Chapter 39
The grates over the openings of the castle sewers that spewed filth into the Canus River were rusted with age.
The air smelt damp and unclean, and it took everything in Arla not to gag at the colour and odour of the water flowing through the grates, which acted like filters, catching bits of muck and filth.
‘Told you it ain’t pretty,’ Brik muttered as his quick hands ran across the railings, searching for a way in.
Arla had never forgotten the time she’d watched Brik open the grates and disappear into the foul sewers.
It was two years after the storming of Hadalyn, and she’d had no idea why he wanted to sneak into the palace via such a revolting entrance.
She’d been eleven and thoroughly furious with her tutor for making her read some strange language when she wanted to be running laps of the castle grounds with the soldiers, and she’d taken herself off to sit on a window ledge that looked out over the river.
She had seen him then – a mere slip of a teenager – pry open the iron grates and scurry inside. She hadn’t understood it back then, but Brik had always been a thief and she had assumed he’d been after a silver goblet or a fork from the kitchens, which lay on the lower levels of the palace.
She’d listened out for talk about the sewers being a route into the palace and had heard a few rumours, but they had been exactly that – rumours.
There was no access into the castle via the sewers, only tiny grates opening into tiny tunnels barely wider than a body.
Arla herself had tried. Numerous times. She’d held her nose and spent hours searching for a way into the castle but all she’d achieved was wasted days and a scolding from her maids about the foul state of her clothes and hair.
She shuddered at the memory, concentrating on Brik’s nimble fingers and the latch with which he was fiddling.
The iron creaked open, and then they were inside the tunnels and it was exactly as she remembered: the bottom four inches of liquid and filth saw her feet and ankles ploughing through a thick sludge that had her almost retching.
‘Be careful. There’s a tunnel on the right that drops thirty feet. Nearly died last time I came in ’ere,’ Brik said, pulling closed the grate behind Arla. He described again the route she must take to find the way in she’d never managed to discover when she was a child.
‘Thank you, Brik,’ she said in the semi-darkness, suddenly feeling sick at what she was about to do.
‘No one ever understood why I spared you but … I’m glad I did.
You were worth saving.’ She saw his face soften, and for a few fleeting seconds she was looking at the face of the boy he had once been instead of the man he had been forced into becoming.
‘Thieves look out for thieves, Miss Reinhart.’ He winked at her, a sad smile growing steadily across his features, as if he knew he wouldn’t see her again.
‘Maybe,’ she whispered, watching him turn and begin the long walk back up to Grey Hill.
‘Brik!’ she called, her heart clenching as he spun to face her. ‘Leave Hadalyn. Go to the continent where it’s safe. They’ll look after you. You could have a new life, get a job—’
‘Be safe, Arla.’
His final words to her as he dragged his too-thin body back towards the town.
* * *
She had counted twelve openings, never straying from her course or her purpose. Lucky number thirteen, Brik had said. As if. She turned into it, easing her body into the sludge as she crawled through the maze of tunnels that lay beneath Castle Grey.
Onwards. Always onwards.
To the legend and myth she had doubted all her life. To the dragons and their magic that she could no longer deny.
She hoped she didn’t end up dead.
Her tunnel began to dry up, until she was free of the foul stench entirely.
She could breathe again, yet she reached into her pocket to rub the dragonhart brooch for comfort.
Touching it, she felt an increasingly familiar call to something ancient and powerful that seemed to linger in the back of her mind.
She kept going, looking around her for …
some sign to tell her where to go next. Behind the column of rock, Brik had said.
She ran her fingers along the wall afraid she would miss it in the darkness, but then suddenly there it was – the hidden grate.
A creeping sensation trickled down Arla’s spine. She felt watched. She felt opened up, laid bare, as if she were at the mercy of something greater than her.
When she turned to look about her, she saw nothing. She held still for a second, two, three, but all she could hear was the beating of her heart in her ears. She was alone in the darkness.
She found the latch of the grate with her fingers, and was able to open it too easily for what should have been rusted metal embedded in rock, untouched for so many years. Bile rose in her throat as she contemplated the bottomless void into which she now had to climb.
‘Come on, come on, come on,’ she whispered to herself, as she crawled into that tiny space and felt the tunnel walls scratch at her body.
This wasn’t a fight she could tackle with knives, or wit, or finely curated aggression. This was a battle she had to fight in her own mind, just her and the darkness, and the years of nightmares filled with blood and screaming.
Arla dragged her stomach across the stone, gritting her teeth against the heavy press of thousands of feet of age-old stone. She pulled the grate closed behind her and crawled on.
Forwards. Forwards. Forwards she dragged herself along the tunnel, ignoring the quiver in her lip and the fear in her heart.
The air was cool down here – just like it had been all those years ago when she’d escaped her minders and wandered the corridors and hallways beneath the populated parts of the castle.
A horrible, squeaky sound escaped her as the walls of the tunnel scraped her arms, tearing at the thin black tunic she wore. Was it getting narrower? Arla bit her lip, resisting the urge to cry out as she tried to scramble backwards in panic and found that she couldn’t.
Her chest heaved and the walls pressed in. Stars bloomed behind her eyes and her heart pounded in her chest.
Gods, oh gods!
Get a grip, Reinhart.
She choked on the breath in her throat and repeated the words her father had once said the first time she had sat on a horse.
You can do anything.
She pulled herself forwards, loose stones rolling away from under her palms.
You can do anything.
In and out her breaths came, through her nose this time, and with each inhale she crept forwards along that tunnel, towards what she knew must lie ahead; towards what she knew she had almost discovered all those years ago.
You can do anything.
A pinprick of light appeared ahead, growing as she edged closer, a soft glow that began to light her way as she pulled herself along on her stomach.
An odd smell reached her that was also strangely familiar – a sulphurous scent that had piqued her curiosity nine years ago in the corridors beyond the dungeons of Castle Grey.
Arla didn’t know how many minutes passed as she crawled through the darkness, the spot of light a reward for her perseverance and self-control.
Eventually, the tunnel came to an end at a sharp edge of rock with a ten-foot drop, past which was a labyrinth of cavernous chambers and tunnels so enormous she could not imagine how Castle Grey was not swallowed by them.
The open space was a salve to her trembling heart – the downright fear that had almost consumed her in that tight space still hammered at the edges of her consciousness.
It was quickly smothered by a new fear, one she had never once had to deal with because she’d never once thought it a possibility.
But she would do this. She would do it for the people Kastonia was enslaving.
She would do it for the people of Hadalyn who’d had their lives destroyed.
She would do it for Hark, who had captured her attention in ways she didn’t dare begin unpicking.
She would do it for Halos, her grandmother and her ancestors before her who had been slaves under the old regime.
She would do this, and she would do it scared.
She dropped off the edge of the ledge, wincing at the pain in her ankle as she took one step into the strangely lit chamber.
Torches adorned the walls so high up that they couldn’t have been lit by any human.
Arla passed under a stone arch – an arch that had been perfectly carved and assembled by skilled craftsman, the gods knew how long ago – and her eyes settled on a thing of legend.
It took everything in her not to scream.
The dragon was a magnificent, hulking beast of iridescent scales in such a pale silver they looked almost translucent in the soft light.
The creature was easily the size of three full-grown stallions, its tail twice as long again.
The dragon did indeed slumber beneath Castle Grey, exactly as legend had it, not yet alerted to the presence of the young assassin and her fire-filled heart.
Arla wondered in disbelief if everything she had been told really was true – that the dragons truly slept so deeply not even the gods could wake them. If that were true, she had no chance of managing it.
She crept forwards, her steps soundless and light, the way she had been practising for years.
Her fingers twitched, aching to reach out and touch the layers and layers of scales so intricately designed and interlocking, like personal armour, decorating the dragon’s body.
She lifted her hand slowly, gliding her fingertips softly over the hardened plates.
It was so … smooth, and warm. Entirely the opposite to what she had imagined upon seeing the giant frame of the beast, her own body seemed so insignificant in comparison.
‘It has been a while, Arla Reinhart. I was beginning to wonder if you had forgotten us entirely.’
She snatched her hand away, clutching it to her chest as she leapt back from the rumbling mass before her.
Its voice was both inside her head and also echoing around the vast chamber that surrounded them.
The dragon turned its head, and its eyes …
gods, its eyes were like nothing she had ever seen before.
They swirled like mist, like spun moonlight, like something magical, powerful, and ancient.
Words stuck in her throat, a lifetime of wonder and astonishment lodging them there.
‘Or perhaps, you did not think of us at all?’ the dragon rumbled, its voice soothing and deep.
‘I—’
‘You did not doubt for one second that I would be here, did you, Arla Reinhart?’
No, she hadn’t. The second she accepted that magic was real, she had known the dragons were, too. She had known that they did indeed sleep beneath the palace, and that she had been a hairsbreadth from finding them all those years ago.
‘How has no one else found you?’ she whispered, easing forwards on her toes to close the distance she had somehow formed between them. ‘The Kastonians stormed Hadalyn. They searched the tunnels. I just walked right in here…’
‘Your stories are true. We sleep too deeply to be woken. There is a special sort of magic that guards us. A magic granted to us only by those we serve,’ the dragon said, its voice everywhere and nowhere all at once.
‘Gods, magic,’ she said on a breath, recalling the teachings drilled into her as a child.
Her parents had never cared much for it – perhaps that was where her own scepticism came from – but at school, in pretty sandstone buildings close to the palace, Arla and her classmates had been lectured with teachings of the gods and their magic.
And then her parents died and she never entered those classrooms again.
Once she’d been taken under the protection of the king, Perry had arranged for her to have private tutors and she had vehemently protested against the teaching of anything to do with magic.
If the gods were real, they hadn’t deemed her parents worthy of life.
She’d be damned if she’d worship them for even one second.
But those lessons she’d had before her parents died, when she was very young, they were suddenly so important. There had truly been gods that walked the earth, their dragons, too, and all of it came flooding back; an avalanche of knowledge she had packed away and never examined.
‘We cannot be found by those who wish to use our strength. But for you, Arla Reinhart, for you who has crossed mountains to save the people, to save the kingdoms, we may just lower the veil.’
She usually hated cryptic shit, but she was so transfixed by the sheer realness of it all that she took in every word.
‘I know what to do, but I can’t do it alone,’ she said softly, edging closer to the dragon.
‘Ah yes, the Kastonian … boy.’ The dragon tilted its head slightly.
‘Hark, is he … alive?’ she voiced the words that had haunted her every moment since she had woken under the scrutiny of Kase. She hadn’t dared speak them into existence; hadn’t dared think too hard about what that meant.
‘He is alive, Arla Reinhart. Unlike so many of those who carry blood magic. How many more will King Elrod march to their deaths?’
‘None.’ Not one more.
‘I suspected you would carry a fierce heart when the gods first spoke their prophecy, though it would have been a first for one of your kind to be meek.’
She didn’t understand. Her mouth was suddenly too dry. ‘What prophecy? The gods spoke of … me?’
‘The gods have always spoken of those whom they have chosen to stand beside their dragons. Dragonharts, they are known as. Those who are blessed to be bonded to me and my kin, to protect any who have magic in their blood. Dragonharts were once worshipped like gods themselves – you have seen the symbols, worn in one fashion or another by the most devout. Some would set your importance higher than a king, Arla Reinhart.’
A wave of nausea swept through her, her fingers trembling uncontrollably as she reached into her pocket for the golden brooch.
Dragonhart.
She’d never cared about what the word meant before, but … they couldn’t be speaking of her, could they?
To be more important than a king…
The dragon closed its eyes, a sigh heaving from its chest. When it opened them again, the jet-black of its pupils bore into her, the shimmer of its irises forgotten against the intensity of the dragon’s gaze.
‘You haven’t changed, Arla Reinhart.’
‘I’ve never met you before,’ she whispered, remembering the darkness and strange scent of that tunnel in Castle Grey nine years ago.
‘I saw your heart back then, and I see it now. It beats for the people. For Hadalyn. For those who cannot save themselves.’
Tears pricked at her eyes, and she blinked them away. She had vowed never to let it happen again but here she was, breaking it.
‘I see you … Arla Dragonhart.’