and push myself to my knees. My fingers catch against a half-buried rock and I glance down with a scowl of impatience.
Not a rock. Bones. Bodies.
This isn’t an escape route, it’s a graveyard.
This is where the kingdom dumps its dead.
Eight
IT’S BASIC ECONOMICS, SUPPLY AND demand. We don’t have crypts enough for all of us, certainly not those of us who die as thieves and criminals. The bodies have to go somewhere, but I never even considered this: savage water and the dark, fifty feet from freedom.
Thaelan is down here somewhere. Discarded. Picked clean by the current and worn smooth with sand. My mother too.
I wilt with the thought as I close my eyes, count to ten. Of course Thaelan never mentioned this part because he always looked up instead of down. Instead of bones, he saw stars.
Bryn approaches, kicking sand, twisting her damp hair over one shoulder. Her cloak snags on a bone and she tears it free with a grunt.
“What’s the matter?” she asks, irritable.
I don’t look at her, staring instead toward the light. My body is a tangle of bruises, inside and out.