Page 34

It was Kael; she knew it was. She knew it from the tenderness with which it had touched her face, from the certainty of its movements as it floated ahead.

Just the same as he’d led her to Yalde, he was leading her now.

She’d asked him for help, and he heard her.

He was here. There was still some part of him in that shell she’d left sitting at the banquet table.

That thought alone was enough to shore up Aisling’s resolve and refocus her on the task at hand. She could do this—she had to. For Kael.

The Luna moth reached Kael’s chambers ahead of Aisling, pausing at the door to wait.

Before she entered she could already picture the space in her mind: the gaping maw of the fireplace hewn into rock.

The silk brocade canopy that enveloped a mountain of velvets and furs and pillows piled atop his bed.

A small table with two chairs—the table where he’d told her about the injury he was unable to conceal now, trapped in Elowas as he was.

It was all there, so dreamlike in this backwards version, and all covered in his unintelligible script.

His room was dim, lit only by the residual light from a torch barely burning down the hall.

Aisling followed the Luna moth inside. It flitted towards the dresser, where it circled a candlestick and alighted on the mirror there.

The candle was only half-burnt, still with enough wick to catch.

Aisling took the stick and moved swiftly back into the corridor.

Standing on tip-toe to reach high above her head, she used the torch to light the candle.

She kept her hand cupped around the tiny flame to protect it as she returned to Kael’s chamber.

There were several other candles scattered across various surfaces; she collected them all on the table and lit each, passing the small flame from one to the next until the space was bathed in a flickering golden glow.

Aisling lifted one and walked the perimeter of the room slowly, searching.

She moved the candle this way and that, casting looming shadows on the stone walls.

Nothing changed or shifted or revealed itself to be her way out.

The Luna moth remained perched on the mirror as she searched.

Aisling looked at the insect again, shuddering briefly when she noticed that the glass behind it was pure black, reflecting only her face as though she were standing in an empty void.

“Help me,” she whispered to the moth again.

It didn’t react. Frustrated, Aisling sat down heavily in the chair.

Finding the answer to the riddle was only the first challenge.

Figuring out what that meant, how shadows were supposed to help her escape Yalde’s arenas, was a different gauntlet entirely.

But it was logic that had seen her safely across that canyon—and it would be logic to get her out of the Undercastle, too, Yalde and his mind games be damned. Aisling was a methodical thinker; not the strongest opponent, but perhaps one more intelligent than Yalde had considered.

She parsed determinedly through the anomalies she’d observed so far: the Luna moth, Kael’s handwriting. The spiral stairs leading not up, but down deeper into the earth. Everything was mirrored here—left to right, up to down.

Up to down.

Aisling seized the tallest candle and ran from Kael’s chamber, leaving the Luna moth and the comfort of familiarity behind.

If the highest point in the Undercastle was now the lowest, it only stood to reason that the lowest point would take her to the surface.

She longed for fresh air, to taste the night and the forest and to feel the cold shock of winter in her lungs.

They were still sore from the smoke of the wildfire, and her throat still stung from the ceaseless wind on the cliffside.

The relief of clean, crisp air sounded better than anything.

She had wondered once how far the Undercastle’s structure reached.

There were corridors she’d peeked down that seemed to stretch endlessly; staircases hidden in dim alcoves that went down and down forever until the steps disappeared entirely.

She imagined it a many-armed monster, all spindly limbs and pointed fingers burrowing through soil and rock and taking hold of the land, claiming it for its own.

And there she was, in the belly of the beast.

So Aisling didn’t know for sure whether the place she was heading for now was truly the Undercastle’s lowest point—but it had felt that way.

She’d never felt lower, deeper, than she had curled up in that dark dungeon cell.

The dripping water’s haunting echoes filled her mind even still sometimes in quiet moments, when she slipped back into the memory of her interminable time there.

There were no redcap guards posted in the hallway, but the stench of rot lingered as though they had been.

Trading her candle for a torch, Aisling grasped the heavy brass handle and heaved the wooden door open.

The effort was greater than she’d expected; she had to throw her whole weight against it to open a gap just wide enough to slip through.

As she descended the damp, slippery wooden stairs, the stale air was choking.

Bile crept up the back of her throat, stinging, at the onslaught of foul scents and the water’s quiet drip-drip-drip .

The dungeon was just the same as she’d left it.

Holding the torch high, Aisling pushed forward through the growing nausea, careful to avoid looking directly into the cell she’d once occupied.

She didn’t want to see it now; the memory of it was enough.

There were eight total, all in varying sizes lining the sides of the dungeon passage.

Aisling had thought hers to be the smallest, but in fact there were several others that she wouldn’t have even been able to crouch in.

The ceiling lowered as she moved forward, so gradually she didn’t notice until the top of her head brushed against its wet surface.

At first it was enough to dip her head down, then she had to stoop at the waist. By the time she reached the last set of cells, the smallest of them, Aisling had dropped to her hands and knees and begun to crawl.

Her movements were awkward and slow as she attempted to keep the torch raised.

Puddles of water collected in the dips and divots of the stone floor; she couldn’t let the torch drop or its small, struggling flame would be snuffed out.

She shuddered at the thought of being there without light again, terrified of what might come slithering out of unseen corners to meet her this time.

The darkness there in the backwards dungeon was thicker than it should have been.

It swallowed everything behind her and concealed everything ahead.

The torchlight hardly made a dent, its flame only illuminating a few inches at a time.

As the rock closed in around her, Aisling was glad for that fact.

She didn’t want to see how close in it was, nor did she want to know how much tighter it would get.

Her chest constricted along with the tunnel.

She imagined herself crawling and crawling, the passageway shrinking and shrinking until she was stuck there inside, unable to move forward or back.

She could die there, suffocating as the torch slowly burned out.

Or, worse, she wouldn’t die—Yalde might just keep her trapped there forever, alone in the dark.

As her heart began to hammer painfully, the torchlight glanced off a slender root.

It was short, barely noticeable as it reached between the rocks.

But it was there: life. She was going up.

With renewed purpose, Aisling dug her elbows into the earth and pulled herself forward, inch by grueling inch, even as the sides of the passage scraped her shoulders and seized around her hips.

There were more roots ahead, bigger roots.

They snaked down through the dirt and rock, worming their way into that dark space.

Soon, the passage reached a dead end, a wall of solid earth.

Only her arm holding the torch was free; the other was trapped at her side.

Carefully, silently urging the flame to hold on just a little longer, she laid it down.

She reached out for the thickest root, the one piercing straight through the center of that wall—and yanked it towards her with all her strength.

The whole passage trembled as it began crumbling, caving in, rocks loosing and falling and Aisling could only watch, could only plead that the end would be swift, that the pain of being crushed would be fleeting, that the—

The starlight was blinding as it streamed in through the newly created hole.

The collapse had opened up the end of passage and air—fresh, sweet, crisp night air—flooded in with the light.

Aisling sucked in lungful after lungful greedily, hungrily.

Using that same root, she pulled herself up and out of the tunnel, desperate to feel space around her.

To be able to spread her arms and move her legs and to take deep, deep breaths without her back and chest pressing against rock.

She’d cleared another arena. Earth . She braced herself for the falling feeling, the sensation of dropping from one dream into the next, but it never came.

Yalde was silent in her mind; he didn’t whisk her away to face the next challenge.

Just left her laying there alone, relishing the taste of clean air in her mouth and the comfort of oxygen returning to her overtired brain and overworked muscles.

A faint glow drifted past, swooping low before floating back up on paper-thin wings. Aisling raised up onto her elbows, watching the Luna moth emerge from the collapsed tunnel. It fluttered past then veered off in the opposite direction.

She knew instinctively to follow, just as she knew instinctively where it was leading.