Chapter 5
I stormed towards Earth House, my skirt rippling behind me like a flag snapping in the wind.
The rest of the meeting had gone as poorly as the start of it.
We’d agreed to send rotating patrols through the territories surrounding Fire, Void, and Blood House, but no one could agree on the particulars.
Drustan wanted Fire’s soldiers to be solely responsible, since he knew they were committed to the cause—the implication being that Void’s soldiers weren’t.
Hector had then accused him of wanting to send spies into Void territory, to which Drustan had commented that Void House would know all about spies.
They’d eventually settled on sending sentries in mixed groups, but it hadn’t been pleasant getting there.
Gweneira was unable to spare many soldiers for those watches, since the situation within Light House was so volatile. I was even less helpful. It had been embarrassing to listen to everyone else plot and bicker, painfully aware that there was only one purpose I served.
Everything would have been different if Oriana had come.
Ahead, an asrai carrying a bolt of fabric emerged from the water tunnel leading into Earth House.
Her brown skin shimmered blue at her cheekbones and the edges of her forehead, and her hair was the color of sapphire where it floated around her shoulders.
Hatheryn—not an Underfae I’d worked closely with, but someone I’d seen around the house and been friendly with.
She was responsible for the mending and cleaning for Lady Rhiannon, the matriarch of one of the stronger bloodlines.
When she spotted me, she gasped and curtsied.
“You don’t have to—” I started, but she was already hurrying past, giving me a wide berth like I was a disease she might catch.
I slowed as I approached the tunnel. Sunlight speared through the lake water, turning it turquoise, and colorful fish swam past the mystically enforced barrier. Despite the beauty, a gnawing unease filled my stomach. At my neck, Caedo quivered with the same tension. We didn’t belong here anymore.
Stopping outside the entrance, I shouted, “Princess Oriana!”
The passageways of Mistei often echoed—whether with footsteps, music, or screams—but the water absorbed the sound. I waited for a few minutes, then yelled again. “Oriana! I need to speak with you.”
A cluster of orange fish that had been hovering near the entrance darted away. More minutes passed, but Oriana didn’t emerge.
Did she know I was here? Blood House had informed me when Kallen had shown up. She was probably ignoring me on purpose, as she’d ignored the summons to the council meeting.
Fresh anger filled me. All that power, and Oriana stayed in her luxurious rooms and did nothing. Didn’t fight, didn’t speak up, didn’t protect her own family. “I’m not leaving until you speak with me!”
A dark green fish with trailing fins drifted up to the curve of the tunnel wall. It paddled lazily, the edges of its scales glimmering gold in the water-thickened sunlight. The black eyes fixed on me were more intelligent than they had any right to be.
Oriana definitely knew I was here.
“You coward,” I told the fish bitterly. “Don’t you care about anything besides yourself?”
The fish flicked a fin and swam away.
No entreaty, no insult, could shake Oriana loose from her sanctuary. A few times servants appeared at the far end of the tunnel, but each time they hurried back inside the moment they spotted me. Eventually no one else emerged.
My throat hurt, and not just from prolonged shouting. Lara was waiting for me back at Blood House, and the thought of why that was infuriated me all over again. Oriana hadn’t just abandoned Mistei—she’d disowned her own child.
The green fish had returned a few times to inspect me.
It lingered now between wavering fronds of lake-bed grass, the golden scales above its eyes gleaming like a crown.
“Don’t you want to know how Lara is?” I asked the fish, lowering my voice.
Surely Oriana cared deep down, beneath the layers of politics and polish.
After Selwyn had died, after Lara had been stripped of her magic, I could have sworn she’d looked as if her heart were fracturing.
The fish watched me, fins combing lazily through the water.
I sighed, shoulders slumping. This had been a fool’s errand. If Drustan hadn’t convinced her to attend the meeting, if Osric’s death hadn’t convinced her to do something, anything , to make Mistei a better place, what hope did I have?
It would have been nice to shout at her, though.
I stepped back—and the corridor tilted. The floor tipped so precariously I staggered, and vertigo spun my head. When I regained my senses, the entrance to Earth House stood to my right—less than a foot away from my grasping hand.
I yelped and leapt away from it. A laugh floated to my ears. “Oriana?” I gasped, clutching my head as a fresh wave of dizziness washed over me.
The water tunnel was to my left now. Fish swarmed around the glassy arch as if in a feeding frenzy. My vision flipped upside down, and I lost my balance, tripping forward…just as the entrance shifted and reappeared directly in front of me.
My knees hit cold stone. The lake curved blue around me. A droplet fell from the magically restrained ceiling.
Then a wall of water crashed down and swept me away.
The impact knocked the breath from me, and there was no air left to replace it.
Water poured into my lungs, icy cold and then burning.
Shock and horror hammered me as the current spun me up.
Colors flashed past my eyes—sunstruck turquoise, the flash of fish, the brown and green of the lake bed.
Then a darker blue as I was flung into a deeper part, away from the sun.
Panic filled me as the water wrapped cold fingers around my ankles and dragged me down, down, down. Sharp pain ripped through my ears, and a horrible pressure filled my chest as my lungs struggled against something they were never meant to hold.
Air, I needed air, where was the air? Help me, please, help…
I was screaming without making a sound, thrashing against nothing as the water filled me up. As it killed me.
My vision wavered, and the terror was joined by bleak despair.
This was how it ended. Kenna Heron, the herbwoman’s wild daughter, who had loved well and hated better, was going to die alone.
I’d finally had power in my hands—the power to change things, to save people, to make this miserable world a tiny bit happier—and in less than a day, everything was lost.
In the end, I’d amounted to nothing at all.
Blackness grew over my vision like mold.
My limbs moved sluggishly. I was heavy now, filled with my own death.
Magic raced through me, but it couldn’t create air where none existed.
The gleam of garnet around my grasping fingers flickered faintly through the black.
It was the last thing I would see—the power I’d had so briefly and let slip away.
Something grabbed my waist like a giant’s fist. There was no breath left for it to squeeze from my lungs as it yanked me through the water, and I was too weak to struggle. My eyes closed against the dark and the pain as a ferocious current ripped past my skin.
Air suddenly burst around me. Bright, windy, sun-warmed. The enormous hand released me, and my knees hit rock so hard my teeth clacked together. I collapsed forward, slamming my face into the ground, and pain burst at the bridge of my nose.
The water inside my lungs surged out all at once, leaving my chest deflated and sore. When I sucked in a breath of summer air, I immediately started coughing.
“What—” My voice was too raw to come out properly, and the sound was strangely muffled. Water streaked down my face, dripping from my sodden curls and weeping eyes. I rose to my knees, trembling from the effort.
Princess Oriana stood before me, lips pursed and arms crossed. She wore a dark green gown, and her golden hair hung loose, as though she’d been in the middle of having it combed when she’d come to my aid.
The pain in my ears disappeared as my ruptured eardrums healed. Sound returned—birdsong and the lap of water. The sunlight was so bright it was nearly painful.
No one survived the death promised by the house entrances. “You saved me,” I said, voice hoarse. More tears leaked from my eyes to drip onto my soaked bodice.
“I did not do this for you,” she said coldly.
My head was so muddled I couldn’t make sense of the words.
Where were we? I looked around and realized she’d brought me to a small island in the middle of the lake covering Earth House—the same island where Lara and I had once sat sharing secrets and looking at the stars.
The water rippled, disturbed from my near drowning.
Wind-smeared clouds dotted the sky, and a copse of trees rustled in a breeze that drew goose bumps from my chilled skin.
The saturated blue of the sky, the green of the leaves, and the golden sheen of sunlight made my eyes sting. I’d spent the last six months almost entirely underground, and while Mistei glowed in its own way, the world above had a heartbreaking sort of brilliance.
I wouldn’t have seen the sky again if it weren’t for Oriana.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, wiping my wet cheeks.
“I will not allow Earth House’s defenses to be used on behalf of anyone else.” There was fury in her hazel eyes, and her fingers dug into her arm like claws.
“On behalf…” I shook my head, then regretted it when the movement elicited a rush of nausea. I was still dizzy from the battering I’d taken in the waves. “I wasn’t trying to use it for anything.”
She gave me a withering look that reminded me painfully of one of Lara’s classic expressions. “Not you. Though you also behaved abominably. My servants were afraid to leave the house.”