Chapter 9
The morning came too soon, as did her next combat lesson.
Ksenia walked into the sparring hall hollow-eyed and found it had transformed overnight.
The mirrored panels on the wall had been swung out on oiled hinges, creating a labyrinth of reflective surfaces that multiplied the space into infinite corridors.
Ksenia stood in the center of the hall with a death grip on Caromir. Everywhere she looked, her likeness stared back. Not just one reflection, but dozens—hundreds—the edges blurring together until she couldn’t tell where one pane ended and the other began.
It harkened her back to the nightmare—watching herself fragmented into dozens of versions—except this was real. Ksenia blinked hard, trying to anchor herself.
This was the sparring hall. Real mirrors, not dream mirrors.
A reflection shifted.
Varka’s blade came in high and fast. Ksenia caught it crosswise—
KLANG!
The clash of steel on steel rang out and echoed back, bouncing off the hard, mirrored surfaces.
She stumbled, and suddenly a dozen Varkas were advancing, a dozen Ksenias retreating.
Varka’s blade came from the left—no, the right—and Ksenia twisted, parrying on instinct. The blow of their weapons radiated painfully up Ksenia’s elbow and into her shoulders.
“Use your other senses if one is lying,” Varka said, her voice bouncing between the mirrors as she disappeared.
Ksenia had become unsure of what to trust. Vornaya’s intrusive hallucinations were becoming commonplace.
Her body was battered and worn from restless sleep, and she found herself preferring to stay awake rather than be stuck in dream paralysis with Vornaya reminding her of the pact.
Behind her, another strike.
Ksenia pivoted and blocked, but only just. Varka’s arm swung from different angles, but she couldn’t tell which strike was coming until the blade was already close.
Her back hit the cold glass as she forced herself to listen.
Footfall—nearing from her right.
Ksenia spun, blade ready, but found only her reflection staring back. Wild-eyed and panting.
Varka appeared, real and solid, her blade driving toward her ribs.
Ksenia dropped into a crouch and lunged forward with her own jab. Their blades met with a satisfying resistance.
The dance continued—thrust, parry, retreat.
Suddenly, Varka slammed the pommel of her blade into a pane. The mirror shattered, and a cascade of glass followed the crack, splitting the air. Ksenia threw up her arm as the shards rained down, slicing across her forearm and over her cheek.
Through the mayhem, Varka’s blade glanced Ksenia’s shoulder, heat and pain blossoming from the contact.
If Varka wasn’t precious about the mirrors, then neither would she be.
Glass exploded, glittering and deadly, as Ksenia broke them with wild abandon, putting distance between her and the noblewoman. Ksenia backed out of the sparring hall as Varka nimbly leaped and navigated the deadly and slippery obstacle.
Ksenia didn’t wait for her to catch up. She turned and ran into the foyer before sprinting for the corridor that lay behind the grand staircase.
“Running is smart—make it count.”
The soles of Ksenia’s borrowed leather boots slapped against the marble, announcing her position with every step.
She flew around a corner and nearly tripped over a hair-thin wire, leaping over it at the last second. Varka’s low chuckle came behind her.
“Good.”
Her next step sank with a soft click.
Shit.
She froze.
A whistling sound filled the air, and a sandbag swung from the ceiling, heaving and arcing through the corridor like pendulums. The nearest one missed her head by inches, and as she fell forward, its companion caught her shoulder, sending her sprawling to the cold marble floor.
“Get up,” Varka called from the doorway, watching Ksenia scramble.
The tip of her blade slammed into the floor, an inch away from Ksenia’s temple, and she screamed as she rolled beneath a sandbag and came up running.
There was a pattern with the bags, and if she timed it right—
She darted between the gaps and burst out of the far door.
The scent of old books and parchment made her nose scrunch: the library.
She tossed a glance over her shoulder. Varka’s footsteps were sure and even, those eagle eyes trained on her as she took a straight path through the gauntlet without breaking a sweat.
Ksenia’s mind raced. She couldn’t outrun Varka forever; this was her house, and she knew every trap, every shortcut.
Shortcut.
There had been a peephole within the library, and if she could find that, she’d be able to hide in the passageways.
The library stretched before her in the dim light of scattered oil lamps.
She ducked behind one of the bookshelves, peering in the space between the tomes and scrolls, looking at the walls for anything familiar to orient herself.
She spotted an arched alcove, tucked between two towering shelves. Within it, a portrait of a scholar, his eyes focused on Ksenia with such intensity that he looked whole and real in the space.
Beneath it, a runner rug featured pomegranates, flowering vines, and birds tucked between the branches—she had seen that before.
She darted across to the alcove and pried her fingers under the gilt frame.
Behind her, shadows pulled in and out as Varka passed between the lamps.
The edge clicked open softly, and Ksenia tucked herself into the musty passageway, closing the portrait door behind her.
She backed into the space before allowing herself to suck in a full breath. Motes of dust rose from the ground beneath her feet.
A flaxen wisp of hair drifted past her periphery.
Ksenia spun on her heel, catching sight of a slip of powder blue fabric disappearing down a staircase.
It led in a direction Ksenia had never explored—away from the manor, downward, deeper into the earth.
“Danika—” Her breath stuttered. Here—this whole time?
The stairs turned uneven, hand-cut. Older than Beranek Manor. Ksenia’s palm dragged along the damp stone for balance and came away gritty.
Somewhere above her, the muffled creak of Varka’s footsteps crossed the library. They grew softer as Ksenia descended further.
She turned the corner and there—another flash of blonde hair. Ksenia had finally found her.
She sped in pursuit of the disappearing figure, fumbling for the match and wax taper in her pocket.
Fsssssssht. It struggled to spark on the damp walls.
She was falling behind.
“Niks—wait. Please, it’s me.”
But there was no answer except her own panicked and echoing voice. She lifted the candle, then dipped and darted through narrow crooks and crannies as the passageway took her deeper underground.
The air changed, no longer the dry mustiness of the manor’s hidden spaces but something earthier and decayed.
The walls were changing. Rough-hewn stone gave way to something older and ruined. A passage that had been here before Kraal ever existed.
And just out of sight, Danika’s presence taunted her forward.
“Niks—stop, just stop!”
The flame flickered toward her.
Airflow.
There was something ahead.
After a long while forward with only her shuddering breath for companion, the passageway opened into a wider space, and she stumbled to a stop.
She found herself in the dark underbelly of the Vein beneath Rothaven.
Ksenia walked slowly, bewildered, down the catacomb hall past a landscape of dealers, their clients, and wares, searching for that shade of blonde hair.
The Vein was a disease, yet it remained the lifeblood of Kraal.
To be rid of it was to bleed the body dry.
Even in the most affluent circles of Kraalian society, there was a need for services and products that only the black market could provide.
She continued wandering between makeshift wooden stalls hawking fragrant herbs, medicines, and illicit drugs.
Contraceptives made of red thorn nectar and painkillers made from a mountainous thistle were amongst the more innocuous offerings.
Her gaze snagged on blonde hair.
Ksenia pushed through the crowd, fighting to keep Danika in sight. She slipped between stalls, never quite close enough to reach yet never disappearing entirely.
The crowd thinned, the stalls sparser and shabbier as Ksenia pursued her sister into narrower alleyways, tapering like fine capillaries. Overhead, oil lanterns became far and few between.
A hum rang through her, faint and low.
She crossed over an iron threshold, set flush into the stone floor—the entrance to a bondsmith’s ruined forge. The bound metal still singing after all these decades.
She pivoted, hitting another one a few paces later, a different pitch entirely.
Her eyes snagged on old maker’s marks lining the doorframes. Family symbols, Damascus fold counts, some scratched away or covered with whitewash.
Then, her teeth ached.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
A discordant needle to her skull. A hellbound blade tapping against stone somewhere ahead.
A man leaned against a narrow junction, all tendon and sinew, his hair roughly shorn, a scar running along the side of his head.
His finger twitched on a wicked, curved butcher blade. Every few seconds, he tapped it against a stone on the floor beside him. His eyes drifted lazily across the crowd.
A boy passed him, no older than ten, with dirty clothes and tattered shoes.
Tink.
The boy flinched.
Less than a second. A tightening of his shoulders, a fraction turn of his head that he caught and corrected.
But it was enough.
The man’s gangly hand shot out and clamped around the boy’s arm.
He screamed.
The crowd parted around them like a school of fish around a shark. No one stopped, no one helped.
On the man’s belt, a sigil embroidered on torn, garish purple ribbon.
Ksenia’s vision turned red.
How many has he caught? Vornaya’s voice was hot and feverish in her ear.
He dragged the boy into the alley.
Ksenia followed, her breathing even, her bondsense tracking the jagged whine of his hellbound blade through the twists and turns. It quavered somewhere between metal and a disembodied voice, pulling her forward.
She could hunt too.