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CHAPTER ONE

LORE

Let all my abasements be used for glory, for the uplifting of my betters.

L ore was exceedingly bad at being a convict.

Maybe if she’d been left to languish in a prison, draped dramatically over a cot in a bare stone cell and not required to do anything but wallow, she could have excelled in her newfound position.

She wasn’t as good at brooding as Gabe—gods, no one was—but she thought she could have given it a solid go.

At least then she wouldn’t have perpetually watering eyes from the ash in the air, and always-open blisters on her hands, and a crick in her neck that at this point she assumed was permanent.

No, Lore was not good at this at all.

But she tried her best not to show it, because the guards on the Burnt Isles all wanted to make her as miserable as possible. And if there was one thing Lore hated more than her current circumstances, it was letting someone else win.

She straightened as much as her sore back would let her and wiped her wrist across her brow.

The ridged skin at her temple was still a surprise every time she felt it.

A scar from that day in the North Sanctuary when she’d brought the whole thing down, tried to kill herself enough to banish the gods in her and Bastian’s heads.

Thinking of him hurt. Thinking of Gabe hurt, too. She tried to do both as little as possible. Thankfully, there were many other things to think of, like how in every hell she was going to get off this damn island. How in even more hells she was going to get to Apollius’s body on the Golden Mount.

How she was going to kill Him.

But even though she thought of those things constantly, she wasn’t any closer to actually knowing how to accomplish them.

And in all that thinking, she still had to find at least three pieces of gems or gold if she wanted a meal and a place to sleep tonight.

Lore wiped at her temple again. It was hard to get a good look at her new scar—mirrors were scarce on the Burnt Isles—but she’d managed to glimpse her reflection in the trough where they were allowed to scoop water into tin cups four times a day for five-minute intervals, drinking as much as they could before the seconds ran dry and their cups did, too.

Red lines wavering from the corner of her eye up to her hairline and down to her cheekbone.

It wasn’t terrible, but Lore was vain, and it still made her want to cry.

She didn’t. Couldn’t spare the water.

The pickax had a splintery handle, and she took a furtive moment to rewrap the cloth around her bleeding palms before picking it up again.

Bastian’s old trick from the boxing ring served her well.

None of the pickaxes were in especially good shape, but some were in worse shape than others, and the better ones were on unspoken reserve for the most senior inmates.

Though Lore was sure she’d have to use a shitty pickax even if she was here for fifty years.

She lifted the pickax again, brought it down on the rock in front of her. It bounced off, barely making a dent. A faint gleam of gold seamed the scratch the blade had made.

“Guess we’re eating tonight,” Lore muttered, resenting her own inner leap of enthusiasm.

Sleeping on the ground was no particular horror after the life she’d led, but hunger was.

Her first few days here, when she’d barely managed to find anything and gone without dinner most nights, her stomach had felt like a feral animal trying to claw its way out of her throat.

Desperation had claws, too, and when she saw inmates attacking each other for pieces to turn into rations, she understood.

There wasn’t much here—the Second Isle had been mined to death already—but she managed to find at least one piece a day. Mostly because she didn’t want to think about how far she could push that understanding before it became a plan.

The main mine on the Second Isle was mostly just a hole in the ground, dizzyingly deep.

Concentric rings lined the hole, different levels where prisoners hacked the chasm ever deeper in search of jewels and gold made by Apollius’s and Nyxara’s blood, dripping to the ground in the Godsfall, growing treasure like seeds.

The deeper you went, the more there was to find.

There were paltry railings to keep prisoners from falling to their deaths, but they were as splintery as the pickax handles. It wasn’t unusual for someone to pitch over the edge, whether by accident or with a push. Or by a solemn decision.

The railings on the First Isle were better, apparently.

That was where the prisoners with money went, those who had a few years to serve instead of a lifetime.

The Second Isle was for poison runners, back-alley murderers, and petty thieves.

You only ended up here if the Sainted King didn’t care about you or was very, very angry.

So Lore’s arrival was bound to be a topic of amusement.

Something slammed into the small of her back, nearly sending her headfirst into the open pit.

“ Fuck! ” Lore dropped her pickax, cloth unraveling from her bleeding hands as she gripped a rock beside her to keep from pitching over.

The sharp edges she’d made earlier this morning bit into her palms, thin blood obscuring the seam of uncovered gold.

Below, jagged stones, winking with the occasional gem; prisoners winding around them like ants headed for the hill. It all shimmered in her vision, dehydration and exhaustion turning the belly of the mine into a kaleidoscope.

“Apologies, Your Majesty.” Gods, they all got a kick out of that.

Lore had hoped that maybe her identity could be kept under wraps, but that proved exceptionally foolish of her.

Every convict on the Second Isle knew who she was, and every one of them hated her for it.

“I thought your balance would be better, being honed in ballrooms.”

“You do know that I spent maybe six months of my life in ballrooms, right, Jilly?” Lore turned, her balance regained, and scowled at the woman behind her. “The rest of it was spent poison running. Just like you.”

Jilly scowled right back. She was probably forty, but years in the mines had put a hunch in her back, and her skin looked sun-leathered despite the coating of ash and fog in the air.

Her own pickax, with a handle that looked silky smooth to Lore’s eyes, waved in her direction again. “You were never just like me.”

Truer than the other woman could know.

“And now you’re here, with your big death-power,” Jilly continued, “and you won’t even use it to get us out. Fat lot of good you are, Your Majesty.”

Lore’s fingers twitched involuntarily against the linen wraps. Searching for Mortem threads, trying to call them. She could feel the filaments of death running through everything here, the rock and the dirt, closer to the surface in the people than they should be.

But they wouldn’t come. Mortem wouldn’t obey her.

Lore couldn’t tell Jilly that, either. “How exactly do you think that would work? I turn all the guards to stone and we take the ships, only to be executed when we get to the mainland? I know dust inhalation is bad for your brain, but surely you still have one.”

The older woman’s lip lifted, a sneer that showed her nightshade-stained teeth. “It’d be something,” she said quietly, with a lace of desperation. “Something other than this. Hope is enough, even when it doesn’t make sense.”

“Get moving!”

The guards on the Burnt Isles were somehow even worse than the bloodcoats in the Citadel. Just as self-important, with an extra helping of stupidity and brute strength. This one, Fulbert, was as tall as Gabe and probably twice his weight, with what seemed to be the common sense of a dazed cow.

“You’re up farther than you should be, Jilly; get back down to your tier and leave the Queen alone.” Fulbert leered at Lore, waving Jilly on with a hand built for fistfights. “Are you trying to hold court, Your Majesty? Miss having a whole Citadel pay attention to you?”

“You people desperately need a different bit,” Lore muttered, rewrapping her hands and retrieving her pickax.

Fulbert wagged his finger and grabbed it from her. “No more mines for you today, Queenie. You’re on dock duty. Martin’s orders.”

Ah. Time to make a bad day even worse.

The sun was covered in a gray miasma, but Lore still squinted as she stepped out of the rickety lift between the central mine and the beach—the sunlight reflected off the particles in the air, making it bright but not really sunny , which didn’t seem fair.

She paused, trying to get her bearings, but Fulbert was impatient and pushed her out, sending her stumbling onto the rocky sand.

“The beach is no marble floor, huh?” He grinned, poking her again. The end of his bayonet was blunt, but it still hurt. “Not like the Citadel. Can’t walk without iron bars under your feet?”

Lore kept her mouth shut. It was the one skill she’d honed on the Burnt Isles. If she had any hope of escaping, of finding a way to the Golden Mount so she could finish the job Nyxara had left undone, she had to let them tire of her. Become one more unwatched face in the crowd.

With no response to his needling, Fulbert grew bored quickly, as men of his intelligence were wont to do. “Martin’s at the lighthouse,” he grumbled, turning back to the lift. “Go straight there and get a mop.”

She was sure a mop was not the only thing Martin would try to give her. Fists already clenched, Lore stumbled her way across the beach in her flimsy prisoner-issue boots, blisters screaming across her arches.