Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Lory
In the dark tunnel, Hadrian was crouching over the lifeless body of Olive, his hands pressed into her side. Lory didn’t hesitate to summon a flicker of her power, illuminating the space so the others could see what was going on.
The skin around Hadrian’s eye was black, the bruise spanning the area from his eyebrow to the side of his cheek, and another bruise bloomed on his stubbled jaw; his curls lay matted against his forehead and neck, sticky with sweat and blood.
“We brought help,” Anees said, shoving Hadrian aside and replacing his hands with hers. “Take a break. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
He didn’t object, merely studied the small group with suspicion.
“They’re fine,” Anees informed him before jerking her chin to gesture for Lory, Jarek, and Tabi to get into the tunnel.
Lory shut the door behind them with her free hand, unwilling to risk being discovered. If anyone came down here to burn the two dead Flames, they would notice an open door and five voices.
“She passed out a minute ago. Blood loss, I assume.” Hadrian sat against the wall of the narrow tunnel, gingerly touching his jaw. With a wince, he gritted his teeth.
At Anees’s side, Tabi was already lowering the bundle of supplies onto the ground, spreading out the cloth, and sorting through the flasks. “Her breathing is shallow, but at least she’s still breathing on her own. That will give me some time to work.”
Hadrian once more glanced at the small group. “Why are we having company? No offense, Lory?” he amended.
Lory shrugged, gesturing at Olive. “Tabi is her best shot at survival, and Jarek, we ran into in the hallways. He’s a friend.” She didn’t bother using their full names. If they managed to pull this off, they would be past any formalities by far.
Hadrian raised his scarred brow and winced again. “Not all friends can be trusted.”
That earned him a groan of frustration from Jarek.
“For the tenth time, I won’t tell anyone, Phantom Bleek, that you are hiding in the tunnels under the Ward, with a black eye and a half-dead woman.
I also won’t tell anyone that she can’t be a student and that she looks remarkably like one of the three prisoners who supposedly died in an attempt to escape from Ashthorn’s dungeons.
And least of all will I tell anyone that I definitely don’t object to helping a Flame-born to get out of the Master of Whispers’ torturous claws. ”
That seemed to put Hadrian’s concerns to rest, and Lory didn’t even want to know how Jarek knew what the three prisoners looked like.
They all focused on Tabi’s restless movements as she assessed Olive’s wounds. Only one stab, but plenty of scratches and bruises that must have been older, some of them fading into scars. Lory’s gut twisted at the thought of what Lenya and his torture masters must have done to the woman.
“Cut the fabric here,” Tabi instructed Anees, who didn’t bother to use her dagger, but rather ripped the linen apart with her bare hands.
“Faster,” she explained with a shrug at Tabi’s sideways glance, but Lory noticed the meticulous tear, just as if a knife had sliced through the fabric. Anees had used her own magic without exposing what it was.
Uncorking a tonic, Tabi poured it over the wound. “I didn’t get the magical disinfectant, but this one should work well enough,” she narrated while the rest of them watched with bated breath. “Just a little more.” She set the flask aside, Jarek intercepting it before it touched the ground.
The air wielder picked up a piece of cloth from Tabi’s bundle and poured some of the tonic on it, turning to Hadrian, whose hand shot to his sword in a practiced move.
“Don’t hit me.” Jarek held up a placating hand, showing the cloth, his eyes shooting to Hadrian’s hand. “Just trying to clean out your wound.”
Lory hadn’t even noticed the cut on the phantom’s wrist with Olive’s blood caked all over his hands.
Though the blood was congealed, the injury still seemed deeper than a simple slice.
He held his hand out to Jarek, nodding his thanks, and Jarek made quick work of the injury, wiping the dirt and blood caked all over it away in one swipe.
“You won’t believe it, seeing Maes now, but my sister used to be clumsy when she was a child.
” A small smile graced his lips, softening his harsh features as he glanced up at Hadrian.
“I used to clean her wounds all the time. A cut here, a bruise there, a scratch…”
“She’s all grown up now and can take care of herself,” Hadrian reminded Jarek, who inclined his head.
“And her temper is a handful.”
Anees and Hadrian shared a look, a grin of mutual understanding passing. “The things we do for family…” Hadrian said with a much softer tone than Lory was used to, and Jarek nodded once more, the smile widening as he turned back to watch Tabi work.
A groan of pain echoed through the tunnel as Olive woke, and Lory’s attention snapped back to the Flame-born woman, the fire flickering in her palm flaring as her emotions threatened to get the best of her.
They needed to get her ready and out of here before anyone noticed they were gone.
“What happened?” Olive’s voice wasn’t more than gravel, but Lory felt down behind her head, smoothing back her sweat-drenched hair. Her skin was so cold—
“We got you out of the cells and under the pyramid. An exit is less than a hundred feet away. We just need to get you back on your feet and out of here,” Anees explained in the neutral tone of the phantom interested in finishing a task rather than the rebel smuggling people out of the king’s most creative prison.
Olive nodded, her eyes darting along the tunnel walls and floor as she rolled her head from one side to the other. “Enya?” she prompted. “Hadrick?”
Anees shook her head, and the choked sobbing coming out of the woman cut down to the marrow of Lory’s bones.
“General Ycken killed them before we had the chance to get them out. By that time, you were already unconscious, and he thought you were dead. We took you under the pyramid as discussed, and our friend is healing your wound so you can—”
“No,” Olive hissed. “Let me die.”
But Tabi had already finished with her work, and where a gaping wound had gushed blood a minute ago, Olive’s smooth, golden skin didn’t show as much as a hint of a scar.
“I’m sorry.” Lory hadn’t been there when Ycken butchered the two older Flames, but it felt like her failure all the same.
Nobody spoke as Olive’s tears fell onto the dusty floor, and Lory’s heart seized with sorrow at what they had lost: not only two Flame-born—two of the last Flame-born if the leonthor was to be believed—but a wealth of knowledge about the Flames’ history and the mechanics of the rebellion spilling over Criulias’s borders through the Amrin Mountains.
Two people who had been willing to trust her and would have taken her in had not Khayrivven and Ycken come to her rescue.
They hadn’t trusted Khayrivven because he needed to keep the facade of the cold captain who didn’t care how many lives he sacrificed for the king’s cause, but he’d won them over enough to go along with his plan for an escape.
Oh, Khayrivven would never forgive himself for those two deaths. She knew deep down in her bones it would destroy him.
Lory did her best not to disturb the woman’s mourning, but the sun would rise in an hour, and they needed to get Olive out of the pyramid, return to their quarters to change into fresh clothes, and sit at their table in the mess hall before the bell pealed a third time.
Whatever heartbreak… it would have to wait until Olive was safely out of here.
“It’s time,” was all she said to Anees, and the phantom gave her a nod, gently helping Olive to her feet, whose tears wouldn’t stop flowing.
Tabi took Olive’s other side, easing her sideways through the narrow tunnel, while Lory illuminated their path with her fire, her own strength fading.
The blood loss would bite her in the ass if she wasn’t careful.
But careful was something she couldn’t afford—not when, after taking a life tonight, she could actually save one.
“Not much farther.” She followed the tunnel Khayrivven had shown her all those weeks ago. A tunnel he’d trusted her to keep to herself, and now, she was involving more people than he’d ever agreed to.
He’d told her and Hadrian about it before taking Lory on her mission that night, but Tabi and Jarek—
The guilt would need to wait just like the grief.
One pace at a time, they made their way closer to the end of the tunnel, where roughly hewn rock hid the secret exit into the desert.
Lory needed both hands to push out the door, and her fire extinguished the moment she laid her palms against the stone.
A collective gasp followed, but she whispered, “I need to open the door—”
In front of her, even in the dark, she could make out the thin groove indicating there was more to the stone than a dead end. She pushed as hard as she could. Nothing moved.
“Maybe I can help?” Jarek nearly stumbled into her as he stepped around the three women, his hand sliding along the wall, the other across Tabi’s shoulders as he felt his path forward. “I’m here.”
Lory nodded to herself, well aware he couldn’t see her in the darkness. None of the others could. They all stared unseeingly into the black wall before them.
Lory took Jarek’s hands, positioning them inside the borders of the door, and told him to shove.
With a small crunching noise, the form slid a few inches out and slipped to the side, the graying, star-flecked sky and the endless desert behind Dunai spreading before them.
The collective intake of breath would have been comical had Lory not spotted the group of men standing around something in the wet sand about thirty paces to the north.
“Get back inside.” She didn’t think as she gave the order, already stepping back into the tunnel, but her back hit Hadrian’s chest, and she stumbled to the side, holding onto the threshold.
It wasn’t much, but the movement had caught the men’s attention.