Chapter Sixteen
Ethyr woke with a start. His room was dark, the fire having died and night still overtaking the sky.
His dream simmered to fading emotions: a sense of home, belonging, affection.
Strangely though, the edges of the dream that remained discernible were of cooling shade beneath trees, roughness of bark, sponginess of moss.
Not the warmth of a hearth and Deian’s arms that Ethyr associated with home.
He wiped sleep from his eyes and looked around for what might have woken him, but everything was still and silent. He yawned and nestled himself under the covers again, turning to his side.
The door was ajar.
He sat back up, heart beating in his throat. He always slept with the door closed.
“Hello?” he called, though his voice barely rasped past his lips.
Every sense and nerve in his body was heightened, but he couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.
Just the rush of the waterfall in the distance.
Still, his skin crawled, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had just been there, like they’d left an imprint in the darkness.
He shuffled out of bed and, steeling himself, stuck his head into the hall. It was empty.
He knew every room of the palace now, down to all the guest bedrooms. He had learned that the only other people besides him and Yorith living permanently in the palace was the palace staff, who slept four to a room; save for the stewards, who got their own rooms.
Knowing this made the palace seem bigger and emptier, especially at night when the only people in the halls were the guards who, being only a few and being mostly stationary, did not do much to liven things up.
There were guards around the corners of the corridor, Ethyr knew, but he couldn’t believe one of them could get into his room and out without him hearing the heavy footfalls and clink of sword at their side.
He stepped out into the hall. It was significantly colder and draftier than his room. He was about to slip back in when another anomaly caught his eye under an unlit lantern: a vertical strip of black that Ethyr knew wasn’t there before. He’d passed that wall hundreds of times.
Creeping closer, it was another door, if ‘door’ was what it could be called. There was no indication of a doorway from the hall, but with it open now Ethyr could see that the heavy stone was interrupted by an imitation wall, of a much lighter material that swung open and shut to expose a passage.
The hair on the nape of his neck stood on end.
This was here the whole time, and he’d had no idea.
But where did it lead? The lanterns dimly lighting the hall only washed the first few steps with illumination; the rest was inky blackness.
The thought of stumbling across anyone in the dark, cramped passageway, especially one who might have just been watching him sleep, was terrifying.
Yet the idea of returning to bed with no answers was equally nauseating.
He sucked in a deep breath and took a first few tentative steps. The floor was the same as in the corridor, cold and hard against his bare soles. He inched forward into the unforgiving depths.
His next step hit air instead of surface and he caught a yelp in his throat and himself on the wall to avoid plummeting face-first into nothing. He leaned against it for a second, catching his breath and his nerves, before lowering his foot past the precipice. It hit another ledge. Stairs.
He went down, keeping a palm on the wall for balance and some kind of sensory comfort, straining all the while to hear if anything else was with him.
But the first change wasn’t a sound, it was sight.
In complete darkness, even the barest shiver of light was startlingly obvious.
At the end of the staircase was an exit, outlined in a yellow glow.
Ethyr's hands made contact with it first, which was when he realized it was a real door, made of wood. He felt around until his hand hit a door latch and he carefully pushed it down to unlock the door as quietly as he could and crack it open.
On the other side was a large room with a row of tables.
The light was coming from an enormous fireplace, whose flames had been smothered but the beating pulse of hot coals remained, bright enough to cast a perceivable light into the room.
It wasn’t until Ethyr caught sight of the brick oven at the other end that he realized he was in the kitchen.
It looked completely different with no people or food or daylight filling it.
Was that why his meals were always piping hot when he received them?
The kitchen had a direct route to his room, instead of having to cross several halls, go up the large stairs at the front of the palace, and down several more corridors to his room.
Unlike the door up there, this one wasn’t trying to be secret at all, standing plainly in the back wall.
He used the paltry light from the room to get a glance at the passageway. It extended further to both sides of him. He tried to think of the layout of the palace, where they might possibly lead, but he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
He reluctantly closed himself back into darkness and went down the left corridor. He hit a turn—only realizing at the corner of the wall—and went another fair length before he spotted more light seeping underneath another door.
This one was fake stone. There was no obvious latch to it, but pushing on it didn’t open it either.
He felt around until his hand hit a notch, carved close to the floor as though made for feet instead of hands.
Inside was a wooden lever, which gave in with unexpected ease and the door swung open, toppling him out of the passage and into an open corridor.
He flung himself upright, looking around wildly, but there was no one around. It looked exactly the same as other halls in the palace, its walls painted with geometric tangles, the dying lanterns along it lighting a path to the right. He stood and straightened his nightshirt and followed the light.
Turning a corner was all he needed to recognize where he was.
The corridor with Yorith’s study. He was about to head back when a low murmur stopped him.
For a moment he was frozen in terror, positive he would be found.
Then he realized it came from behind Yorith’s door.
It wasn’t the heated conversations he had eavesdropped on before, so it wasn’t easily overheard.
Yet Ethyr couldn’t resist sneaking closer, pressing up against the door to listen.
The muffled voices were Yorith and a woman who sounded familiar, but Ethyr couldn’t place who.
“...always been a thorn in my side, but this is ridiculous. He…” Yorith was saying. He must have been pacing the room, his voice only clear enough to be understood when he was close to the door.
“You’ve known from the start he’s no different from his father.”
“I’d hoped he would… … …with the counsel’s guidance. Instead he spits in the face of…”
“It’s no secret he’s desperate to claim power, but now Ethyr has offered him an opportunity,” the woman replied.
“Murder is a rather serious…” Ethyr strained harder to hear, alarmed, but the words were lost.
“Is it? Who knows what deranged plans he has in mind—for you, for the council. This must be dealt with, Yorith.”
“I handled his father, I can handle him.”
“Plotting a murder is very different from political perversion.”
“Maybe. But in the end, Lyrian’s weaknesses are the same. You may recall I knew his father very well.”
They were getting closer to the door. Ethyr made a mad dash down the corridor and around the corner, pressing against the wall and trying to hear over his pounding heart whether he’d been noticed.
But it was another few seconds before the door opened at all.
Yorith and his companion stepped into the hall and said nothing else.
Fortunately they went the opposite way from Ethyr.
He listened until their footsteps receded to silence before poking his head out. The corridor was empty.
He crept up to the study doors and tried one, but it was locked.
He made his way back to his bedroom through the passageway, heart pounding nonstop, and no longer for fear of the dark.
If Yorith wanted Lyrian killed, Ethyr had to warn him right away, but he didn’t know how. He still had no idea who Sabatus was.
He paced his room for the rest of the night, until the first light of dawn propelled him out to Poyut’s room. It was empty, so instead he sought out a corridor guard.
“Where is Poyut?” he demanded. The guard blinked at him, looking a little weary. She was probably one of the night shift guards about to be relieved from her post.
“Poyut? If she’s not in her room, she’s probably training.”
“Where does she do that?”
“Off the stables, in the riding arena.”
In the early morning, stable keepers were already there mucking stalls and feeding the horses.
They stopped to bow to him but he ignored them, heading to the large arena at the back of the stables.
He could hear Poyut before he saw her, grunts of effort accompanied by the dull thuds and swipes of assault.
She stood in the middle of the dirt enclosure, landing vicious blows onto a straw mannequin that had most of its straw on the ground at that point.
She put her whole body into the attacks, straining and sweating and growling between her teeth.
Ethyr had never seen her so feral. He was too stunned to interrupt, so he watched her eviscerate the mannequin with a focused anger that she’d never once revealed to him.
She stopped abruptly, leaning on the wooden sword to catch her breath. Ethyr didn’t move or make a sound, but Poyut sensed his presence anyway and jerked towards him, surprise written across her face.
“Ethyr!” She dropped the sword and jogged towards him. “What are you doing here? Are you okay?”