The hallway beyond her rooms was dark and quiet. She was relieved not to find a guard there. Perhaps they weren’t suspicious of her after all. Or perhaps this was a test and she had failed the moment she opened the door. She froze, but no one came to reprimand or arrest her. It was late, and most of the palace residents and workers would be sleeping, and those that weren’t—her father most likely among them—were otherwise occupied.
Her sister had been conspicuously absent from her greeting party, but it had been a matter of a couple of persistent questions during her bath to get her maid to tell her where Edlyn's rooms were—just a floor above her own on the ocean wall. It wasn't a secret, she told Rayne, but the wing was off-limits.
Not to me, Rayne thought as she slunk through the dark hall to the stairs. She could only hope that Danyll had left the same or similar enchantments in place. In her limited experience with elemental wielders, she didn't know what he was capable of or how he might have reinforced his spells.
From the windows in the stairwell, the gentle roar of crashing waves reached her. It was a strange sound, enough to drive her mad if she focused on it, much like the incessant smell of fish. Orabel was an assault on all her senses. All things she would get used to, she supposed, if the general were correct. Or more likely, something she wouldn't have to live with for very long.
The door on the next level was locked, but this wasn't something a couple of hairpins could fix. There was no handle, no obvious locking mechanism, no spellwork; it was just a smooth slab of stone set into the wall, visible only by the small groove running along its edges. Rayne stared at it, waiting for something to happen, when she noticed the faded smear of red in the spot where a handle should be. Crowheart blood. It's what the Knight spies had told Imeyna, and apparently Danyll had taken it literally this time, perhaps given this door extra reinforcement after the breach in Iblia. Taking the knife from inside the folds of her skirt, she opened a small cut on her palm and pressed it to the stone.
1 . . . 2 . . . The door seemed to grab her arm just as it had done in the tunnels of Iblia, the familiar jolt causing her body to go completely rigid before releasing her. This time it gave beneath her hand and opened inward without a sound. She tried to imagine her father doing this enough to have stained the pale stone. Did he visit her often? Did he love her as more than just an heir to his stolen kingdom? Would Edlyn's death hurt him as Madlin's had hurt Rayne? She didn't know the answer to any of these questions and pushed them aside as easily as she did the door as she slipped into the hallway beyond.
It was simple, nondescript and dark, not unlike the tunnels in Iblia. But unlike in the tunnels, there were windows cut high into the stone which would make it easier for Danyll to wield the elements against her. But he was nowhere to be seen. She crept forward, expecting to see him or another guard at any moment. If she hadn't been a Crowheart, she imagined hundreds of traps would have sprung for her by now. As it was, Edlyn was a sitting duck just waiting for her in her gilded lake.
“Have you seen her?”
At the sound of a girl's voice, Rayne's heart leaped and she pressed herself against a cold stone wall, her breaths shallow and silent. It had to be Edlyn just a few steps away, in some room that Rayne hadn't seen yet.
“Yes,” a man answered. This voice was the one that had threatened to kill her not long ago—the same deep baritone, the same clipped accent. How had her timing been so impossibly poor? Or did Prince Danyll just never leave her side? Rayne certainly hadn’t seen him when her father had greeted her unless he had been lurking in the shadows. “Don’t even think about it. We still don't know if she can be trusted.”
“Oh, Dany,” Edlyn said. The nickname surprised Rayne. She had thought Edlyn would resent her jailer, but there was a familiarity between them she hadn't expected. “If I could just see her—”
“You know you can't. We can’t risk it.”
“I know I’m safe with you.”
He meant they couldn’t risk letting Edlyn around Rayne, not when her loyalty was uncertain. Rayne’s fingers twitched to her pocket. She hated to prove him right.
“Tell me how she is, then. Is she well?”
Danyll grunted in what must have been affirmation.
“Is she beautiful? She was always so beautiful.”
Rayne nearly scoffed in disbelief. It was Edlyn, with her smooth hair and sweet smile, that had always been the prettier of the two.
“Yes,” Danyll conceded, and Rayne felt the blush creeping up her face in the dark.
“Don’t tell me you’re like my Uncle Wynn,” Edlyn teased. “He traded one sister for another and look what happened to him.”
He died, killed by the sister he left. It was a thinly veiled threat that made Rayne smile. Just do it, she told herself, but she hung back, listening, getting to know her estranged sister in the little time they had left.
“You’d kill me?” Danyll asked. “How would you do it? A dagger in the heart? Poison in my drink?” His voice grew lower and more dangerous as he spoke, enough for Rayne to push herself off of the wall and slink along the hallway until she found the door. It was barely cracked. She couldn't see anyone, and the light inside the room was dim, hardly reaching the hallway.
Do it, she told herself again. Just throw the door open and do it. She had no other choice.
Except she did.
She could walk away.
But then what? Keep living a life in between, a life that she didn’t fit into? If she went through with it, she would at least be someone—a Knight, a rebel, a hero, a traitor.
There was a sound from inside the room then, a gasp, a muffled cry, and suddenly Rayne was back in Dusk, watching her friend being beaten to death, a gag in her mouth so that her cries wouldn't disturb the gathered nobility. The sound was so raw and familiar that Rayne didn't think. Couldn't think. She knew only that this time she wouldn't run.
She flung herself at the door, stumbling inside, her crazed eyes searching the room for Danyll. She would kill him first, she decided. But then she saw them, in the split second before they saw her—Danyll with his hands in Edlyn's hair, her back against the wall, her head tilted back so that her neck was exposed to his searching mouth. It wasn't a cry of pain, but pleasure. Of happiness.
Stupid. She couldn't even tell the difference. But for Rayne, love and pain had always been two sides of the same coin. And now more than ever, with her sister's wide, confused eyes on her, she felt them both twisting her apart.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rayne
The two of them jerked away from each other, Edlyn scrambling at the neckline of her light blue dress, drawing it closed in one fist and using the other hand to smooth her already-perfect hair. Danyll was the first of them to find his composure, though.
“I wondered if we would be seeing you,” he said.
“I— I wanted to see my sister,” Rayne said stupidly.