by Ruth Lauren
I didn’t believe she was guilty at first, of course. None of us did. But there was no choice after the evidence was presented. It’s only now that I realize how fully I’d begun to accept it as truth. Then I was so busy planning to get myself in here, I didn’t think about it at all anymore.
I suppose I didn’t want to.
Sasha pulls back. “You thought I stole it?” She stops glancing nervously down the corridor and leans back, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“I … I’m sorry. I thought … we all thought …”
Her head lifts, eyes sparking with understanding.
Suddenly, I couldn’t feel any worse. What was I thinking, believing in anything but my sister?
Sasha’s expression softens. “Don’t apologize. It’s what you were supposed to think. I’ve been wondering why I’m locked up here away from everyone else.” She climbs up onto her knees. “They keep me with the Black Hands, Valor. I don’t speak to anyone else.”
I shake my head, too tired to follow her thoughts and too sorry that I’d trusted the system of justice even up until this moment. I should never have trusted anything over my sister. It seems so obvious now.
“If no one knows I didn’t steal the music box, not even Mother and Father …” She waves her hand, beckoning me on to the realization. It used to drive me insane when she did that, waiting for me to catch up. “No one asks the question … ?”
“Who did steal the music box?” I finish.
CHAPTER 8
She speaks fast, her face pressed to the bars. “Yes, who? And why? Obviously whoever it was needed somebody to blame. And I’m it.”
“So that’s why you couldn’t tell anyone where the box was—because you never knew?”
Sasha nods, then her gaze drops and fixes on the bars. “You really never considered I might be innocent?” She looks up again, and I can barely meet her eye.
I shrug helplessly. How can I even begin to explain that I’d just grown to accept that she had taken the box? My voice comes out soft, soaked in misery. “I didn’t care whether you’d done it or not. I’d have come for you no matter what you’d done. But you’d been seen so many times trying to gain access to the box. There were witnesses. And you had no alibi, and … the evidence was very convincing …” I trail off, shame-faced.
She swallows, and I see her do something she’s done before. On the day my sister was due to be introduced to Father’s colleagues as his apprentice, one of the princess’s ponies fell badly. The groomsman had no choice but to shoot the poor beast. It was the pony Sasha always rode when she accompanied the princess on rides, and both girls cried bitterly, clinging to each other.
Sasha knew our father would have allowed her to delay her apprenticeship by one day. But she also knew how it would look if the queen’s future adviser couldn’t put her own concerns away for the good of the realm. She dried her tears and pressed her lips together and put on her new uniform in her bedroom while I sat on her bed wanting to do something to help.
I see that same look on her face now as she narrows her eyes at the ground, still thinking. “Yes, it was very convincing. Whoever wanted me to look guilty did an excellent job of it.”
I curl close against the bars, tugging my mittens up under my sleeves as she thinks. I start to shiver, the cold and the reality of where we are seeping into me.
“Oh, saints, are you cold? Of course you are. Here.” Sasha feeds half her blanket through the bars to cover me, though I can barely focus on what’s happening anymore. I have never been so tired in my entire life, and I doubt I could recite my own name were someone to ask me for it. The snow stops, and the stars come out again. They’re the last things I see as I drift off, holding tight to my sister’s mitten-covered hands through the bars.
I wake with a start, stiff with cold. I’m still clutching Sasha’s hands. The sky is dove white, and there are puddles of slush around us. It’s morning. I don’t know how I can have slept for so long. Sasha stirs, moving her hands away from mine.
“You let me sleep?”
“I had no choice,” she says. “I couldn’t wake you.” Then she blinks, and her usual sharp, focused expression returns. “You have to get back down there before the cells open. Run.” Her breath freezes in the air, and she’s shivering.
I push the blanket back into her cell and stand up slowly, feeling like I’m frozen almost solid. “I meant everything I said, Sasha. We’re getting out of here.”
I want to say more. I want to tell her how sorry I am and how wrong I was and that I can’t believe I let myself get taken in by evidence that someone fabricated.
She puts her arms through the bars, and I hug her tight. “It should have been me, of all people, who knew you were innocent,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I feel her nod against my neck, and then I turn away, heading back out through the passage in the stone. I should feel worse than I do, chilled to the bone, hungry, and still tired. I should be terrified that I’m going to get caught. But all I can think about as I hurry away is that I did it. I found Sasha. And now there’s nothing I won’t do to get her out of Tyur’ma.
I force my cold, clumsy feet down the steps, level after level, until I’m standing by my cell.
“You’re still alive. How did you get out of those chains?” Katia stands rigid at the cell door, waiting for it to open. She doesn’t sound too disappointed, and I choose to take that as a good sign.
“You were right about where my sister was,” I say. But before I have a chance to say anything else, the cell doors start rolling back. I run for the lower level where I should still be chained, my heart bursting into such a fast rhythm that it hurts. I snatch up the chains, huddling over them and trying to calm my breathing. My stiff fingers won’t move fast enough.
The Peacekeeper reaches me seconds after I snap the manacles back into place, and I wait for her to notice, wait for her to see how fast my icy breath comes. Then, as she unshackles me, I wait for one of the other inmates to give me away.
But they stand silent, shivering in their cells, the threat of another night with no roof keeping them quiet. The Peacekeeper barely looks at me. And this time, when the rolling of the doors stops, I know what’s going to happen, and I ready myself to take my place in the crowd and run the minute the rush starts.
Today I get a full bowl of the oaty mixture they call breakfast. I do my best to ignore the looks of hatred from the frozen girls and take my seat by Feliks and Katia. We’re told that we’ll be working in the laundry today.
When we line up in our groups, I find that Natalia, Nicolai, and the others who were with him are in our detail again. The laundry is a long trek back past our cellblock. We continue to another block, and Feliks leans forward to whisper that this is where he sleeps. There are other smaller buildings. I smell heat and hear the clanking of metal from one of them—it’s a forge of some kind. I went to one once with my mother, and she showed me how they made the weapons we used for hunting. She wanted me to know every part of the job I was to assume, right down to an understanding of the skill it takes to make a hunting knife, a sword, or an arrowhead.
I see her face in my mind, glowing with the heat of the fires in the forge as she explained how the molds and the heat shaped the metal. I feel the sparks on my skin, smell the iron and the soft leather of my mother’s clothing. Her hair was braided into one thick tress. She never had the patience to sit and put the customary number of braids in, or to loop them as the rest of the women of the hunt did.
The chill wind blows the warmth of the memory away. I pull my coat closer against it. Feliks shivers as we walk past the forge. His hand moves to his arm, rubbing at it, and there’s a strange look on his face. I remember something he said back in the palace dungeon, something about him being an apprentice.
“Have you been in a forge before?” I ask.
His eyes dart to me, and he nods. “Worked in one for a while after my parents died. Didn’t really suit me.” He walks off ahead, and
then we’re called to a halt and I don’t get the chance to ask more.
The laundry is a long building, two stories high. It sits right in front of a circular tower that stands in the corner against both cliff and wall and reaches up as high as the walls. There’s a tiny slit of a window at the top of the tower, and movement catches my eye. Someone’s watching us.
I’m knocked forward as Natalia shoulders me out of the way. One of the others has slipped and fallen. Natalia hauls the boy to his feet and roughly brushes the snow from his furs.
When I look at the tower again, there’s nobody there.
“Come on, Valor,” says Feliks.
As soon as I get inside the doors of the laundry, I know that no better detail could have been handed out to our group today. The Peacekeeper shuts the doors and takes up a stance by them, and I let the heat wash over me, relaxing my muscles. Steam rises from stout wooden vats along the walls. Each tub is chained to iron pegs sunk into the floor. In the center of the room there are slatted wooden steps that lead up to the second floor. The air smells of soap and warmth.
“This way,” says Katia. She leads us into a side room, and I wrinkle my nose. In the room is a mountain of underclothes, trousers, and tunics. Everything each prisoner wears under their furs. And it looks as though every single prisoner has changed their clothes today.
“Dig in. This happens only once every two weeks. You’ll have to wait for clean things, though—we do half the inmates one week and half the next.” Katia sounds positively cheerful, although I’d rather skin a stag than touch anything in here. We take our coats off and each grab an armful of the laundry, dumping it into the vats of soapy water. My hands sting when I reach into the warmth to start scrubbing, but soon Feliks, Katia, and I are hard at work wrangling sopping-wet clothing.
Nicolai is farther down the room, his head bent over the mound of clothes he’s scrubbing. Natalia and another prisoner are opposite, twisting white sheets to wring water from them. The other prisoner is small, and Natalia’s doing most of the work, making sure the sheet doesn’t drag on the floor. I watch her smile a little and shake her head as her partner struggles.
“Where are those sheets from?” I ask.
“Who cares about sheets?” says Feliks.
I look to Katia. Her face is closed. She scrubs hard at something woollen. Water slops out onto the floor and runs down underneath the tub. There must be a drain under there.
“Katia, where are they from?”
“The hospital block. Why?”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say. I shoot up the stairs to the second level. As I thought, there are lines strung all over the place, the laundry drying in the heat rising from the washtubs. I tear down a white sheet and fold it as small as I can before jamming it into the waistband of my trousers. Then I shuffle the rest of the laundry along so there’s no gap and race back down the stairs.
“What are you doing now?” Katia says with a frown.
“Just checking how much space is left up there,” I say.
I carry on working until the steam mixes in beads with the sweat on my face, but I watch the rest of the group at their stations, waiting for everyone’s attention to be elsewhere. I glance at the Peacekeeper. He stands like a statue by the door, not watching me. I slip a bar of soap into my pocket. I’ll need it to make impressions of the keys I’m going to steal. When I turn back, Katia’s sleeves are rolled up to her elbows and her arms are dripping. But her eyes are on me, and her mouth is a rigid line. She saw me.
“What are you doing?” Her voice is a low, furious whisper. Feliks looks between me and Katia, his eyes wary.
“If you’re caught stealing, we’ll all be punished. Again.”
I shake my head, trying to think of something to say.
She lowers her voice even further. “Put it back. Put it back right now before someone sees.”
“What’s going on?” asks Feliks.
Katia bends over the washtub again, scrubbing extra hard, her jaw clamped shut.
“Shh,” I say. I have to keep the rising fear out of my voice.
“Why should he be quiet?” Katia asks. “In fact, why should I? I felt sorry for you; I tried to help you, but why shouldn’t we inform on you? If anyone else had seen you, they’d do it in a heartbeat. And then they’d get the reward.”
“What reward?” asks Feliks.
I scrub the clothes in front of me, hardly seeing what I’m doing. I have to say something. She has to keep quiet. But I need this soap too. I might not have another chance to get some, and I’m not putting it back.
I cast a glance around. No one’s listening. I lock eyes with Katia and keep my voice low. “Listen,” I say, moving around the tub so that I’m closer to her. “I have a plan.” My skin prickles despite the warmth. If Katia won’t listen or, worse, if she tells anyone, I’ll never get Sasha out of here. I can’t live with any more guilt than what’s already piled on top of me.
“What sort of plan?” asks Feliks.
I suck in a breath. “The sort that ends with us on the other side of that wall, far away from here, without anybody realizing we’re gone.”
They both stop what they’re doing and stare.
Katia shakes her head. “Don’t even think about escaping. There’s no point in tormenting yourself. Just accept your fate.”
“I make my own fate. You’ll see. Keep working,” I whisper.
But Feliks grins at me. I hadn’t planned on taking anyone else when we escape, but I can’t very well leave him now. I remember holding on to him as he struggled to run away from Peacekeeper Rurik. I still wonder whether he could have gotten away if I’d let him go. Katia, however, is a different matter. “Katia, my father had old maps of the city. Just listen to what I have—”
“No, you listen,” she says. “I’ve seen people try to escape before. I’ve seen girls shot down before they even made it to the wall and left on the ground for two days with arrows in their backs and their blood soaking into the snow. I even saw one girl make it to the wall. She’d found some way of attaching spikes to her boots, and she made it nearly halfway up before they shot her down. Warden Kirov didn’t kill her—she had them leave her on the ground for an entire day before they took her to the infirmary. Mila lost her hand; she limps and she has only one eye, Valor. One eye.” Katia shakes her head. “They stuck her back in the cellblock after that as a warning to all of us. You’ve seen how punishment works here. If one person does something wrong, they punish everyone. If you get caught trying to take people out of here, I don’t know what they’d do.”
Her words dry my mouth and try to melt my resolve like snow on skin.
“Just … think about it,” I whisper. “Nobody ever did what I’m planning before. We’re going under. Under the whole prison. There are tunnels that run underground from the prison to the city. One even goes to the palace. It’s an old escape route for the royal family in case of trouble. My father had secret maps—”
Behind us, the door rattles. Our Peacekeeper opens it, and Peacekeeper Rurik enters.
“Valor, come with me,” he says.
I jump to my feet, imagining all sorts of horrible things. Warden Kirov heard me somehow. Or she knows that I found Sasha last night. Or they saw me steal the sheet or the silver pick. I’m going to be searched and punished.
I snatch up my furs and throw them around myself, only then turning to Rurik, who waits in the doorway. I know better than to ask him where I’m being taken. He leads me out of the laundry and toward the tower. I look to the slit window again and draw in a breath. There’s no one behind the glass, but someone is out on the battlements of the inner wall of the prison. It must be deep enough to have a walkway across the top of it.
The figure sees me and heads back toward the tower as Peacekeeper Rurik and I reach the rounded wooden door at the bottom. I go rigid. I would recognize that blue tunic, those gray furs, that face anywhere. And I should, because they belong to the boy I’ve been convicted of
attempting to murder. I’m not being taken before Warden Kirov. I’m being taken before His Royal Highness Prince Anatol of Demidova.
In truth, I never expected to see him again. But this is also the first bit of luck I’ve yet had. The tunnel I plan to use can be accessed right beneath this very tower.
Peacekeeper Rurik pulls the heavy wooden door open, and I note the thick barrel of the lock as we enter. He closes and locks the door behind us.
Under my feet is a thick blue carpet, cut circular to fit the room. The tower could have been taken right from the palace itself. White marble, gold filigree, plush blue velvet drapes along the walls. Ahead of me is a spiral staircase going up through the tower. I take a deep breath to slow the pounding of my heart when I see that it also goes down. There’s a room below this one, below ground level, and somewhere down there is the entrance to a tunnel that only I, out of the three hundred prisoners at Tyur’ma, know anything about.
“Up,” says Peacekeeper Rurik, his deep voice filling the chamber. He follows me as I climb the polished staircase, curling up past a first floor with a number of finely carved chairs around a shining chestnut table, a second floor filled entirely with shelves full of books, a third with only a music stand and a violin, and finally to the highest part of the tower, a room with a cone-shaped roof and a dark wooden desk, a severe-looking Prince Anatol seated behind it.
Peacekeeper Rurik takes up a stance at the back of the room. Prince Anatol levels a steely look at him. “You may wait downstairs.”
I’m surprised, then worried. He means to speak with me alone?
Peacekeeper Rurik seems to hesitate. I don’t blame him. For all anyone else knows, he’d be leaving our future queen’s brother alone with a vengeful would-be killer.
Prince Anatol gives him a haughty, expectant look, and Peacekeeper Rurik turns slowly and descends the stairs. I feel like I can hear his footsteps all the way to the bottom. Prince Anatol waits until we’re alone, leaving me standing in the middle of the room, before he speaks.