Chapter Ten Vina
Chapter Ten
Vina
Sometimes I think of the tales that keep our Isle alive as a great wheel—like the sundial we saw at Oxford, when we studied together as boys. Do you recall? The sun rises and sets. The solstice returns. Tales end, and they begin, and end. And so forth.
Every day I grow more convinced that nothing can truly be immutable. Even incarnates perish. My vision fades, my skin wrinkles—and I wonder, my love, if we will renew too in the fullness of time. If we will return again as boys, and meet once more at that sundial, a story spun into new gold.
Source: Letter from Dr. Felix Scott to Mr. Cillian Ferrers
Archivist’s Ruling: Preserve. Review in 6 months. No interrogation currently required. Continued surveillance recommended.
Fire was a drumbeat behind Vina’s eyes and in her veins. But as they walked down the slope leading them deeper and deeper beneath the Palace grounds, the air grew colder and wetter. It felt blessedly cool against her skin.
Simran raised a hand in the air. Vina heard her click her fingers—one crisp snap, followed by small flames rising luminously on the ends of her fingertips. The darkness around them eased, revealing a vast, cavernous space. The walls of the underpalace were white stone, rising to a vaulted ceiling.
“A crypt?” Simran asked, but even she sounded dubious. There were no graves visible—no tombs with sleeping figures in repose carved on their surfaces. Simran was striding forward without pausing, the lights of her fingertips throwing long shadows on the high walls. She wasn’t slowing down.
“We’re not being followed,” Vina said. “You don’t need to run anymore.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I’d hear them,” said Vina. “I promise.”
Simran didn’t reply, but she did slow down a little.
The air smelled loamy. Vina could hear the rumble of running water.
“There’s a river down here,” said Vina. “The Tyburn. You’ll never see it anywhere else in London. It’s tangled with the royal Palace.”
“A river passing through a crypt seems like a recipe for disease,” Simran muttered.
“I haven’t caught cholera yet,” Vina said cheerily.
“I told you, there are so many tales wound about the Palace that it can’t always hold its shape.
Sometimes the tales mingle together. Crypts, rivers, lost parts of the Palace gone to rot—whatever lies through there.
” She gestured at the tunnels leading off from the vaulted roof hall around them.
“They cross paths, then they diverge as they like.”
“You know this place,” said Simran, looking around carefully, eyes narrowed.
“I’ve been here once before,” said Vina.
“Is there another exit we can reach fast?”
“I didn’t stay long enough to check,” Vina admitted. “I turned back.”
“I can’t imagine you being frightened of the dark,” said Simran. “You’re a big fighter with a sword, what’s a little gloom to you?” Her words were mocking, but the flames on her fingertips grew brighter, illuminating the cavern around them.
“How did you end up here, anyway?” Simran asked. “Does the Queen have you gardening or digging tunnels in your spare time?”
Vina laughed. “No. I, uh.” What was the harm in saying it?
“I tried to run away, early on. Sometimes the Palace responds to strong feeling, and I wanted to escape. It gave me a way down here.” She gestured at the space around them—the grand, vaulted darkness.
“I was very young, and very stupid. I didn’t know how to control my feelings.
Things got better when Eddie and Matthias joined me as royal squires.
This is the first time I’ve seen it since. ”
A beat of silence.
“How long have you lived in the Palace?” Simran asked. Her voice was unreadable.
“Since I was ten.”
“No wonder you were scared down here,” Simran said, after a moment. Her voice was soft.
“I wasn’t really,” Vina admitted. “I just realized I had nowhere to run to. My father would have simply sent me back.”
Something flickered at the edge of her vision. Dark as ink, and swift. Vina paused.
“What?” Simran asked urgently. Her face was painted in licks of gold, her eyes wary and vigilant. “What is it?”
“I saw something,” said Vina.
“So we have been followed.”
“No. I—” Vina hesitated. She pointed at one of the tunnels coming off the central underpalace—ominously dark, an unwelcoming circle of black. “I thought I saw movement. Something low to the ground. Rats, probably.”
“If there’s rats, there might be a way out.” Simran turned to the tunnel.
“I don’t think rats guarantee an exit! Simran—”
But Simran was already gone, swallowed by the dark. With a sigh, Vina strode in after her.
The dark gave way to a room half-flooded with running water: the Tyburn’s work, no doubt.
Rats were scurrying across the ground. But it was the detritus that caught Vina’s attention. A broken table—a circle like the one in the Queen’s White Hall, but vaster, white as the moon, and broken in two. It looked as if it were fused with the wall—immovable, and deep-rooted.
This was the first, an old instinct whispered in her head.
Simran kneeled by the table, holding her fire-lit fingers up to reveal its surface.
There were images carved into the table, gouged deep and with grace by an artisan’s hand.
A sword, haloed in swirls of light. Knights, each helmed, faceless, lances in their hands.
A woman with loose and trailing hair, sitting in a barge on water, holding a body in her arms—a crowned body, a man with a great wound at his heart.
A ghost of emotion ran through Vina as she gazed at him, as if a tale had touched her, then drifted away. She felt the edges of awe—and fear too.
Beneath it all was an inscription.
“‘I live and live again,’” Simran read out. “‘Eternal.’”
Something at the corner of her vision again. This time, Vina could have sworn it was a chain, red-black as ink, worming its way through stone and soil. When she turned her head it was gone.
“There’s no way out here,” said Simran, sounding displeased. But her eyes were still fixed on the broken table.
“We’ll follow the water,” said Vina.
They did, following the black sluice of water until the ground began to turn soft.
Finally, they came to a grate. Vina managed to ram it open, and they emerged on the far edge of the gardens, no guards or courtiers around them. They were alone.
“I can see the walls,” said Vina. “We won’t go to the main gate. The other gates are manned but the guards move on a schedule—if we’re lucky we can slip to freedom.”
Simran nodded, jaw tense.
They strode forward. They were almost at the postern gate when Vina heard the silvery hiss of a blade ahead of them, and saw two figures emerge from the shadows of the fortified wall.
Vina sighed. “Ah, shit,” she said. “Eddie, Matthias, lower your swords. Let’s talk.”
“We’ll lower our swords when you come back into the hall,” said Matthias. “Come on, Vina. We can sit and talk there.”
Really, it would have been ideal to have a sit-down. Vina’s skin was burning. She could feel the fae’s magic moving under it.
She watched Matthias and Edmund through a thin golden haze. They were creeping hesitantly toward her and Simran. Matthias, usually the more sensible, was in front. He had one hand up, palm out in a calming gesture, which would have been more convincing without the sword.
She thought he’d be better at diplomacy.
She kept her hands lax at her sides. Someone had to remember how not to escalate a conflict.
“This seems silly,” she protested. “The Queen won’t be happy if you hurt us.”
“Of course we won’t hurt you,” Matthias said, as Edmund simultaneously replied, “We were ordered to bring you in ‘by any means,’ you think we’re waving these swords for fun?”
“Edmund,” Matthias groaned.
“The Queen probably doesn’t care if you’ve got all your limbs,” Edmund went on doggedly. “You think the Queen really gives a shit if you lose a toe?”
“Probably not,” Vina agreed.
“We don’t have time to banter,” Simran said frostily. “Let us pass, boys. You’ve exhausted my patience.”
Edmund hissed between his teeth.
“I’ve got to say, Vina. I’m not sure even you deserve a shrew like her.”
“Don’t go around calling witches ‘shrews,’ Eddie,” Vina said. “That’s how you get cursed.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Of course not,” she said. “We’re friends. I’m advising you.”
“I’m not friends with any of you,” Simran said, impatience in her voice. “But one of my friends is in trouble, so I need you to get out of my way.”
“You have a duty to the Isle,” Matthias entreated. “Both of you do. You serve the Queen—please. Come back. All she wants is to ensure your safety.”
Edmund muttered something under his breath, sword steady in his firm grip.
“Duty,” Simran scoffed. “Is it my duty to dance? To wear gowns? I don’t bloody think it is.
You toffs may love your duty, but I have no time for it.
It’s not my business.” She took a step back, her footsteps as light as her words were hard, one heel scuffing the ground in a neat line.
Vina noted it, then looked away; shuffled on her own feet, letting her own hand brush her sword hilt, drawing Edmund’s wary gaze to her.
If Simran had a plan, if Simran wanted a distraction, then Vina would provide it.
“I don’t understand why the Queen wants to have me under her thumb,” Simran was saying hotly.
“I can feel the tale. I felt it the moment I saw Lavinia. It’s going to drag us along no matter what we do.
What’s the fucking use of having us bow and dance in front of her?
Why keep me here with her?” She gestured dramatically at Vina.
Her heel dug into the earth. “The tale should just happen. She doesn’t need to do this. None of you do.”
Edmund and Matthias didn’t know about incarnates being killed. They wouldn’t understand the Queen’s drive to keep Simran here alongside Vina, safe from a stranger’s blade. But it wasn’t their place to question the Queen, and Vina knew they would do as they were ordered to.