50. Kye
Kye
Solid rock hit me like a slap to my side. I beat water and salt from my lashes, coughing from the sudden gust of oxygen and aiming my head up at the brightness behind my blindfold. Nori scoffed, diving back into the sea without a second glance.
“Fucking fish woman,” I muttered under my breath, pushing onto my hip, my free hand ready at the base of my skull to rip the silk off. I wasn’t even sure I needed it. I was still firmly rooted in the camp of a Naiad’s tail can’t kill me twice. “Nice of you to drop us off.”
“They’re heading to Venusia to wait with Maren,” Selena said. The stab of ire within me died down at that, until a moment later when she said, “All here.”
As if we hadn’t just left my wife alone on some rock face with a Venusian asshole.
I pulled at the silk strip dripping like the cold fucking tears of winter down the side of my collarbone. “Let’s go.”
“Give us a moment to dry off,” Aren called.
Already twenty paces ahead, Cebrinne whipped around and called off the water from our group so powerfully it felt like being pummeled by a hurricane. She turned on her heel as she finished, stalking to the nearest palace door without a second glance at us.
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, eyelids scratching over dry eyes as I blinked moisture back into my body.
Selena fixed Diara’s hair, grumbling to herself about impatient sisters and the need for clear heads.
But I’d recognized the look in Cebrinne’s eyes.
The need to find a cordae, to know they were safe.
“Where are you going?” Hadrian asked. I hadn’t realized they weren’t directly behind me. Still shaking the last of the Naiad air from their lungs, they moved like a crowd of sleepwalkers across the cliff edge. But Hadrian wasn’t looking at me.
Next to him, Diara flexed the feeling back into her arms. “To get my bow.”
“There’s some in the armory on the way.” Hadrian glanced at me. “But I think we should go in unarmed.”
I stepped back, impatience leaping into my blood. “Why the fuck would we do that?”
My brother twisted his mouth. “Hidden weapons, then. And take a breath, Kye. You already look like you’re about to single-handedly place the entire palace under siege. There might not be anything in there.”
“Fine,” I tossed the word back like a dart. “Come on, Verrata.”
Hadrian raised his hands in a gesture that could only mean, are you serious?
“I want a hidden knife,” Leal said somewhere behind him. Boots against mud thudded after me, Dimas and his cousin tucking into my side. A moment later, the rest of them had joined as well, eyes rolled up at the sky.
“It’s just crows,” Hadrian muttered under his breath.
I veered under the stone arches that led us back from the cliff edge. My steps slowed. This should have been the first place we’d encounter guards. Two of them were always stationed here. Day or night, rain or wind.
But there was no one there now. Over the top of the arch, a black bird waited, thin talons hooked into the grout between stones.
It aimed a beady eye at us, the rest of its body unearthly still.
The hair along my arms raised, my hand tracing the leather edge of my belt that my knife usually claimed.
At my side, Diara lowered to the ground, reaching through dry grass and heather for a loose pebble.
The bird cawed once and launched.
We ducked under its feet. Off it flew, swerving in a wide arc toward the distant towers. Diara hurled her rock at it with a growl that made me relieved she was on my fucking side.
“The armory is this way,” Hadrian said, sweeping his hands down his arms as if dusting off his jacket. I flexed my own shoulders, banishing my remaining goosebumps to Perpetuum.
We crossed the grounds in a tight cluster, though no one was around to contest us. Guards had disappeared from every corner, every bridge, every curtain wall. Dead silence draped over the palace like a hungry fog, leaving my skin itching with sun-damned warning.
The door to the armory was fucking locked.
“Your tower?” Aren asked me.
It was the closest thing to an armory, and the nearest collection of weapons we had. “Going to have to be,” I said through clenched teeth.
We backtracked, waiting for each other before turning corners or stepping over bridges. The empty halls should have made for faster travel, but they seemed to slow us instead, forcing us to exercise caution and restraint and fucking patience I didn’t want to have.
“I wish Cebrinne would have waited for us,” I heard Selena whisper to Pheolix.
“She’s fine,” he replied. “Probably the reason no one’s here. They took one look at her and shit themselves.”
“Quiet,” Diara snapped.
“Why?” Leal leaned against the nearest wall. “No one is even here to—”
I raised my hand for silence, but he’d already cut himself off.
Something was being dragged just beyond the bend in the hall.
A heavy, slow scrape against the low carpet.
The sound was soft. Slow. But it shrieked inside my head the way a silver fork clashed against porcelain, making me want to cover my ears and scrunch my shoulders until it stopped ringing from inside my thoughts.
The blood drained from Diara’s face. Closest to the corner, she stepped backward, pressing into me, her body tight with tension. I passed her off to Hadrian behind us, nudging my way to the front, my jaw clenched and eyes squinted as I rounded the corner, fists ready.
They surged behind me, already at my back.
But the hall was fucking empty.
“Has everyone been eating shield weed?” Selena demanded. “Someone is playing tricks.”
“To my sun-damned detriment,” Leal muttered, a tongue roaming the sides of his teeth. “I swear it’s turning my piss green.”
Aren tsked. “Your piss was already green.”
“One time,” Leal hissed back. “One time, and you said you wouldn’t mention it again.”
“Shut up. Keep moving.” I wove down the hall, moving faster now.
At the spiral staircase at the base of my tower, we broke into a run, thundering up the steps.
The sound bounced and echoed against the glass, pounding against my ears.
I was panting by the time I reached the door to my quarters, my hand curling around the iron handle.
It didn’t budge.
I swore under my breath, a wave of perspiration kissing my skin with cold air. I turned to face them, huffing and gasping with breath. Hadrian coughed, pausing to sit on the nearest bench, clearing his throat. “You don’t have a key?”
“I do,” I said, glaring at the door. “Inside.”
“Well, that doesn’t help us, does it.” Aren stepped into my left, trying the door himself as if I might have been mistaken. Diara reached for the door behind her. Aitne’s little apartment, the one I’d once abandoned Maren to.
She tugged, but it may as well have been welded shut. “Is there anything that isn’t locked?”
Hadrian stood, clasping a hand against the servant’s door hidden in the wall.
It swung slowly under his weight. We stared for a moment, as if the dark staircase within held a trance we couldn’t escape from.
The lights along the stone wall extinguished, it descended into shadow, down to the servant’s quarters that ran the length of the palace.
As if the palace wanted us to descend below.
My skin raised behind my neck. That’s where Cebrinne had gone. Alone.
Selena was the first to break from the spell, rushing toward the stairs.
“Stay together!” Pheolix growled after her, fingers skimming the wall as he chased her steps. “Heiress!”
“Hurry,” she called back, the word rebounding a hundred times around us.
My gaze darted to Hadrian, who was still swallowing the salt in his throat away. My body screamed for me to move, but I refused to leave him behind. “You need a minute to breathe?”
“No,” he said, drawing a rasping pull of air. “Let’s go.”
Our steps cracked and roared again, a stampede against stone.
We dropped into sheer darkness and I had to slow, afraid to trip over Dimas.
As a child, I’d explored in the servant tunnels, ignoring the elderly maids as they chided at me for sneaking behind them when I hadn’t meant to, laughing at the younger ones in which I had.
Those memories barely served me in the dark now. I surged forward as fast as I dared, a newfound appreciation for Pheolix’s blindness. The rough rock rubbed my palms raw, but I held my hands against them anyway, as willing to let go now as I might be while holding the reins of an unbroken horse.
We delved past floor after floor, until the air became packed with damp mildew, alkaline and bitter on my tongue.
Cumbersome gusts of air overlapped as we heaved our lungs, my skin blotchy with the oppressive weight of body heat and sweat seeping from my pores.
I recognized the soft panting of Selena nearby, and something in me loosened. She hadn’t made it that far ahead.
As if waiting for the final pair of feet to touch the stone floor, Pheolix pushed himself ahead, leading us through the narrow hall. We hunted single-file for light or sound or anything but fucking shadows, my thumb latched into my belt for the ghost of a hilt that wasn’t even there.
A faint outline stirred, hints of light nestled between grooves of the ceiling. It curved around Pheolix’s shoulders, shifting between the strands of Selena’s hair. We tried every door we passed, but they all remained stuck tight, guiding us forward.
The drone prowled like a damn cat, low to the ground as if running at a crouch didn’t even faze his knees, his steps silent and precise.
I’d only ever seen him sit or stand, and if not weaving jokes at his own expense, quietly listening to the world, as if tucking every chirp and whistle and click away like details to paint together in his mind.
He slid along the wall now, one arm ahead, the other wrapped around Selena behind him, keeping her within reach. When I murmured, “There’s light ahead,” he stalled, and I could almost see the dilemma flickering through his thoughts.
If there were drones waiting somewhere for us in these quarters, Pheolix was the only one who truly knew how to fight them.
But the rest of us could see if anything darted out at us.
Two different brands of blindness warred behind his eyes. Selena studied him in silence, then pressed past him. He grabbed the lacing of her corset, dragging her back. “I know where she is,” Selena whispered, her voice frenzied and thin.
“So do I,” Pheolix answered, his fist entrenched in her ties like a barb laid into skin. Dimas swept past them, taking the lead, and once again we were moving, hunkered over each other like a fucking night-dwelling centipede.
Unlike the towers, no wind crept through cracks of windows and shutters this deep in the foundation of the palace, nothing to cool my skin as I moved, stacked between Diara and Leal.
I’d always hated how sound echoed down here.
Solid rock in every direction, resonance should have directed our breaths and voices back to us.
Instead, the servant’s quarters absorbed noise as if we were buried somewhere deep in space.
Ahead, a single door rested on its hinges, soft light from inside drenching the hall.
Diara glanced ahead at me, mint-green eyes round with worry.
Ano’s room.
I wished I could do what Maren could. Stretch my senses beyond walls, listen for heartbeats or voices or even the fucking groan of creaking wood as the palace shifted on its roots.
Instead, I searched the side of Selena’s face for clues, half smothered by the dark.
Her hands covered her mouth, frozen still until a guttering sob tumbled through the open door ahead.
Then, like a bird taking flight, she shot for the light.