The Beasts We Bury (The Broken Citadel #1)

6. Silver

6

S ILVER

|13 DAYS UNTIL THE ASSURANCE|

It’s hard to think over the sound of my own inner voice screaming in panic. From waking up to her dangerous, dark eyes to dancing my way through a rooftop inquisition, almost every second of this day has felt charged, like the air right before a rainstorm.

As Mancella settles on the parapet next to me, I give her a glance that I hope comes across as “thoughtful” instead of “barely reining in outright hysteria.”

I actually crossed the tower so she wouldn’t be standing right next to me. For starters, because it would be a lot more difficult for her to toss me to my death from twenty feet away if this conversation goes awry. But, more importantly, because her proximity seems to scramble all the rational parts of my brain.

She angles her pointed chin toward me, and all I can think about is the jaguar that lurks beneath her skin and the birds that claw the air above me, ready to attack. Her dark eyes are unreadable, but the message in them is clear. Whatever I say next had better be good.

Clearing my throat, I turn back to the Academy. It’s weird how small it looks from here. I could cover it with one hand. And even if I didn’t, it doesn’t look like much. A squat building. A neatly trimmed yard.

And a large black fence littered with jagged shards of magic glass, sharp enough to shred the hands of any children who might want out.

Since she’s already caught me in one lie, it seems safest to stick close to the truth.

So I tell her, “It’s a waking nightmare.”

Because nothing’s truer than that.

She tilts her head, expression indecipherable. It’s actually infuriating how hard it is to read this girl. And yet I can’t stop trying, scrutinizing every flicker in her eyes or twitch of her lips, hoping for a crack.

“That’s where they send kids whose parents choose to enlist as soldiers, isn’t it?” she asks.

I bark out a laugh, my hands flexing. “I’m not sure ‘choose’ is the right word,” I tell her bitterly, “but yes. Half orphanage, half prison, and one hundred percent future army recruitment.”

That seems to surprise her, but I’m not sure why it should. It’s not like the Academy is particularly subtle in its mission.

“And you went there.” She doesn’t say it like a question, but I answer anyway.

“Not for long.” The smile on my face twists and turns caustic. “Just a couple years, clinging to the hope that my parents would show up again and take me back home. But the second I got the news that they were dead and there was no use waiting around for them, I ran. I’ve been living in the streets since.”

“How old were you when you left?” The question is so gentle it causes me to jolt.

“Ten,” I bite out, not sure why she’s pretending to care.

“That must have been hard,” she says softly.

I prickle, angry that she’s acting like her family had nothing to do with any of it. Like it was just this random thing that happened to me, when—

“It was your father who conscripted them. Your father who made the Academy what it is. Your father who made it impossible for runaways to have any kind of life.”

As soon as the words are out, I want to slap myself. What is it about this girl that makes me lose my cool so quickly? She’s locked up tight and I feel like I’m just out here ripping scabs off and inviting her to crawl into my skin. I need to remember how dangerous it is to anger the Prime’s daughter. I need to get myself under better control.

But when I sneak a look at Mancella, she doesn’t seem angry. Her head is angled to the side and she’s frowning, but not at me. “What do you mean?” she asks. “About the runaways?”

I try to make my tone more clinical. Distant. “If you don’t graduate, you’ll always be a criminal. No one will touch you. No one will help. You can’t get a house, you can’t get a job, you can’t get any kind of foothold in society at all.”

She shakes her head, still not getting it. “Why? Because people won’t hire you?”

It’s the honest confusion in her question that makes me lose it. Because it’s infuriating that this girl should get to live in a literal tower with no idea what the rest of us are going through down in the dirt. I forget about control or caution or the advisability of hiding my wounds from her and I wheel on her with a snarl.

“No,” I say, my fingers digging into the stone of the parapet. “As in, if you try and you’re caught, then you and whoever employed you are publicly executed and displayed along the road as a warning to anyone else who’s thinking about it. I’m talking kids . Kids who are just trying to scrape together a living, just trying to learn how to build a bookshelf or make a loaf of bread—” I break off and a burst of fear explodes in my chest like fireworks as I wonder if mentioning bread was too close to betraying Rooftop. If she’ll storm into town questioning bakers and she’ll find him. If she’ll—

A loud chorus of screams derails my train of thought, and I jolt back from the wall, my head whipping around wildly to find the source of the noise. Mancella, on the other hand, seems completely unconcerned. She has both hands over her mouth, and her dark eyes are wide and haunted.

She looks… devastated.

The sight is so jarring that I can’t look away, can’t make sense of that broken expression on her normally ferocious face. I was looking for a crack in her composure, but I wasn’t expecting her to completely shatter before me.

And I wasn’t expecting this vulnerable sorrow.

Suddenly the air is full of creatures, as a mismatched assortment of birds—the ones she summoned—drifts down in forlorn circles around her, landing in awkward lumps at her feet. They must have made the noises I heard. They weren’t screams, but avian cries of despair. Cries that reflected Mancella’s genuine reaction to my words.

She drops her arms to her sides, but they’re trembling slightly.

“So that’s why you lied?” she confirms, voice shaky. “Because it was the only way for you to find work? The only way for you to survive?”

I mean. Not the only way, technically. I’ve survived this long mostly on thievery. But somehow I think she’ll be less sympathetic if I explain that to her.

So I shake off my surprise and press my advantage, relieved to finally have found an angle that seems to be working.

“That’s right,” I say, making my voice rough for effect.

“Where’s the real Marc, then?” she asks.

Mentally, I cringe. For all I know, the guy is dead in a ditch somewhere.

“He’s… a friend who changed his mind about working here,” I say, the first actual lie of the conversation. “And was kind enough to let me show up in his place.”

She considers this, one finger pressed to the corner of her lips.

“What’s your real name?” she asks.

“Silver,” I say, and then immediately wonder whether I should have. “At least that’s what I go by.”

She nods, studying my face. Then her expression sets, like she’s just come to a decision, and I stiffen, wondering what exactly it might be.

“Well, Silver,” she says, and the birds around her stir. “You haven’t made a very good first impression. You presumed my feelings, you pushed me to tell you more about my life than I was comfortable with, and you even suggested I engage in subterfuge. Now I come to find out you’ve already engaged in some yourself. I’ve got grounds to throw you back on the streets. Probably have you killed if I were so inclined.”

As if I didn’t already know all that. I tense at the sound of talons scraping on stone as her birds pick themselves up, clicking their beaks and emitting a babel of clipped caws.

“And are you?” I ask through clenched teeth.

“No,” she says. “Even if I were so inclined to begin with, I could never go through with it after hearing your story. I think you’re abrasive and shameless, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day… we both want the same thing.”

My brows scrunch together because that seems incredibly unlikely.

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Better,” she says. Then she pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket.

One with a bright ocher seal on top.

Time seems to slow as my vision tunnels on the scrap of paper in her hand and the crest of her family pressed into the shiny wax on top of it.

It can’t be that easy.

“I don’t know if this is the right thing to do or not,” she says, oblivious to my shock. “I don’t really know if I can trust you when you’ve lied to me already. In fact, I probably shouldn’t. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that I can’t go on as I have been. I have to try something. Fight… somehow. Even if it fails spectacularly. At least… at least I will have tried. Will you sneak this into the bag of letters for me after all?”

She thrusts the parchment toward me, and it’s a full ten seconds or so before I snap out of my stupor enough to take it.

As soon as I touch it, the birds all disappear, called back into her body.

“I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine,” she says, letting the paper go. Then she turns and marches down the stairs without a single look back.

I stand there for several more moments holding the letter, turning it over and over in my hands.

Thinking about how if I’m caught with it, the message might as well be a warrant for my own execution.

Thinking about how even I don’t yet understand the full weight of what I’m doing.

Then, finally, I slide it into my pocket.

After that, I have to book it back to my assigned tasks for the day, working double time to get them all done by the afternoon inspection. I don’t feel like I breathe once until the supervisor gives me a curt nod that says my efforts are adequate. Once that’s done, I’m off for the evening, since I took the dinner shift the night before.

So I basically flee the castle. Across the grounds, through the servants’ tunnels, and out into the market district. It’s not until I’m among the familiar, crammed-together buildings of the city, breathing in the smells of moss and dust and spicy, street vendor kebabs that my heart stops hammering in my ears. The muddy cobblestones beneath my feet feel like the first steady ground I’ve walked on all day.

That is, until I catch sight of a dark shadow moving between buildings.

My heart rate ratchets up again immediately and I freeze, thumbing the dagger concealed at my hip.

But then a balled-up wad of paper hits me in the side of the face. I catch it before it drops and unfurl it, only to find an impressive list of insulting names scrawled inside.

My shoulders relax. “Hey, Vie,” I say.

She emerges from the alleyway and gives me a toothy grin.

“You’re alive,” she says, looking pleased and appraising.

“Rooftop didn’t tell you?” I ask, pocketing the insults and continuing to walk as she falls in beside me.

“He did, but it’s nice to know he wasn’t just so delusional with grief that he imagined you.”

Rooftop drops down from an awning as we pass it. “If seeing him was only a delusion, I would’ve gotten to eat the whole torte myself. And I wouldn’t have had to clean up alone.”

I snap my fingers and point at him. “Speaking of, I’ve got more chores for you to do tomorrow.”

“Oh, delightful.”

“Don’t pout. I’m gonna get fired if they’re not done.”

“So you do them.”

“I would, but unfortunately I’m super busy.”

He shoves my shoulder with an open palm, grinning. “Super busy wooing the Prospective Seconde, right?”

“Wait, what ?” Vie swipes her bangs out of her face, spinning on her heel until she’s walking backward in front of us, her eyes shifting from Rooftop’s to mine.

The back of my neck prickles uncomfortably. “I told you,” I protest. “I was just persuading her.”

“With your body?” Rooftop asks, waggling his eyebrows. A sudden flash of Mancella crouching over my bed flits across my mind, and once again I find myself uncharacteristically at a loss for words. A pattern that is decidedly obnoxious.

“Shut up, man,” I grumble, fighting a blush.

Vie unsheathes a dagger and starts to spin it in one hand, a fun and not-at-all-intimidating thing she does when she’s irritated.

Gritting my teeth, I turn toward her to deliver more convincing denials, but then something over her shoulder catches my eye.

The clang of metal on metal echoes down the street as a blacksmith beats a glowing hunk of steel in front of his shop. His face is darkened with soot and streaked with sweat, but what gives me pause is that there’s something familiar about the way he holds himself. I’m usually good with faces, so it bothers me that I can’t place this one when I have such a strong sense that I’ve seen this man before. He makes me feel uneasy, and I’m not sure why. Which of course makes the unease worse.

Then his keen blue eyes flick to mine and immediately the rest of his features take on an unmistakable context.

I do know him.

Without warning, I halt, and the others stumble to a stop around me, giving me curious looks.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell them. “Wait here.”

Guerre puts his tools down as I approach and wipes his brow with the back of a filthy leather glove.

“New job?” I ask. My unease lingers on the question, and I wonder if he can hear it.

“Just for the week,” he says gruffly. “It gives me access to some of the tools I need.” He holds up the sword he was working on, still blazing with orange heat, and my stomach lurches. But then he drops it in a barrel of cold water, making steam waft over the rim, and takes his gloves off. “So do you have it?”

It suddenly strikes me that Guerre has a full beard today, and he definitely didn’t when I saw him yesterday morning. Is it fake? It doesn’t look fake. Between that and the soot on his face, he looks like a completely different person. No wonder it took me a minute to place him. In spite of myself, I’m a little impressed by the intricacy of this disguise.

I pull the envelope out of my shirt and hold it up. Guerre’s eyes gleam as he takes it, but not with warmth. It’s more like sunlight bouncing off a lake that’s frozen over completely. Somehow, even as he stands in front of the heat of the forge, his eyes still look so cold.

“I knew you’d come through,” he murmurs. “Good work.”

He withdraws a wide knife from the sheath at his side and in one swift jerk cuts the seal free from the paper, which collapses to the table like a butterfly with broken wings. Then he pulls a hunk of what looks like soft clay from a drawer and presses the seal into it. After carefully prying it out, he then fills the hole with some kind of liquid and sets it on a shelf to solidify.

“What are you going to do with that?” I ask.

He grunts like this should be obvious, but answers anyway. “I’m going to reverse engineer my own ring.”

He’s right. That should be obvious. And yet my mouth drops open in surprise. Somehow, until this moment, I didn’t think about how much power Guerre could wield with a copy of the signet ring. He can make me and my friends papers, sure, but he can also make… anything. Anything at all.

I snap my mouth shut again as the enormity of what I’m doing hits me like a hammer to the skull. With creeping dread, I realize that I don’t know anything about Guerre or his plans. Not really. Why am I helping him again?

“I had the family of that house evicted,” he says, as though he can read my thoughts. Maybe they’re written on my face.

“What?” I say, shaking out of it.

He pulls an official-looking document off a shelf and shows it to me. It’s a deed. The stately stone house with the green roof springs to mind and I suppress the urge to reach out and run my fingers over the numbers and letters that make up its address. The words that say it’s going to be mine.

“How?” I ask instead. Then I shake my head. “Wait… you mean people were living there?” I’d assumed it was empty. Though, come to think of it, he’d never said it was.

“You worry about your part, and I’ll worry about mine,” Guerre says dismissively. “I just wanted to give you some assurances that I’m ready to make good on our deal when the time comes. You’ve seen the graduation papers, and now here’s the deed. Once this ring is finished, your future will be secured. And you’re only two tasks away from claiming it.”

I nod slowly, but there’s still a lump in my throat. I do my best to swallow it down. After all, this is what I wanted. Everything is going smoothly. There’s no reason at all to be upset or to feel so slimy. Anyone with a house like that can probably get another one just as easily. Whereas for me, it would be life-changing.

And anything Guerre plans to do to the Prime is completely deserved. After all the suffering he’s caused to me and the people I care about, I won’t shed a single tear if he has some suffering coming back for him. It would be nothing less than justice.

“I’ll contact you when I need you,” Guerre continues. “In the meantime, consider this a token of my gratitude.”

He tosses me a few coins—which I catch between my palms—then goes back to work, taking the cooled sword and sticking it back in the forge to heat up again. With a flick of his wrist, he tosses Mancella’s letter in the garbage, where it rests on discarded ashes and what looks like rotten beef.

It’s a clear dismissal, but I feel rooted to the spot, staring at the paper as juices from the meat soak into it, seconds away from turning it into a putrid mess. Mancella’s earnest expression when she gave it to me flickers in the back of my mind.

I look up to see if Guerre is watching me, but he’s peering into the flames, cold eyes lost in thought. Acting more on instinct than on any conscious decision, I pluck the letter out of the bin and hurry away, tucking it into my waistcoat even though the stink of rancid meat makes my stomach turn.

“That’s the guy?” Vie asks as I approach. Her dagger is sheathed again, so Rooftop must have calmed her down.

I nod and she wrinkles her nose. “I pictured him differently. But whatever. Was he happy?”

“I don’t know if that guy’s ever happy,” I tell her. “But he said I did well. And he showed me the deed to the house.”

“What house? We’re getting a house?” Her tone is cautious, but her eyes are wide and excited, like she hasn’t figured out yet whether I’m joking, and her face and voice have two different theories about it.

For the first time today I give a smile that’s actually genuine and sling an arm around her shoulders.

“Let me show you,” I say.

It takes us about an hour to find it, since I’m going off my memory of a bird’s-eye view, but finally it stands in front of us in all its glory. Bigger than I thought. Classier. And even more gorgeous. So gorgeous that none of us says a word as we take it in.

It looks like something from a story. Lush, thorny roses climb up the smoke-gray stones, twining themselves around curved double doors in a dark burgundy. There’s a row of cheery windows, each with a wrought iron balcony just big enough to lean out of. And the roof is gabled and ornate, just as green as I remember.

Rooftop stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and looks like he might cry.

But Vie bares her teeth at me in the glinting light of the hanging lanterns. “It’s the wrong place. He must have pointed somewhere else.”

I understand what she means. This house can’t be real. Or at least, it can’t be real and ours at the same time.

“Nope,” I assure her. “This is it. Go ahead; pick a room.”

Both Rooftop and Vie immediately point to the biggest window in the middle, and I burst out laughing as they break into a good-natured bickering match over who deserves it more. If I know Rooftop, he doesn’t even want the biggest room, he just wants to make Vie think he does so he can get a rise out of her and then look like a hero when he steps aside.

I hook an elbow around both of their necks and drag them back down the street. “Plenty of time to work it out later,” I tell them good-naturedly. “Let’s go home. It’ll be dark soon.”

They both look at the sky and then nod. In the Outskirts, it’s best to be indoors before sundown.

Rooftop ducks out of my grip. “You mean you’re going to slum it with us tonight?” he asks. “Don’t you have fancy new digs at the castle?”

Most people wouldn’t call a bedroll shoved against a shelf of jarred fruit paste “fancy digs,” but to us, any room with four solid walls and no leaks in the roof is paradise. And yes, technically, I am supposed to sleep there every night. But I’m sure I can sneak back in before anyone really notices.

“I do, but it was desolate without you,” I say teasingly. “I just tossed and turned all night from missing you so much. Please let me come home so I can finally sleep knowing you’re near.”

Rooftop scoffs. “Not if you’re going to be weird about it.”

“Of course you can come home tonight,” Vie says. Although, even as she says it, I catch her looking back toward one of the taverns in this part of town.

I wonder if she was planning to fight there tonight.

“Here,” I say, shoving the coins Guerre gave me into her hand. “I’ve got room and board at the castle from now until the Assurance, so you guys should keep this.”

Vie’s eyes widen. What I’ve just given her is more than she makes in a week, even with her new, increased pace.

“I don’t need your charity,” she says automatically.

I roll my eyes and flick her nose. “Fine, then give it all to Rooftop. He can eat like a king this week while you starve in a corner, content in your pride.”

“Sounds good to me,” Rooftop chimes in.

Vie sneers, but her fingers curl around the coins and she doesn’t say anything else about it.

Pretty soon the houses get less flashy and more haphazard. Storefronts become slapdash lean-tos or blankets on the ground with dirty wares set out in piles, easily swept up and carried away if some noble recognizes a bauble or a necklace that went missing last week. As we wind down to the bottom of the cliff, the cobblestone road beneath our feet starts to break up into gravel, and then dirt. And when we reach the end of the road, that dirt gets crunchier beneath our boots.

Up on top of the cliffs, the glass trees are still pretty. Even the deadly pines have a certain sinister beauty to them.

But down here in the Outskirts, we make our homes in the dark side of the magic. The aftermath.

Before Prime Elod’s time, this land used to belong to the Forest Realm. But once the magic was rediscovered and everyone wanted to fight about it, it became a battleground. A war zone. Quite possibly the one my parents died in.

I’ve heard the crystalline hollies and hawthorns Elod sprouted were awe-inspiring, even covered with the bodies of the soldiers he skewered as he grew them. Some of the trees are still standing, but most of them were shattered in combat by Prime Gore’s horrifying magical explosions. They could burst anything to bits, whether it be pines, arcane glass, or human bodies.

What’s left now is a wasteland, even a decade later. The corpses are cleaned up, but no one bothered with the rest of the fallout. Jagged shards stick up from the ground, with only the remnants of bark-like patterning around their bases. The dirt is so full of broken glass that boots are a necessity, and tripping can be catastrophic. Worst of all, because the glass is magical, its sharp edges never smooth or break down. They just infest the earth, sowing pain for all future generations.

You don’t live out here if you have anywhere else to go.

We clomp on. Because the ground is so hazardous, the rickety shacks that speckle the forest are built on stilts or crammed into trees. Many of them are abandoned military bunkers from the war, visible only if you know where to look for the doors hidden in stacks of logs or the staircase openings buried in leaves.

Ours is a hastily constructed guard tower in the branches of a weathered oak. It’s hanging together by a thread, but it’s better than sleeping in glass. Barely. The wooden sides are graying and flecked with ancient, peeling paint of an indistinguishable color, and the windows are just openings in the wood. We cut off the ladder because it’s easier to defend that way. Besides, we can all climb.

We scale the trunk and swing onto the small porch jutting outward. Then we take our boots off, hitting them against the railing to dislodge as many shards as we can before setting them down on the mat.

And then I’m home, and it’s easy to fall into our regular routine. We board up the windows for the evening in a mostly vain attempt to keep out the night’s chill. We make a dinner of some berries Rooftop foraged and a loaf of stale bread Vie swiped from an abandoned table at the tavern last night.

It’s not until I fall face-first into one of the three hammocks we strung up in the tiny back room and hear a faint crinkling in my waistcoat that I remember I still have Mancella’s letter.

It’s dark now. We only have one flickering candle that I made out of some beeswax I found in the woods. By its weak, wavering flame, I pull the letter out and unfold it, brushing off the ash and fetid meat that stain its pages. In the dancing shadows, Rooftop raises an eyebrow at me, silently asking what it is. But I ignore him, flipping toward the wall as I take in the words that the Prospective Seconde entrusted to my care.

It really is the apology she said it was, and it reads as though it’s sincere. She speaks of regretting her actions and desiring a truce. She extols the virtues of peace. If I had read these words on the tower when she’d given them to me, when her broken expression was still fresh in my mind, I might have been tempted to believe them. There was something in the way she looked that made me want to, that tugged at parts of me I’d thought long dead.

But here, in the bowels of a battle that drew in hundreds of lives only to destroy them, all so we could possess land that the Prime isn’t even using, the words read false. At best, naive.

I listen to the sound of wind throwing glass against the trees, occasionally punctuated by the cry of someone who didn’t make it to shelter before the evening breeze turned into a gale.

It was the Prime’s family who did all this, and they don’t even care. Whatever happens to them, whatever Guerre might have planned with his new ring, the Cliffs have it coming. Even their Prospective Seconde. She may have surprised me a little today, but I can’t forget about her beasts, or how she came to possess them. If push came to shove, I’m sure she’d rip me apart just as cruelly.

Leaning out of the hammock, I grab a knapsack and shove Mancella’s letter inside it, buried under a collection of other rejected items—mostly worthless knickknacks that I stole and couldn’t manage to resell.

Then I toss that knapsack into the corner and don’t think about it again.

The candle finally sputters out, and the room is plunged into darkness.