by May Dawson
But Silas had two plans he wanted me to choose from. One where we had our friends meet us and we broke through the wards to escape into the forest; that was the plan we’d originally ginned up. One where he poisoned all the guards and let the rest of Elegiah escape, trusting that Rebel Magicians would rush to take credit and no one would ever guess we were here.
Since we still didn’t understand why Maddie could shift and no one else could, we couldn’t afford to miss our chance at the shield. I raked my fingers through my hair. This mission just kept getting worse.
He gave me a long look, as if he’d expected a decision that very second before we even made contact with Maddie and Jensen again. We needed for them to locate Sebastian and Isabelle and Keen for this plan to work.
I wondered if he even cared what I decided anyway, or if he’d already made his plan. Maybe he had never intended to just rescue his three best friends.
He just rolled up his cigarette and smoked the messages to make sure no one would ever see them.
I’d never seen Silas smoke. The two of us were silent as he rested his feet on the stone wall that surrounded the balcony overlooking the colony. The night sky was beautiful, vivid with stars and streaked with purple and pink lights, over the pines; it was a dramatic contrast with the ugly squat buildings below where the prisoners lived.
Silas seemed peaceful as the smoke curled around his face, which was almost lost to me in the dim light.
Silas was clever, that was undeniable.
But sometimes I wasn’t sure if that made me feel more confident.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maddie
One of the guards had directed Jensen, me and a handful of other prisoners into the transient house. We’d have to wait for space to open up in the other barracks, which it was implied wouldn’t take long. People must be dying here; I didn’t think anyone left Elegiah on parole.
There weren’t a lot of prisoners with us. Apparently those who knew someone had already been pulled into their cabins.
I’d worried at first that the fact no one recognized us as Rebels might draw attention, but Silas had said the Rebels operated in cells. He knew his friends and a handful of sympathetic criminals and citizens who helped them, but he didn’t know the other knots of Rebels and he didn’t know everyone sympathetic to their cause either. That way, when they were captured, they couldn’t be tortured to bring the entire organization down.
When they were captured. The thought that everyone here had known they were choosing this fate or worse humbled me; had they really chosen to live their lives like this because they believed it was the only way they could save the torn universe?
It made me think I should face anything that life threw at me with the same dreamy smile and fierce heart that Silas did.
“I’m going to look for Isabelle,” I told Jensen.
“Is that a good idea?” Jensen said. Prisoners seemed to be moving freely in and out of the barracks now, so I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. “Maybe we should get the lay of the land first.”
The sooner we found our new friends, the sooner we could get out of here. Jensen was touching his shoulder absently.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Got on the wrong side of the welcome committee,” he said lightly.
“Take off your shirt,” I told him.
“That’s pretty much your motto for me, isn’t it?”
“You love taking off your shirt,” I chided. “You can barely keep your clothes on. Which I don’t blame you for, given those abs, but… when you don’t want to take it off, it’s usually because you’re trying to protect me from something.”
“Me? Protective?” His brows arched as if that were ridiculous. Then he sighed and pulled his shirt over his head.
I moved to look at his back; there was a vivid bruise that ran across his shoulder, an ugly white weal of a welt at its center.
“What happened?” I asked. My first impulse was to hurt whoever had hurt him, and my second impulse was wishing I could heal him.
For a second I could’ve sworn that despite the rune on my hand, I felt magic spark at my fingertips, but the impulse must’ve provoked the ward. Pain burned through my hand and I clutched my hand under my arm, putting pressure on it as if that would ease the pain, but it did nothing.
“I put my hands in my pockets,” he said lightly. “I have a feeling there are a lot of rules here, Maddie, the kind that you only learn the hard way. I’d like for you to stay under the radar.”
“I will,” I promised.
Jensen gave me a distinctly baleful look as if he didn’t believe me, then pulled his shirt on. “Fine. I’ll go looking too. Meet back here in an hour or when the guards beat the shit out of us, whichever comes first?”
“Always the soul of optimism,” I accused him lightly.
Jensen snorted. “I leave that to you and boy wonder.”
But Jensen’s grouching just made me smile.
The smile died as soon I stepped outside into the ugly courtyard.
The air of misery felt palpable; the shadow of the castle seemed to press down on us all. I glanced up, wondering if Silas and Rafe were there somewhere.
I didn’t like being apart from them, but we all had our jobs to do right now. That was what I needed to focus on.
“Excuse me,” I asked another prisoner. “Do you know Isabelle Role?”
She gave me a strange look. “What do you want with her, new girl?”
“She’s a friend of a friend.”
She half-smiled. “I don’t think anyone is friends with Isabelle, but all right. You can find her in barracks seventeen, if you’re sure you want to.”
Well, that all seemed very foreboding.
“Thanks,” I said.
The Isabelle in my memories was tender and kind, helping Silas when they were all just children.
The Isabelle I found was very different.
When I stepped into barracks seventeen, it didn’t look like the other barracks. The rows of beds had been pushed to the sides to make space for her to hold court, surrounded by magicians who looked at me skeptically. Blankets hung behind her, separating the room into two, and I wondered what was behind the divider.
“All right, Mills, you know I can get a message out for you,” she promised. “But you still haven’t paid me back for the others.”
“I don’t have anything I can do for you,” the girl said.
“Then I guess we’ll all have to wait for the exciting seventeenth installment in can an Establishment officer and an imprisoned Rebel Magician ever find love?” Isabelle flashed her a dark look, and the girl blanched.
Some of the folks nearby Mills shifted, as if they didn’t trust what Isabelle might do next.
But she just said, “Actually, I think there is a favor you can do me. Give me your message and stand by, please.”
So she was running a black market operation and she’d all but taken over barracks seventeen as her personal office/apartment, it seemed. But how?
Was Isabelle able to do magic somehow? It made me think of how my own ward had burned when I tried to heal Jensen—and how it felt as if my magic had almost worked anyway.
“What do you want?” she demanded, looking up at me.
There were too many other people staring at us. I didn’t dare tell her that I knew Silas; if we tipped our hand that this was a rescue operation, we put the whole thing at risk.
The thought of only smuggling Isabelle, Sebastian, and Keen out of here, though, and leaving the camp standing already struck me as wrong. I’d found Isabelle, and she’d know where Sebastian was if he were anywhere in the camp. From what Silas had told me about the two of them, I was sure of that, at least. But did they still have eyes on Keen? Was Frederick right that they were all here?
I didn’t dare mention Frederick. I wasn’t sure what anyone thought of him now, or if they even knew he was out working for the Establishment.
“I’m a friend of Keen
’s,” I said, “and I wondered if you knew where she was.”
Isabelle was on her feet instantly, and the air in the room felt suddenly charged. People were already looking away, and those nearest me were shifting away even faster than they’d gotten away from Mills.
I’d chosen poorly.
“Are you sure you’re a friend of Keen’s?” she demanded, stalking around the table to look at me.
She glanced away, looking at someone pointedly, and suddenly the room cleared out. The door shut behind the last person. Good; I couldn’t have asked for better. I needed privacy to talk to her.
I turned to tell her just that, and Isabelle punched me across the jaw.
“What the hell?” I demanded.
“Because last I checked, I was Keen’s only friend,” she said.
“Is this a safe place for us to talk?”
“This is a safe place for you to get your ass kicked.”
This wasn’t the way I’d planned to get to know Silas’s friends, but there was no way around it.
Isabelle threw herself at me.
I fought Isabelle, getting in a good punch, knocking her down to the ground. She immediately wrapped her legs around mine and pulled them out from under me.
But as I fell, I twisted, landing heavily on top of her, driving my elbow down into her gut. I felt the impact ripple through my elbow, tingling up my arm which wasn’t entirely under my control for a moment, but I was already moving to pin her anyway.
The two of us rolled over and over, jostling for control, trying to get a blow in anywhere we could.
When I finally pinned her, she panted up at me. “Maybe I can believe you are a friend of Keen’s.”
“More importantly, I’m a friend of Silas’s,” I said, and her face changed. I kept her pinned though. “Can we talk? Less violence, more friendly chatting?”
“It’s safe here,” she said, although I wasn’t entirely sure it was safe for me, the way she’d reacted. She pulled a face. “Get off me.”
I rolled off her and offered her my hand. She reluctantly took it and let me pull her to her feet.
“I hate not having magic,” she said. “Makes everything into such a fair fight.”
At least she could acknowledge being bested. It almost made me like her, except that my jaw hurt like a bitch and my teeth felt a little loose. I fingered my jaw absently, trying to push away the temptation to wiggle my tongue against my teeth. Since shifters got new teeth every time we changed, I normally didn’t have to worry much about dentistry, but the past few months my teeth had become a bit more precious than they ever were before.
“Where’s Keen and Sebastian? Are they all okay?” I demanded, even though that question had let to a bit of drama earlier.
She stared at me for a second. “Where’s Silas?”
“He’s working on a plan to get you all out of here.”
She huffed. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Where is he?” she demanded. “Is he still on the outside?”
“Are you sure it’s safe to talk here?”
“Believe me,” she said, giving me the thinnest smile, “no one is going to double cross me again. I’ve got this barracks locked down. It’s safe.”
Again.
Somehow I could believe it. Even though I’d knocked her on her ass, something about Silas’s best friend was terrifying and not the girl I remembered in his memories. There was just something about the way she carried herself that screamed that she wasn’t a person you tested. I suddenly wasn’t sure if we could even trust her.
But Silas did. I decided to take a leap of faith for now, because if Silas believed in someone, I trusted his judgment. And that meant I had to trust her, at least a little.
“Silas is posing as a guard,” I said, “and I’m here to rescue you.”
I left Jensen and Rafe out of it. Maybe I only trusted her halfway for now.
“Oh?” She came to my side in one quick stride and seized my wrist, pulling my marked hand up between both our faces. “How exactly are you going to do that, genius?”
“It was fake,” I admitted. “Until…”
“Yeah, they had an escape attempt a few months ago and they really lost their senses of humor,” she said. “They’ve tightened the security ever since. Everyone hates the bastards who tried to escape and failed.”
From her wry tone, I was pretty sure Isabelle was one of those bastards.
“You seem to have a lot of friends, though,” I said, thinking of how the barracks had been crowded.
“I’ve got some special skills,” she said. “Anyway, tell Silas thanks, but I’m not quite ready to leave. He can go back where he came from.”
There was a bitter edge in her voice, as if she felt like Silas had abandoned them, even though he’d been assigned to his own mission. She dropped back into her chair beside the woodstove.
“He’s not going to do that,” I disagreed. “You’re all supposed to be headed to the colony at the Grave Sea.”
For a second, emotion flashed across her face, but then it was gone. “Ah. That is unfortunate.”
“We’ve got to get all of you out of here,” I said.
“Well, Keen isn’t going anywhere.” She stacked her boots on top of the tabletop, leaning back. “And so I’m not either. Unlike the others, I’m not leaving her.”
I stared at her. “You are leaving, though. I can’t imagine the Establishment is going to take your no thank you, rather not too seriously. Isn’t it better to escape with us?”
She was silent for a moment. “Then she said, “No offense, but I don’t know you. I want to talk to Silas.”
“That’s not safe,” I said, and then added, “For Silas.”
I thought that would carry more import than she might care about herself.
She just smiled faintly as if she knew what I was trying to do. “I think Silas and I can find a way. How is he doing anyway?” She tilted her head to one side. “You’re Maddie Northsea, correct?”
Being named surprised me. “Yes. How did you—”
“He mentioned you.” She was studying me curiously, and I had a feeling maybe Silas had said more than a mention. “He seems quite taken with you. Must be that right hook you’ve got.”
“Must be.”
“You’re pretty, too.”
Isabelle was also quite pretty, with thick, dark hair and even, caramel skin.
“So are you,” I said coolly. We sounded more as if we were strategizing than complimenting each other.
“Find a way to get me some time alone with Silas,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll believe you can get me out of here without damning us all.”
I’d never seen anyone less enthused about the idea of being rescued. She waved her hand, dismissing me.
I stepped back out into the night, feeling far more perplexed by the Greyworld than I had been before.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tyson
While we were riding the rest of the way to Faer’s castle, I asked my friends everything I could about the shifters in their world. They told me about how the Dark Collar..or the Dark Crown, depending on one’s perspective… had been used by the shifters as a weapon, then turned into a weapon against them by the Fae. The Crown drew magical power. Raura told me that some believed that the Fae and the shifters grew from the same core of magic, but Fae didn’t like to believe that they were all the same, deep down.
“I don’t know if I’m going to stay in this world long enough to try to fix the shifter situation,” I began.
Raura scoffed. “No one can fix shifters.”
I fixed her with a look. “I’m a shifter.”
“Yes, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she shot back. “You’re impossible.”
“You want a promise, don’t you?” Lake asked. He rode beside the two of us. “You want to know that we’ll try to make life better for the shifters.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll do everything I can,” Lake promised.
Raura scoffed again. Arlen gave her a hard look, then turned to me. “You can count on me as well.”
“What are you all going on about?” Raura asked in exasperation. “Arlen, Lake, what exactly do the two of you think you’re going to accomplish? An unrecognized bastard of a royal and a refugee from the winter court?”
Arlen fixed her with a cold look. “We might be nothing, Raura, but we’re also the best friends you have.”
“And one day, you’ll realize that,” Lake shot back.
The two of them spurred their horses, riding ahead. Raura’s lips were parted in shock.
“As I said,” I started, about to remind her that she’d be a good queen with them by her side.
“No, don’t start,” she hurried to cut me off.
I drew my horse up. She went a few steps past me, then turned as well.
“Raura,” I said. “I don’t want the three of you to come any further with me. It’s too dangerous for you in the Summer court.”
“You can’t go in there alone, “she warned me. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I never do. It usually works out.”
She hesitated. “I see your point. You can pledge allegiance to Faer, then leave, if that’s what he demands. But if he forces me to as well…”
“There will be consequences from the magic if you break that vow,” I finished. I didn’t entirely understand why magic operated the way it did in the Fae world, but after what I’d seen, I believed in it.
She nodded. “I don’t want to volunteer either of them right now… not that they feel they need to listen to me anyway, apparently… but you should take Arlen or Lake. Or both. Faer has no reason to care about them, but they can guide you.”
“And when I get back, you’ll help me go home to Maddie,” I said. “As long as there’s no fresh disaster.”
“Oh, Tyson, you innocent thing,” she told me. “This is the Fae world. There’s always a new disaster.”