“No,” Rayne said. “That's not true. That can't be true. My father wouldn’t have allowed it.” The block of ice inside her chest cracked, and the shadows threatened to pull her back under, whispering names in her ear. Madlin, Merek, Tamsin, Imeyna. Imeyna. Imeyna.
“Your father hasn’t been in Orabel for some time, so I couldn’t say what he would have done, though he’s expected back for tonight’s festivities. But it’s true. I buried the body myself,” he said. “A gruesome sight.”
She opened her mouth to object again but instead gagged on the rising bile. She lunged for the corner of her cell just in time. Her empty stomach ejected yellow bile onto the stones, heaving until nothing else came up. She imagined Wido receiving the package, opening it and looking into the dead eyes of his last daughter, of the one he let go off to her own death. She imagined the guilt, the anger, the decision he would make. Sending her head to him was an act of war, a challenge, and Wido would rise to the occasion. Danyll wanted to posture, to show strength, without thinking about what they would be met with. Innis had been trying to avoid an outright war with the Knights for twenty years. He may have had the advantage in numbers and size, but he didn't have the loyalty that Shade had. When Shade came, how quick before Hail turned on its conqueror? How long before the slaves picked up weapons and turned on the Crowhearts? Before the Sons of Enos rebelled against their captors?
Old Sim left, the receding torchlight plunging her back into darkness. Rayne hugged her knees to her chest, feeling small beneath the weight of everything that was about to happen and not knowing if she would be alive when it did.
? ? ?
Rayne must have fallen asleep after Old Sim had left her to her own thoughts, because she woke with a start at the sound of metal on metal, followed by a thick, heavy silence. The silence of anticipation, of a held breath, of an empty hallway. She pushed herself to her knees and listened. Without Sim's torch, the dungeon was dark. Her eyes strained against it but couldn't pick up anything.
Then there was a distant shout. Not from the dungeon, but from the world above. Rayne stood and moved forward to where she thought the door was, but two steps in and she hadn't hit the iron bars yet. Her hands groped blindly through the open space and finally found the door pushed open, folded back on itself against the stone wall.
Was this a trick? She took a hesitant step outside of her cell, and then another, shuffling slowly with her hands held out in front of her. A voice, a flicker of firelight, and she pressed herself to the wall. As the light grew closer, her surroundings came into focus. It was as she had suspected. She was in the hall beyond her cell and her door was thrown open. A few yards away, the prisoner that Old Sim had beaten was gripping the bars of his cell, his wide, white eyes trained on her.
“—just to see,” an unfamiliar voice said. “The prince wants to be certain that the princess is safe.”
“Of course, she’s this way,” she heard Old Sim's gravelly voice say. Rayne looked at the prisoner across from her, waiting for him to shout, to draw attention to them. But he held a bony finger to his own lips in the universal sign for silence and Rayne exhaled. Old Sim appeared at the end of the hall with a guard in golden Ashsky armor. He glanced at her and then away as if he hadn't seen her at all, then pulled the guard in the other direction, deeper into the maze of the dungeon. “After all these years, and it still feels like a maze down here…” His voice faded away until it was nothing but an indistinct whisper.
“Go,” whispered the other prisoner.
Rayne nodded. When she was sure they weren't coming back this way, she slipped around the corner and found the main gate cracked open. It must have been him. Old Sim must have opened her door and given her this chance, but why? Then she remembered his words to her, just before giving her the grim news of Danyll’s challenge to the Knights: It is my greatest shame, to have done nothing.
A door had been left open for her, and she would walk through it. She would not feel the regret of doing nothing again. She squeezed through the cracked door and took the winding staircase two steps at a time before finally emerging into the abandoned corridor above. She paused, listening. A pair of guards in iron armor marched past her so quickly that they didn't see her where she blended into the shadows of the door frame, and then servants carrying trays bustled in the opposite direction.
“Damn the poisoner,” one of the women was saying in hushed, urgent tones. “Having to take each course to the taster.”
The other woman nodded in agreement. “Cook will have our heads for serving cold dishes.”
The women prattled on as they scurried down the hall and out of sight. Rayne fell in behind them. As they moved through the palace, a sound like the roar of the ocean grew louder until she realized it was the gathering—laughter and conversation, music and dancing feet, all mingling together to create a noise that took her back to her childhood. To dark Duskan parties where nobles in fine, black dresses danced in the firelight, and Rayne and her siblings caused endless mischief even though they were to be in the nursery.
“Oh, you mustn't,” Madlin would beseech them as they stole ladies’ hats and stuffed pilfered pastries in their pockets.
Rayne followed them through a servant's entrance, stepping out of the way of a woman who pushed past her with a pitcher of mead. The woman raised her brows at Rayne but said nothing, and Rayne looked down at herself for the first time. The dress had been black once but was now brown with dust and mud, and the torn sleeve exposed her burned arm. Even the servant woman was better dressed in her simple gray smock.
Before the door could close, Rayne slipped in and kept close to the stone wall behind the columns that encircled the ballroom. There were some other wallflowers nearby, but they were so absorbed in the dancing that none of them turned her way. At first, she didn't see anyone she knew in the swirl of gaudy Hail colors, but then she spotted a dark, still figure in their midst, a crown on his head. Her father watched the dancers, and beside him, a head shorter than the king, was Danyll, wearing a tunic with the Ashsky sigil—a snake ready to strike—on its front, his golden wielder’s mask pushed up on his head. But her eyes skated past both of them, drawn to the figure behind them.