Chapter 16 Find What You’ve Lost
(or Kill It, Whatever Works)
Arabella
Where the hell are you going?” Kazimir’s voice chased me down the corridor as I practically sprinted toward our chambers.
“After them, obviously. We can’t leave it up to anybody else.” I didn’t slow down, though my hands trembled as I reached for the door. “But I need to change first. Can’t exactly hunt down escapees in a dress.”
“You could,” he said, catching up to me. “You’d look magnificent doing it.”
“Flattery won’t distract me from the fact that my father just escaped from your supposedly inescapable dungeons.” I threw open our chamber door hard enough that it bounced off the wall.
My father. Free. The thought sent ice through my veins before I buried it under anger.
I’d spent weeks pretending he didn’t exist, that he was just another prisoner in Kaz’s dungeons.
But fathers don’t become strangers just because you wish them to.
And apparently, don’t stop being trouble just because you leave them to rot after saving their worthless lives.
“Is Griffin still alive?” I yanked open my wardrobe.
“Barely.” Kazimir leaned against the bed, watching me tear through my clothes. “Along with Sebastian and Vex, though I’m reconsidering all three.”
I pulled out my new leathers—the latest ones Kaz had commissioned for me, reinforced with protective enchantments and flexible enough for light combat.
They’d just arrived, and I was looking forward to trying them out.
Instead of blue like the last ones, these were black with silver buckles that were enchanted so they didn’t catch the light.
Stealth leathers. “Going soft on me? The terrifying Dark Lord I married would have already mounted their heads on pikes.”
“Must be your terrible influence.” His tone was dry, but I caught affection beneath it. “I didn’t used to keep prisoners long enough for them to escape. They were either immediately useful or already dead.”
The word “prisoners” made my stomach twist. That’s what my father was now. What I’d made him. Just like he’d made me one.
“And what was Griffin thinking?” I pulled off my dress. My fingers fumbled with the clasps on the leathers, and I had to try twice before getting them open. “Showing off necromancy to Sebastian of all people?”
“Hero worship,” Kazimir snorted. “Literally, in this case.”
I paused, halfway into my leather pants. “That man could probably make friends with a basilisk.”
“Don’t give him ideas.”
I struggled with a particularly stubborn buckle, cursing under my breath.
“Need assistance?” Kaz pushed off from the bed. “Or is your intention to let our escapees go free?”
“I can dress myself, thank you very much.” But my fingers slipped again. “Fuck.”
He crossed the room and batted my hands away with surprising gentleness. His fingers replaced mine at the buckle.
“Arms up,” he murmured, his breath ghosting across my collarbone as he worked the stubborn leather into place.
I obeyed, watching his face. The concentration there, the care in each movement made my pulse quicken. I blinked, and he was done.
“There.” His hands lingered at my waist, thumbs tracing the edge of the leather. “Ready to hunt?”
A few minutes later, Kaz’s portal spat us out into ankle-deep swamp water. The smell hit next—rot, stagnant water, and something metallic.
“Delightful,” I muttered, pulling my foot free from the mud with a wet squelch.
Above the twisted trees, the storm clouds beneath Skyspire churned endlessly, occasionally lit by flashes of lightning that revealed nothing but clouds and dark floating rock.
Kazimir raised his hand, and shadows peeled away from him. They formed into sleek wolves, ravens, and serpents before dispersing into the murk. The display sent an involuntary shiver down my spine, equal parts fear and something considerably less appropriate for our current situation.
“What exactly lives down here?” I asked, turning in a circle to look at the gnarled trees and clinging fog.
“The magic from Skyspire affects everything below. Mutates it. Makes it unpredictable.”
A branch cracked somewhere to our left, and I instinctively summoned a shadow blade into my hand. The reminder of my power was comforting. Not like the helplessness that kept trying to claw its way up my throat.
Kaz turned to the south. “Stay alert. I don’t want you eaten by an overgrown deer with fangs.”
“You say the sweetest things.” We picked our way through the swamp, following what might have been a path if you squinted and had a generous definition of the word. “How do you even know where they landed?”
“Educated guess based on the Tempest Cage positions and wind patterns.” He gestured ahead where the trees thinned slightly. “They should have bounced somewhere near the old emergency ascension system.”
“The one the Hero’s Guild used to attack us? We still don’t know who told them about it.” The thought had been gnawing at me since the attack. “Who the spy was—or is.”
Better to think about spies than about my father and the last time I’d seen him—during that interrogation weeks ago. I’d walked away from that room and hadn’t looked back. Hadn’t visited. Hadn’t even asked Kazimir what he’d done with him beyond “put him in a cell.”
Like my father had done to me.
“All these weeks later, and we’ve still not heard from Pip,” Kazimir said, ducking under a low-hanging branch that dripped something viscous and green. “He’s the only one unaccounted for.”
I picked my way through the muck, remembering those frantic days after the attack. “We questioned everyone who survived.” A beetle with too many legs scuttled across the water away from me. “Every servant, every guard, every kitchen boy who could still draw breath.”
And I’d used my truth-sense on all of them.
The memory of those exhausting interrogations made my head ache.
Hours upon hours of sitting across from terrified staff members, feeling for that telltale prickle behind my eyes that would signal a lie.
None of them was the spy. They were all genuinely shocked by the attack, genuinely loyal—or at least, genuinely more afraid of the Dark Lord than the Hero’s Guild.
Which is why Kazimir decided to question the dead. He’d suggested it so casually, as if raising corpses for interrogation was as mundane as checking the weather.
I suppressed a shudder. The Necromantic Wing of the dungeons had reeked of death magic and preserving salts as Kazimir worked his necromancy on the fallen.
One by one, he’d animated the bodies of those who’d died defending Skyspire—or attacking it.
Their slack faces and clouded eyes had haunted my dreams that night.
“You questioned everyone except Sims,” I said.
“His loyalty was never in doubt.” Kazimir’s jaw tightened. “He died protecting the citadel. Protecting us.”
The dead had shambled forward at his command, their voices hollow echoes of what they’d been in life.
Each one had denied being the spy or knowing who it was.
Watching them speak, I’d felt nothing. No prickle of deception or cold tingle of lies.
Just an unsettling blankness where my truth-sense usually resided.
“I still don’t know if my magic even works on the undead,” I admitted, stepping carefully around a puddle that reflected too many colors to be natural water. “For all we know, every corpse you raised could have been lying through their rotting teeth.”
“Regardless, Pip is still our likely culprit.”
“You really think that nervous kid was a spy?”
“Everyone’s a spy until proven otherwise.”
The swamp gave way to slightly firmer ground, though “firm” was relative when everything squelched.
We emerged into a small clearing dominated by the twisted metal remains of what had been an elegant magical lift system.
Now it looked like a giant had used it for target practice, all bent beams and shattered crystal matrices.
“I always imagined a great black void down here,” I admitted, eyeing the wreckage and thinking about how my father must have felt, plummeting through the air.
I imagined his terrified face and almost smiled.
“You know, befitting the whole ‘Terror of the Western Realms’ aesthetic. Speaking of which, where do you keep the void beasts?”
Kazimir’s laugh was dark and amused. “Void beasts?”
“You’re always threatening to feed people to them.”
“Ah.” He stepped over a puddle that bubbled ominously. “Arabella, my darling wife, the void beasts aren’t real.”
I blinked. “What?”
“They’re a euphemism. A colorful way of saying ‘I’m going to kill you and dispose of your body in a creative manner.’ ”
“You’re joking.” I turned to look at his face.
He still wore that amused smirk. “No.”
“But—” I stared at him. “Everyone’s terrified of them!”
“Exactly. The threat of being fed to mysterious, unknowable horrors is far more effective than simply saying ‘I’ll throw you off the battlements or separate your head from your body.’ ” Kazimir shook his head in mock-disgust. “Though I’m disappointed you didn’t figure it out sooner.
I thought you’d appreciate the theatrical misdirection. ”
“So what do you do for minor infractions?” I asked, resuming our trudge through the swamp. “Since you’re apparently not feeding servants to mythical creatures?”
“All villains worth their salt know that it would be terribly inefficient to keep replacing servants.” He stepped over a fallen log.
“For minor infractions, I usually go with public humiliation, wage garnishment, or making them clean blood off the dungeon walls—that stone doesn’t stay polished on its own. ”
We continued deeper into the swamp, with no sign of our escapees. The shadows Kazimir had sent ahead occasionally returned, whispering reports in that strange guttural language of his.
I’d never asked, but since we were sharing more these days…
“Why do you need to talk to your constructs?” I asked after another reported and then left. “I can hear what mine say in my head. And for that matter, what language is that? I’ve heard you speak it a few times now.”