Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Eurydice
He led me through the alleys of the southern district like a son of scorn, like he knew the turns as well as I did. He guided us toward the middle wall, and an uneasy feeling took hold of me the closer we got.
It was the same feeling as when I’d first learned his name.
Dorian.
The wall grew and grew until it obscured even the moon. I so rarely came this close to it, as though it were not to be touched—as though I weren’t meant for such things. Finer things. Better-cut stone. Beyond it lay a world of imagination, of envy.
“This way.” Dorian cut through a last alley, and then we were at the middle wall. A wide street ran quiet and empty along its perimeter. Two portcullises connected the middle wall and the southern district, but those were manned by guard day and night.
Dorian had not brought us to a portcullis. He’d brought us to a rarely traversed point where the southern district met the inner district, a corner with little else but a derelict two-story building that was long known to be haunted.
He approached the building’s front door, but I stopped.
Theo had once dared me to go inside, but I’d refused. He’d gone in himself and come out at a run, truly screaming, tears and snot on his face. He claimed he’d seen a ghost, heard the creak of boards before it came around the corner of a doorway. And we’d never again approached the haunted place.
Dorian pushed the door open. He glanced back. “This way.”
I didn’t move. I wanted to tell him a ghost lived there, but that would be ridiculous. I had seen real ghosts in Sylvanwild. I had seen them in the streets of the southern district. I’d already lived that fear. I’d survived it. I still had no idea why he was bringing me into this building.
Imagination and envy leashed me forward. I followed. He shut the door behind us, enclosing us in a darkness so deep even my night-adjusted eyes struggled to make out the grayscale space.
A big, empty room with doorways leading off. Perhaps it had once been a pub; it had the faint scent of yeast.
I touched a stone wall. “Are we communing with the dead?”
“Something like that.” He started forward, floorboards creaking under him. The two of us passed through a hallway, turned a corner into another room, and Dorian crossed to the other side. He fiddled with something metallic before opening a door I hadn’t even seen. Beyond it lay pure darkness.
He reached for something in his cloak—a Highmark crystal, golden-white. The light illuminated a passageway beyond the door. “Through here.”
I lifted my own crystal from my belt. The passage seemed stone—manmade. “Where does it lead?”
“To the place you dreamed of.” He passed through the doorway. “The inner district.”
But there was no entry to the inner district. Not unless we passed under the portcullis, which only certain guard and high-ranking citizens could…
Yet I followed. I followed like a moth after his light.
The passageway was cramped, the ceiling so low Dorian had to duck. I brushed my fingertips over it; the stone was frigid.
“What is this?” My voice echoed backward and forward.
“You don’t suppose the portcullises would be the only means of getting between districts.”
“Of course I would. The city is perfectly walled—outer, middle, inner.” I paused. “And how would you know? Were you killing highborn changelings, too?”
That was sharp—too sharp. But I couldn’t take it back. I didn’t blame him for not answering.
My ears pricked to a strange sound. Constant, soft, tinkling— “Is that running water?”
“It’s no Virellan Falls.”
“There’s no running water in our kingdom,” I said. “Nothing like the falls.”
“I saw the well in your barracks yard.”
“That connects to a river deep underground.”
We came to another door, and Dorian opened that one with a shoulder against it and a grunt. The sound of moving water became clearer. He stepped onto a narrow stone walkway and gestured me forward.
Beyond the door, torchlight illuminated an underground passageway running perpendicular to our tunnel. Water ran past our feet in a wide groove. I stared, inhaled, gagged.
I backed away, pressing a hand to my nose and mouth. “What the fuck is that?”
“Like I said”—Dorian swept the torchlight around—“it’s no Virellan Falls.”
I remained where I stood. “It’s like the whole kingdom took a shit in here.”
“Because they did. Well, the wealthier ones.” He disappeared from the doorway. “Let’s make this quick.”
I came back onto the landing, my breath held. This was similar to the hollows running alongside every street in my district, where the rains flowed and people dumped their privy pots. Except this was a hollow for a giant. A city of them.
Twenty paces down the walkway, Dorian set his crystal between his teeth and began climbing a ladder. It ran upward to a slatted hole; moonlight slanted through it into the tunnel.
I didn’t hesitate. I kept my breath held and moved.
By the time I’d climbed the ladder, Dorian had paused at the top to listen and clearly decided we were alone. He pushed aside the slatting with a metallic groan, climbed out, and reached back for me.
I took his hand, and he lifted me the rest of the way out. The godsawful smell followed like a haunting spirit. Maybe that was what Theo had encountered.
Dorian knelt to replace the grate, but I hardly noticed.
Before me, a wide nighttime street lay in perfect, quiet repose. The buildings were familiar—slanted, shingled roofs; acid-worn shutters—but everything felt better. Alike, but better. The street straight and wider, fewer cobblestones broken, none of the shutters hanging or shingles missing.
The street ran on and on, straight to a sight I’d only imagined.
The portcullis to the castle. The center of the Kingdom of Storms.
Dorian slid the grate back to place, the noise breaking the nighttime quiet like a knife through silk. He rose, wiping his hands. “We don’t have much time before sunrise.”
It had taken a full minute to drag my eyes off the castle. It was more beautiful than Highmark’s citadel, with spires and turrets better than the drawings I’d seen as a child. The sigil flapped atop its highest point, a white banner with the three interlocking circles.
Old pride rose in me, inevitable and a little embarrassing.
I wasn’t her anymore. This wasn’t my home. I didn’t even belong in that castle, or anywhere around it. I never had.
“Where now?” I asked.
He nodded down the street running at a right angle to the one leading toward the castle. “Not far.”
This district was even quieter than the southern district. I felt freer and more out of place. Beside me, the stink still rose from the grate. “What was that place we came from?”
“The sewer.” He lowered his hood, black hair shining white and blue under moonlight. “Acid rain runs along the streets, through the grates—”
“A sewer? Here?” Highmark had one, but that was Feyreign.
Faint amusement gleamed in his eyes. “You didn’t fantasize as a girl about how the inner district got rid of their shit?”
Now that I was paying attention, the smell up here was distinctly better than my district’s. Not half as fresh as Sylvanwild, but this was no treeless expanse. The buildings were taller, the window boxes planted, and the lanterns along the street were actually lit—all of them, not one in three.
Fresh envy spiked through me. Would I ever stop being poor and desperate, in sad and unexpected and fearful moments like this one? I was a queen, and I was Eurydice Waters.
Maybe childhood never felt far away for any of us. Maybe I would always feel unwelcome beyond the portcullis.
Dorian’s fingers touched my shoulder, and he urged me down a narrower street. “Over here.” His breath gusted out as we came to the stoop of a two-story row house. “Boarded. Of course.”
The windows to the home had at some point been nailed over with imprecisely laid boards. Whatever lay beyond was maybe visible during daytime between the cracks. If I set my face to the window now, only darkness would push back.
Dorian opened the front door with his shoulder; it gave without real resistance, like any handle or knob had long ago been broken or just given up. The floorboards groaned under his boots.
I stepped into the doorway and paused. Dorian stood in a small sitting room filled with the dust and spiderwebs of disuse. Chairs stood at odd angles, like everyone had just gotten up. One had been knocked over.
He knelt and righted it. “Close the door.”
I did so, pressing my back to it. The moonlight through the window boards patterned the chairs, the walls. Bookshelves were inset along the far wall, next to something strange I didn’t recognize—a black box with a fat tube running into the ceiling.
I crossed to it, set my fingers on it. Metal, cold; my fingertips came away black.
“It’s a stove.” His voice had gone thick. “It burns coal.”
“Coal?”
“For heat, in winter.” He stepped through a doorway into another room. His words echoed around the frame. “The winters can be brutal here.”
I stiffened. The doorway was still, empty, yet I had a sudden understanding that the person who had passed through it was not the person he’d been five minutes ago, or days ago, or weeks ago. Not the historian, not the killer, not my veyre.
Not just those things, at least.
The uneasy feeling kept me in place. It made my heart a rabbit. It turned my stomach over.
“Your name,” I said. “It’s a common one in the Kingdom of Storms.”
No answer from the other room.
I took a step forward. The floorboards announced my approach. “A highborn name.”
A scoff from around the corner. “Can you be highborn if you live daily under acid?”
That took my breath and yanked it from my lungs. My hand went out to the dusty bookcase, still filled with books. The room felt small and too large and strangely uneven.
It didn’t make sense. He had already taken me to his mother’s house in Sylvanwild.
“This is a trick.” I sounded ill, hoarse. “Another lie. You—”
When I came to the doorway, I found him sitting, hunched, on a narrow bed in the corner. The bedspread had a rip through the center; his fingers ran over the hole.
“I was twelve when he came into my home at night.” Dorian’s fingers kept moving over the rip. “First he killed my mother—ran her through with his sword while she slept in the other room. He stabbed my father in the neck with his short blade.”
I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t dare ask.
“I woke to the sound of my father dying,” he went on. “Like he was choking on water. Found him with his hands at his bloody throat in the hall, on his knees. I heard footsteps and ran to my sister’s room. A man stood over her bed. He set both hands around the grip of his sword, and—”
His fingers stopped moving over the tear. That was when I noticed the stain, what I had thought in the low light was some kind of bloom or pattern on the bedcover.
Old blood. So much of it. Like an overturned inkpot.
I didn’t hesitate. Maybe it was because I was back here, inside the walls. Maybe it was the spirit of my mother moving me. I still didn’t understand, not nearly, but I did know one thing:
Dorian wasn’t lying. The tremble of his shoulders wasn’t a lie.
Nobody could call me the comforting type. That had always been Elisabet. She was the one who’d hold you, who’d stroke your hair, who’d let you cry as long as you needed without a word spoken.
I wasn’t her. But I knew the language of pain, and of need.
I crossed the room until I stood in front of him. I set my hands on his head, fingers moving automatically into his hair.
He reached out, arms wrapping around my legs. He pressed his face into me, inhaling and shuddering out a breath. A sound broke out of him, strangled, almost like the boy he’d been.
It felt like the most honest thing he’d ever said, and it hadn’t even been in words.
I’d never seen this kind of vulnerability from him, could hardly have imagined it. Had he ever been back here? Ever told anyone this story?
I remained silent, stroking his thick hair, the night punctuated by his noises. Not because I should, but because I wanted to. My hands kept moving, gentle and careful. My mind kept working.
When he stilled and his breathing became more regular against my belly, I said, “You called my mother’s death a mercy.”
He swallowed against his plugged nose. “I meant it.”
“‘I am like you, but I am not you.’ Do you know that riddle?”
He breathed out, long and slow. When he leaned back, a stroke of moonlight illuminated one eye and a wet cheekbone.
“Of course I do, Eury.”
“Then—”
“Changeling.” The word like a stone in a deep, deep pond. “It means changeling.”