by Everly Frost
I back away. I really didn’t think my request through. A cold chill speeds down my spine. He allowed Gilda and Carmen to speak with me, but he’s not my friend. Now he’s either insulted because I talked to him like he’s my errand boy (bad move, Marbella) or he’s considering flying me up there himself which would involve standing much closer to him than I’m prepared for. Considering he’s seen me naked, very bad move.
“Sorry.” I stumble as I step backward, righting myself just in time. “I forgot where I was for a moment.”
Two more quick steps back, I spin and hurry away.
Not fast enough.
Two fully spread wings snap together in front of me. I pull up sharp, completely encircled. I remember seeing Cassian’s full wingspan when I first encountered him flying beside the Phoenix. His wingspan is broader than any other gargoyle I’ve met, massive in fact, and that includes Howl.
“Turn around.”
At least he draws the line at grabbing me. I pirouette on the spot, careful not to move closer to his wings in any direction. He focuses on a point at the edge of my shoulder. For a second, I sense regret in the line of his closely pressed lips and downward cast eyes, but I’m not sure where that’s coming from.
“Step on my feet. I’ll fly you up.”
Stepping on his feet requires leaning in to his chest. I know that because Llion has flown me up to my hammock every night and that’s the only way I don’t topple backward. That, and Llion wraps his arms around me. It’s perfectly fine with someone I trust. Not so much with Cassian.
My throat is dry. I try to find my voice. “I really don’t need to take these up right now. I can wait until tonight—”
His scowl is back. Combined with a growl. He’s not looking at my shoulder any more, glaring directly into my eyes. “Step on my feet.”
Somehow it’s easier to deal with him when he’s mad than when he’s bordering on helpful. “Fine.”
He does a quick double take and I’m reminded that the last time I said ‘fine’ to him was right before I threw off my clothes in disgust. Before he can get confused, I slip the bag over my shoulder, step on his feet, and slide my arms around his waist. I grit my teeth and close my eyes. He pauses for a moment. My nerves return.
Then he spread his wings and we lift effortlessly into the air. After a moment of silence, he says, “It might surprise you to know that I also started my life as a servant.”
That does surprise me. Somehow I imagined him as evil General Cassian right from the moment of his birth. At the very least, I pictured him raised in some sort of military family like the children in many of the major elven Houses.
“I was a slave in the home of the Supreme Incorruptible, King Roman, himself.”
He reaches my hammock but doesn’t fly close enough for me to deposit my bag, choosing instead to wrap his hands around my waist and lever me backward so he can see my face. It’s not a seriously dangerous angle, but it will be if he lets go. I keep my own firm grip on his waist. Otherwise, the only thing between me and the ground far below are his good intentions. I’m certainly not counting on those.
He says, “I’m from the Hideaway Clan. The lowest of the low. You would be forgiven for thinking that all of Howl’s army is Grievous, but they aren’t.”
Since we left the ground, he’s done all the talking. He seems to expect me to say something now while he maintains our position mid-air with light wing flaps. Not moving any closer to my hammock.
I ask the first question I can think of. “How did you become Howl’s General?”
He answers my question with a question. “How did you become the Storm Princess?”
“The Storm chose me.”
“Why? She was our storm. A gargoyle storm. Why would she choose any elf to calm her?”
I consider his question, searching for a reason. The truth is that she never told me. “I don’t have an answer for that. I… she…” That awful memory returns to me, the full force of it so clear that Cassian blurs in front of me. I’d pushed Baelen out of the path of a lightning strike—a natural one—prepared to take the strike myself, but the Storm beat it to me. “I was trying to save someone’s life, but I put my own in danger. When she chose me, she saved my life.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I honestly don’t know.” I don’t know what else to say. I need to ask the Storm these questions. I need to know why she became the Storm in the first place as well as why she chose to save my life, what triggered that choice for her. She could have let me fall. She could have allowed the last Storm Princess to die and never chosen another. She could have raged and killed us all.
Cassian pulls me back to him, leans in, closes the gap. He inhales. His breath tickles my cheek. “You smell like…”
A deep frown descends, darkening his chiseled features. He peers into my eyes as if he’s trying to draw something out of me. I have no idea what he wants. His eyes narrow and his voice lowers to a whisper. “But that’s not possible.”
He reminds me of Llion the day we came to the mines, telling me I smelled different now, and Erit the other day telling me about shadow panthers. I don’t know how those things are connected, but both Llion and Erit wore identical expressions to Cassian right now, as if they’re trying to discover the reason for something they sense but can’t quite pinpoint. I have no idea what it is. I certainly have no idea why it’s about me.
He contemplates me for another moment before he silently turns and allows me to place the bag into my hammock. His arms return to my waist. I only realize then that he hasn’t brought his bone lash with him. He’s completely bare of weapons. One arm wraps around my back and the other sweeps up into my hair, startling me until I realize he’s supporting my head for the flight down.
He judges the distance to the ground before we drop. As the air rushes past us, he murmurs, “Definitely not possible.”
A single beat of his wings slows the fall and we glide to the ground. He releases me immediately, his wings snapping back into their usual position. “Be careful… Princess.”
I step off his feet, not certain how to decipher his final comment. I back away and race to the entrance to the tunnels. I’m not staying up here any longer. I’ve never been so glad to enter the mine.
Welsian is the first to meet me in the third tunnel. He and Llion are in the middle of tapping planks of wood into place to create support beams.
“What happened?” Welsian asks. “Why did you have to stay back?”
I bite my tongue. I’m not supposed to mention the females. Not that I care about Cassian’s rules, but I’m worried about the consequences. I don’t know the identity of the other females, but if the miners knew that their wives and loved ones came here every week, they might attempt to see them. I meant what I said to Jasper: I don’t want gargoyles getting killed because of me.
I clear my throat. I hate lying to my friends and I can feel my face flushing with guilt. Hopefully they will interpret it as embarrassment. “A gargoyle brought me a basket of provisions.” It’s not a lie. Just not the full truth.
The mention of ‘provisions’ does the trick. “Oh. Nothing nefarious then. Good.” Llion changes the subject. “You’re just in time to help finish the supports.”
Anything to shift my focus off Cassian’s cryptic remarks. I’m so busy trying not to think about what happened earlier in the day that I don’t think about Gilda and Carmen’s visit either. It’s not until we finish work for the day that something Carmen said returns to me. We’d talked about how dangerous the tunnels are and she’d asked me whether the teams helped each other.
I stop at the entrance to the third tunnel on my way out. Tomorrow the teams will fight each other again to determine which tunnel they work in next. The team from the fifth tunnel passes by, their clothing scorched. They look hopeful but also afraid: can they survive another week in that place?
I swing back to Roar. “No team should have to mine the fourth or fifth tunnel twice in a ro
w.”
His pickaxe clatters into his bucket as he puts it down. The other members of our team pause behind him.
“True, it’s cruel,” he says. “But who would voluntarily take their place. And how would we even arrange it?”
“Well… we can’t determine which bones get picked, but we can determine who wins the fights.”
“You mean… throw the match?” Iago draws his chin back as if that’s a horrifying thought. “Like Roar said, who would voluntarily do that?”
I sigh. “The teams who had the easiest tunnels this week.”
“You mean us?” Welsian asks in his quiet voice. He rubs his arms and it’s like watching tree trunks move.
I plow on. “What if we got all the teams to agree to a system? Random enough not to be obvious, but an order that gives everyone easy tunnels one week and harder ones the next. A week to recover before the next challenge.”
I spin to the others. “Look, accidents happen and people are more likely to get hurt when they’re tired. The teams that go into those tunnels next week need to be fresh. That’s us.”
Llion has been quiet up until now. He lifts himself out of the shadows at the side of the tunnel. “And Erit’s team. They mined the first tunnel this week. It’s going to be hard to convince him to take the fourth or fifth next.”
I say, “I can do it. I can convince him. But I need your help with the other teams. It only works if we all agree.”
Iago asks, “I already hate the answer to this question, but which tunnel do you propose we mine next?”
I push away the suicidal urge to choose the fifth. I don’t know enough about mining yet to attempt that, but I know the time will come when I have to. “The fourth.”
Roar blows out a breath and drops himself against the side of the tunnel, shaking his head with a half-laugh. “What are you getting us into, Princess?”
“Control,” I say. “We’re taking back control.”
Erit waits for me to speak. All week, gargoyles have been coming to speak with me at dinnertime, but now I’ve asked for him specifically. He knows I have a question. But I don’t intend to start with the one that really matters.
As the general hubbub of dinner washes over us, I ask, “Was General Cassian always stationed at this mine?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think he ever came here before.”
I ask a question that I already know the answer to. “Why is he here now?”
“Because of you.”
“Because of me.” I prop my elbows on the table. “Why do you think that is? I have no power. I’m not a threat. What is Howl so afraid of that he sends his General to watch over me?”
A glimmer of a smile touches Erit’s mouth. “He sees what we see.”
“And what is that?”
“You’re a leader.” He shakes his head at me. He tries to hide his smile but it doesn’t work. “Wrapped up in a tiny package.”
I hold his gaze. “I want to give Howl something to be afraid of, Erit. But I don’t want him to know he should be afraid of it until it’s too late.”
“Well, I guess I’d like to know how you propose to do that.”
“I want to start with the fights. I want us to take control of the outcome.”
When I finish telling him my plan, he leans back in his chair, tapping the table, contemplating his hands. “You want my team to take the fifth tunnel next.”
“Then you wouldn’t get it for another four weeks.”
“Assuming the other teams agree.”
I lean forward. “They already have.” It was easy to convince the teams who mined the fourth and fifth tunnels. Badenoch’s team also agreed—I knew I could get him to see the plan’s logic and Jasper backed me up.
“We cycle through the tunnels in the same order: three, four, two, one, five, and then three again. It means we get a break between the difficult tunnels and the burden never falls on one team more than the others.”
“I don’t know…”
“We have to take fear out of the equation. Howl rules by fear. If we start beating him in small ways, then the big ways will follow.” I’d told Jasper I wasn’t going to start a rebellion, but it’s pouring out of me now, the need to fight back. “We’re going to end him, Erit. I don’t know how yet, but I know that this is how we start.”
He rubs his face, scrubbing at his eyes. When I first met him, I thought he was an arrogant male. He’d underestimated me, but now I consider how much of that was fuelled by fear. He pushes back his chair and a number of random gargoyles stand up at the same time. They’ve been shifting around us at intervals for a while now and the guards have stopped paying attention.
“You’re out of your mind.” A grin breaks across his face. “But I’m in.”
The next morning when Cassian brings in the bones and Roar leans in for me to tell him which is the shortest, it’s because he doesn’t want to pick it.
“Third from the left,” I whisper. At the same time, I hold my left hand behind my seat where the guards can’t see it. I hold up three fingers. I’m sitting at one of the front tables and each of the passing team leaders glances my way. The leader from the team that mined the fifth tunnel is the one who will pick that bone.
The gargoyles don’t question how I know which bone to pick. Even if they did, I couldn’t tell them. All I know is that the hum that fills my body at night and makes me freezing cold is the same hum that tells me which bone will give me the greatest power.
20
The next three weeks pass without incident. We survive the fourth tunnel by wrapping wet cloths around our noses and mouths. The collapsed pockets in the floor are giant holes, at least six feet deep. While the rest of us spend time familiarizing ourselves with the safest pathway through, Iago comes up with something better. Identifying the solid sections of the floor, he shows Roar how we could run wooden planks across the holes—two spaced apart—and then nail boards across them. He calls it a false floor. But we need flatter boards than the ones we have, which are all thick planks.
Roar asks to speak with Cassian who looms ominously in the entrance to the tunnel as Roar and Iago describe what we need. I wait in the background, but Cassian looks to me before he gives a curt nod. “You’ll have them tomorrow.”
As Iago passes me by, appearing pleased about the outcome, I understand why Roar had no hesitation about choosing Iago for his team. Whenever there’s a difficult engineering issue, Iago always has a solution. When we need something enormous moved, on the other hand, Welsian is the gargoyle for the task. And Roar and Llion… I can’t help but grin as I mentally label them as the work horses. But me? I’m still not sure where I stand in all this. I just follow Roar’s directions.
I catch his attention as he passes me. The wet cloth tied securely around my face muffles my voice. “Where does the wood come from?” All I have to do is turn around and every week there seems to be a new supply of it at the entrance to each tunnel, cut and ready to use.
“Groups of gargoyles work in the forests, chopping down trees, measuring out the planks. They’re carpenters the same way we’re miners. Then the couriers bring the supplies during the night.”
“Why at night?”
He glances back to check that Cassian is gone. I can’t see Roar’s mouth because the cloth covers it, but I can’t mistake his wry tone. “It’s so that we can’t pass messages to them. We’re stuck in our hammocks while they distribute the supplies without encountering us.”
“How come I never noticed that?” A bunch of gargoyles lugging in wooden planks seems like a major disruption. Especially in the quiet of night.
Roar scratches the back of his head and tightens his mask. I’ve gotten so used to seeing the gargoyles bare from the waist up that I hardly notice anymore. Sweat drips down the side of his face and down his chest. It’s warm in the fourth tunnel.
He says, “You… ah… you’re a heavy sleeper.”
He seems oddly uncomfortable answering my question and I�
��m not sure why. I let it go even though I want to ask more. I was never a heavy sleeper in Erawind. In fact, light noises would wake me. I still remember the night Baelen woke me from my dreams when he sat outside my bedroom door, completely drunk, blaming the storm for tearing us apart.
On top of that, the arrival of the female gargoyles the other day sounded like a tornado so I don’t understand how I could sleep through the arrival of a swarm of males.
That night, I’m determined to listen out for them. Cassian said there would be a delivery and I want to see it happen, even if I can’t interact with the couriers. I fall asleep while my toes chill and my breath frosts, determined not to sleep so deeply, but I don’t wake up until the next morning when my body temperature returns to normal. Curse these cold nights. It must be the night-time freeze that keeps me asleep.
We spend the following week finishing the work of the two teams before us to clear the collapsed second tunnel. The third week is the easiest when we get to mine the first tunnel, but our turn in the fifth tunnel approaches fast.
At the end of the third week, as he does at the end of each week now, Cassian calls me out of the food hall and shows me to the door of his bathing room. He closes the door behind him and I don’t see him again until the next morning. The night before we’re due to mine the fifth tunnel, I emerge from the bath to find a silver handheld mirror resting on one of the chairs.
It’s the first mirror I’ve seen since I left Harem Hall. The door is still closed, but Cassian is the only one who could have left it here for me.
I hesitate. I don’t pick it up. I don’t want to look at myself. I can see enough of my body to know that I’ve gained muscles I never had before, especially in my thighs and biceps—constant work will do that. I’ve spent a lot of time with my new hairbrush removing the bird nests from my head, so at least my hair won’t look terrible, but as for my skin and eyes… I’m scared I’ll look as bad as I feel. I can refuse to admit I’m exhausted if I don’t see it written all over my face.