Beneath the Citadel

by Destiny Soria

  Mira shrugged.

  “Then why are you here?” she asked.

  Evander swallowed hard. His mouth was suddenly dry. They’d come all this way, and now he had no idea what he was supposed to say. There was too much riding on this. They had so much to lose.

  It was Alys who spoke at last.

  “We do need you to bloodbond someone, but it’s a little more complicated than that.” She hesitated, visibly weighing her words. “There’s a man who needs to be bonded with mirasma to . . . save his life.”

  Mira jerked her head around, toward the closed door leading to the other part of the house, as if she’d heard a sound. Evander hadn’t heard anything. Mira’s gaze swiveled back to them, her expression showing no trace of the momentary distraction.

  “What man?” she asked.

  “Someone important,” Evander said. “Someone who values his privacy.”

  They’d decided beforehand that telling the Blacksmith anything more than the barest information was a bad idea. They didn’t know anything about Mira’s loyalties, about how likely she was to turn them in if she knew what they were really asking.

  Mira’s eyes narrowed slightly. He could almost see her mind churning. What was she trying to figure out?

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, waving a hand and slouching in the chair. “I can’t bloodbond someone with mirasma. It’s impossible.”

  “It’s a pure element,” Alys insisted. “Same as silver.”

  “It’s man-made.”

  “Your father has bonded people with glass before.”

  Mira cut her a glare. Her lips twitched.

  “Do you think arguing with me about the finer points of my own trade is going to change my mind? I have no reason or desire to help you. You should leave.”

  “What if I told you helping us would hurt the council?” Evander asked.

  Alys sucked in a sharp breath. He kept his eyes on Mira. He knew very well what he was risking, but something about the way she’d spoken about the council earlier had stuck with him. Though he hadn’t fought in it, he’d grown up during the rebellion. The first skill anyone learned in those times, if they wanted to stay alive, was to recognize who shared their opinions and who didn’t. Who was safe and who was dangerous. Ally and enemy.

  Mira stared back at him, unflinching.

  “I’m not interested in joining a rebellion,” she said.

  “The rebellion’s over,” said Evander. “The council won. That doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it.”

  Mira kept his gaze, her expression softening barely.

  “I didn’t think—” she started, but cut herself off. She shook her head, but it was with resignation rather than refusal. “You’ll bring him here?”

  Evander nodded.

  “I can’t promise the bloodbond will work,” she told him. “Even if it does, I doubt he’ll survive.”

  “We know the risk,” Alys said softly.

  And the risk was so much greater than Mira could fathom. She closed her eyes for several long seconds, then sighed and looked at Evander.

  “Why do I get the feeling that agreeing to attempt this makes me as big a fool as you were three years ago?” she asked.

  Evander flicked his wrist and all three coins in his pocket shot into the air between them, spinning around each other in a hypnotic dance.

  “Because it takes a fool to do the impossible,” he said.

  Mira watched the coins. The corners of her mouth tugged into a small smile.

  “I can see why my father liked you,” she said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  CASSA

  It was only the fourth time Cassa had stepped foot in the citadel. The first time had been with her parents when she was seven or eight. From hearing bits and pieces of her parents’ conversations, she’d known she was supposed to hate it. But it felt impossible to hate the grand, stone archways, the broad, paved streets, or the castle-like keeps stretching toward the sky. The paths were streaming with ink-stained clerks and frowning alchemists and the small gold badges of diviners and sentients and rooks. Secretly, Cassa had loved the citadel.

  The second time, she watched a chapel burn just inside the walls. She’d been too distracted by the chain of events that followed to think much about the citadel or its inhabitants.

  The third time was four days ago, when she was carted past the walls in a beer barrel. The trip had been nothing but darkness and sloshing liquid and the pit deep in her stomach. That time, Cassa had secretly feared the citadel.

  Today she had the hatred she needed. That scalding, scarring ache inside her. A fire she’d been born with. For centuries, the council had hidden behind these walls, twisting prophecies to their whims and forcing the entire city toward a future seen only by long-dead seers. She knew the history of their mistakes better than her own name. The unfair allotment of resources and the convenient “prophecies” giving them license to seize land and imprison dissenters. The years of protests that were either ignored or violently dispersed. The massacre a century ago that had sparked a rebellion doomed to end in yet another massacre.

  Over the years, almost everyone Cassa had ever known or loved gave their lives to that rebellion. She didn’t know how to be anything but angry. She didn’t know how to do anything but fight. Now she was so close to destroying the chancellor and his council, to ripping everything away from them the way they had ripped everything from her. She had no doubt that Newt would escape and that Alys and Evander would be able to convince the Blacksmith to help them. The plan could still work. She just had to get out of the citadel.

  She had been in this room before. She’d sat at this table before with cuffs on her wrists. The ankle shackles were new. She’d kicked a few guards in their tender parts when they subdued her, so she couldn’t blame them for the precaution. It was a bare, windowless room, with none of the antique woven rugs and tapestries the nobility was fond of. When the citadel was built, it was probably meant to be a storage room. Now it held nothing but a table and two chairs. There was also a ghost globe suspended overhead casting its eerie light over the proceedings. Lamps would have been cheaper and easier, but the sentient would need as much light as possible if he wanted to find all her deepest, darkest secrets.

  He was going to see everything.

  Her hatred flared momentarily into panic. She didn’t mind it. Panic made her sharp and strong. Panic meant she hadn’t given up. She let it roil inside of her, though she kept her expression neutral. It wouldn’t fool the sentient, but she wouldn’t give anyone else the satisfaction.

  The door opened. She didn’t recognize the man who entered, except for the golden sentient pin on his lapel. With his hunter-green tie and matching waistcoat, he looked like he was sitting down for a dinner party rather than an interrogation. He also looked irritated, which she couldn’t imagine boded well for her. The sentient who’d read her after the first arrest had been a completely different sort of creature, gangly and mumbling and very visibly terrified of messing up what was probably his first real assignment. She’d broken his concentration so many times, he finally had to call in a guard to shut her up.

  Somehow she didn’t think this sentient would be so easy to fluster. He was young, but there was nothing hesitant about him. He had dark eyes and an impeccable haircut, and he had the look of someone who had never walked into a room without everyone taking notice. Handsome. Dangerous.

  He was going to see everything.

  “My name is Crispin Cavar,” he said brusquely, taking the other seat. “Have you heard of me?”

  “Afraid not,” she said. Her voice was softer than she’d meant it to be. That was annoying.

  “I’m the best sentient in Eldra,” he said, “so let’s get one thing clear. I don’t care who you are or how noble you think your cause is. I’m going to read everything you’re hiding, and then I’m going to return to the dinner party that your arrival very inconveniently interrupted.”

  Cassa wanted t
o laugh at that, but the panic had coiled around her lungs, and she had to concentrate on breathing. He was staring hard at her, his eyes roving over her face. She never understood how sentience worked, how you could see a person’s entire past in their features. Was it like watching their history play out again in your mind’s eye? Or was it more like scanning the pages of a book? She’d never known a sentient well enough to ask.

  Strange thoughts to be having when everything she’d worked for since the day her parents died was about to be ruined. When her own memories were about to betray the last friends she had in the world. The council wouldn’t bother with the death rites this time. They’d just shoot her and be done with it.

  Crispin was frowning at her. He must have found what he was looking for. He must have seen . . . Cassa couldn’t think of what it was he must have seen. Her head felt light. Her thoughts were flitting, unsettled. Why couldn’t she concentrate? Had they drugged her somehow?

  “She’s not going to get away this time.” Crispin’s low voice drew her focus. “Not this time.”

  Cassa opened her mouth to ask what the hell he was talking about, but he stood abruptly and left the room. Cassa stared at the closed door. She moved her manacled hands into her lap. Something was wrong. She just couldn’t figure out what.

  The minutes ticked past. Cassa kept casting her thoughts back, but her mind felt slippery. It was like having a word on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t quite speak. It was like trying to remember something too important to have ever been forgotten.

  Voices in the hall, muffled but pleasant. Soon there was silence again, then the door opened.

  It was Vesper. She looked the same as the last time Cassa had seen her, on the bridge the night before they broke into the citadel, in her neat clerk’s uniform with her red hair pinned back and her fingertips stained black with ink. Now her eyes were bloodshot, as if she hadn’t slept since.

  Cassa’s panic tightened into something harder and darker.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Vesper didn’t reply. She rounded the table and pressed her hand against Cassa’s head.

  “Don’t touch me!” Cassa pushed her hand away and scrambled back from her. She made it out of the chair, but her feet got tangled in the shackles, and she fell hard to the ground.

  “Cassa, please just listen—”

  “No, you listen to me.” Cassa twisted so that she was at least sitting up, her back against the cold wall. “You tell the honorable members of the council that if they want to steal my memories, they’re going to have to pry them from my corpse.”

  “I’m not here to take your memories,” Vesper said, kneeling down in front of her. “I’m here to give them back.”

  Cassa’s head felt light again, her thoughts slick. Something important on the tip of her tongue, just out of memory’s reach.

  “What are you talking about?” she whispered.

  “Please, it’ll be faster if you just let me . . .” Vesper reached out tentatively and put her hand on Cassa’s.

  Almost immediately her mind began to clear. Spans of time she hadn’t known were missing began to fill in. Puzzle pieces of memories were clicking together. Nausea welled, and she clutched her stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” Vesper said. “It’s a lot of memories to give back all at once. It may take you a few minutes to adjust.”

  “I’m fine,” Cassa said through gritted teeth.

  Vesper had been here earlier. After they’d first put her in the room, Vesper had slipped in, begging Cassa to listen to reason, to let her help. Cassa hadn’t wanted to trust her, but what choice did she have? If the sentient read her memories, he would know everything about their plans, about Solan, about where to find the others. The only way to stop him was to make sure none of those memories were there to read.

  “Do you think it worked?” Vesper asked. She produced a key from her pocket and unlocked the shackles. She helped Cassa stand, even though Cassa insisted she didn’t need help.

  “He seemed pretty upset, so I’d say yes.” Cassa paused. “Vesper, I think he knows it was you.”

  Vesper nodded, her features grim. Cassa realized she had never expected to get away with it. The anger in her chest shifted at the thought. She’d trusted Vesper once, maybe more than anyone, even knowing who her uncle was, even knowing that one day her loyalty might be torn. There was a small part of her, smothered by the anger, that wanted desperately to have that again.

  “We have to leave now,” Vesper said. “Before he comes back.”

  “What about the guard outside?”

  “I—I took care of him.” Vesper ducked her head and went to the door.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Cassa asked in a low voice, as she followed her into the hall.

  “It means I sort of . . . made him forget why he was standing there in the first place.”

  “You took his memory.”

  “Just a small one.”

  Cassa bit back the reproach that sprang to her lips. She couldn’t exactly take Vesper to task for the very thing that was saving her life. At least not until she was safely out of the citadel.

  “Where, exactly, are we going?” she asked instead.

  Vesper was leading her through corridors of the Central Keep that Cassa was sure had been forgotten even by the inhabitants. Everything was less grand than she remembered from her first visit to the citadel. Curtains were moth-eaten, rugs were threadbare, and the gaslights lining the halls were cracked and blackened with grease. She felt a small surge of satisfaction that the century of rebellion had drained the council’s resources if nothing else.

  “Out of the keep,” Vesper said. “And then to the old chapel, where we first met.”

  The chapel that Cassa’s parents had gutted with flames. The chapel where Cassa had saved Vesper’s life and then Vesper had saved hers. She wondered suddenly if Vesper had seen the note she’d left in her prison cell. I should have let you burn. That night she’d meant every word. Now she wasn’t sure. Now her fury and distrust were tangled with relief and gratefulness and the realization that if they were caught now, Vesper would be executed alongside her.

  Cassa was surprised to find that she actually cared.

  “Wait.” She grabbed Vesper’s arm. She’d finally caught up with what Vesper was thinking. “The door in the wall that led to the upper echelon—it was bricked up years ago. After the fire.”

  She desperately hoped that Vesper knew something she didn’t. Another passage. Another way out. But when Vesper looked back, her face was bleak.

  “Are you sure?”

  “They were hardly going to leave it open.”

  A secret door in the wall was obviously of particular interest to the rebellion. When she’d told her parents, it had almost assuaged their anger at her running into a burning building to save a citizen of the citadel. But less than a month later, workmen arrived with stones and mortar, and soon the hidden passage was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the wall.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” Vesper said. “About you, I mean. About that night. I never told anyone.”

  There was a line of desperation drawn between her brows, and she searched Cassa’s face as if seeking out any doubt. Cassa almost laughed. Vesper had already betrayed her when it mattered the most. Why did she think Cassa cared about a night six years ago?

  “Don’t worry,” Cassa said. “I know you’ve always been a loyal friend, except for that one time you tried to get us all executed, of course.”

  “I’m the only reason you didn’t get executed.” The desperation was gone as quickly as it had come. Vesper had never been one to bask in her own vulnerability. It was one of the things that had drawn Cassa to her in the first place.

  “My apologies,” Cassa said coolly. “I’m sure you can understand why that was hard for us to believe when sentients were digging through our heads and the council was sentencing us to death.”

  She tried to keep walking
. She wasn’t sure where she was going, exactly, but she knew she couldn’t stay here. Vesper blocked her way.

  “Cassa, please,” she said, her tone soft again. “I just need you to understand why I had to do it.”

  “I do understand.” Of course she understood. She’d never thought for a moment that Vesper would turn on them because of some latent loyalty to the council. Vesper had seen the corruption firsthand. She wanted change as badly as any of them. That was the reason she’d fed information to the rebellion, the reason she’d sneaked out of the citadel more and more often over the years until she and Cassa were inseparable. There was only one reason she would have backed out. “You didn’t trust me to pull it off.”

  Cassa pushed past her, but Vesper dogged her steps.

  “Your plan wasn’t going to work. They would have—”

  “It was going to work,” Cassa snapped over her shoulder. “We got caught because you told your uncle everything.”

  “If we’d gone through with it, we would have been caught and executed. All of us.”

  “There was nothing wrong with my plan.”

  “It wasn’t going to work.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.” Vesper yanked on her arm so forcefully that Cassa almost fell backward. She caught herself and whirled, but Vesper didn’t flinch. “I didn’t have to tell my uncle anything, Cassa. He already knew. His diviners saw it all.”

  Cassa could feel her heartbeat in her head, a dull, steady ache. She thought about the slaughter in the lower ward almost a century before she was born. She thought about the path it had carved for the generations who followed. She thought about the day her parents didn’t come home. Why did she ever think she could make a difference with all of the past and future stacked against her? When all those generations had failed. When her parents had died trying.

  “What are you saying?” she asked, even though she already knew. Even though a part of her had always known.

  “You were foretold.”

  It felt more like a death sentence than the one the chancellor had given her. Cassa suddenly felt impossibly tired. She put her hand against the wall and dropped her head, considering what would happen if she just sat down here and never moved again. Surely it didn’t matter what she did anymore. Surely her fate was already written in a handful of runes, in the dreams of seers.