Chapter One. Gin
CHAPTER ONE
GIN
They’re coming.
I make myself as small as possible and back deeper into shadow, beneath a flowering tree, while I catch my breath.
I hear the muted flap of a bird’s wings overhead and the slight rustle of leaves as it lands.
I can almost make out the music playing inside the palace, a romantic melody.
There’s a tinkle of glass, faint voices.
Hazy nighttime clouds blot out the moon’s faint light, enveloping the courtyard in darkness.
A gust of wind blows through. I look up to the menacing sky as leaves flutter to the ground around me.
It’s going to storm soon. An owl hoots in the distance.
I tug on one of the vines wrapping the mossy surface of the towering stone wall beside me.
It snaps easily—too weak to support my weight, especially thirty or forty feet or more.
The top of the wall is barely visible against the inky black sky.
Where can I run? How do I get out of here?
They’re going to find me any moment now.
I silently curse that I’ve allowed myself to get so complacent and soft.
Months ago, back when I was working with Aris, a predicament like this would’ve been nothing.
I would’ve found a way to scale that wall with hardly a second thought.
The clanking grows louder. I crouch lower.
Barely dare to breathe. Three figures emerge from the passageway beneath the palace.
Two grim-faced guards drag a hooded figure— a girl about my height and build—toward a scaffold that’s been set up in the middle of the garden.
The doomed girl wears the same thin beige tunic I was given when I was arrested, and her dark hair is pulled back into a similar low braid.
It peeks out from beneath the burlap sack covering her face.
I scrunch my eyebrows together in confusion. Only moments ago, that would’ve been me, being led to my imminent death. Now, somehow, a stranger stands in my place.
A loud bong breaks the silence, startling me.
I curse under my breath. The sundown bell.
Lady Ariadne is nothing if not punctual.
When she’d sentenced me to die that evening, she’d meant exactly that, and not a moment earlier or later.
I look away from the gallows to the balcony above it.
As expected, the golden doors swing open wide.
Right on cue. Honeyed light spills out from within the glowing room, brightening the dark outside, as music and raucous laughter reverberate from deep within the palace.
Even the execution of an impoverished Ophir street urchin won’t spoil the never-ending festivities.
Lady Ariadne floats out from the doorway like a phantom. Her floor-length evening gown the color of onyx billows around her, blotting out the party light like the gathering storm clouds over the moon. She takes her place at the ornate golden railing, a vulture ready to perch over her latest prey.
The bell continues—bong, bong, bong—matching the prisoner’s reluctant steps up each shaky stair. The executioner looms closely behind, his face masked by a ghastly black hood with gaping holes for eyes. Wind whistles through the trees, shrill and haunting.
On the sixth toll of the clock, they reach the platform.
The executioner steps forward and wraps a knotted rope around the prisoner’s neck.
Cold dread floods through my chest. I put a hand to my throat reflexively.
Once he’s satisfied with his work, the executioner steps back again and turns his face up to the gilded balcony.
A smug smile passes briefly on Lady Ariadne’s thin lips before she lifts her pointy chin and gives him a tight nod.
Without further hesitation, the executioner pulls a lever. Metal gears shriek as the floor gives out from beneath the prisoner with a thudding heave. The body plummets through the gaping hole and snaps back before falling into a lazy sway, as the corpse swings ever so slightly, side to side.
My stomach lurches. My heart pounds, my throat constricts.
That’s how quickly I would’ve been gone.
As if it were nothing. Instead, a wholly innocent girl is dead, all because of me.
I’m filled with shame and fear. After I escaped, the guards probably grabbed the first maid they could find to avoid Lady Ariadne’s wrath.
I close my eyes and resist the urge to vomit.
I try to remember what happened just moments ago, when the guard unlocked the door to my cell, right before I ran—had he mouthed something?
Did he say, “Go,” or was he just shocked that he’d let me run away?
My stomach flips. It doesn’t matter. There’s blood on my hands either way.
A girl is dead because of me. Someone else took my place.
But I can’t think about that now. Survive first; ask questions later. I’ve got to get out of here.
Lady Ariadne peers over the railing’s edge at the prisoner’s limp, lifeless form.
Apparently satisfied, she turns abruptly and sails back into the brightly lit palace in a sudden flurry of silk chiffon.
Back to her glossy marble floors and gilt walls and twenty-foot ceilings flanked by alabaster cherubs and crystal chandeliers.
As if witnessing the death of her son’s supposed inamorata is nothing but a brief interlude, a slightly inconvenient interruption to the party. The doors bang shut behind her.
The courtyard is cloaked in darkness again.
The orchestra plays once more, muffled behind thick stone walls.
The palace exterior turns gray in the night, its black towers spearing into the sky.
The guards at the scaffold shuffle toward the dangling body.
Their boots scrape against the splintered wood.
Beams of yellow light sway from their swinging lanterns.
A drop of rain falls on my cheek and runs down my chin like a tear.
Someone grabs my arm. I whip around and swing at the attacker.
A palace guard in full armor. He intercepts my punch.
I struggle to free myself while not attracting attention from the others.
But his grip is too strong. I try to pull away, but he spins me around and wraps his arms tight around my waist instead.
“Hey, hey,” the guard whispers in my ear. “Calm down.”
My entire body relaxes at the familiar sound of his voice. “Rollo?”
He lets go and I turn around to face him. He lifts the steel visor and nods.
Seeing him brings such an intense relief I almost fall to the ground, but he holds me.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“No time to explain. Come on.” He grabs my hand and pulls me along with him.
As we flee, stalking along the back wall to the other side of the yard, the guards hoist the prisoner up from beneath the stage.
They place the body on the ground and untie the noose, then one of them grabs the girl’s feet and the other lifts her under her arms. I can’t look away.
It feels like penance, somehow, to force myself to witness the grisly spectacle.
The three guards return the way they’d arrived only minutes before, down the steps and back into the corridor that leads to the dungeons. Once they reach the entrance, they lower the girl to the ground. And just as the door is about to close, she stands up and rips off her hood.
The girl’s alive.
I yank on Rollo’s arm frantically.
He turns and looks around, alarmed. I point to the scene at the far end of the courtyard.
But he only glances over, unimpressed. “I told you. No time to explain.” He pulls on my arm again and walks faster. More raindrops fall from the sky, and then all at once it becomes a steady drizzle.
We reach the wall. “It’s too slippery to climb,” I whisper. “I already tried. And we can’t go through the back entrance. I’ll never make it through the main hall undetected.”
“You’re not going over the wall,” he says tersely.
When we first met, I’d been on the run from Madame Verona’s thugs.
Rollo was walking out of his private eating club when he noticed me, lying helpless, encircled by a group of leering men. He confronted the thugs, who scattered at the sight of a nobleman, and helped me up from where I had fallen on the street.
“Do you have a place to go?” he’d asked.
I’d shaken my head.
Of course, I knew it was illegal for me to be there, hiding in the bedroom of a Laconian nobleman, and heir to the wealthiest estate in the city.
We Ophir are servants and thieves, inhabiting the lowest rungs of society.
My mere existence is a capital offense. Lacon has been trying to get rid of us forever—it wasn’t enough that they conquered and destroyed our kingdom, but they’ve been trying to stamp us out entirely, restricting where we can go and where we can live, closing our schools, starving our community.
But the Sleeve is equally threatening to my life, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s safer behind palace doors.
I should hate him, this handsome Laconian lord, knowing how his people have treated mine for centuries, but I don’t. That much I know. I don’t hate him.
Being caught was inevitable. Ophir slattern! Lady Ariadne had screeched, yanking back the bedcovers this morning. By the afternoon, I was sentenced to die.
Another lesson learned: Injustice is swift.
Rollo roots around beneath the wiry vines snaking through the thick stone wall.
Once he finds what he’s looking for, he pushes on one of them.
There’s a scraping noise and then a pop.
He removes a key hanging around his neck, turns it in the lock, and then pushes on the wall and slides it over a bit, revealing a narrow doorway.
We slip into the pitch dark. He shuts the secret door behind us.
I’m already feeling slightly better about my survival odds.