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Chapter Sixteen

I wait until dark before seeking the tunnels, but the kitchens aren’t empty upon my arrival.

The staff lingers around a table, planning meals, sampling sauces, all in preparation for the next day.

At least they’re too preoccupied to notice me as I squeeze behind shelves stacked with crates of fresh produce.

I find a door behind another set of shelves at the end of the storage alcove.

But the moment I wrap my fingers around the handle, a tap on my shoulder startles the breath from me.

I snap around, only to find a kitchen girl offering me a sheepish smile.

A hair net covers her apricot hair, her apron smeared with flour as pale as her skin.

“Vasalie?” she asks. I blink, then nod. She motions me to follow. “Over here.”

I tread after her before I can think better of it, and she leads me down another narrow space too small to be called a hallway, then pauses before another door. “You almost went into the pantry,” she whispers. “Cellar is this way.”

I open my mouth, but she notes my confusion and clarifies, “Laurent asked me to make sure you find your way. Especially since they’ve put me in charge of the cellars for the Gathering.

” She reaches for the handle but slides it upward before swinging it open.

“This way it won’t creak and alert the others. ”

She guides us inside, lighting a small lantern beside the door. The space is dark and ovoid, large casks wedged together on one side, the other stocked with bottles. The moment the door shuts after us, I swing to face her. “I thought . . . I thought no one knew . . .”

She holds up a hand. “He told me only that he’s helping you the way he once helped me. Your secret is safe.”

He did tell me that he once forged paperwork for a friend. But then I notice her hand. The tattered skin, the way it branches up her arm and neck—

Burn marks.

I peer more closely at her face. The scars are less visible there, what with the smattering of freckles. Then there’s her eyes, a matching amber, and so very familiar—

My heart stops in my chest.

“Marian. You’re Marian.”

It’s her turn to look confused, but it confirms my suspicion. Brigitte’s face is one I’ll never forget, and the story she told me more so.

The story that ignited something in me. That pulled me to my feet when I needed it most, when I was ready—so ready—to stop trying.

Marian’s story.

I shake my head. “You look just like her,” I say. “Your mother.”

She licks her lips. “You . . . know her?”

“I met her in West Miridran. During a . . . visit,” I say.

The moment I say it, her eyes widen, sparkling with tears. She takes my hands. “When did you see her? How did she look?”

“She looked well,” I tell her. “Truly.” I wish I could tell her the whole of it, what it meant to me, and I vow to do just that once I’m free.

At least she relaxes. “She’s the reason I’m here, the reason Laurent helped me. I live in East Miridran, but she’s stuck in the west. King Illian won’t release her from his service.”

But Brigitte didn’t seem trapped—at least, it appeared that way, until her words come back to me: I’d be with her now if it weren’t for . . . Then she’d trailed off.

How could I have forgotten? I’d been too consumed in my own pain to notice hers.

But then I recall what else Brigitte had told me.

“He won’t release her,” I say, “because you refused to work for him.”

Marian’s eyes fall, and she tucks an errant curl behind her ear. “I should never have left her in the first place. And she does such a good job; she’s made herself indispensable to him.”

“It doesn’t sound like your fault,” I say, wishing I had something more to offer her. “If anything, it’s his.”

“I was hoping he’d bring her here to the Gathering, and then I could try to sneak her out.

” She pauses, taking a breath. “I can’t have my name on the staff roster, not when Illian might recognize it.

Laurent helped me forge documentation for that reason alone.

I know it’s wrong, but I refuse to abandon hope that he might one day bring her. ”

Brigitte, trapped. All that time, I’d assumed I was the prisoner, not her.

“I’m sorry,” I breathe. I want to pull her close. To help, somehow. But being close to me could cause Marian more harm. Illian is the shadow that hovers behind me, my chains wrapped around his long, elegant fingers like the reins of a mare.

I settle for “She was good to me. I hope you find your way back together soon.”

Marian smiles warmly, then tugs a bottle from its spot. She reaches inside the now-empty crevice and yanks something I can’t see.

The rack shifts, opening like a door to reveal a deep, yawning pit of black.

Wind, cold as a crypt, brushes my shoulders. I wrap my arms around myself.

“The tunnels,” Marian says. “Please keep these a secret. One of the reasons Laurent put me in charge of the cellars was to make sure they remained that way—though I know if Laurent told you, he did so for a reason. They will be empty, but be careful. Only use them when you must.”

I swipe away a spiral of dust as I slip through the tunnels.

Here, they’re nothing but a wide expanse of dark, unpolished stone.

The air is stale, dry, catching in my throat, though a cool breeze whistles through cracks and crevices every so often.

Where it comes from, I cannot see. Only faint wisps of light from underneath the doors break up the syrupy dark; Marian advised me to leave the lantern behind.

She also told me to head straight, which will take me outside, and to avoid the tunnels that branch off. She trusts me, like Laurent.

She shouldn’t. I veer left.

Laurent’s suspicions, the things he heard—I have to know if Illian is funding a Brisendali war.

It would change everything. The Beast of the North’s strength is matched by no one and nothing—not by steel, not by men, not even by the entirety of the other northern kingdoms. No one would survive them, should they decide to put their weapons to use.

And when they win—because they will win—nothing would be out of my father’s reach.

His appetite for blood will drive him to push through more borders until none remain.

I’ll have nowhere safe to disappear to.

It used to be idle talk. Slurred rants by the fireplace after he’d returned from his station, the scent of cognac sour on his breath.

All nations should follow our order, he’d say.

He’d speak of their avarice, their wretched ways.

The absurdity of the last vestiges of piety some clung to—as if he were all-knowing.

And I might have bought into his reasonings, had it not been for Emilia. Yet it seems King Rurik may have caved under my father’s influence.

If Brisendale is the Beast of the North, then my father is its fangs, already coated in blood. And if I am helping to enable his war—

I have to know.

I’m supposed to retrieve Annais by midnight, but this might be my only chance to seek answers. I’ll just have to be quick.

Feeling faint, I use walls for support, jumping when something spindly crawls across my fingers.

Adrenaline chases my heartbeat into a sprint, slowing only after a few long minutes of uninterrupted travel.

Just when I’m about to turn around, the tunnels lift, taking me higher into the palace itself.

And then they narrow.

And darken.

Dark like my cell. Cloying darkness, stale and never-ending. Eternal.

Swathes of it. Layers.

A familiar panic hurtles through my chest. I press my hands to my heart as if I could push it back down, but it grows thicker until my lungs feel heavy, as if I’m gulping seawater. Sap. I slink against the wall, the ghost of my shackles weighing down my wrists. I can’t seem to draw in air—

No. I can’t let this happen. Not here, not now. I thrash around in my mind, fighting to regain the body slipping from my control—

Copelan.

His arms, the way it feels to be held by him. The way it feels to be touched, even if it takes me hours to recover from our rehearsals. And our last one was as exhilarating as it was exhausting. An escape—maybe the only thing holding me together.

Until I fail him.

Because I cannot balance the way I need to. I lack the strength or stamina required for many of the moves, forcing him to compensate with his own strength.

I never tell him how humiliated I feel.

A broken toy has no worth.

I am weak and brittle as century-old bone.

No—breathe. Please, breathe.

A glimmer catches my eye, just beyond the corner. I round it slowly, brushing dampened hair from my forehead to clear my vision.

Because surely my sight is deceiving me.

Shivers of prismatic light dance along the walls ahead like leaves in the wind, and it takes me several moments to understand.

The mosaics.

Or the backs of them, because I am on the other side.

And I can see straight through them.

Figures stride by, tapering the light as they pass. And not only that, I can even make out fragments of conversation.

“Anton,” I say under my breath.

Instead of paintings, the palace is decorated with sea glass mosaics.

They line every hallway, garnish every room, and from my brief explorations, I know they’re opaque from the other side.

But here, certain panes are thinner, near translucent.

They must be the new additions to expand the tunnels Laurent spoke of.

And it’s brilliantly done. Being that they extend only slightly off the wall, who would know there’s a walkway behind them?

He’s made the entire place an illusion.

I don’t know if I’m impressed or unnerved. Has he been spying on us? On me ? Or are they merely an escape route, like Laurent said? My room is free of sea glass, perhaps because I am mere staff, but who’s to say he hasn’t been watching from the halls?

Chills spike the hairs on my arms. Is this why he suspects I’m working for his brother?