Page 40 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

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(A LITTLE LEGACY)

Ceridwen leads me to a narrow crack in the wall. She shudders, staring into the dark.

“Is this it?” I jut my head toward the crevice.

She nods jerkily. I step forward, only for Ceridwen to seize my wrist.

A thin black mist pools at our feet, leaking from the gap in the rock.

It coils at our skirts like a writhing snake.

There’s no obvious smell, nor a change in temperature.

If I still had a Davy lamp, I could lower it into the gas to confirm my suspicions, but I don’t need to.

It’s black damp, a silent killer that can appear in even the most regulated mines, never mind this forgotten depth of hell.

Great.

“I’ve been breathing it in for days,” Ceridwen tells me. “It’s all over this part of the mine, but nothing’s happened to me. I don’t know why.”

I force myself to shrug. I’m trying to believe that we can do this, but the chinks in my armor are obvious as an open wound.

“Good thing there’s two of us and we’re both armed.” I nod to her dagger and my sword.

“How did you get to Peg?”

“A fairy prince I made a deal with took me.”

Her head snaps around and her eyes narrow. “You don’t mean…”

“Yes,” I say, hoping it’s dark enough that she can’t see my reddening face. “I’ll explain later.”

Thankfully, Ceridwen just raises her brows and says in an arch tone, “You’ve had an interesting journey.”

I open my mouth to tell her that’s an understatement—that I’ve had my first kiss with said prince of our mutual acquaintance—but the fact that it’s the only thing I want to tell her, even as we stand in lethal gas, annoys me to my very core. So I stay quiet.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” she says eventually.

“Then how do we stop the sickness?” I ask incredulously.

Ceridwen swallows. “We’ll have to figure that out together.”

The tunnel is short and smooth, far less terrifying than the one I had to crawl through alone, but maybe that’s because Ceridwen’s here. I put my foot in the crevice, but she pulls me back again. Ceridwen places herself before me and leads the way.

I wiggle through after her. Black damp leaks into our lungs and I hold my breath, both to keep it out and to make shimmying through that much easier.

Ceridwen staggers out first and I almost knock her down as I follow, but she holds her ground.

I take in the cavern around us.

The few remaining lamps on the walls are pale and waning, barely able to light the space and bouncing off piles of misplaced coal, but I can feel the track underfoot.

Different tunnels converge here, filled with drams carrying black gold as they make their way to the surface. It’s how the men left every day, too.

A lump of coal falls from one of the piles and rolls over the floor toward us, the sound echoing through the abandoned circuit.

I look toward it. From the pitch dark, another falls, and another, until the rocks shift and crack apart.

Stiff limbs protrude from the stone. There are horror stories of men sitting dead where they took their lunch, sandwiches in hand, the air ripped from their lungs by the force of fire though they were tunnels away from the mine explosion.

These aren’t forgotten stacks of coal, waiting to be taken topside and burned. These were people.

Not just miners and not just from my time.

There are other failed champions, men wearing lanterns that far surpass those my dad would have used; there are fairies who slipped and fell through a crack in the earth and never clawed their way back out.

They stick together, forced groups of two or three, their limbs tangled like rats bound together by their tails, welded together through stone, more coal than people.

No faces remain beneath the tumorous lumps.

They lurch up, straining against each other, fighting to lead, their movements jerking as their bones crack.

Black damp swirls at their feet, creeping toward us, seeking new victims.

As one creaking, groaning machine, they rise, and turn to look at us.

I grasp Ceridwen’s arm and feel dust beneath my fingertips. When I look down, there’s a layer of coal wrapped around her wrist like a manacle. She swallows, and I notice the veins creeping up one side of her throat, half hidden by her high collar. Were they there before?

“Open wounds and black damp.” She exhales, shaking. “Couldn’t exactly stop breathing.”

“You’ve tried to come through here before?” I ask.

“And every time, they chase me back. This”—she shifts the arm in my grasp—“started after the first attempt.”

My throat constricts with understanding. We can’t go back—we’ve gone too deep, even for humans. The rot at the very core of Eu gwlad has made its way inside us through sliced skin and the gas in our lungs.

A fist tightens around my chest and cold seeps into my fingers.

The creature closest to us is made of four people, stuck together chest-to-back by the stone, a many-armed beast straining to move forward, its eight arms reaching toward us.

Where hands should be, there are only jagged lumps of coal.

I reach for my rapier, draw the blade slowly.

The threat of iron cuts through the air, and a unified shriek rises from the cavern.

The creatures snap to life. They surge forward, and Ceridwen yelps, recoiling toward the crevice, but I hold firm.

My heart leaps to my mouth as they crash toward us, a wave of dust and pale, clawing hands, snarling and baring their teeth.

I raise my sword, my eyes squeezing shut despite myself, bracing for the worst—but it never comes.

There’s a rush of air as they approach, then nothing. Jaws snap and half-fastened limbs slash, but nothing touches us. I open my eyes to a wall of monsters.

The onslaught has halted mere inches from the tip of my blade, forming a ring around us.

As I turn, the wall ebbs and flows, obeying the order of the iron blade.

They’re puppets on poorly manned strings, their minds lost to the sickness.

They’re no different from their counterparts above.

They aren’t the source of Y Lle Tywyll. I don’t need to hurt these people—it won’t fix anything if I do—but they could hurt us, all the same.

Despair closes around my throat. I can see nothing beyond the creatures that surround us.

I look to my sister and hope that she knows what to do.

Ceridwen stares into the face of a six-armed creature.

The face—if there is a face beneath all the rock—is mere inches from Ceridwen’s own.

Long strands of fair hair escape from a patch of scalp left undevoured.

It might have been a girl once. It could have been us.

I tug her hand, and Ceridwen’s eyes slip away, looking over its shoulder.

Then she gasps loud enough to make them all shiver.

“Light,” she says.

I follow her gaze. At the very back of the circuit, the cart tracks disappear into a tightly packed mass of coal, forming a wall over what should have been a passageway leading deeper into the mine.

There, in the center of the mass, is the faintest glow of lamplight, casting a halo on the floor. Another chamber lies ahead.

There’s a certainty that comes when you toss a coin to decide an outcome.

The moment it’s thrown, you know what you wanted all along.

When I look at that distant flicker—too orange to be daylight, too pale to be hopeful—I know, like my coin is still in the air, that the heart of Y Lle Tywyll is just before me.

I only have to get past this forest of grasping hands and gnashing mouths.

With my blade aloft, I take a tentative step forward and the creatures flinch back, but Ceridwen won’t budge.

I brandish the sword. They all recoil from the iron. “They won’t come near the rapier.”

Her nails bite into my palm as her eyes dart between them. “It won’t get through the coal, and if we start a fight, there’s too many. You want to use it as a shield, don’t you?”

“We keep them at bay, cut a path,” I say.

“And get to the light.” Ceridwen finishes my thought.

I nod. “I think where we need to be—the source of all this—is just ahead.”

“Through another tunnel, no doubt,” Ceridwen agrees, “which means that eventually we won’t be able to have your iron pointing toward these… things.”

“Yes.” It’s barely more than a breath. “We’ll have to crawl fast. Someone has to wait behind.”

“You’re going out first.” Ceridwen raises her dagger, copying my stance. “You came looking for me. The least I can do is ensure that you get out.”

When I exhale, I can see my breath mixing its way into the black damp. “You were meant to be here. You were meant to enter these tunnels and win—and so was I. We are supposed to do this. Together.”

Ceridwen starts offering half-formed protestations, but I squeeze her hand. “Besides, your mermaid will kill me if I leave without you.”

“You’re infuriating,” she says after some thought.

“It runs in the family.” I wink at her. It’s not something I’ve ever done before. I’m lightly horrified to realize I’ve picked it up from Neirin.

We step forward, and the crowd parts around the blades.

I snap mine in an arc around us. They cannot come near, cannot touch us without burning.

Still, they try. Ceridwen yelps when one reaches close enough to brush her arm, swinging her hand out to defend herself.

The iron ring catches a corrupted limb. It jerks back, shrieking.

I move the rapier erratically, but I can’t kill the creatures, and on some instinctive level they know it.

With every step they draw closer, grow bolder.

One that’s too burdened by heavy stone to stand grips Ceridwen’s skirt.

She jerks it away. Someone paws at my hair.

They want, without knowing why, to take us, drag us into their hive, make us one.