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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Corrick

Iknew revolution would find us.

I didn’t expect it to be so soon.

I didn’t expect it to be from all sides.

Alarms blare in the sector, but I have no way of knowing if they’ve attacked anything more than the palace. After Allisander’s comments, I don’t even know if this attack is the work of rebels or consuls.

The hallways are full of smoke and darkness, but I can sense movement, and I can hear the shouts and fighting. We have the advantage of invisibility, but so do they. I keep the wall at my back and head right, away from the noise. I’ve lost track of Rocco and the guards who were in the hallway, but Harristan and Quint are somewhere ahead of me. Tessa grips tight to my hand.

“This guard’s got the king’s mark,” calls a man. “He must be close.”

Ifreeze. Tessa’s fingers bite into my palm. I don’t dare say Harristan’s name.

The voices fall silent, and I know this is not a good sign. They’re hoping to use the darkness against us. The smoke tickles my throat, and I try to breathe shallow breaths.

Harristan coughs.

“There!” shouts a man, and I hear the swip of a crossbow. It hits something, but I have no idea what. A man cries out ahead of me.

A rush in the darkness tells me an enemy has drawn close, and I leap forward to tackle them. An elbow drives into my ribs, and my earlier injuries scream at me. We crash to the ground, and I realize I’m not going to be fast enough to do anything but die.

But then the body is jerked away from me, and I hear the unmistakable sound of a blade piercing flesh, followed by a body hitting the floor beside me. A man groans. There’s a scuffle, and I roll just before a booted foot strikes my shoulder. Something—someone—hits the wall with a sickening thud.

I brace my hands against the wall, waiting for a clue about what just happened.

“Corrick?” Tessa’s voice cries out from the darkness. “Corrick.”

A hand brushes my shoulder, and I jerk away. It’s too much fast movement at once, and I have to brace a hand against the floor. I inhale a lungful of smoke and cough.

“Your Highness?” Rocco. His voice is closer, and I realize it was his blade that rescued me, his hand that found me in the darkness.

“I’m all right. Harristan?”

He doesn’t answer, but he coughs again, hard.

“We have to get out of the corridor,” calls Quint, and his voice sounds more distant.

Ifind my knees, then the wall again. “Get to my quarters,” I call. My room is along the back wall of the palace, which hopefully hasn’t taken as many hits as the front half. I have ropes in my chest to go out the window, but I don’t want to shout that into the darkness.

Crawling through the smoke seems to take an hour, but no further voices cry out in the dark. But then my hand finds the familiar edge of a doorjamb, and we push through the doorway.

At first I’m not entirely sure it’s my quarters. The lights here are as dead as they are in the rest of the palace, and while the smoke is nowhere near as dense as it was in the hallway, the room is still cloudy with a haze, even though a fire burns low in the hearth. But my stinging eyes begin to adjust, and I can make out my side table, my bed, the low chest along the wall.

I can make out Harristan, who’s not still coughing, but I can hear his wheezing from here. Quint, who’s got a hand braced against the wall. The guards Rocco and Thorin, who are already dragging a chest of drawers in front of the door.

Tessa, whose eyes are full of questions I can’t answer.

“Who?” says Harristan between gasps.

“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. I look at the guards. “Could you tell?”

“Just men,” says Thorin.

“With crossbows,” says Quint, and a strain in his voice forces me to look back over. That hand braced against the wall is leaving a dark handprint, and his jacket is unbuttoned, showing a spreading stain near his waist.