Beneath the Citadel

by Destiny Soria

  “He was terrible in bed.”

  Alys flinched, though she could tell from Cassa’s smirk that it had definitely been her intention this time. Cassa laughed and stretched her arms in front of her, lacing her fingers together and arching her back.

  “Lighten up, Alys. I’m just kidding,” she said. “He was perfectly adequate in bed.”

  Alys kicked her in the knee and then again for good measure. Cassa just laughed louder.

  “Forget I asked,” Alys said, pulling up her blankets higher, as if that could protect her from more unwelcome information. “I’m never talking to you again.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Cassa asked, still chuckling. “There’s not some big, scandalous reason. We were just always better as friends.”

  “That simple?” Alys was unconvinced.

  Cassa shrugged.

  “That simple.” She blew some hair from her face and cast a sideways glance at Alys. “I do second-guess our decision sometimes, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s this look he has, when he’s flipping those ridiculous coins around and saying something he thinks is clever, and—I don’t know. I just miss him. I miss us.”

  Alys couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Cassa so serious, without her usual acerbic tone, except for maybe the morning before they broke into the citadel, when Cassa had told them that Vesper wasn’t coming after all. That was different though. Or maybe it wasn’t. Alys wasn’t sure how to reply, and so she let the silence stretch between them. She was asexual, with little interest in romance and no interest at all in physical intimacy, but she knew what it was like to miss someone who wasn’t really gone. After the council had branded her parents as rebels and taken everything they owned, her family had been shattered. They stayed together, but to Alys it was like living with phantoms, haunted by the memories of who they used to be. It had taken a long time to get her parents and brother back.

  And now her parents were gone again—this time for real.

  She swallowed hard against the panic rising in her chest and squeezed the blankets in her fists. If they didn’t help the chancellor, what would happen to her parents? If they didn’t help Solan, what would happen to the city? She couldn’t help but think that neither of them was telling the whole truth and that no choice was the right one. But they still had to choose. What if they chose wrong? What if what if what if—she scrambled out of bed like she was fleeing the thoughts, like her anxiety was something she could run away from. Her hands were shaking as she pulled open her wardrobe, but rifling through her clothes, focusing on something practical and necessary—it helped. Slightly.

  “He wanted it too, you know,” Cassa said cautiously. “It’s not like I broke his heart.”

  It took Alys a couple of seconds to figure out that Cassa was still talking about Evander. Of course she had no way of knowing that Alys’s mind had already spiraled to a new subject.

  “I know.” She kept her face buried in the wardrobe, but Cassa must have caught the breathiness of her voice, because Alys heard the bed squeak as she straightened.

  “Are you okay?”

  Alys hated that question. What did it even mean to be okay? She wasn’t hyperventilating on the floor of a prison cell, but she wasn’t exactly fit to save her parents or the city—especially not both.

  “I’m fine.” Her stomach growled to remind her that she hadn’t had a decent meal in two days, but she ignored it. She pulled some work clothes out of the wardrobe, the sturdy pants and loose shirt she wore when she and her father foraged for mushrooms, herbs, and medicinal roots in Eldrin Wood.

  “Liar.”

  Alys slammed the doors shut. “And how do you expect me to feel after everything that happened yesterday?”

  Cassa shrugged, but it wasn’t a casual gesture. Her eyes were steady on Alys, sharp and inscrutable. “We had to come back to the city. We didn’t have a choice.”

  “Why? Because Solan said so? Because the chancellor already knew we were coming?” Alys dressed quickly, hating how vulnerable she felt shivering in her nightgown. Cassa had slid off the bed and wandered back to the window, resting her arms on the ledge. Alys wondered if she was planning on climbing out again—midconversation. She wouldn’t put it past her. “You’re the one who’s always going on about how the prophecies can’t control our lives. Either we have a choice or we don’t.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Cassa said.

  “You were singing a different tune on the lake. What happened to all that sentimental tripe about making our own way, about not needing auspicious stars?”

  “Fine, we had a choice,” Cassa snapped, whirling to face her. “We had a choice, and we chose wrong. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I didn’t want to come back.” Alys’s pulse thrummed in her ears. Why did every conversation with Cassa turn into an argument? “Maybe if we hadn’t, my parents would be safe.”

  She braced herself for a scathing retort, but Cassa’s shoulders sagged a bit. She turned back to the window before Alys could decipher her expression.

  “I told you, I’m sorry about your parents. I didn’t—I should have stopped the chancellor somehow.”

  Alys shivered again, though she had already pulled on her woolen socks. She remembered the glint of the letter opener as it sped through the air. Such a harmless thing. Such a deadly arc. The look in her brother’s eye wasn’t something she ever wanted to see again. She’d almost wept at the sound of Newt’s voice, because her own had been trapped inside her, stifled by the fear that Evander, in that lethal moment, wouldn’t hear her at all.

  “There wasn’t anything you could have done,” she said at last, picking up her hairbrush.

  “It doesn’t feel that way.” Cassa’s voice was soft and strange. “It never does.”

  Once again, Alys didn’t know what to say. It didn’t feel like a conversation or an argument anymore. It felt like a confession. Cassa hadn’t moved away from the window, hadn’t even glanced back. Alys finished brushing her hair and tied it back from her face. Then she left without saying anything, shutting the door gently behind her.

  TWENTY-ONE

  EVANDER

  The Sera house was too dark and quiet for Evander’s comfort. He had hung a CLOSED sign on the front door, hoping that there weren’t any customers with dire medicinal needs. He knew that even in the dungeons or wherever they were being kept, his parents would be worried about their apothecary shop. Alys would no doubt love to open the doors and pretend it was a normal business day. Keeping busy in the workroom was her way of dealing with almost any problem, but pretending everything was normal wasn’t going to help them or their parents.

  He met Newt in the kitchen, and together they scrounged enough food to make a passable breakfast. On the table they laid out a couple of loaves of bread, cold cuts of salted ham, and two jars of canned apples. Evander was so hungry that he tore off a hunk of bread and started eating while they laid out some plates.

  Newt was patient enough to fetch some butter from the larder and cut the loaves into even slices before taking his first bite. Evander had never figured out where Newt’s deliberate patience came from. He’d always been quiet and careful, though Evander had never thought of him as being gentle. There was something about his caution that was razor-sharp, as if he was eternally poised on some kind of precipice, as if he was holding something back.

  Alys joined them a few minutes later and filled her plate in silence. Evander tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. He knew he should apologize for snapping at her last night, but before he could decide on the right words, Cassa wandered down the stairs, her jaw cracking with a yawn. The sudden sight of her in rumpled clothes, hair disheveled, wearing a jacket she’d stolen from his room, made his heart stutter. For a moment, he was transported back to a morning about a year ago. A morning that wasn’t so different from dozens of other mornings over the course of their relationship. When the sun had broken through his bedroom window, she’d still been
lying against him, her back pressed against his chest, her body fitted to his like a puzzle piece. He remembered that her hair smelled like autumn leaves even though it was the middle of summer. She’d never made a lot of sense to him, but he liked that about her. He liked how brash she was, how reckless, how unapologetic. Back then it felt like something he needed.

  Of course, he liked the feel of her too, her skin against his. The urgent way she kissed him, with her fingers wrapped around the back of his neck like he might try to escape. The way that sometimes she would rest her head on his shoulder and close her eyes, and for those moments she was a different person. Younger and softer. He wondered if that’s who she would have been all the time if she’d been born into a different life. Somehow, he doubted it.

  That morning there hadn’t been anything soft about her. He didn’t remember what he’d said—something about her needing to pay rent—and she’d elbowed him in the chest and rolled out of bed.

  “You’re lucky you’re gorgeous,” she told him as she got dressed.

  He scrubbed his hands across his face and dropped back to stare at the ceiling.

  “And clever and daring and spectacular in bed,” he added.

  “Sure.” She sat down on the edge of the bed to put on her shoes.

  He started to reply, but she twisted around to kiss him. The words died in his throat.

  “Passable kisser,” she said, her eyes bright with mischief, her warm breath tickling his chin. She’d grabbed his gray canvas jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on without asking if she could borrow it. Then she’d climbed out his window and was gone before his family woke up.

  His memories of those mornings were a pleasant ache inside him. He didn’t necessarily want them back, because so much had changed since then, and Cassa’s brash, reckless, unapologetic, unwavering determination wasn’t what he needed anymore. He wasn’t what she needed anymore either. That’s why they had ended it. Though some part of Evander knew that Cassa had never really needed him in the first place. She’d only ever needed one thing, for as long as he’d known her.

  “You’ll be happy to know that I have a brilliant plan,” Cassa announced as she plopped down beside Evander with a slice of bread in each hand.

  “Are we allowed to finish eating first?” Evander asked, eyeing the hard set of his sister’s jaw as she sawed at a piece of ham.

  Cassa shot him an unappreciative glance but shrugged and took a bite. They all finished their first helpings without further conversation. The quiet was just starting to make Evander nervous when finally Alys spoke up.

  “If we help Solan, what’s to stop the chancellor from hurting our parents?”

  “Solan will,” Cassa said. “He’s seen the downfall of the council. He knows how to make it happen.”

  “What if he’s lying?”

  “What if the chancellor’s lying about letting your parents go free?” Cassa tapped her fork impatiently on the edge of her plate. “What if we do his dirty work for him, and then he just kills us and your family so that there aren’t any witnesses?”

  Alys pursed her lips together until they were a thin white line.

  “Maybe the only way to help our parents is to help Solan,” Evander said, and Alys finally met his eye. He told her and Cassa about the prophecy Solan had given him before they left. “He helped us escape the crypts, and even if we didn’t understand at the time, he warned us about the chancellor and the danger to our parents too.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s on our side,” Alys said.

  “No one’s on our side,” Newt said softly. “It’s only us. It always has been.”

  No one seemed comforted by this idea, but no one disagreed. Evander took a deep breath, wishing briefly, confusingly, for the days before he’d met Cassa and Vesper and Newt, when the rebellion was just a mysterious force at the edge of his existence, when his only purpose every day was to keep his family from starving. It had been so much simpler back then. No choices to make. No motives to decipher. Just survival.

  “Alys,” he said, then waited for her to look up from her plate. “The last time the council took everything from us, there was nothing we could do to stop them.”

  “I could have.” There was a crack in her voice. “I saw it in the coins.”

  “You couldn’t have,” Evander said firmly. He ignored Newt’s and Cassa’s gazes. For this moment, it was only him and his sister at the table, making this decision together. “They take whatever they want without consequence. They always have. But this time we can do something. For the first time, we can take something back.”

  Alys had been fiddling with a strand of hair, but her hand stilled. There was a stitch in her brow as she studied his face, as if she could find the future there.

  “Okay,” she said at last, and her voice was steady. She cast a glance around the table at the others. “I guess I wouldn’t want to die next to anyone else.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Cassa. “Now who wants to hear my brilliant plan?”

  THE DAY EVANDER MET THE BLACKSMITH

  He knew only three things about the Blacksmith. The first was that the Blacksmith owed his parents a huge debt. “Your mother saved someone very dear to him once,” his father had told him one night in conspiratorial tones. “The physician was at his wit’s end, but your mother knew what was necessary. Your mother didn’t give up. The Blacksmith told her he would never forget what he owed her.”

  Evander’s mother had told the story differently, when she had finally been persuaded to tell it. “That physician was useless,” she’d said flatly. “Even Alys would have known what needed to be done—and she was six at the time.”

  His mother always looked at every situation with a calculating eye. She didn’t tell stories, only facts. While Edric Sera experimented wildly, joyfully, doing his best to turn the world inside out and learn all its secrets, Lenore Sera kept the world outside his head and workroom running in orderly fashion. Alys had always been closer to their father. If given the choice, she would have gladly spent every minute of every day working alongside him. But Evander had always thought she took after their mother. He’d always envied that a little, the way she knew the answer to every problem, the way she could see everything like a diagram in her head, easily picked apart, easily mastered. Even the future was at her fingertips.

  All of that, of course, was before the council ruined their lives. Evander didn’t know the answer to his family’s problem as they slowly starved to death in the worst corner of the lower ward. He experimented. He learned how to smile, what to say, and what trick of the coin he could use to earn money on the street from the wealthy citizens who once would have paid his parents handsomely to treat their most difficult ailments. He told stories about the future that he knew people wanted more than the facts. Slowly, he started to hate his own smile and the words that came out of his mouth. Slowly, he realized that the pittance he was earning could only help his family continue to eke out their miserable existence.

  The second thing he knew about the Blacksmith was that you had to bring your own material. Evander stole three spoons from a pawnshop after he overheard the owner boasting to a customer that they were pure silver. It was his first time stealing outright. He knew that if his plan succeeded, it wouldn’t be the last. That was okay. He could hate himself if it meant his family would survive.

  The final thing he knew about the Blacksmith was where he lived. He left at dusk, letting the shadows chase his heels along the compacted dirt road that wound through the wood. He didn’t tell his parents he was going. He didn’t tell Alys either. He knew she would have tried to stop him.

  The Blacksmith was a bear of a man, with a bushy beard and calloused hands. When Evander told him who he was and why he had come, the Blacksmith stared at him for a painfully long time, as if he could read everything Evander wasn’t saying in the hollows of his eyes, in each distinct line of his rib cage that showed through his ratty shirt. The Blacksmith told him it wo
uld hurt. Evander said he didn’t care. The Blacksmith told him he might die. Evander said he didn’t care about that either.

  The leather straps cut into his bare arms and chest. The wood was worn and smooth against his back. Overhead, strings of glass orbs twinkled like stars in the lantern light. Evander’s nose filled with a harsh, metallic scent as the Blacksmith melted the spoons in a small crucible. The searing sound of the hot metal made his skin crawl as memories of that glowing brand glimmered brightly in the darkness of his mind. The Blacksmith never said a word. Evander thought he heard another set of footsteps enter the room, but before he could look, the Blacksmith was at his side. The blade he held caught the glow of the lantern, then he sliced open a line along Evander’s left forearm. Evander bit back the cry of pain. He knew this was nothing. He knew this was only the beginning.

  It wasn’t until the Blacksmith lifted the smoking crucible with a set of tongs and poured the molten silver along that bleeding line that Evander began to scream. He screamed so long and so hard that he thought for sure his lungs would shrivel up inside him. A distant, unhelpful part of his brain wondered if the reason the Blacksmith lived outside the city was so that no one had to hear the screams. Then he blacked out.

  He woke up to another wave of pain crashing into him. All he could see was the blur of the gleaming orbs through his tears. He blacked out again. Woke up again. More pain. It was less like a wave now and more like a fire burning through his blood. He had no idea how long it lasted, the rotating cycle of darkness and agony. Every time the light slipped away, he was afraid he was dying, and every time the pain woke him back up, he wished he was dead.

  He lived a hundred lives and died a hundred times on that wooden table. When he woke up the final time, when the pain was only a simmering threat, he could barely remember his own name.

  “It will be about six hours before the bloodbond takes effect—assuming it does,” the Blacksmith told him as he undid the straps. He helped Evander sit up. “In about an hour, there’s going to be more pain while your body tries to reject it. If you can survive that, then you should be all right.”