Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The clicking of footsteps bounced off the cell walls. Alvara jolted upright. Without windows or sunlight, it was impossible to know how long she had been out.
A mixture of voices floated down the hall, and her muscles seized. They might be coming for her.
“Where is she?”
Her gut twisted itself into knots. Pyry. She had never wanted to be more wrong in her life, but there he was, struggling against his restraints, his face flushed.
He stumbled into the cell, eyes wide and body tense. “What’s going on? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. They think I’m involved in some movement with the humans. I’ve told them I don’t know anything—”
“We’ll see about that.” The guard escorting Pyry brandished a short sword, yanked his head back, and dug the metal into his neck.
Alvara’s stomach might as well have dropped out of her body. “Please, I don’t know what you want from me. There’s nothing to tell you. Don’t hurt him. He didn’t do anything wrong!”
The blade only sunk deeper, dyeing Pyry’s collar a deep red. “It’s quite simple. Tell King Einar what he wants to know, and I won’t carve your seluri into ribbons.”
Pins pricked at her eyes as she held back a gag.
“I don’t know anything!” The guard removed his sword, and she drew in a long breath.
Finally, someone willing to listen. “They have it all wrong—” She choked on her words as Pyry’s scream of agony tore through the cell.
The guard had forced him to his knees and begun slicing the blade down Pyry’s back, flaying both fabric and skin.
His blood gushed like the horrific river of Helvahem.
The world spun in a nauseating blur of crimson.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
Pyry collapsed to the ground. His strangled cries crushed the air from Alvara’s lungs, and her tears mingled with his precious lifeblood seeping over the stones. Any anger she held against him, any animosity, it drowned, bathed in his blood.
“Pyry.” Alvara stretched her chains as far as they could go, but it wasn’t enough. She could do nothing but watch him bleed.
Oh gods. Oh gods.
The guard wiped his short sword on Pyry’s mangled clothes and pulled a few hunks of stale bread from a pouch at his hip, tossing them to the ground. “I’ll be back. Tell us what you know. Or don’t, and he’ll lose something more precious than skin next time.”
His words gained no purchase in her dizzy mind. All she could see was Pyry. His back. His blood. She couldn’t reach him. She couldn’t do a godsdamned thing to help.
“Pyry?”
He grunted as he crawled to the nearest wall and leaned his shoulder against it. His clothes were soaked, his contorted face damp with sweat.
“I don’t—I don’t know what to do. I can ask a guard—”
“No.” He let out a sharp exhale and opened his blue eyes, foggy with pain.
“It’ll get infected. You’re losing too much blood. You could fade.” Her voice cracked, the weight of her terror snapping it in two.
He hung his head. “I wasn’t the best to you, Alva. I—”
“Stop.” It sounded too much like a goodbye. “We’ll find a way out of here.”
Alvara pinched her eyes shut and focused on steadying her breaths, even as her body trembled.
Pyry had been the center of her world once, someone who understood her in ways she had never experienced. The way they had parted would always taint those memories with bitterness, but she still couldn’t lose him. Not after everything she had already lost. Not like this, right in front of her.
She refused to add him to the list of souls she would meet in Levahem one day.
He was so pale.
Pyry’s chest rose and fell weakly, but he was still alive. The bleeding had slowed, but the metallic scent filled her nostrils, and her gut roiled. He needed healing, or he would fade.
Feet shuffled down the hallway, and her hands shook, rattling her chains. If the guard came back, she needed to think of something to tell him. She couldn’t watch as he stripped the life from Pyry piece by piece.
A drooping form with weathered gray hair entered the cell, carrying a bucket and mop in their scarred hands.
“He needs help. Please!” Whoever it was didn’t seem to have a weapon on them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here to hurt Pyry. Or Alvara.
“They sent me to clean cell. Guards no like mess.” The female exaggerated each consonant, her broken Elvish heavy with an unfamiliar accent. She dunked the mop in the bucket and pushed it through the gore as she spoke, the scrape of the mophead on the uneven floor setting Alvara’s teeth on edge.
“And what? You just do whatever they tell you to?”
The mop paused, and the female—no, woman—lifted her head and pulled back her hair, exposing her human ears. A raised white scar marred her wrinkled face and a cloudy eye that was clearly blind. “I have no choice.”
Alvara couldn’t bring herself to feel pity for this creature. Not when Pyry sat paces away, his skin growing colder with each minute that passed. “There is always a choice. And he’s going to fade if he doesn’t see a healer. You have to help him!”
The woman’s lips parted, but she said nothing. She looked down at her bucket and placed the soiled mop inside. “I go get fresh water.”
With that, she was gone. Godsdamned useless humans. Alvara buried her face in her hands and released a scream that should have reduced the dungeon to rubble.
She had already lost Eloisa and Mother. If she had to watch Pyry slip away too, no matter their past…No, she didn’t want to think about it. But tucked away in this dim corner of the palace, there was nothing she could do. She knew nothing of healing, even if she had been close enough to touch him.
Hinges squeaked, followed by the scuttling of the servant lugging a bucket behind her. She set it down and lifted her hands up, palms out. “I move him. That is all.”
“If you hurt him…” Alvara had nothing to back her threat. The woman could bludgeon him, and she could do nothing to stop her.
The servant wrapped her arms around Pyry’s chest and heaved him toward Alvara at a painstakingly slow pace. He didn’t so much as flutter an eyelid as the human leaned him next to her.
Pyry had to survive. He just had to. There was no other option.
The woman pressed a wet cloth into Alvara’s hand, tightening her fingers around Alvara’s palm for a brief moment before leaving the way she came.
Something poked Alvara through the dripping rag—a small needle and a spool of thread. It wouldn’t mend his injury for long, but she had to try. If she’d had even a trace of Elan healing magic, she could have done so much more.
She drew a shaky breath and began.
Pyry’s stillness during the grisly proceedings didn’t instill Alvara with much confidence, and she couldn’t even reach a sizable section of his wound because of her chains.
The stitches were lumpy and horribly uneven, but at least his skin was no longer split open to the foul things that lingered in the air.
She stared at her blood-soaked hands. The color. The gods-awful stench. None of it would ever leave her, even if she were given hours to scrub her skin raw.
The door opened, but Alvara didn’t even bother to look up. There were hardly worse things they could do. At least if they chose her as the next victim, she might lose consciousness for a few hours.
“Little time. I am Noma.”
“What?”
The servant stood before her again, except this time she had begun to remove her overgarments. How much ale had this woman had?
“Give me clothes.” Her apron landed beside Alvara.
“What?”
She muttered words in another language and freed Alvara’s hands with a key.
“How…”
“They ignore us. Think us stupid, weak. No care what we do, how we look. Stealing easy when they no care we exist.” Noma helped Alvara to her feet.
“Switch clothes. I stay. You leave. Keep head down. Ears covered.” She pointed to her head.
“Both have gray hair. Go up stairs, down hall, down staircase. There is door leads to servants’ hall.
Separate entrance to palace. You need help, find Ylva. Tall, long braid, green eyes.”
This woman…human was helping her escape.
Alvara willed her fingers to move despite her shock, shimmying out of her pants and tugging the servant’s dress, brown as mud, over her head.
Her hands stilled as the weight of Noma’s words pressed on her mind.
“You’ll fade. When they realize what you’ve done. ”
Noma smiled, but nothing about it was joyful.
“You remind me of daughter. Words you say, ‘There is always choice,’ she say them too. She always help others, put them first. Do right thing. I made choice to come here. Need help with daughter illness, but she gone now.” Her eyes roamed the cell around them.
“I have nothing left. Few years to live. You have life left, choices to make. Go and live. This she would want.”
Alvara’s bleak life seemed a pathetic trade for this woman’s, who had undoubtedly done nothing wrong to deserve her fate at the hands of the king. But Alvara had her father to think of. She would go.
“Pyry.” Her fingers brushed sticky strands of hair from his ashen face. “I can’t leave him here.”
“You stay, they heal him. Hurt him. Heal him. End always same. You both die. This is only chance.”
“Die,” Alvara whispered the word to herself. It sounded familiar, like something she had heard in one of her father’s stories.
Noma rubbed her temple. “Fade. He fades. You fade. We all fade. Stupid elves.”
Right. Humans had always been mortal. Unlike Alvara’s ancestors in the distant past, who had chosen to fade when an endless lifespan became too boring.
And yet here Pyry’s lifeblood was dripping onto the stones, and Noma wanted her to leave him.
But it was also the only possible way Alvara could find help.
“Why are you bothering to help me?” She couldn’t stop herself from asking as she chained her rescuer to the wall and tucked the key into her apron pocket.
The woman’s eyes settled on Pyry. “We all bleed same.”
Alvara absorbed her words for a single breath before she hunched her shoulders, tugged her hair over her ears, and snuck out of the cell with the wretched bucket at her side.
The guards paid her no mind as she hobbled down the hall, her hand clutching the handle so tightly her fingers screamed from the pressure.
Up the stairs. Down the hall. Down the stairs. Step by step, Alvara ascended into the palace at a relaxed pace despite her rushing pulse. She couldn’t appear to be in any kind of hurry without raising questions. She needed to look broken.
She focused on putting one foot in front of the other, only looking up to confirm her course, until the door that led to her freedom stood before her. Her fingers trembled so fiercely she had to discard the bucket to avoid spilling it all over the spotless floor.
One tug, and she stepped into the crisp air with a quick glance over her shoulder. No one had followed her. She had done it.
“Alvara?”
She cursed and lurched backward, her hand skimming her dress for a dagger that wasn’t there.
“We’re here to help.” A petite elf with dark brown skin bowed her head of tight raven-black plaits. A Valonian.
We? There was no one else around, except a pile of three crumpled guards next to the door. Who was she, and why had she incapacitated the men standing watch? “What do you want?”
The Valonian elf’s honey-colored eyes flitted to a small gray and white falcon alit in a barren tree. “We were ordered to rescue you, but it seems that was taken care of.”
That made the situation about as clear as a pile of sludge. “Who are you?”
“You’re Eloisa’s sister.”
“Yes, but—”
“This is for her. We have to leave.” The female turned away, but Alvara stood firm. Whatever was happening, she wasn’t ready to go without at least trying to bring Pyry to safety.
“I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’m not leaving Pyry to fade.”
The Valonian elf tipped her face back to the sky and cursed, beckoning to the falcon, who shifted into a hazel-eyed elf with lavender-ringed pupils.
An odd combination if Alvara had anything to say about it.
The new elf tilted her head, and her long, dark curls brushed against her freckled light brown skin. “What’s wrong now, Aurilena?”
Aurilena jabbed a finger in Alvara’s direction. “She wants to rescue someone else from the palace. But we need to leave now, before they notice anything wrong.”
If they wanted to flee, they could, but Alvara would never forgive herself for stranding Pyry. “I’m not leaving. He’s hurt. He needs to see a healer immediately or…” The words faded in her throat. She didn’t want to consider the alternative.
“Of course we’ll help!” The shifter cocked an eyebrow at Aurilena, who grimaced.
“Fine, Kat.”
Kat clapped her hands. “Let’s save your sweetheart.”
“He’s not my—oh, never mind.” Alvara would pretend Pyry was anything he needed to be if it meant bringing him home to Dalvi.
“Is he able to walk?” Aurilena peered around Alvara, eyeing the servants’ door.
“Not without help. He’s lost too much blood.”
Aurilena shook her head. “It will draw too much attention. The plan relies on unique, full-body illusions for all three of us, which already stretches my magic to its limits at its weakest time of year. To add another, let alone someone who can’t walk on their own and will only slow us down? It can’t be done. Not without help.”
Help. Noma, the human who had helped Alvara. Maybe she would be willing to play a part. “I have an idea.”
Alvara silently asked Vitharen for strength and hoped she wasn’t completely insane.