He pulls the limes out of my hand and brandishes them, his disappointment metallic, like blood in my mouth. “One day you’re going to get caught and then the king’s executioner will cut off your hands. And I need these hands.” His accusation softens as he drops the limes to take my hands in his. Kissing my knuckles, he says, “I can’t conquer the world without them.”
My breath catches in my throat as he turns my palms over and kisses my wrists and each of my fingertips. His hazel eyes tilt toward mine, cloudy beneath the fringe of his lashes. “Promise me you won’t steal anymore,” he says.
“I promise,” I whisper, wanting him so much it feels like a sin.
He draws me closer and kisses me with his own cold lips sweetened by wine: He wants me too. But there are rules to our stolen moments, an unspoken boundary. There are too many unmarried mothers in the Brim left abandoned to fate while their noble lovers never look back. We defy expectation by resisting temptation. It’s the way the gods like it: vice balanced by virtue.
“And anyway, I’m supposed to bring you gifts.” Reaching into his cloak, Thaelan pulls out a scrap of vellum, smoothing it across his leg. “Happy birthday,” he says.
Blood hits low at the base of my throat, a sudden frantic dance of adrenaline as I take the paper from him. “You found a new tunnel,” I say, already an expert at reading his codes.
He fights to suppress a smile. “Yes.”
I trace the path in my imagination, but I’m too eager and skip ahead, losing my place. I have to stop myself and slow down, reading it again.
“Thaelan,” I say, eyes lifting to his, my voice rising in question. “This tunnel doesn’t end.”
“Oh, it ends,” he says, “when you reach a staircase carved from stone, leading to a hallway full of marble and columns. And just beyond . . .” His voice drops and he barely breathes the words at my ear though they echo through me like a shout: “Avinea is still out there.”
I fumble to press the paper back against his chest as the hairs on my neck stand on end. Despite the dark, despite the cold, I cast a look around us for witnesses, eavesdroppers—maybe one of the king’s shadow crows, golems with smoky wings that circle the skies above, trailing embers and drifting ash in their wake. Controlled by scrying members of the king’s council, they watch Brindaigel with beady eyes, searching for infraction. And this paper Thaelan holds, this is treason.
Thirty years ago, a civil war divided the neighboring kingdom of Avinea between its rightful king, Merlock, and his younger brother, Corthen. The magic used to fight the war stagnated in the aftermath of Merlock’s victory and subsequent disappearance, producing a plague that decimated everything it touched. In an act of self-preservation, King Perrote moved the very mountains around Brindaigel to form a barrier between us and Avinea. It keeps the plague out.
It keeps us in.
Once a year, on the Day of Excision, the king sends his shadow crows over the mountains to survey the world beyond. One by one they return as the kingdom waits for Perrote to emerge with the formal conclusion. Every year it’s the same.
Avinea is dead and the plague has destroyed everything.
So with no other choice, Brindaigel hibernates another year, grateful that our king had the foresight to protect us. Of course, Avinea’s not the only thing out there. There’s a whole world still, separated from the plague by oceans and mountains and continents. But to leave would be to question the king; it would be calling him a liar when he says that we’re better off here, crowded in against ourselves, fighting for a broken scrap of sky and a chance to breathe.
Some have tried. Either over the mountains or around them, dropping ladders made of rope into the gorge, following goat paths to the peaks above. Most are young, desperate, eager for a life of their own.
All are dead now, executed where they were caught, their bodies left as warnings: Nobody leaves Brindaigel.
But we will.
Six months ago, Thaelan told me about the tunnels, offshoots of the castle dungeons, buried beneath our feet. He discovered the first by accident, the second by chance, and now, he knows almost all of them by heart. Old supply routes, we guessed, and it became an addiction: Where did they lead? Why weren’t they closed, and who uses them now? Every chance he gets, Thaelan risks his life and his family’s reputation by sneaking out of the training barracks and making maps, marking the dead ends and the twisty forks, searching for a glimpse of the world we’ve been told no longer exists. A world where a girl like me could love a boy like him and nobody could stop us.
“There was water,” Thaelan says now, tracing the edge of my chin with his knuckles. “And sand, and sky. I could see the stars.” He pauses, almost breathless, his fingertips soft against my neck. “I could see the moon.”
On instinct, I rock my head back as he steals a kiss against my throat. “You saw the moon?” I ask faintly. Our mountain borders cut off all but a small glimpse of the sky and we only ever see the moon for two weeks out of every four, when it rises far enough east. I’ve read that it grows fat every month, bloated enough to color the world with a silver light, but not here. Not in Brindaigel. “You saw all that and you still came back?”
Threading his fingers through my hair, Thaelan leans his forehead to mine. “In three weeks, I swear my oath to the king,” he says. “He’ll bind me to this city, Faris. To him. But I choose you. I choose you and Avinea and whatever we find out there, for better or worse, until death—or the plague—do us part.”
It’s not the first proposal he’s made me, but tonight, it feels more potent—more possible—than any before. “And then what?”
“And then we will have one hundred beautiful babies,” he says with a grin, “and all of them will have three heads and five arms.”
“It’s the plague,” I say. “They wouldn’t have any arms at all.”
His smile turns sad, thumb tracing the curve of my cheek. Exhaling softly, he pulls back, tucking the paper into his doublet. “Look,” he says, nodding to the sky. “There’s your wish.”
A single star emerges from the mist, flickering like the eye of Rook, God Above, whose ambition and courage drew him out of the dark caverns of the earth and into the temples of the sky. We praise him for leaving everything behind, including his sister Tell, the Goddess Below. And we scorn Tell for being too weak—too complacent—to follow his lead.
I accepted my mother’s decision to choose gold over me; I accepted the king’s orders to destroy my father’s shop and my father’s life, until the only job he could find for his nimble fingers was in picking rocks from the farming terraces and lifting tankards of ale. Thaelan’s betrothal, my life in the Brim, even the mountains that cradle us and keep the rest of the world at bay: I have never argued these facts or this fate.
Is that courage or is that submission?
“There was another raid last night,” I say.