Chapter Twenty The Keepers Secret
"They're breaking through," Cassian said, already moving toward the door, knife raised again. "Maren, is there another way out of this room?"
Maren hesitated, just for a moment, and Lyra caught something flicker across her ancient face — something that looked, for the first time since they had met her, like guilt.
"There is," Maren admitted slowly. "But it requires a truth of my own, one I have kept even longer than Cassian kept his."
"What truth?" Lyra asked, though the cracking door behind them made the question feel painfully urgent.
"I am not merely the Keeper of this Kingdom by choice," Maren said, her voice tightening.
"I was placed here, centuries ago, as a punishment — and a protection.
I, too, once stood against the Hollow Court.
I was one of the first to try to keep this Kingdom's secrets safe from them.
And when Verity's order finally caught me, they did not kill me.
They bound me here instead, to guard the very truths I had died — or nearly died — trying to protect. "
"You've been trapped here," Lyra said slowly, understanding dawning. "This whole time."
"For longer than either of you have been alive, in any life," Maren confirmed.
"But there is a door out of this room that only I can open — a door that leads not back into the Kingdom, but briefly, into the living world itself.
I have never used it. I was forbidden to leave this place, by the very bargain that keeps me bound here. "
"Then how can it help us?" Cassian asked, glancing anxiously at the cracking doorway.
"Because the bargain that bound me," Maren said, "was made under the old rules — the rules that existed before tonight, before the two of you remade your own bargain in this very room.
I do not know if my binding still holds the same power it once did.
But I am willing to find out, if it means giving you both the chance to escape. "
"Maren, if this goes wrong for you —" Lyra started.
"Then it goes wrong for me," Maren said firmly, already moving toward the far wall of the chamber, pressing both palms against the pale stone.
"I have spent centuries protecting truths that were never mine to keep secret in the first place.
If tonight is the night I finally pay a price for choosing to help you honestly, instead of hiding behind duty — then so be it. Some debts are worth paying."
The cracking door behind them gave a final, splintering groan, and Verity's cold voice carried through the widening gap.
"Clever, clever girl," Verity called, sounding almost delighted.
"Remaking a bargain centuries old. I confess, Lyra Solis, I did not expect that particular move from you.
But it changes nothing. The truth is loose in the world again either way, and I intend to make sure it does not survive the night to spread any further. "
Maren's hands glowed brighter against the stone wall, and slowly, painfully, a second doorway began to open — smaller than the first, edged in the same golden light, but showing, through its widening crack, not the Kingdom of Echoes, but a glimpse of Lyra's own bedroom, the star-shaped door still standing open on its other side.
"Go," Maren said, straining with the effort of holding the doorway open. "Both of you. Now, before Verity reaches us."
"What about you?" Lyra asked.
Maren's ancient eyes met hers, calm despite the strain visible in every line of her body.
"Worry about me later," she said. "Worry about surviving tonight, first."