7. Adelina #3
Darkness swallows me. For one heartbeat, I can’t move. I hear the stone settle above my head. Hear the muffled scrape of the rug being dragged back into place. Hear, or imagine I hear, Freya’s breath on the other side.
Then faint light stirs below me.
Small stones embedded along the tunnel walls glow one by one, pale blue, barely enough to see by, but enough. The hidden passage stretches ahead, narrow and sloping, carved into old rock that smells of frost and earth.
I climb down. My boots touch the floor. The satchel bumps lightly against my hip, heavy with maps and money and impossible hope. My back aches, my throat burns, and my heart beats so hard it feels like it may crack my ribs from the inside.
I run.
The tunnel is too narrow for grace. My shoulder brushes the wall more than once, and each jolt sends pain flaring beneath my cloak, but fear carries me faster than strength could.
The glowing stones lead me onward, spaced far enough apart that darkness pools between them.
My breath echoes around me, ragged and loud.
Every sound behind me becomes pursuit. Every drip of water becomes a footstep.
Every shift of air becomes a hand reaching out of the dark to drag me back.
I don’t stop.
The passage slopes downward, then twists, then narrows until I have to turn sideways to pass through a crack in the stone.
Once, the ceiling dips low enough that I duck, and my satchel catches on an outcropping.
Panic tears through me, sharp and mindless.
I yank too hard, pain exploding across my back, and I nearly cry out before clapping a hand over my mouth.
Breathe.
Next mark.
Next star.
Next breath.
There are no stars underground, but I hold the words anyway.
The tunnel goes on so long I begin to wonder if I’ve misunderstood the map, if I’ve missed a turn, if this is not escape at all, only another kind of burial. Then the air changes. It grows sharper. Cleaner. The scent of snow reaches me, faint at first, then stronger.
I slow.
Ahead, the glowing stones end at a narrow wall of darkness.
No, not a wall. A door of old wood and stone, hidden from the inside by shadow and root.
My hands search the surface, remembering the sketch in Freya’s book.
Three knots in the wood. Press the lowest. Turn the stone above it. Push with the shoulder, not the hand.
The door groans softly. Cold air rushes in.
I slip through and stumble into the night.
At first, I can only stand there, bent beneath the branches of a dead pine split down the center, the castle far behind me and high above, its towers black against the clouded sky.
The ravine hides me from the outer walls.
Snow gathers in patches around my boots.
The wind cuts through the fur lining of my cloak and steals the warmth from my wet cheeks.
I’m outside. There are no walls around me.
The enormity of it nearly sends me to my knees. I can’t stop. I throw back my cloak, step into the open, and call my wings. For a terrifying second, nothing happens. Fear floods me so quickly I almost choke on it.
Then power answers.
It rises from somewhere deep, unfurling through my spine and shoulders in a rush of cold light. My wings form behind me, silver and opal, spreading wider than they ever can inside the garden walls. Moonlight catches in them, scattering pale color across the snow. They tremble once.
“Please,” I whisper, though I don’t know who I’m begging.
Then I run. Three steps. Four.
The ravine drops away, and I leap.
For one sickening heartbeat, I fall. Then my wings catch the air.
The force yanks a gasp from my lungs, pain flaring bright beneath my skin as the muscles of my back and shoulders strain against the lingering punishment.
I nearly fold. Nearly drop. But the wind surges beneath me, and instinct, older than fear, takes over.
I climb.
The ground falls away in a blur of black trees and silver snow.
The castle shrinks behind me, its walls still impossibly vast, but no longer all there is.
I beat my wings harder, biting down on a cry as pain tears through my back, and push upward through the low clouds until the world disappears into mist.
At first, there is nothing but cold vapor and my own broken breathing.
Then I break through. The sky opens. Stars scatter above me, sharp and endless, more than I have ever seen from behind castle glass. They burn over the clouds like watchful eyes, and I search them with the map already bright in my mind.
The winter star.
I turn toward it, cloak snapping behind me, tears freezing cold against my skin.
And something pulls. A thin, low ache behind my ribs, as if a thread I cannot see has gone taut and is dragging at me from somewhere far behind, somewhere back toward the black towers already shrinking under the clouds.
I tell myself it is only grief. Only Freya.
Only the home that was never a home, refusing to let go cleanly.
I face the star and fly into the dark anyway.
Below, Dravaryn sleeps beneath cloud and snow and stone. Ahead, there is darkness, distance, and the impossible promise of the sea.
I fly.