Chapter 1
Chapter One
Briar
I woke to a pounding head and the sounds of hitching sobs.
“Quiet, they’re going to hear you,” a voice hissed.
“Where are we?” the sobbing voice asked.
“What makes you think I know?”
The stone floor beneath me was hard and damp; moisture that only appeared in the wee hours before dawn–or beneath the ground in caverns or mine shafts. I drew in a deep breath through my nose, smelling urine, sweat, and the sour tang of stomach acid.
I tried to comb through my most recent memories, finding them obscured behind the shadow of pain and exhaustion. Agonizingly, I wrestled myself up onto one of my elbows, squinting in the dark. I could feel my eyes moving, but they saw nothing. Utter darkness stretched out around me, but the room was humid with body heat. How many of us were there?
Sobbing continued from the direction I’d heard it; the sound became deeper, each breath shattering and sawing through the poor girl’s throat.
“You’re going to get us all killed,” the second voice said.
“I don’t think you’re helping,” a third voice came. This one was close–only a few inches away from me.
I reached out and felt warm skin under my fingers, along with the jolt of a flinch. “Sorry,” I croaked.
“I didn’t even know you were there,” she replied.
I continued combing through my memories as the sounds of other people waking around us wove together in a sort of indiscernible mess of noise. I pressed my fingertips to my now-sweating brow, as if I might reach into the confines of my skull and pull something out. Nothing became clearer. I had to go further back, thinking of the morning and my tasks for the day.
I’d had to mend my best dress–the one with the lace I’d kept from yellowing with a bit of lemon juice and some time in the sun. I was going to have to wear it in the evening…I was going to be meeting with someone. Someone important.
“Where are we?” the sobbing voice wailed again and the way her voice caught on the syllables, wet and miserable, made something stir in my chest.
“Shh,” I said softly. “Shhhh. Calm down, love. Take a deep breath in. If you keep that up you’re going to fall unconscious.”
“She’s not going to listen to you,” the snippy voice said.
“Would you shut up and let the woman help,” a new voice said, thickly accented. “It’s not as if your methods have been doing much good.”
“I–I–I’m terrified of the dark,” the crying girl whimpered. “I sleep with a candle lit each night. The servants keep it lit.”
So she was well-to-do. Poor thing. I wondered what got her on the wrong end of someone’s notice.
“What’s your name, love?” I asked, using my most disarming voice.
“C-C-Cassandre–my papa calls me C-Cassie,” she said.
“Alright, Cassie,” I said. “We’re going to breathe together, alright? Let’s calm you down so we can figure out what’s going on and get you out of here. Take my hand. Reach out; I’ll find you.”
I heard the quiet hiss of satin on satin as she reached out. She must have been in her night shift. I stretched my arm ahead of me until I felt the stickiness of sweat and tears on fumbling fingers. We grasped blindly for each other for a bit before she caught my hand in a vice grip. I tugged on her arm, pulling her toward me and cradling her against my chest. My fingers caught in the tangled curls of her hair as I pet soothing lines down her head.
I heard her breathe in a shaky breath before she let it out in a long, shuddering exhale. Her sobbing quieted to small hitches. Her body was so small; twiggy. She must have been no older than eighteen.
Her body went limp in my arms as I soothed her. Her breathing slowed to a steady rhythm in the slow minutes that passed while I whispered soft comforts to her the way I did for my younger sister when we were small. I’d always been good at getting someone to calm down.
“Thank gods for that,” the snippy voice said once she was asleep. “I was getting ready to strangle her myself.”
My jaw tightened as I continued petting down Cassie’s hair. Getting in an argument with the woman wasn’t going to help any of us so I bit my tongue. All the same, if we’d run into each other under different circumstances, I would have gladly wrapped my own fingers around her throat.
Instead, I focused on what I could do.
“And what’s your name?” I asked her.
“Yours first,” she sneered.
“You must be fun at parties,” I said.
“Wouldn’t know; never been to one,” she said. “Just know better than to give my name out freely to strangers. ‘Specially ones that coo little niceties to comfort babes in swaddling. That’s how you end up in a bargain you can’t afford. I’m not stupid enough to fall for it when we all woke up in the dark.”
So she was superstitious. Maybe she was one of the wise women that called the tent encampments outside of the city home. I’d only heard a few of their stories, usually chortled by the men at the gambling tables that complained about how the encampments were eyesores at best and slowed the flow of commerce at worst. I always hated how they sneered at the tales of the very people that staffed their factories at a fraction of the cost that would be paid to someone born and bred in town.
“My name is Briar,” I said. “How many of us are there in here? Does anyone remember anything about how they wound up here?”
There was quiet for a while, broken only by the shifting of heels against the wet dirt beneath us. Details were slowly coming into focus; not so much through vision, but through sound. The floor was irregular and rough, covered in sand or dirt but not carpeted in it. So we were definitely in some kind of cave. As voices hesitantly chimed in, I formulated a rough idea of the size of the place we’d been thrown into; it was tiny. Perhaps the size of the patio outside of my tenement in the pleasure district.
Names were given, and by the time everyone quieted again, I’d counted nine of us. The wise woman, Atreya, was named for the goddess to which she devoted herself to as a high priestess; virgin goddess of the hunt and medicine.
The woman closest to me, Diana, called herself homebody and a bookworm. She wrote books under the nom de plume of D. T. Trenton, a name we all recognized.
Freya had only just arrived at the port from the warring country of Vidalgo. She hadn’t even been here long enough to have an occupation.
Marguerite, an aptly named florist. A nurse named Bella. A young spinster by the name of Eugenia. And a recently emancipated orphaned girl called Lily.
None of us had anything in common as far as we could tell. We all hailed from different countries, all had different backgrounds of family, different levels of wealth. We did slowly begin to piece together memories, though. Each hand stitched more pieces of it to the quilt until a picture became clear.
“I was casting stones for a man. He asked about how his god regarded him,” Atreya scoffed. “Arrogant thing to assume his god even looked his way. Even more so to think my mistress would act as his messenger.”
“I was meeting with my publisher,” Diana said. “We were toasting my most recent best seller.”
“Wait, I was drinking, too!” Lily exclaimed. “Someone left a handle of whiskey outside the place I’m squatting in. I thought it was my lucky day.”
“I don’t drink,” Marguerite warbled. “My pa always struggled with it so I never touched the stuff. I remember someone grabbing me, though–f-from behind. I didn’t see his face but his hand smelled like the tobacco shop across the street from mine.”
“It was the same for me,” Bella said, her voice steady. “Someone injected something into my neck, too. I was only in the room with the doctor but…he’s usually so kind to me.”
None of my memories had returned as clearly as they had for the others. I did remember who I’d been meeting though. Richard Ganswell. We were meant to go to the gambling tables. The last thing I remembered was pinching my cheeks in the reflection of the carriage window he’d picked me up in.
“So safe to assume we’ve all been drugged,” I said.
“They would have had to drug me,” Atreya scoffed. “Never would have let an oaf drag me away.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “The bravado is getting tiresome,” I griped.
“We can’t all become a shrinking violet like dear, sweet Cassandre,” she sneered.
“Can’t you just leave the poor girl alone?” I said. “It’s not her fault she was captured. No more her fault than it was yours.”
“Gullible thing like her probably let herself be carted away for the promise of candy,” Atreya said.
“Shut it,” I snapped.
“Or what?” Atreya said.
A familiar rage built in my chest–though it was the first time I could remember that feeling burning behind my sternum for anyone other than a man. I almost lost myself to it, but then Cassandre spoke.
“My brother brought me tea,” she said sullenly. “I was feeling under the weather. Been….out of sorts since Papa died. He said it would balance my humors.”
Silence fell like a wet blanket over a campfire. We’d all known our captors, or at least could place them. But she was the only one who had been drugged by a family member. Cassandre didn’t seem to sense the heaviness in the room, for she continued, “Papa cast him out a long time ago. Called him shameful. He never told me why. He…seemed so nice until all of this.”
Judging by the silence that still sat heavy in the room, we all knew exactly why her brother had been turned out.
I rested my cheek on the curve of Cassandre’s head, squeezing her close.
I heard Diana wet her mouth, pause, then exhale. “A-Atreya,” she said hesitantly.
“What?” she asked, her mood even more sour than it was before.
“Aren’t…don’t the high priestesses of Atreya take a vow of celibacy?” Diana asked.
“Yes, on the day of our first bleeding,” she said, her tone becoming wary. “What of it?”
I heard Diana wring her sweat-damp hands. “Well…not to be impolite but… I’m a virgin myself. N-not because of any vow of celibacy, just because I’m…disinterested in copulation I suppose.”
More silence. Then Bella, the nurse, spoke up. “I was–I am saving myself for marriage,” she said. “Work has just been getting in the way.”
“I’m intact,” I said flatly, not feeling the need to explain myself.
My stomach twisted as each woman reluctantly confessed their virtue. They all spoke slowly, as if they hoped one of us would be the outlier. After all, what good could come from a group of entitled, arrogant men gathering a clutch of virgins?
Cassandre started to cry again, quiet and breathy.
But this time, Atreya did not bark an order for her to stop.