10. It’s All About Denying Your Instincts
10. IT’S ALL ABOUT DENYING YOUR INSTINCTS
~ RUSH ~
“Am I the only one thinking maybe we’re heading in the wrong direction?” West asked from directly behind me.
In the many tunnels that wove within the palace walls, there was only enough room for the four of us to travel single file. Each of us illuminated our path with a lumoon that floated above our heads and kept pace with us. We’d been creating the glowing orbs of light since we were children. They required only the most basic of power, that which was largely innate to faekind.
Hiroshi, Ryder, West, and I’d already climbed down several floors beneath the throne room level when the narrow passageway shook. The floor tipped and sent me sliding into a wall, before tilting a bit less in the opposite direction, and then finally settling in a series of smaller quakes that reverberated up my legs and into my hips.
Silt rained down from the low ceiling in a fine powder, causing me to cough as I rubbed the shoulder that had taken the hit.
“I’m not feeling so hot about being stuck in a tunnel when the ground’s shaking like this,” West added. “When I die, I plan on going out doing some heroic feat that’ll have some awesome purpose—shit, maybe they’ll compose songs about me—not with my face buried in Rush’s ass, which is exactly where it’ll end up if we’re crushed right now.”
“Why not?” Ryder asked from behind West on a snort-cough. “There are worse ways to go. We all know Rush’s got a fine ass.”
“Yeahhhhh, no. If my face is gonna be buried in anyone’s ass, it’s gonna be pretty, plump, and smooth, and belong to an equally pretty, plump, and smooth female.”
Though I didn’t hear the usual lament in West’s voice every time he danced around the topic of romantic relations, my heart panged just the same. West had loved my sister with a devotion and intensity that suggested there could never be another match for him. Now that Ramana was dead, I didn’t know if he’d ever find someone to share his life with in that way again. She’d been gone more than two years now. West had started making efforts here and there to joke, to pretend he could eventually love someone else, but I wasn’t sure he believed it, or for whose benefit he was making these efforts.
Perhaps he was just sick of mourning her, of feeling the hollow cavern in his gut he knew would never again be filled in the right way—of knowing he’d failed her when she’d needed him to save her, and now he’d never hear her laughter ring out again, see her brilliant smile brighten even the shittiest of days.
It was I who had failed her, of course. My sisters were my responsibility, not West’s, not anybody else’s. From the start, our parents had made it clear I was meant to be their protector.
“You know we’ve gotta figure out what’s making the place shake,” Ryder told West. “It might be everywhere. Hell, the whole damn mirror world might be rattling. But knowing her , she’s probably done something to cause it. No way is she innocent if shit’s going down.”
Even though the tunnels were one of the few places within the palace where Elowyn had never spotted the queen’s disembodied body parts that served as spies, whenever any of us were within the court, we were careful. Out of habit, the queen was always she .
“There’s something furious and roaring down here,” Ryder went on. “No one pisses someone else off like she does. Whatever she’s done, we’ll find signs of it. She hardly ever leaves the palace.”
“Besides,” Hiroshi piped up from the very back of the line, “we may not get a better chance to check out the fae dungeon. With her and her two kiss-asses busy, we’ve gotta make the most of the chance.”
“I know, I know,” West said as we walked rapidly toward the hidden staircase that opened several more paces ahead. “It’s just that my every instinct is telling me to get outside the crumbling walls, not farther down into the pit under them.” He huffed. “But what’s new? Court life’s all about denying my instincts.”
“No shit,” Ryder said. “My skin’s still crawling from seeing her crook her finger at Rush like she owns him. You can be a pain in my ass sometimes, West, but you’re still my hero for coming up with that plan.”
“You’re my hero too,” I said in West’s direction, “but I’m not sure that’s not part of the reason we’re in this position now. I...” What had I even done, exactly? “Never mind. I don’t know what I did, or if I did anything at all.”
Slowing where the wall opened into a door, I pushed it ajar and started down the stairs to the fae dungeon, the one place within the palace where none of us wanted to end up—where fae went and never returned, and if they did make it out alive, they were no longer the same person or creature they’d once been.
The queen was a master at breaking her subjects, body, mind, and will.
My friends— my brothers —and I circled carefully down the spiral staircase, all senses alert. From the back, Hiroshi’s whisper reached me.
“Tell us, Rush. Whatever it is, tell us before we get there.”
I stopped, looking up to face them. “I would, but ... I think all this stuff with Elowyn’s messed with my head. It’s nothing. I made it all up. Just coincidence, is all.”
Ryder crossed his arms over his chest and scowled. “Well now ya really gotta tell us. There’s no such thing as coincidence and you bloody well know it. Maybe not anywhere, but especially not here, not where she manipulates every single, little, fucking thing.”
Sighing, I rubbed the back of my neck. My fingers caught on some crystal fragments and, one by one, I yanked them out, casting them to the corners of the steps. “I...” I huffed. “Fuck. I’m just gonna spit it out.”
“Please,” West said. “I’m not joking about wanting to get out of the palace as soon as possible. This place makes my balls want to run in the opposite direction. Now that it’s rumbling, even more so.” Frowning, he shook his head.
“When doesn’t it?” Ryder asked on a grunt, then pointed at me. “Go.”
“So ... I obviously didn’t want to kill those kids, but when she was gonna make me do it, I didn’t know what to do, didn’t see a way out of it that wouldn’t expose everything we’ve all been working so hard for. Our goal’s more important than just a few of us.”
Within the stone stairwell that stretched high above us and faded below into the dungeon, the three of them nodded, mouths pressed into grim lines.
“I couldn’t find a way out of doing it, but how could I live with myself after doing it? Already, I can barely make it through a day with ... well, with what I did to El.”
“So what did you do?” Hiroshi urged.
I shrugged, rubbing at my sore shoulder some more. “Not really sure if it worked or how it might’ve, but I tried to do what El did. Or what she said she did anyhow. I just ... asked for help, asked for another way, that’s all, with my thoughts.”
“Who’d you ask?” Hiroshi said.
“I’m not sure. I didn’t specify. I wasn’t in a picky mood right then. She was gonna make me kill them, and I’m certain not even their parents had done anything to deserve that.”
“I’m thinking she may’ve killed Saturn,” West breathed in less than a whisper.
Hiroshi’s lavender head bobbed up and down, as Ryder, scowling, said, “Same.”
“Hard not to think that now,” I agreed. “Before I absolutely didn’t. With how she’d always treated him? No way. Now? I totally can see it.”
“Yeah,” Ryder snorted. “She’d treat him like he was sent down from the Etherlands just to be her special prince.”
“Maybe all an act?” I suggested. They’d been there to witness her initial displeasure when the guard had first informed her of the supposed new suspect. Whatever her thoughts, they weren’t of a grieving mother searching for closure and justice for her murdered son.
“Yeah,” West echoed in perfect understanding.
Assuring myself the many blades tucked into my belt were ready to be drawn rapidly, I said, “If something responded to my plea, I have no idea what it might’ve been, but I do know whatever happened went down exactly when I asked and without a single second to spare. I would’ve left her no doubt about my true intentions—all of them—if the shaking hadn’t started when it had.”
Hiroshi leaned to one side of Ryder so I could better see his face. His lumoon hovered close to his crown, making the lavender of his hair bright. “So we have a potential ally we don’t know about.”
“Maybe. If we have the fortune of dragons.”
West chuffed. “When have we been fortunate?”
I forced a smile. “Hopefully starting now?”
“We could use all of it we can get,” said Ryder, his hair appearing pale as moonlight beneath the glow of his orb.
“So perhaps whatever was roaring is what responded to you?” Hiroshi suggested.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Then let’s get down there and find out,” West urged.
“Thought you wanted to get the hell out of here,” Ryder said, probably only because he knew it would irritate West.
West had been wise to Ryder’s game since we were boys, though he still rose to his goading more often than not. This time, West only chuckled.
I turned back around to head downward, but before I could take the next step that would deliver us to the worst of the queen’s two dungeons, the staircase, carved from the rocky foundation of the palace, trembled badly enough for my throwing knives to vibrate in their sheaths.
We braced ourselves, and closed our eyes to the falling debris—a fine powder, nothing more, thank the Ethers.
The earth around us grumbled and shook and protested ... and finally settled into a mild quaking.
But then—a roar louder than any I’d ever heard before in my entire life, raced toward us in the passageway, so ferocious, so potent, so enraged , it fluttered the loose strands of my hair.
“Holy. Shit.” West breathed the words as he crowded me. “That’s no pygmy ogre.”
“That’s not even a dozen pygmy ogres,” Ryder said.
“Is that...?” Hiroshi shook his head. “Could that have been a ... dragon?”
“No, definitely not. There haven’t been live dragons here in ages,” West answered, but his eyes were already widening at the possibility.
My eyes were surely just as wide. “We gotta get down there right now.” With the queen out of the palace, there was no better time.
I didn’t wait to see if my brothers were ready to follow when I sped down the stairs. My lumoon raced along with me, each of my footfalls careful to avoid the trail of fallen gravel and grit.
I slowed only long enough to listen at the open threshold to the dungeon. When I didn’t hear the usual grunting and loud breathing of the pygmy ogres typically stationed there as sentries, I sucked in a deep inhale, drew my sword as silently as I could, extinguished my lumoon, and rounded the corner.
West, Ryder, and Hiroshi, their own blades at the ready, prowled a step behind me.
But there were no pygmy ogres at all within sight, when there should have at least been several. They rarely ventured beyond the walls of the fae dungeon, which had become a prison for them nearly as much as that of their captives. I’d never seen them, but their living quarters were rumored to be on this same level, beyond the cells, deep within the earth, where no one the queen deemed “proper” would ever venture.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Ryder cautioned as I stepped into the dungeon’s walkway, large enough to be considered a courtyard if above ground. Seemingly endless rows of barred cells lined its four sides. Most were full. Those that weren’t still carried the foul scents of their last occupants. My nose itched with the urge to close off to the odors of piss, shit, and puke, of fear, suffering, and death.
The rows of cells were far enough away from where we walked that we weren’t forced to stare into them to witness who inhabited them and how they looked, to wrestle with the inevitable urge to free them and spare them from any more torment.
“Not now, but later,” Hiroshi promised us, echoing my thoughts. “Definitely later.”
“We’ll come back for every single fucking one of them,” Ryder agreed.
But neither of them said it loudly enough for any of the captives to hear. The queen made it impossible to keep all our promises, no matter how much we might want to. I’d promised Ramana I’d always keep her safe. And now she was as dead as many of these fae probably wished they were.
“We have to hurry,” I said, the reminder perhaps unnecessary to my friends who would be as aware as I that the queen would have alarms and spies in place here, where no one was ever supposed to come without her explicit permission.
I felt the next roar in my bones an instant before I heard it.
Just as furious as the previous, we were closer to it now. It whipped past us like a gust of wind intent on barreling over anything in its path.
The four of us pressed together to weather it, and when it finally passed, West’s short hair was left standing on end.
He whistled under his breath. “Are we sure we want to head toward that ?”
It was a rhetorical question. When it came to Embermere and the rest of the mirror world, we rarely got to do what we wanted, only ever what we were duty bound to accomplish.
No one else was going to save faekind from the queen’s darkness.
“Let’s go,” Ryder said, and I resumed our progress, heading back toward the depths of the dungeon, where none of us had gone before. While we stalked forward, several prisoners called for help.
We couldn’t answer, not even when they begged. Their cries might not trigger whatever spells the queen must have in place, but our responses, loud enough to reach the prisoners thirty, maybe forty feet from us … they certainly would.
Feeling like the most callous of pricks even though we were doing all we could, aiming to take down the queen and offer them all permanent freedom instead of a temporary escape, I kept going until I reached a bare wall. Moisture dripped along the edges of its old, worn stones, but in the dim lighting of the dungeon, I spotted no ridges, no lines, nothing to indicate a passageway.
“There’s gotta be a way through,” Ryder said in a hush. “The pygmy ogres live down here.”
The three of them stepped forward to join me in examining the wall. We trailed our hands across it but had found nothing when I edged toward where the barrier intersected a cell.
“Hey, Rush,” a male voice croaked from within the darkened depths of it.
Reluctant to witness the state of its captive, I steeled myself and neared. “Yeah?”
“It’s me, Gadiel.”
Shock rolled through me, and I hurried to close the distance between us. With my free hand, I gripped the bars, peering between them. The last time I’d seen Gadiel had been in the arena, when he’d shot an arrow at the queen up on her balcony. As part of our ruse, we’d helped apprehend him. We’d handed him off to her guards—who would have captured him anyway—then they’d dragged him away.
“I thought you were dead,” I admitted softly. Gadiel had been the visdrake of Magiarantos. Had we known he was so willing to risk his life and that of those he cared for, we would have approached him about joining our rebellion. But we hadn’t known, and secrecy was paramount to our success. Already, the queen knew too much.
His chuckle was rough and hollow, but at least he laughed. “I’ve lost count of the amount of times I wished I were.”
Gadiel’s voice had been full of life. Now, it was a husk of its former vitality, seeming to beckon toward the end he yearned for.
“We didn’t want to be the ones to capture you, and if we can, I promise we’ll come back for you and get you out of here.”
“I understand, truly I do,” he answered, while the others, hearing me talk, flanked me.
“Gadiel?” asked Hiroshi, sounding as stunned as I was to discover the man with whom we’d sparred many times over the years, with whom we’d drunk when our paths crossed as diplomats for our clans.
“If only I’d actually killed the bitch,” Gadiel answered on a rasp.
This time, I sensed the beast’s fury before its roar, and gripped the bar hard.
The bellow, deep and loud enough to threaten to crack the earth in half, wound around us, as if trying to find its way inside us, to split us open too.
When it quieted, I was left panting.
“You must hurry,” Gadiel implored. “There’s an illusion in place, that’s why you couldn’t find the door.”