11. Kaedryn
Kaedryn
The tunnel is older than the castle above it.
The air changes first, losing the perfumed warmth of Adelina’s chamber and turning damp and mineral, old enough to have forgotten sunlight.
The pale stones along the walls glow just enough to reveal the rough cut of the passage.
Whoever built this did not intend it for ceremony.
It was made for secrecy. For flight. For survival.
Soren moves ahead of me, one hand near the wall without touching it, his attention fixed on the ground.
Rowan follows behind him, silent and alert, while Sylas keeps close enough to my back that I feel his presence more than hear it.
Merritt and Kellan are behind us. Varek comes behind them with two of his guards, his anger pressing into the tunnel like another body.
Selvara does not follow. That is probably wise.
The tunnel is too narrow for her silk and sharp smiles, and perhaps even she understands there is less power in a hidden passage where beauty has nothing to reflect.
Freya is gone now, taken from the room by Varek’s guards, silent to the end.
She said nothing.
Not when the bed was uncovered. Not when the trapdoor was found.
Not when Varek demanded to know where his sister had gone.
She kept her mouth closed as though silence were the last weapon left to her, and in some ways, it was.
Every moment she refused to speak bought Adelina another breath, another step, another span of sky.
That should make me respect her.
It does.
It also makes me furious because Adelina is gone.
The thought moves through me again, sharper in the tight dark beneath her room than it did above. She is gone, and she did not vanish in confusion or panic. This passage was waiting for her. The old nurse was waiting.
For years, perhaps.
I admire the discipline of the plan, until I think about Adelina’s hand trembling around the quill while an escape route lay beneath her floor.
The tunnel slopes downward in a long, uneven grade. The ceiling lowers in places, forcing me to duck, and the walls narrow until my shoulders nearly brush stone on either side. It would have been worse for someone carrying a struggling woman. Nearly impossible without leaving damage or evidence.
There is none.
Soren slows several yards ahead, then lowers into a crouch. The faint blue glow catches along his cheek and the edge of his dark hair as he studies the ground.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Prints.”
Varek pushes forward behind me. “Move.”
I don’t. The tunnel is too narrow for his temper, and I have already watched him use it once this morning.
“Soren,” I say. My voice is quiet, but Varek hears the command in it. So does everyone else.
Soren leans closer to the dust and damp soil gathered between old stone slabs. “Small boot. Fresh. The tread is soft, not soldier’s leather. Whoever wore these was light on her feet, but she was moving quickly.”
He does not say the name. He does not need to.
My gaze drops to the ground. The print is partial, pressed into damp grit near the edge of a glowing stone.
It is small. Almost delicate. Too small for any guard.
Too small for any servant carrying another person.
The heel has skidded slightly, as if she stumbled or pushed off too hard while running.
Tiny feet.
I think of the way her silver dress moved around her last night, concealing every step. The way she walked beside me with her hand in mine, controlled even then, while pain moved beneath her composure and fear shaped every breath she took.
Varek’s voice comes low behind me. “That proves nothing.”
“It proves she was on her feet,” Rowan says mildly.
Varek’s attention snaps to him.
Rowan does not look back. “A person being carried does not leave one set of small prints.”
A dangerous silence follows.
Sylas shifts just enough beside me to turn the moment away from open insult. “How far does this tunnel run?”
Varek does not answer because he does not know.
That lands in me with more weight than it should. Adelina lived above a secret passage her brother did not know well enough to control. Freya did. Others likely did. People who had prepared for the day the princess would need to disappear from the very room Varek called a kindness.
Soren rises, and we continue.
The passage twists beneath the castle, into older rock, the cold turning wet and close the deeper we go.
In places the ceiling dips low enough to scrape pale light across my shoulders.
It would have been painful for her back if she struck the stone.
I don’t want that thought, but it comes anyway.
Her flinch during the curtsy. The way Selvara’s hand near her back made her wings tremble.
The careful fall of her hair over skin the dress exposed.
What did they do to you?
The question has no place in my mouth. I swallow it.
We find more prints as the tunnel bends, scattered where the dust is thickest. One along a wall where her hand must have braced.
One at the base of a narrow turn, the toe angled awkwardly like she had slipped and caught herself.
Near a low section, Soren finds a smear along the stone, not blood, not cloth, only disturbed dust at shoulder height.
“She struck the wall here,” he says.
My jaw tightens.
“She was running,” Sylas murmurs.
“Yes.” The word is mine, though I barely hear myself say it.
Running from Varek.
Running from the queen.
Running from me.
That last part hardens inside me, because I need it to. If I sit too long with the memory of her eyes, with the tremor in her hand, I will be useless to the search.
She signed a treaty, took my hand, listened while I summarized the contract because I thought she deserved at least that much dignity, and then she vanished before sunrise.
Softness was a mistake.
The thought comes easier each time.
I almost believe it.
The tunnel dips again, then levels out. Somewhere ahead, air moves. I feel it before I hear it, a thread of clean cold cutting through the damp dark. Soren glances back once, then continues faster.
Varek does the same behind me.
“Whatever path she took, she can’t be far,” he says. “She has lived in guarded rooms since childhood. She does not know the land.”
“She has a map,” I say.
“You do not know that.”
“This passage was lit. Maintained. Prepared. She changed clothes before entering it, left behind a false body in the bed, and escaped through a route your own guards did not know existed. Do you truly believe whoever planned this forgot a map?”
His anger presses closer. “You speak as though you admire her betrayal.”
“I speak as though underestimating her is foolish.”
That silences him.
Good.
The thread in my chest pulls harder as we near the end of the tunnel.
It’s still faint, but the direction feels clearer now, enough that my body wants to move faster than the passage allows, even if I cannot trust it fully.
It is no tracking spell. No military trail.
Nothing I was trained to use or taught to break.
I know what it is. I have known since the signing, and I have refused the word every hour since. What I cannot do is the one thing I have always been able to do with power. I cannot command it. It does not answer to me. It only pulls, toward her, whether I will it or not.
That alone would make me wary. That I am following it through a passage full of Dravaryn’s men, with Varek somewhere at my back, makes it worse. Whatever else he learns today, he does not learn this.
The glowing stones thin out until the tunnel ahead is more shadow than blue light.
Soren stops at a door set into the earth and root-tangled stone, nearly invisible even from inside.
Old wood, reinforced with iron gone dark with age.
Three knots mark the center, and one of them is worn smoother than the others.
“She came this way,” he says.
Varek steps forward. “Open it.”
Soren does not move until I nod. He presses the lowest knot, then turns a stone above it. The mechanism groans softly, and the door gives way enough for cold morning air to rush in. It smells of snow, pine, and open sky. I step out first.
The world beyond is a ravine hidden below the castle’s outer rise, sheltered by black pines and jagged stone.
Above us, Dravaryn’s fortress looms from the cliff like something carved out of the mountain itself, its towers pale against the morning sky.
From this angle, the walls are distant enough to seem unreal, high enough that no guard looking down from the battlements would notice a narrow door tucked beneath a split dead pine.
Freya chose well.
Or whoever built this route did.
The ground outside the door is a mix of frozen dirt, old needles, and patches of snow protected from the wind. Soren crouches immediately, brushing aside a fringe of dead grass.
“Here,” he says.
The boot prints are clearer outside. Small, fresh, and rushed. Adelina stumbled when she left the tunnel. One print is deep where she must have caught her weight. Another slides toward a tree root. There is a mark in the snow where her hand touched down, fingers spread.
My chest tightens before I can stop it.
For one breath, I see her there. Not the princess in silver.
The woman in whatever plain clothes Freya put her in, alone in the dark with the castle behind her and no world ahead she had ever been allowed to walk.
I see her turning toward the sky, afraid her wings would fail.
I see the weight of a satchel, the ache in her back, the choice to leap anyway because staying was worse.
Then I force the image away.
“She went on foot from here,” Varek says, moving past me. “Search the ravine.”
Soren follows the marks a few yards, then stops near the edge where the trees thin.