by Lucy Tempest
“I am not useless!”
“You are! You have no qualities or skills that would help you survive beyond your castle’s walls.” I sniffled loudly, nose starting to run. “And from what I saw you don’t even have the skills needed to survive within them. You can’t negotiate with or befriend people—are you even capable of being nice? Or pretending to be so? If all you expect to do is push out heirs and host your husband’s guests, you could wind up alienating your children and starting a war because of how nasty you are.”
She hunched, neck and shoulders re-entering the water as she looked up at me. “That doesn’t seem to bother my mother. She’s quite content being a friendless queen.”
“You don’t sound like you want that for yourself, why not act different than her?”
“For what reason? This is a competition, we’re here to battle for the chance to win his hand—a hand that was always mine and should have only been extended to welcome me here as his betrothed.” Fairuza turned her face up at the stalactites hanging above us, like she wished one would fall and impale her. “For all that importance I’m supposed to have, I was unimportant enough to have our since-birth betrothal easily discarded. And negligible enough to be called here as one of fifty, all beneath me in rank, breeding and country, and put through inane tests to narrow his choices.” She looked down at the water rippling around us. “Being here, with you, someone who has nothing to offer, with Ariane, who is from a small, emerging island nation, with Cherine, who is a mere noble, and Cora, who isn’t even titled, it says I am equal to you.”
“You’re not!” I hissed. “We’re here because the prince and his council believe we have something to offer him, and as you said, all you have to offer is your tiara.”
It might have been the cold water or exhaustion, but her glare had no anger behind it anymore. “Luckily, all a princess needs is a tiara from a kingdom her betrothed can enjoy trade and peace with. That is the purpose of a king’s daughter, to solidify treaties and alliances.”
“Weren’t you just complaining about your lot in life a minute ago?”
“Just because it’s true, doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
I rubbed at my nose, starting to shudder. “Then what would you have done apart from this? What more would you even want with every hobby, tutor and servant afforded to you?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted in a small voice. “And I’ll never know, because we won’t leave this cave, and I’ll die here.”
“You won’t die here.”
That was a bold promise considering I was beginning to lose the feeling in my legs and was growing drowsier by the minute in a pool surrounded by ghouls.
But at least we were safe for now, and I could catch my breath and think.
But no matter how hard I did, there was only one way to fulfill my promise. By finding Zafira’s necklace. And that was impossible now.
I could see now why people hated witches. And to think my mother had been one…
The crack almost didn’t register at first. My head snapped up in time to see a stalactite breaking off and hurtling down to cleave the water with a violent splash. A massive wave slammed us into the edge before it sank.
Gasping, I found only half of the ghouls by the entrance. The rest were crawling up from the walls and to the ceiling like giant spiders, some climbing down the stalactites, chipping at their bases until they cracked.
They’d found a way to fish us out of the water.
Another stalactite crashed dangerously close to us, the resulting wave almost rolling us back underwater but splashing the ghoul, scaring it up and away.
I swallowed water, Fairuza’s weight making me sink beneath the surface. I kicked up, tried swimming back to the ledge so she could hold onto it instead but more ghouls crawled down dangerously close, shrieking monstrously, their shouts of anticipation and hunger echoing off the cavern walls, increasing my shudders.
Even if we managed to evade the stalactites, we couldn’t stay in the water forever. We were bound to fall asleep or faint, and drown. But I would drown before I let myself be eaten, and Fairuza couldn’t stay afloat without me.
I shook so hard I almost sank us both, the reality of our situation seeping through me like ice. No matter what I did now, it would end with us dead.
We would die before I got the chance to find out who my mother truly was or seek out her family in Almaskham. Before I could win Cyrus and find the lamp, and Bonnie would die a brutal death thousands of miles away from home, away from me.
“Fairuza, you were right,” I wheezed, one arm across her chest, mine too tight. Losing the will to stay afloat with every breath, my voice tore up as I wept. “We’re going to die here.”
“No.” I felt her shaking in my hold. “No, you promised me. You said that you weren’t done with life yet, that you have things to do.”
“So?” I cried, blubbering, hopes now at the unfathomable depths of this pool.
“So, do what needs to be done to get out, to do whatever you have left to do,” she choked. “And if I’m going to die, it’s not going to be here, it will be at home with my sister and my brothers.”
“It’s nice that you’re choosing to be optimistic, but now’s the worst time to do it.” I shut my eyes tightly, squeezing out tears. “You were right, witches do nothing but hurt us. Marzeya lied just to torture us for her own entertainment.”
“She is torturing us but she didn’t lie.”
I opened swollen eyes to look down at her. “What makes you say that?”
“Because I think I found the necklace.”
I spun her in the water, had her facing me. “Where?”
Fairuza jerked her head to the flat wall to our right. “When the rocks fell and the water went up, I saw something blue. Either there is another cave beneath the water or it’s floating down there.”
That was where I’d been facing when I’d thrown us into the water, where I’d seen the blue flash. I’d thought that had been been caused by the impact, but now I remembered. It had been nothing like the burst of light from a head bump, too blue, too localized.
Hope expanded within me, siphoning the ink of despair in my insides like a sponge.
Our way out finally had a location!
It was another obstacle to overcome. But that was better than nothing. I’d swim down there and search for it. But—Fairuza had nothing to hold onto anymore. I couldn’t leave her.
“I can take you on my back while I swim down there,” I said.
She shook her head weakly. “If you do, we’ll both die.”
“Most outcomes of this situation end with our bloated corpses floating like logs,” I gasped. “Can you stay afloat?”
She swallowed. “I’ll try. But you’ll need to hurry.”
Not wasting another moment, I dove into the dim depths.
I was a dozen feet down when I saw the flash of blue again.
Going back up for air, I gulped the deepest breath I’d ever drawn, and dove again, down, down, towards the beckoning blue.
It was harder than swimming up in every conceivable way. Instead of gladly helping me sink further, the water resisted my downward strokes. The earlier pressure against my eyeballs and heart worsened the lower I forced myself to go.
Every muscle ached as the resistance grew and my force weakened. It was painful to keep the air in my lungs and my head tightened until I felt it would burst.
I was too close to fainting.
But I knew if I went back up for air I wouldn’t be able to come back down.
Ignoring the tightening pressure in my chest, I continued my taxing dive down, eyes as open as the pain would allow.
A few more feet down, the blue flash spread into five separate spots. The sapphires.
The certainty reignited my fight, numbing the stress on my heart and muscles but it wasn’t enough to delude my lungs.
I needed to breathe.
Just a few more feet…just a bit more and I could finally bre
athe…
The sapphires were distinct now, neither in a cave nor in an aimless float.
Standing on a giant rose quartz lily pad, the petals of the lotus flared behind her like the peacock tail of her crown, was Anaïta. Around her pale pink neck was the sapphire necklace.
This wasn’t an underground lake, but a flooded shrine to the goddess.
Head on the verge of bursting, I floated before Anaïta’s statue and unclasped the necklace from her neck with shaking fingers. Taking more time to clasp it around my own neck was potentially fatal. But I couldn’t risk fainting and having it slip through my grasp.
I missed its hook clasp again and a frustrated scream rang within me, escaping my lips in bubbles. When it finally took, I blacked out.
Everything went dark, my body went limp and my jaw slacked. Water flowed into my mouth, wiping out whatever precious air I had left, filling my nose, my throat.
I was drowning.
Light came back, but everything was faint and silent. The resistance that had fought me on the way down was not pushing me up now. It had abandoned me, leaving me to float up only a few feet before the statue and remain there, caught in Anaïta’s unfeeling gaze.
Please, I begged her, begged Marzeya, begged anyone. Please. I didn’t come all the way here to die. I can’t die, not yet.
Nothingness kept threatening to consume me, lasting longer with each blink, becoming harder to fight with each brush with darkness. I fought to keep my eyes open, but my vision dimmed, its edges blurring into the void.
Somebody please save me.
The world around me throbbed, as if the mountain shook, and the thousand opals around me closed and reopened as glowing blue eyes.
I felt myself floating up, weightlessly soaring back towards the surface and before my vision finally flickered out, I saw Anaïta smile.
I came to with a violent lurch, coughing until I almost fainted again.
I was still in the pool, being held up by Fairuza. She’d learned how to stay afloat.
My swollen eyes slid around. We were in the cavern, surrounded by ghouls.
We were still here. Why were we still here?
“But the necklace…” I slurred, head pounding. “Why—why hasn’t she—” I couldn’t find any words to complete that thought.
Fairuza, kicking weakly, held on tighter. “I felt the mountain shake. The door has likely reopened.”
I didn’t understand the point she was making, could barely manage breathing let alone speaking.
“What?” I managed, one eye drooping shut.
“She gave us a way out,” she said, shivering. “But we can’t reach it.”
Oh.
More air flooded my lungs and spread up to my head. Aware, but exhausted beyond words, I understood just how much worse our situation had gotten.
Freedom was now tangible, and we knew where it was. Just out of our reach.
“This…” Fairuza shook at my back, voice a bare whisper. “…is why we burn witches.”
We bobbed heavily in the water. She wouldn’t be able to hold us much longer. And there was no reason for me to anymore. We should give up the struggle. I closed my eyes.
I opened them, about to tell her that—and saw the ghouls rearing up, sniffing the air. Then the ones blocking the entrance turned and ran, fighting to beat each other out.
Someone else was here!
Yells echoed up, deep, discordant notes too vague to discern. The ghouls’ collective screeches were unmistakable sounds of attack. They’d found more victims?
Horrifying bellows detonated, accompanied by the wet, nauseating sounds of bodies being crushed against rock, followed by the sickening rupture of skin, hacking of flesh and the thunder cracking of bones.
I tried not to imagine those claws viciously slicing through necks and ribs. I didn’t want to accept that whatever poor souls had wandered in here had met their end between those monstrous jaws.
The ghouls over the walls and stalactites rushed back to the opening as something—likely their comrades now smothered in human blood—approached.
Heavy footfalls stomped up the steps, then a pale, clawless hand gripped the edge of the entrance, fingertips dripping with dark blood.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Bodies bent like bows, the ghouls appeared as anxious as I was as a man pulled himself in, armor coated in thick, black blood, hands clutching a scimitar.
“Apologies for the delay, my ladies,” said Ayman, running a fingertip over the curved side of his blade as he eyed the clustering ghouls. “I would have come sooner, but someone insisted on coming along.”
“You’re damn right I did!” Cyrus appeared at the top of the stairs, a sleeve torn, a bite-mark on his forearm still beading with blood, his hair a mess and plastered to one side with the blood-splatter that masked half his face.
Ayman. Cyrus.
They’d come for us.
It was too good to be true. And good things didn’t happen to me.
It made me wonder if I was still at the bottom of the pool, drowning, and this was a departing dream.
Hallucination or not, they were quite the pair. Ayman a calm and simmering threat with his intricate armor and vicious sword, and Cyrus a half-wild mess in his stained and ruined clothes, brandishing an axe ripped from a war god’s statue, bright eyes flashing in the firelight like a lightning-crack in the night sky.
He surveyed the beasts with violent disgust and the confident focus of a hunter, as if he was not to be their prey, but they were his. Ayman, without his gauntlets and his faceplate open, glowered at the encroaching mass with contempt, as if the sight of them personally offended him. Whatever both men’s reasons were, they weren’t afraid. And they were here to save us!
Suddenly the soaring hope was shot down by dread. There was no way they could go through all these ghouls!
Before I could beg them to leave, to save themselves from being cornered like us, Cyrus ordered, “Get out of the water, quick! A carriage is waiting outside!”
“We can’t,” Fairuza gasped, clinging tighter to me, shaking all over. “They’ll attack us.”
“I promise you they won’t. Go!”
The effect of his composure, the command in his princely tone on me was immediate. Gone was all the lethargy and disorientation as I made Fairuza hold on to an arm while I launched into a taxing mix of one-armed strokes and splashing kicks. It didn’t matter how heavy and worn out I was by the effects of near-drowning. Cyrus was here, Ayman was here, and I was determined to reach them. If anything, I’d fight alongside them. I wouldn’t cower in the water while they faced the monstrous horde alone.
When we reached land and began to climb out, a few ghouls rounded on us, salivating and hissing hungrily and Cyrus’s axe came down on the neck of the one closest to us. As its severed head hit the ground, three remained focused on us while over two-dozen ghouls swarmed him and Ayman.
My heart lodged in my throat as I forgot the ghouls before me, desperately looking past them, to see how Cyrus and Ayman were faring.
They were back-to-back, swinging their weapons at the beasts, scoring precise swipes and cutting blows that lopped off hands and cleaved necks. They moved in a practiced, unhurried ease, not with the urgency of a cornered animal that I’d been brimming with earlier. It was like they’d done this before.
I never thought I’d ever see Ayman use his guard’s sword, thought it purely for ceremony and precaution. What had been even less feasible was seeing Cyrus brutally wielding a heavy axe and bellowing the foulest curses as he cut down one beast after another.
They weren’t merely standing their ground, they were winning.
Cyrus’s axe cut through the air with a whoosh, cleaving into a ghoul’s spine, even as he extended his bloody arm to the others. “Go on! Have a bite! I dare you!”
“Don’t goad them, one already nipped you.” Ayman heaved, slashing an attacking ghoul’s throat. “It better not scar. I’d hate to explain that to your f
ather.”
“Oh, why not? It would be a fun story to tell the grandchildren.”
“Keep following me into places like this and you won’t have grandchildren.”
Cyrus ducked as he buried his drenched-in-black-blood axe in a ghoul’s midsection, stepping on two others’ ribs and neck as he attacked the ones before us, crushing the skull of the biggest one. “Out! Out now!”
I flopped up onto the ground as our remaining ghouls jumped on him. Fairuza grabbed hold of my leg and I heaved her out as I got to my feet. Legs shaking, I stumbled around Ayman and his determined handful with Fairuza clinging to me.
“Get out, now!” Cyrus’s bellow made me stumble to the entrance. Once there, I still looked back, unable to bear leaving them. I caught the instant Cyrus and Ayman swung their blades at once, Ayman beheading a ghoul and Cyrus cutting off both its legs in one brutal swing.
It was a jarring thing to behold. These two palace-bred boys whom I’d been to ballrooms, treasure vaults and temples with, unleashing their bloodthirst, destroying these man-like creatures with such violence—and relish. It was yet another part of Cyrus I’d never thought could exist. I didn’t know why I never had. Warfare was part of a future king’s education. At least that was what the folktales of a king and his knights claimed.
When I became certain they had the upper hand, were in no danger, I tore my eyes away from Cyrus viciously excited face, from the glint of savagery in Ayman’s eyes, and ran.
Water poured from my hair and clothes, my slippery feet drying against the dusty ground as I dragged Fairuza with me down all levels. We only paused by the two ghouls we’d killed, exchanged a glance, as if we still couldn’t believe this had happened, that we’d done this.