13. Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
M arina leads me to a small gate at the back of the courtyard, hidden behind one of the glimmering trees. Together, we walk down a small path that winds between the main keep. Everything is still but for the sound of our footsteps on the dew-slick cobblestone and the distant crash of the surf against the cliffs. Letum is always dark, but I’ve begun to notice there are shades to the darkness depending on the time. Right now is the deepest sort, a black velvet shroud blanketed across the kingdom.
We walk in a stilted hush, like the world around us holds its breath. And as we step out from the cover of the Lunaedon and out onto the palace grounds, it feels as if it’s frozen entirely. Marina leads me in the opposite direction of the gates to an outbuilding. Though much smaller than the castle itself, it is crafted of the same obsidian stone and identical intricate details. Marina marches up to one of the many arched doorways neatly lining the front of the building and presses her hand to the spiral carvings.
The door vanishes, revealing a horseless carriage identical to the one we’d taken to the city. It’s gilded exterior gleams in the soft lantern light, the eyes of the skulls carved into the front glowing eerily in the darkness. Marina’s gaze darts around warily as she ushers me forward.
Digging my heels into the ground, I spin, meeting her eyes in the shadows. “Come with me.”
Though my voice is pleading, it isn’t hopeful. Even so, my heart drops as her delicate mouth thins into a line, and she gives one curt shake of her head, before gesturing again for me to climb into the carriage.
“Please, Marina,” I implore. The scars on her back are imprinted behind my eyelids, a permanent reminder of the cruelty carved into her skin. When the king finds out she helped me escape, he’ll be furious at having lost his prize. I can’t leave her here to be brutalized. “We can go somewhere he’ll never find us.”
Marina laughs softly and shakes her head again, as if the very idea of escaping the king is ridiculous. What she doesn’t understand is I’ve been disappearing my entire life—shedding my skin and becoming something new before anyone realizes I’m gone. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know the geography of Letum. Fading into the night is second nature, now more of a base instinct than a decision. I can keep both of us from being caught.
“You don’t have to stay here—you don’t have to stay where you were hurt, Marina. You can be safe.” Even as I speak, I wonder at the truth of it. I can’t remember the last time I felt safe, not without Sam’s power manipulating me into feeling so. Falling through realms hasn’t changed that facet of my existence: nowhere is safe for someone with secrets like mine.
Marina hands me a lantern, then points to the ground and signs. Then she points to the forest surrounding the palace grounds and makes the same sign she made in the castle when we spoke of the Strayed. Her meaning is clear. Here, safe. There, not safe.
She’d rather stay with the man who stole her wings and her voice, than take her chances on the outside world. I don’t know whether to be furious or horribly sad. Taking a leveling breath, I try one more time. Then you’ll leave. Just like you always do.
“He isn’t safe, Marina—he…he hurts people. He murdered Jamie in cold blood. He’s stolen your wings and your voice. Someone safe doesn’t do those things. Please…just come with me.”
Marina’s expression shutters, her gaze melding into steel, and her mouth turning down in disproval. Despite everything he’s done, she doesn’t like when I insult Niko. It’s this, more than anything, that pushes me to get into the carriage without more protest.
She’s been trapped here with him for too long, and I don’t have time to unravel the manipulation and deceit. Not if I want to keep myself from being trapped here, too.
Marina watches stoically as I climb into the carriage. She makes a motion for speaking and then gestures to the carriage, which I understand to mean tell it where you want to go. Then she closes the door.
“Away,” I tell the carriage, a furious mixture of relief and regret raging in the pit of my stomach. It doesn’t matter where my final destination is, as I’ll need to ditch the carriage long before then anyway. I don’t want the king tracking my location with it.
Settling onto the satin seat, I try to breathe through the panic climbing my throat as the carriage lurches forward. As Marina steps back to allow my retreat, her face still twisted in the same vague frown. You’re leaving her to her death, just like you always do. You left Celie. You left Zenni. You left them all.
Selfish to the very core.
Guilt wrenches my stomach and shame barrels down my throat, making it suddenly hard to swallow. For a wild moment, I consider screaming at the carriage to stop. Consider turning back to drag Marina inside, even if I have to knock her out and tie her up. To do anything but what I always do—run.
But in the same breath where my guilt lives, so does memory. Of my blood dripping onto concrete floors. Of the burn of acid on my skin. The cold sting of a scalpel. The raw ache of my throat, ragged and raw with my unending screams.
I lean back into the seat, curling up the softer parts of me—the parts that existed before those memories—and shoving them into the recesses of my soul. I won’t be sacrificed on someone else’s altar again.
Marina is on her own.
As the carriage rolls smoothly over the palace grounds, I half expect the entire Lunaedon to come alive. For the ground to rise up and ensnare the wheels, trapping me irrevocably inside it. But we pass through the gates without incident. There's no sign of the Carrion King’s haunting face, nor his malevolent power.
I lean into the seat, the soft fabric soothing beneath my palms. My breathing evens and the Lunaedon grows smaller on the horizon, before disappearing from view entirely as the carriage travels deeper into the forest.
I debate whether I should head to the city and find a place to hide there while I figure out my options of returning home. People think the best way to disappear is somewhere remote, but they’re wrong. New things stand out too much in rural areas; it’s better to go somewhere bustling, where they’re used to ignoring things on a daily basis.
But based on what I’d overheard at the Pixie’s Hollow, the king has plenty of eyes in the city. I have no way of knowing how far they stretch.
I consider finding Adira, but the idea dies before its even fully formed—I don’t know where she lives. And though she says she has no loyalty to the king, she also has no loyalty to me, which means she could just as easily sell me back to Niko if the circumstances were favorable.
Which leaves me one choice. Retracing my steps and trying to find the way back to my world the way I came.
The lagoon.
“Stop.” At my command, the carriage halts so abruptly, I nearly tumble face first into the doorway. Hastily righting myself with a huff, I shove the door open and climb down the steps.
The forest buzzes around me, the sound so much more alive than the Lunaedon grounds. The hushed rustle of leaves, the warble of birds, the whir of insect wings—it all fills my ears, and I immediately feel calmer despite the clear oddities. It should be near impossible to see at this hour, but overhead, thousands of tiny lights flit between the branches. Some float lazily in groups, while others zip from tree to tree, illuminating the canopy.
And they aren’t the only light source. Moss glows on the trunks of the trees, an iridescent blue reminiscent of the color splashed across the night sky. Flowering vines crawl over the forest floor, their small blooms shimmering cheerfully, as if twinkling in answer to the floating lights above.
The earth is spongy beneath my feet, the dampness soaking through my silk slippers after only a few minutes. I scowl and yank them off, hurtling them at the nearest tree with far too much relish. Going barefoot isn’t ideal, but neither is getting a blister from those stupid shoes.
I leave the carriage behind, ducking off the small forest path. I’d been bound and blinded when I was taken from the beach, so I can’t be sure I’m heading in the right direction, but the lagoon was visible from the Lunaedon windows. It can’t be far.
The walk is arduous, my progress hindered by the thick undergrowth carpeting the forest floor, but with each step, my fear ebbs a bit more—and this time, it has nothing to do with Sam’s magic. I hadn’t realized how deeply being restricted to the castle had burrowed into me, twisting me bit by bit into the animal I’d become all those years ago in the Amelioration camps. As I move deeper into the wood, my muscles unfreeze, and my lungs expand in my chest without limitation.
You’re not caged. You’re free.
I repeat it to myself until I believe it, purposefully shoving away images of why my freedom matters so much. Of why I’m so willing to sacrifice everyone else to keep it.
Instead of ruminating any further, I focus on moving forward without disturbing any of the forest life. If my short time in Letum has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is entirely harmless here, despite its inherent beauty.
I can tell I’m getting closer to the beach when the beautiful flowers I’d seen on my first night begin to appear in the depths of the shadows. Electric blues and violets so vibrant, their glow is as pervasive as the stars above. Yellows and oranges so creamy and lush, their spread petals shine like rays of sun. A pang of regret echoes through me that I have to leave Letum so soon. If it weren’t for the king, I’d stay a little longer, if only to enjoy the dark beauty of the kingdom.
To try and imprint it permanently to memory before I go back to a world devoid of anything artful.
The king’s words drift through my mind. Our worlds are more intertwined than you realize. A death of imagination.
And you, Willa Darling…you’re going to save them both.
The Corpse King may be right about the cause of the plague, but he’s wrong about who’s capable of saving our worlds, no matter how fiercely he believes it to be true. I failed long before I ever stumbled into Letum, and a random connection to some fairy tale isn’t going to change that.
The flowers grow thicker around my calves, and I move faster, certain I’m getting close to the beach, when a scream rents through the night and halts me in place. The skin on the back of my neck prickles as another pierces the pleasant hum of the forest, this one seeming to circle around my head and burrow in my ears. The call is harrowing but melodic, the sound of it burying a leash beneath my ribs and yanking me toward it.
Help.
The next scream slams against my spine, sending me tumbling forward through the underbrush. Low lying branches sting my cheeks as the desperate cries wind around my heart, pulling me toward the edge of the forest. The lagoon’s starry water had been still when I stood here with Jamie, but now, it rages. Giant waves crash against the black sand, the water churning and frothing like it’s been pulled by the same desperate sounds I have.
Dreaded understanding settles in the pit of my stomach as I peer between the trees. A siren lays sprawled on the sand only a few feet from the tree line, her once beautiful hair now matted with blood, spread around her head like a grotesque halo. Naked from the waist up, hideous gashes of varying depths litter her chest and stomach. So many, it’s impossible to know the original color of her skin as now, it’s a deep crimson, stained by her own blood.
Parts of her abdomen and arms have been pierced through with fishing hooks, their rusted metal pulling her skin in unnaturally taut angles. Nausea and sorrow barrel up my throat at the condition of her tail. It must have been beautiful once, but now, it’s raw and bleeding. Thousands of scales litter the sand beside her, their prismatic color still reflecting the stars above, as the siren’s keening sobs echo through the night.
More horrific than even the state of her, is the raucous scene carrying on around her brutalized body.
At least twenty children scamper in circles, their screams of delight clashing with her screams of terror. A large bonfire burns off to the side, its smoke curling up into the night sky, as a few of the children chase each other near the flames. Others pluck up the siren’s scales and plaster them to their cheeks with taunting laughter. Some run their fingers through her blood, wiping it across their foreheads like gruesome war paint. A girl, who appears to be no more than seven, her cherubic cheeks flushed with pleasure, tosses sand into the siren’s wounds, while two boys near eighteen tug at her hair, yanking her ever closer to the fire.
As horrifying as the depravity is, it isn’t what floods my mouth with bile; isn’t what chills me to the marrow of my bones. It’s their laughter.
Cackling, hollow, insane .
The sound rattles painfully against my ears, turning my veins to ice. I thought the king’s eyes were the worst abyss of madness I’d ever see, but the children’s laughter is far worse. Deeper. Maniacal.
There is nothing light, nothing good. Only unending black.
How could something so pure become so malevolently twisted?
The siren screams again, the heartbreaking lament bringing tears to my eyes. The children only laugh harder, the sound so discordant with her misery that I finally realize who they are.
The Strayed.
I trap the scream building in my throat behind my lips and begin to back away, my mind racing with everything I’ve been told of them. Adira warned me that the King of Carrion was not the worst monster in Letum, and now, I see the stark truth of her words. As horrible as Niko is, there is reason in his violence. Everything he’s done has been in service of a clear goal: keeping me.
But this —this is brutality for the sake of it.
Adira’s other warning races through me as one of the children digs a small knife into the siren’s eye. It’s better to be dead than be captured by a Strayed.
I duck silently back into the shadows, pulling the gladius from where it hangs at my hip. Terror pulses through me, its sickly film miring my limbs with heaviness as I turn back the way I came and run.
Sticks and stones tear at the bottoms of my feet, but I don’t dare slow as the siren’s keening call grows fainter. Though I’m nearly silent as I race toward where I left the carriage, I don’t make it more than a few yards before something wraps around both my ankles and jerks me to the ground.
I scramble at the dirt, pulling frantically at the rope that’s snared me like an animal. But it’s no use, as at least ten pairs of gleaming eyes appear from the depths of the trees.
A boy steps forward from the shadows. He appears to be the oldest of the group, maybe somewhere near nineteen. Tall and lean, his face is handsome and youthful, his black hair tumbling over his forehead mischievously as he saunters toward me. He wears only a torn pair of pants, leaving his feet and chest both bare, but for various belts crossed over his body, each one laden with a multitude of weapons. A shudder of dread ripples through my chest when he smiles. It isn’t kind like Sam’s or even arrogant like the king’s: it’s manic. Rotten.
But even the depthless evil of his smile doesn’t scare me as much as his first words. With a wild glint in his eyes, he says, “So nice of you to finally join us, Willa Darling. We’ve been waiting ages. ”