Chapter 9 Bravery Undone
CHAPTER NINE
brAVERY UNDONE
Iran barefoot through the stone corridors, my silk robe fluttering behind me like a desperate flag of surrender.
Valen’s words pursued me, vicious and mocking. My wedding night, a trap. My marriage bed, the stage for betrayal. And now the screams rising through my father’s fortress told me that death had already claimed too many. But not Lysa. Please, not my little sister.
The cold stone bit into my bare feet as I flew past tapestries and sconces, their familiar patterns now witness to a night of blood.
My breath came in ragged gasps, each one burning my throat raw.
In any other moment I would be appalled by the lack of propriety in my choice of clothing, but modesty seemed absurd when Valen’s warriors were butchering my people.
The silk clung to the places where his hands had been only minutes before, where I had surrendered to desire only to be rewarded with this nightmare.
The corridors weren’t empty. Servants scrambled past me, their faces masks of terror.
A kitchen boy carrying blood-lined linens dropped them at the sight of me.
The bastard princess in her wedding robe, hair wild, eyes wilder.
No one stopped to help me. No one dared.
In their eyes, I was the bride of the monster who was killing them all.
“The nursery,” I gasped at a fleeing chambermaid, grabbing her arm. “Have you seen Princess Lysa?”
She yanked away from me, her face contorted with hate. “This is your doing,” she hissed, then disappeared around a corner.
Perhaps she was right. I had agreed to this marriage, believing Valen’s and my father’s promises of peace. Now it seemed I had merely opened the gates to our destroyers.
A distant clash of swords echoed from the great hall. Men shouting, the thud of bodies falling. How many Nocthari warriors had Valen truly brought? It had seemed only a small contingent accompanied him to our wedding. Now it sounded as if an army had materialized from the shadows.
I took a shortcut through the chapel, its stained glass windows casting patterns across the floor in the torchlight. Father Eidir lay face down in his own pool of blood, a shocked gasp pulling from my chest at the sight. I didn’t have time to stop, so I ran past without a second glance.
Control over my life… that’s what I had always craved. What bitter irony that in claiming it, I had lost everything.
The nursery lay towards the northern wing, far from the royal chambers where Valen had taken me. As I neared it, the sounds of struggle grew more distant, but a new kind of silence stretched before me. The hollow quiet of aftermath rather than peace.
I slowed as I approached the nursery door, which stood partially open.
A dark stain spread across the threshold, black in the dim light but unmistakable nonetheless.
My heart stuttered in my chest. I pressed a hand against the door, pushing it open with a creak that seemed to echo through the entire palace.
“Lysa?” My voice sounded foreign to my own ears, small and broken.
The room beyond answered only with silence. I forced myself over the threshold, into the nursery where I had spent countless hours reading to Lysa, braiding her hair, singing her to sleep.
The nurse lay sprawled across the floor like a discarded doll, her throat a gaping red smile.
Her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, reflecting nothing but the cold light of the moon.
Blood pooled beneath her, a dark stain spreading across the pale stone floor.
I stepped around her body, bile rising in my throat.
“Lysa?” I called again, slightly louder, though I knew that if she could answer, she would have done so already.
The nursery had been ransacked. Lysa’s toys scattered, her small desk overturned.
The bookshelf I had filled with stories of brave princesses and clever queens lay toppled, its contents spilling across the floor like the entrails of some gutted beast. But it was the bed that drew my eye and froze the breath in my lungs.
Lysa’s bed, with its canopy of pale blue silk, was empty.
But across the cream-colored sheets spread a dark stain, a smear of crimson that seemed to mock the very concept of hope.
I staggered toward it, my fingers outstretched but not quite touching the fabric.
Too much blood for a child so small. Too much blood.
“No,” I whispered, “no, no, no.”
I tore through the room, throwing aside fallen furniture, checking behind the curtains, under the bed, inside the wardrobe, anywhere a frightened child might hide. Nothing. No one. The stone walls seemed to close in around me, the air suddenly too thick to breathe.
The distant shouts grew louder again, the fighting spreading, perhaps reaching the royal apartments where the rest of my family would be hiding. I should have felt concern for them, but my heart had room only for Lysa’s absence.
I forced myself to my feet, my legs trembling beneath me. The blood on the sheets was still slightly wet to the touch.
But there was no body. No small, broken form. Just blood and absence.
Outside the nursery, footsteps pounded against stone. Running feet, too heavy for servants. Nocthari warriors, searching room by room. I had no time left to linger.
I cast one last glance at the ruined nursery, at the nurse who had died trying to protect my sister.
Then I was moving again, out the door and down the corridor, away from the approaching footsteps.
If Lysa lived, there were few places she might go.
The royal family had contingencies for attacks. Secret chambers, escape routes.
I knew of one, hidden behind the old throne room, accessible through a servants’ passage in the north corridor. A final refuge for the royal family in times of siege. If Ira had managed to gather her children, that’s where they would be.
I turned toward the north wing, my bare feet now numb against the cold stone. Outside, a red glow had begun to stain the night sky, fires in the city beyond the palace walls. Valen’s betrayal was not limited to the royal family, it seemed.
All of Vareth was bleeding tonight.
The sound of steel clashing against steel grew louder as I approached the main corridors.
Twice I had to duck into alcoves as Nocthari warriors passed, their armor splattered with the blood of my countrymen.
One carried a severed head by its hair. A servant I recognized…
Elara, the servant who had fled from Nocthar and informed me of their wedding customs. I pressed my fist against my mouth to keep from screaming.
This was my doing. My marriage, my surrender, my failure to see the monster beneath Valen’s handsome face. I had opened my legs and my kingdom to slaughter, all while believing I had finally captured some semblance of control.
If Lysa lived, I would find her. If she was already gone, I would ensure Valen paid for every drop of her blood with oceans of his own. These thoughts propelled me forward, through corridors increasingly thick with smoke and the metallic tang of death.
I slipped into the servant’s passage, avoiding the main hall where the sounds of fighting seemed concentrated.
The corridors here were narrower, the stone darker with age.
I counted the alcoves as I passed them, trying to remember the whispered conversation from years ago.
Something about a statue, a mechanism hidden in plain sight. ..
There—a weathered stone carving of Vareth’s founder, his stern face staring imperiously down the corridor.
I ran my fingers along its base, feeling for anything unusual.
My thumb caught on a small depression, and I pressed hard.
A soft click, then a section of the wall beside the statue swung inward, revealing a narrow passage.
I slipped inside, pulling the hidden door closed behind me. A steep spiral staircase led downward, faintly illuminated by narrow slits in the outer wall that admitted thin beams of moonlight. I descended carefully, one hand on the damp stone wall for balance.
At the bottom, a heavy iron-bound door blocked the way.
I could hear voices behind it. A woman’s clipped, controlled tones that I recognized immediately as Ira’s, and Cordelia’s sharper, more strident responses.
My stepmother and half-sister were alive, then.
But what of Lysa? What of my father and his sons?
I pounded on the door with my fist. “Open the door! It’s Mireille!”
A sudden silence fell on the other side, followed by hurried whispers. Then a familiar male voice called, “Princess? Is that you?”
“Darius,” I breathed, relief washing through me. At least one person I trusted had survived. “Yes, it’s me. Open the door!”
The sound of a heavy bar being lifted, and then the door swung inward. Darius stood framed in the opening, his guard’s uniform spattered with blood, a deep cut marring his left cheek. His eyes widened at the sight of me, barefoot, dressed only in my wedding robe, wild-eyed and desperate.
“Princess,” he said, reaching for me. “Thank the gods you’re alive.”
I pushed past him into the chamber beyond.
It was smaller than I’d expected, with rough stone walls and a low ceiling supported by thick wooden beams. A few torches cast uncertain light over the room’s occupants.
Queen Ira, standing rigid and pale near the far wall, Cordelia beside her, her perfect features arranged in an expression of haughty disdain despite the tear tracks on her cheeks, and a handful of guards, Darius’s men, their weapons drawn and ready.
No king. No young princes. No Lysa.
“Where is she?” I demanded, my voice cracking. “Where is Lysa?”
Queen Ira’s lips thinned to a bloodless line. “You dare show your face here? After you brought this upon us?”
I flinched as if she’d struck me. How dare she accuse me of such a thing? Especially after telling me to behave for my future husband, to please him.