Bile rises in my throat. Using the sides of my feet to brush away what I can, I carve a path to the back and press my hands against the wall. No openings that I can make out, but if a fire has been lit here, as I’m starting to suspect, fire needs air to stay alive. Which means there must be an opening somewhere. I look up.
There’s a thick slab of metal grating, so crusted and black with soot that it’s difficult to make out in the dark. The opening to a chimney. I slide my fingers through the gaps around the greasy, gnarled rods and pull. A bit of debris rains down on my head and shoulders, and the fresh cuts from the glass shards scream in protest, but the grating doesn’t budge. I try again, lifting my knees so my whole weight is hanging on the bars. Nothing.
By now I’ve regained enough strength to hold a shift, for a little while at least. So I shed my clothes and shift to lynx, then fasten my jaws around the grating. A foul taste enters my mouth, but I don’t allow myself to stop and consider what it might be. I pull, and this time the metal groans a little in protest.
I don’t know how long I remain there, working to loosen the grating. My jaws are aching like thunder by the time I release it and sink back onto the floor. The metal won’t yield.
This can’t be the end. Not when I’ve actually found an escape I can fly out of. Fighting not to give in to despair, I shift back to human and shove my shirt in my mouth, trying to scrape the taste from my tongue. Then I stumble back into the room, chest heaving. Think, Rora. Think.
Air feeds fire. Fire breeds smoke. Smoke needs a means of escape, if the soldiers here are meant to enter this room after a fire without breathing it in. I scan the walls and find what I was looking for: small metal vents, like the chimney’s grating in miniature, set into the walls a good distance apart. There are four in total, and I work my way over to the first with a surge of hope.
It doesn’t give. I huff in disbelief and move to the second, brushing my fingers against my shirt; they’re rubbing raw in the effort, and a couple of the wounds have reopened. The second holds as fast as the first, and this time I don’t muffle my scream of frustration.
Only two left. I choose the one that’s farthest away and move until I’m directly in front of it. A couple of the bars here are missing from the set, so I shift to lynx and examine the opening. My heart nearly bursts at the sight.
The metal has begun to rust. When I’ve secured a firm grasp with my teeth, I yank, and the grating screeches free.
The opening in the wall is just wide enough to work. I whisper one final apology—and a promise—to the bodies around me. Then I take my chance and fly into the gap, shifting from goshawk to mouse when my talons start to slide on the metal. Exhaustion is eating at my body; the strength I’ve regained is almost spent. I have no choice but to carry on as long as I can, though, so I scrabble through the metal tunnel, whiskers twitching.
At last, the passage ends in an opening the size of a brick. Night proper blankets the world outside, and the fresh air cleanses my lungs like a stream. I take a minute to listen for the sounds of restless guards standing watch, but it seems they’ve left this side of the building unmonitored. I muster the final dregs of strength and shift to goshawk, letting my wings carry me quickly, quietly, away.
TWENTY-FIVE
I find the boys only a short distance from where I’d left Wes. They didn’t obey my order to move on after all.
Helos pushes to his feet the moment I explode into the clearing. Weslyn, who was pacing, jerks to a halt, hand on his sword. I drop to the ground and shift to human, regaining my natural form with a gasp. They’re at my side in an instant, a jumble of limbs supporting me under the arms and offering me my pack. I recoil from their touch as if it burns.
“Take it easy,” Helos murmurs, retreating as I pull on underthings, dark brown pants, green shirt, socks, boots—the movements mechanical, made by quivering fingers. “You’re okay.”
“I told you to head for the river!” I choke out.
“You think I could leave you?”
Wes turns his back while I change. I think I should be grateful, or at least feel something, but I’m having trouble focusing. A shield of fog thicker than mist has somehow permeated my brain, obscuring most threads of rational thought.
“You’re okay,” Helos repeats. “You’re—what happened to your hands?”
They’re bleeding again. Wes swivels round, and I lower my arms, looking up at him and Helos. Both visible in the moonlight, whole and breathing and mercifully alive.
But not safe. Not yet.
“We have to move,” I rasp, as Helos withdraws bandages from his pack. “Jol kno—”
“Look at me, Rora,” he says, very seriously, dropping the bandages and taking my face in his hands. “Did they hurt you?”
“No. Not me, they—wait, did they hurt you?” I ask, instinct thrumming a warning.
But Helos shakes his head.
“Then listen to me. Jol knows the three of us are traveling together, and he knows King Gerar is working with shifters—”
“What? How?” Wes says.
“—And he implied that’s as good as a refusal of his terms. He’s going to attack.”
“He was there?” Wes asks, at the same time Helos exclaims, “Now?”
“How should I know?” I snap. “If he doesn’t give the order now, I’m sure he will soon!”
Despite Helos’s alarm, his hands are steady as they tend to my own. “Rora—”
“I’m fine,” I insist, but this time when I look at my brother, I don’t see the dark brown eyes creased in concern, the skin bruised but flushed with life. I see bodies, some whole, some severed, crawling in insects. The scent of decay lingers in my nostrils like tendrils of smoke.
I dry heave into the grass.
“What’s wrong with her? What happened?” Wes demands. His voice sounds like his hands feel, holding my hair back while I gag. That ridiculous thought propels an even more ridiculous impulse to laugh. Instead, I start trembling harder—chest, arms, hands, everywhere. I can’t seem to stop, and the wall of fog thickens.
A hand to the back of my neck. “She doesn’t feel feverish.”
“She’s in shock.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know.”
Something soft brushed across my mouth, wiping away any stray saliva.
“She’s right. We should move.”
“She’s shaking. Take this.”
Something draped around my neck, bulky and warming. I glance down. A cloak.
“Rora.”
I shake my head.
“Rora,” Helos repeats, more insistent this time. “I need you to stand.”
I snatch my arm away from the hand that grabs it.
“Stand,” he commands, regaining his grip.
Dimly, it occurs to me that he’s not being cruel. He’s being me, were our situations reversed.
I let him help me to my feet, only to have my knees buckle on the first step.
“Hold her while I shift,” Helos says, releasing me. Suddenly there’s a new pair of arms supporting me, one wrapped around my waist, the other resting gently under my arm. Awareness of the touch to my waist pricks through the fog, kindling a flicker of feeling, something strange and stupid. I will it to retreat, even as his hold remains steady.
Helos appears beside me shortly after, bobbing his antlered head. An elk. Understanding dawns, and the part of my brain that’s working properly abhors the idea of having to be carried. The rest, however, is finding it difficult to stand, let alone resist. My brother kneels to the ground, and I clamber onto his back. Then without another word, he stands, and we flee.
* * *
Whether by fortune or the Vale’s design, no one catches up to us in the days to come. Which is a miracle, because we’re not moving fast. Wes is still limping from the leg wound that he claimed didn’t hurt much. Helos is weak all over, not yet healed from our skirmish in the woods—he walks evenly, but slowly, appearing uncomfortable under the weight of his
pack. And I—well, there’s no point in pretending I’m fine.
There is death on you.
I don’t know whether he meant the people I would kill or the victims I would join. I’m not sure I even care anymore. I’m having trouble caring about a lot of things.
There’s a heaviness between my ribs that hasn’t lifted since my escape. It’s a strange sensation, almost like burning. As if the memories from that day are searing a hole through my heart. Every once in a while, the ground beneath my feet seems to shift, and in those moments I shriek and stagger a few paces to the side. Once I stumble right into Wes, who winces at the impact to his injured arm. Another time I swing onto a low-hanging branch, just to avoid touching the forest floor. Because in these moments, twigs, acorns, and grass turn to arms, eyes, and fur. I can feel them on my neck, my shoulders, my back—I’m lying there again, cast into the chamber, fighting to keep my head up before I’m buried alive. Buried in flesh and rot and bones.
I can still smell it.
The boys try to soothe my wasted nerves by assuring me it’s all in my head. A memory, only a memory. But it isn’t just a memory—those corpses and those prisoners are still there, even if we can no longer see them.
This is the fact that shapes my thoughts in the coming days. As we travel, I pass the time by imagining the Vale as a conscious being and the prison as a parasite, leeching its lifeblood acre by acre. In my fantasies, the woods and the mountains come to life. Trees seize the soldiers with gnarled roots and crush them, snapping their bones and squeezing their lungs until they no longer draw breath. The mountains bellow in fury, thunderous roars that shake the earth and rip chunks of rock from the cliff faces. Under such duress, the buildings and the cages collapse in broken heaps, but the prisoners remain untouched. Rain falls then, a healing mist that seeps through their fur and into their skin. And pockets of wind carry them to safety.
These thoughts of destruction give me comfort, and in turn that comfort disturbs me. Sometimes I fear I might be turning into the monster Dom claimed me to be.
Then I remind myself that whatever danger may be taking root in my mind, I have seen its mirror image enacted tenfold by humankind. Violence gets its wings by choice, not by nature, and I am no more monster than they.
Regardless, as I lie awake at night, reliving the horrors of the compound after triple-checking to make sure that the boys are still breathing, only sleeping, nothing more—I can feel it there, sprouting in my core. The seed of vengeance planted deep in my heart.
Wes and Helos seem to be getting along with each other better than they had before. I wonder if my absence had anything to do with it, whether concern over my safety somehow brought them together. Then I dismiss the idea that Wes would have been so concerned. Then I wonder if he might have been.
Stupid. Strange and stupid.
In time, I tell them about Jol’s interrogation and the shed. Peridon’s cousin I never managed to speak to more—I should have freed her when I had the chance. Helos alternates between swearing loudly, asking questions, and coming close to tears. Weslyn says little, but I can read his dismay in his face.
Both are rattled when I tell them about the traitorous guard.
“One of them must have told Ambassador Kelner we were traveling together.” Speaking the words aloud is like drawing poison from a wound. “They’re the reason he’s known about us for weeks. The timeline fits.”
After hours of hiking, the three of us are sitting cross-legged in a circle, Weslyn’s knee grazing my own. He’s not moving away, and I’m grateful for the tether to the present.
“One of the Guard, a traitor.” He tests the syllables like foreign words. “I don’t understand it. None of them would—”
“Clearly they would. It’s simply a question of who.”
Anger twists in my belly as I recall Dom shoving me into an alley, Carolette making the sign to ward off bad fortune. Even the quiet acceptance from Ansley and Naethan might have been a lie. Their king swore them all to silence, but one of them talked anyway, and now Telyan will go to war because of that.
Well, not just that.
“Dom was clearly against us,” Helos says. “Carolette, too.” He runs a hand over his shoulder. “Ansley was quiet, maybe too much so. Naethan—”
“Impossible,” Wes interrupts. “Naethan and I have been friends ever since we were boys. The notion is laughable. And Ansley would never. She and I trained together, we were—” He stops and looks down, cutting that thought abruptly at the roots.
“Rora?” Helos says, looking pointedly at my claws.
It’s an effort to sheathe them, but I do. “There’s something else.”
I tell them about our mother. That she was Jol’s mother, too, and how Kelner spotted the resemblance between us in Grovewood. I reiterate Jol’s suspicions that King Gerar knows our parentage and has been planning some kind of secret coup. Saying it all aloud, it sounds impossible to the point of absurdity.
“That’s impossible,” Helos whispers, because we’re of one mind, always.
I shake my head. “I saw the portrait. Two of them, actually. It’s her.”
He just stares as if he’s never seen me before.
“And you’re absolutely certain it’s your mother?” Wes asks. “You did say you were very young when you last saw her.”
I glare at him. “I’m sure. She looked like us. So does Jol; all he had to do was see Helos to guess the truth. You’ve met him before, haven’t you?”
Wes holds my gaze awhile longer, then looks at Helos. Well, more than looks. Studies.
While he studies my brother, I study him. His beard has grown longer over the last few days, his skin darkened a shade by the sun. The pack set beside him bears a small rip near the top, and the clothes on his back are rumpled and smudged with dirt. Not to mention the bandages underneath.
How far he’s come from his castle life.
In time, he nods, slightly wide-eyed. “You do look alike,” he admits, speaking to Helos. “Very much so. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”
“Were you ever really looking?” I ask quietly.
He doesn’t answer.
“Think,” I urge Helos. “What do we know about her life before us? Nothing. And Jol is, what, seven years older than you?” Well, more or less. “Weslyn said she left Oraes before she was killed. The timeline’s entirely possible; she must have taken refuge at Caela Ridge. And those people who led the raid—I bet you Daymon sent them. The soldiers in that compound had the same arrows as the one that killed Father.”
Helos blanches as heat rushes through my body. To hunt your own wife.
“But that means—” Weslyn runs a hand over his beard. “Are you saying that Jol’s mother was a shifter?”
I nod. “He could be one, too. Who knows how much magic she passed to him.”
“Magic in the Holworth line,” Wes echoes, mystified. “If the people there knew, they would turn on him.”
“We should tell them,” Helos says gruffly.
“How would you prove it?” I counter. “Our mother is dead. Unless Jol himself shifts in public—which we don’t even know he has enough magic to do, if no emotions have triggered this already—the only way to be certain would be to get a shifter in there. One who could smell the magic on him in an animal form and speak out about it. Assuming anyone would even believe them.” I shake my head. “In any case, I don’t think he’s stupid enough to allow that to happen, not while—” My voice drops away, more pieces settling into place. “He’s eliminating magical people from the continent. He’s burying the truth.”
Helos frowns. “Then why didn’t he kill you or me when he had the chance?”
I don’t have an answer to that. But playing through my conversations with Jol once again, another connection clicks at last—the reason his accent sounded familiar. In my limited memory, my mother’s accent wasn’t as strong as his, but it was there.
Northern brusque.
“He’s r
ight about one thing,” Wes says, looking thoughtful. “My father must have guessed the truth, or at least suspected it. If you resemble your mother as closely as you say, he will have spotted the similarity. He met her—and Jol, for that matter—several times.”
I contemplate King Gerar’s refusal to send me north, despite Violet’s entreaties. “I’d like to ask him.”
“And on that note.” Helos fixes me with a piercing look. “If our mother was a queen, what does that make us?”
Even with the blackness clouding my head, that invisible barrier severing me from reality, a small shiver runs down my spine at the words. “Wes?” I ask, since this is more his territory than ours.
Wearily, he massages his forehead. “Daymon is the one who carried the Holworth blood. You’re not part of his line, but the current king is your half brother.” He shakes his head, shrugging a little. “It’s conceivable you could have some claim to the throne.”
I imagine it then. For one horrible, fascinating moment: me, a shifter. A girl who doesn’t even know how old she is. A princess of Eradain.
I find it doesn’t fit at all.
“I wouldn’t want it,” I say.
“Wouldn’t you?” Helos says in a quiet voice.
I stare at him, astonished.
“Think about what Jol is doing. The prejudice he perpetuates. The atrocities he’s committing.” He takes my hands in his, gaze locked on to mine. “If you had the chance to stop him, remove him from power altogether—wouldn’t you?”
It takes a moment for me to register it—the exact thing Jol suspected Helos or I have been plotting, straight from my brother’s mouth in less than an hour since learning his lineage. Yet the future he suggests is so removed from anything I ever imagined for myself that it’s nearly impossible to picture. I want to stop Jol, yes, to fix this broken world, and for the first time in my life, I’m starting to feel I have the capacity to. Scars and selfish thoughts at times, but also—courage. A good heart. But to become responsible for an entire kingdom? To rule?
I yank my hands from his, afraid of what he’s suggesting—and ashamed of my fear.
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