3. An Awful Plan, Practically Not a Plan at All
3. AN AWFUL PLAN, PRACTICALLY NOT A PLAN AT ALL
RUSH
What had to be the sole barrier separating Larissa and me from the queen’s guards burst open with a violent crash. Too loud—which meant too close— the demolishing of the wall that Larissa had sealed behind us told me that we weren’t yet safe from our pursuers.
As if there’s any such thing as safety trapped inside this fucking palace … And we were only heading deeper into its putrid, belching guts. Now that Braque’s spell was broken and I remembered everything, I anticipated all too well what awaited us once we reached its bowels: a host of tortured dragons I’d vowed to free—and no way out for them or for us.
Larissa was several steps ahead of me, her lithe form illuminated by her lumoon, which kept pace with her as she darted down the slim tunnel, its walls tightening the deeper we went. She’d knotted the second tablecloth she’d snatched around her torso as we ran so that she was now more or less fully clothed. It would take a great deal more than covering her nudity to get me to forget how the queen had stripped my precious sister naked, pierced her nipples with fucking decor , and commanded her to perform for her audience.
“Just keep going straight?” Larissa tossed over her shoulder, not slowing down.
As well as I had, she’d heard the queen threaten the guards on our trail with punishment if they didn’t catch us. The guards would be driven by self-preservation as if the queen herself were at their backs, flogging them for every passing minute that didn’t deliver her quarry.
“For now,” I told Larissa, my mind racing as fast as my feet. It had only just finished returning from thoughts of Elowyn.
For several crippling moments, back in the Great Salon of Delicacies, I’d felt my mate so suddenly, so intensely, that there’d been nothing but her—and an awareness of all the queen had attempted to rob from me. Now there was no time for anything beyond survival. I willed away any lingering wooziness and disorientation that realization of my mate had delivered like a blow to the back of the skull.
“Down the tunnel. Follow them! Go, go, go!” commanded a voice that was singsongy despite its curtness, signaling its speaker was from Forzantos. I recognized Arno, the centumo who led the queen’s most dedicated guards, the ones who had the most to lose at her hands.
Boots pounded at our backs, the footfalls distorting as they wove through the winding passage to reach us .
Alarm pinching her brow, Larissa glanced back at me. Her bare toe snagged on stone and she stumbled, and I lunged to catch her, righting her quickly. “They’re going to catch us.”
“No. They aren’t.” I had no idea how, but I wouldn’t allow it. No one was taking another sister from me. No one . My tattoos, dim now, surged in a brief flare of twisted, vining light.
We passed doors on both sides and sprinted on. The doorways led into rooms in the palace proper, but I could think of only one way to lose the guards, one place they were likely never to have visited. Unless they’d ever stopped to ponder where the pygmy ogres the queen never allowed outside might live, the guards probably weren’t even aware of the prison that festered beyond the human dungeon, past the even bloodier fae dungeon.
The dragons, and the fetid cells where the queen kept them, were her closely held secret, hidden behind an illusion of Braque’s crafting. Ryder had been able to break through the alchemist’s enchantment so that he, Hiro, West, and I could walk through it.
Ryder was presently off searching for Elowyn at my behest. If he hadn’t crafted his illusion to allow me through at any time—and why would he?—I’d end up trapped in the fae dungeon. And if his magic hadn’t counteracted Braque’s in such a way as to allow Larissa through the false wall along with me—and again, why would he?—then she and I were once more ensnared.
It was an awful plan. It practically wasn’t a plan at all. But I could think of no better one, no other place to go. No other single chance at escape, not now that I’d committed us to this path.
As the floor began a steady downward slope, the guards’ swift footfalls were a monotone thumping that merged with my heart. I could not be leading Larissa to her doom, I could not . I didn’t even know if Elowyn still lived, or if that dark doorway of the Nuptialis Probatio had stolen her from me forever. Whatever had awaited my mate on the other side of that threshold had been of the queen’s design, and the monarch had been trying to murder Elowyn since she first laid eyes on her.
Larissa and I zipped past a few more of the doors that lined the tunnel. The doors here were plainer, smaller, and in some cases no larger than a goblin, servant entrances into the palace’s many chambers. One was painted a dreary black that blurred as I ran on, and I wondered, Should we try one of them?
The servants, surely, were no allies of the queen. But like with the guards, she leveraged threats over all of them. As prevalent as the stories were of how terribly the queen punished nobles who disobeyed her, there were also many stories of servants who had dared to look at her wrong.
There was no telling whom we’d run into on the other side of any of these doors. Any delay could bring about our immediate capture. Downward, ever downward, at least there I knew what to expect.
Yeah, a dead end, you moron , snarked a voice of doubt, perhaps even of intelligent reason .
“Keep going,” I encouraged Larissa. “Faster.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” she muttered, her breathing heavy now. But Larissa had been as sprightly as a fawn since she was a child, playing chase with Ramana and me, who were far too old for such games save for our baby sister. The three of us had bounded across practically every inch of our family’s vast estate. With her long legs, the passing years hadn’t slowed her down.
“Good thing…” she said on a pant, her stare fixed ahead as she whipped around a bend, dipping her head as the ceiling shortened. “…the queen got a message … when she did.”
Had Ivar not rushed into the great salon at the precise moment he had, Larissa and I would be dead by now, and if we weren’t, we’d probably be wishing we were.
Whatever magic the queen had been doing lately—probably blood magic, the darkest among the fae—it had made her too fast. Not even my deer-like sister would have been able to outrun her.
“Yeah,” I grunted while ducking low. The guards’ footfalls seemed to press in on me, making my back itch as I was forced to slow my pace. At least they would have to crouch too.
“Thank the Ethers,” I said before belatedly wondering if I had true reason to be grateful. After all, I hadn’t stuck around to find out what Ivar’s message was—and the queen had sent him after Elowyn. Did he interrupt to inform her that he’d located my mate? Had he found her alive … or dead, destroyed by the monsters Ivar himself had earlier recounted had ripped chunks from her beautiful body? Flesh and hair, a toenail, even? My heart thudded all the more frantically until I forced my thoughts away from Elowyn.
For a mere instant, Larissa hesitated before her lumoon zoomed up ahead, illuminating deeper into the tunnel.
“What?” I barked, quieter now that the shaft pressed in on us, though the guards would have no doubt as to where we were.
“Stairs.”
“Take them down.”
When I’d discovered the queen intended to hold the Nuptialis Probatio in the Great Salon of Delicacies, I’d explored the hidden exit we’d taken. But though I’d entered the tunnel behind the wall-sized painting that concealed it, I hadn’t traveled much of its length, assuming I’d never need it.
But down was where the dungeons were. Despite obvious faltering logic, the faith that embraced me earlier—that I suspected came from my connection to my beloved—urged me forward.
Even though I had no greater plan, my faith did.
Something answered your silent prayer .
The reminder surprised me, but it was true. Or at least it felt like it was. The queen had ordered me to kill four innocents, and then suddenly a dragon, or perhaps several, was shaking the throne room as if it were their plaything. Who or what had actually answered me, or if it had been mere timely coincidence, I didn’t know.
Please save us , I thought intently, projecting my plea outward. Of all people, I understood how private thoughts might be heard. I’d been entering the minds of others since my power first manifested when I was a boy.
If there’s a way, any way at all, please spare my sister and me. And if you can’t save both of us, then please save Larissa. And if you can reach Elowyn, wherever she is, please, by the Ethers, please, save her too.
Larissa was already racing down stairs that swept around in a tight spiral when I took the first. Step, step, step. Run, run, run . She’d breezed over the landing and entered another spiraling staircase when I caught up with her.
“We’re heading for the dungeons,” I whispered, concerned my words would carry back to the guards, whose shouts to “hurry” confirmed we couldn’t tarry.
Larissa’s shoulders twitched with surprise before they disappeared behind another turn of the stairs. “The dungeons?” she hissed. “We’ll be cornered!”
Yes, dammit, we might be. But my body urged me forward without hesitation, as if it were tuned into some instinct that bypassed the natural outcome of this path we were on.
“Just keep going,” I insisted.
Without question, Larissa took halls and stairs and turns until the last one led into the dungeon dedicated to the humans. When Larissa lunged as if to enter the prison, I pulled her back into the stairwell.
“Down to the fae dungeon,” I told her. “We’ll have to be very quiet now.”
She grimaced but nodded, and continued down another level. The stairwell’s air grew dank and foul, the stench of unwashed, stagnant people and creatures assaulting us. I extinguished my lumoon and waited for Larissa to do the same. When she was lined up behind me, I peered around the corner that led into the fae dungeon.
The scene was similar to the last time my brothers and I had been here: dim, miserable cells lining the walls with a corridor between them large enough to be considered a courtyard had it been above ground. This time around, however, the prison guards were at their stations.
A pygmy ogre sat slumped atop a bench, leaning his back against a damp wall, so close to us that he might have scented us if the odors down here weren’t so pungent. Naked but for a loincloth, his body was as much fat as muscle. Rolls cascaded down his belly, which was round and large, protruding amply in a visceral reminder of how large the pygmy ogres’ appetites were—and how they best liked to satiate them: with meat, the bloodier and fresher the better. There was a good reason their teeth were blunt stubs designed for grinding bones. A club the size of my thigh rested against the bench within his easy reach.
A second pygmy ogre lumbered along the court between the cells, his frame highlighted by the faint overhead lighting. Two of me could fit inside his body with room to spare. Larissa peeked around my shoulder and went utterly still against my back.
The footfalls of the chasing guards were faint but undeniably in pursuit. It wouldn’t be long before even the dull-minded pygmy ogres realized something was amiss. It was now or never. How fresh , I thought miserably. The threat of the queen’s wrath had been catapulting me toward desperate ideas and certain danger since I first laid eyes on her. Even twenty years ago, she’d worn her darkness like a finely embroidered cloak.
I pressed Larissa’s shoulder into the wall behind her in a silent, Stay here and don’t move , and then stalked into the prison.
It took the nearby pygmy ogre several beats to process I was there, long enough for me to notice the second guard was harassing a prisoner, jeering at some poor sod in their cell. When the seated pygmy ogre turned his large, bald head my way, I was already upon him, waiting.
He blinked heavily—and met my eyes. A grunt of surprise died on his lips before it could alert the other ogre. With as stupid as the pygmy ogres were, I took instant control of this one’s thoughts, implanting my own.
Soon I’m going to tell the other pygmy ogre keeping watch with me that several of the queen’s guards are running down the stairs. They aren’t supposed to be here. They’re disobeying queenie. She wants them imprisoned. We’re both to ignore whatever the guards say as they will be lies. Rush and his sister were never down here, they have nothing to do with us, and I want to keep them safe no matter the risk to myself, but I won’t tell anyone that. We will defend the stairwell and won’t let anyone down here, no matter what they tell us to try to convince us. Queenie will praise us for our good work and obedience.
Urgently, I attempted to anticipate all facets of the upcoming scenario. What might I have forgotten?
There was surely more preparation I could do, but I couldn’t think of it. The other pygmy ogre was chanting into the cell, in a disturbingly infantile voice, a taunting, “Queenie’s gonna lemme eat you. Queenie’s gonna lemme eat you. Yum, yum, yummy, yum, yum. Queenie’s gonna lemme eat you.”
The steps of the pursuing guards had grown loud—way too close, practically upon us. Holding the ogre’s stare, dim in this light, I projected, I’m going to count to seven, and then I’ll tell my fellow pygmy ogre guard everything I’m supposed to.
I released the grip my power had over his mind, and the ogre blinked groggily, dully. But, then, his kind tended to do that anyway.
Without delay, I checked that the other guard’s back was still to us, grabbed Larissa by the arm, and darted with her to crouch behind a large, load-bearing column dense with shadows. I felt the stares of inmates on us but kept my eyes on the ogres.
“Cambo!” the ogre called out on cue, grunting as he stood and picked up his club. “We got intruders on the stairs. Queenie don’t want ‘em here.”
At the mention of their precious queenie , Cambo lurched toward the entrance. His heavy steps shifted his giant body from side to side, rattling the stones beneath us.
“We can’t let ‘em in, no matter what,” continued the first ogre. “Queenie won’t like it. She’ll be mad.”
“I don’t want queenie mad,” Cambo said, already halfway across the prison.
“No mad queenie,” said the first. “No mad.”
“Let’s eat ‘em,” Cambo said with obvious delight. “No one hurts queenie.”
“Yeah.” The first started up the stairs. “Let’s eat ‘em for queenie.”
I grimaced. Though the guards hadn’t hesitated to chase me at the queen’s command, I knew all of them, if not by name, their faces—Arno and I had been friendly.
As if Larissa were the mind reader instead of me, her hand touched my shoulder, her fingers light against my tunic. “They’ll be alright. They know how to take care of themselves.”
I swallowed gravely. Dense as tree trunks though they were, pygmy ogres could be formidable foes. The brutish oafs made up for their lack of finesse with fearless brawn.
“Yeah, of course. You’re right,” I said. Even if she wasn’t, there was no time to waste.
I clasped her hand and dashed across the wide hall to the opposite row of cells. Once in their shadows, I ran.
“Hey,” called a prisoner. “Help us!”
I didn’t waste time informing the male with the broken voice that the only way I’d be able to help him or anyone else was if I first survived this day. My focus remained on the wall at the very end of this dungeon—the one that wasn’t a wall at all.
Seeing their captors gone, more prisoners clamored for aid. I didn’t so much as glance at them either. They would be in a deplorable state, and I couldn’t afford a single distraction, however slight. But when we were paces from the wall that I hoped would grant us passage, I allowed myself to look despite my firm determination to the contrary.
Through the bars of that final cell enclosed on one side by the wall, in its dank, dark, essence-quashing depths, right where I’d last seen him, I found my friend Gadiel, former visdrake of Magiarantos. Leaning against the wall, his legs were long in front of him. His feet were bare of their usual boots. His head was slumped forward, heavy against his chest. His long hair was stringy, hanging around his face in thick, clumped strands.
He looked as if he could be sleeping to whittle away some of the misery of his sentence. But an aching loss that swept through my chest to my limbs suggested differently. The shouts of pygmy ogres and men entwined to reach us from the stairwell, yet still I drew closer to my friend .
Little of the faint light from the corridor filtered into his cell. A patch of blood so dark it appeared black spread across his tattered tunic. No mistaking the black line that sliced across his throat, though it was made finer by the slump of his head. A knife was still clutched in his hand.
My knife. My blade. The one I’d given him in case… In case, what, Rush?
I knew full well why I’d done it: in case the agony grew too great to bear. In the event that the better option was a swift death and passage to the relief of the Etherlands.
Grunts and pained cries wafted from the stairwell. Larissa was suddenly behind me.
“Rush,” was all she said, but I already knew: even in this, the queen had robbed me. There was no time for a proper sendoff for a very good man.
I snaked an arm through the bars of Gadiel’s cell and retrieved my blade. I was already standing as I whispered in his direction, “May your memory live forever. May your essence voyage to the Etherlands. May you enjoy well-earned peace there, my friend. Farewell.”
Clutching the blade with too firm a grip, my anger on Gadiel’s behalf tightening my hold, I added, “We won’t forget your sacrifice.”
He’d been one of few with the courage to take action to end the queen and her reign of terror. He’d failed, aye, but he’d shot that arrow straight at her heart. Fuck, the man had tried . Sometimes that was all we could do: try, and keep going until we succeeded—I glanced at him one final time—or we died.
With Larissa mirroring my steps, I turned my back to Gadiel, clutched her hand, and raised the other that held my blade. I pressed it to the wall and pushed?—
The wall was as solid as its damp, moss-riddled stones suggested it should be.