Chapter 17
Iwake to hands dragging me out of bed.
Fingernails rip the chain from my mouth before a bag is thrown over my head.
I taste copper, blood dripping from where my chain was attached.
My gloves are not on. I slept with them off like Caelus said.
I stand there, blinking in the darkness, hugging myself.
My linen dress suddenly feels too thin and exposed.
The first trial is the Trial of Courage, I remind myself, standing straighter.
I’m shoved forward, bare feet on cold ground. My heart thuds in my ears. Rough hands guide me out of the room, down the hall. I stumble forward, groping in the darkness. Their hands touch me every few moments, prodding me one way or another.
Three lefts.
More stairs.
I trip, catching myself on the wall. My senses are completely unsettled in the darkness. The commotion of others being torn from their beds sends goose bumps racing up my arms.
Two rights.
Down more stairs.
Courage. I have to be braver than I’ve ever been.
I try to remember the curves of Serafina’s little face.
But the uncertainty in the darkness makes the bag around my face feel like it’s shrinking, sticking to my mouth, constricting each breath.
I panic, my heart racing. This is the part of the tournament I should be strongest at.
I strain to use my ears as eyes, trying to remember where we are on the ground.
Right.
Left.
Long straight corridor.
We’re by the throne room. We’re leaving the palace.
Metal screeches, long and low as the doors to the palace open.
Cold air hits my legs, whipping past my arms. Rocky pavement cuts my feet as the warmth from the fire under the drawbridge wafts against me.
Feet shuffle behind me in line. Someone coughs. Someone else is sobbing.
“Fifty-Four,” the Mercyenforcer holding onto me announces.
Then, I’m lifted into dark quiet. When I’m free of their hands, I rip the cover off my head.
Several others are wedged in together on a narrow bench seat in the back of a transport.
My eyes find Caelus in an instant, drawn to him like a current to the deep.
I sit beside him and the wall. He shifts, not away or toward me.
Just a shuffle like he’s settling deeper into his seat.
Our arms brush, and the fabric of his sleeves is the only barrier between us.
It’s thin enough for me to feel the heat of his skin, but thick enough for me to not recoil.
I get only a glimpse of the others’ scared faces before we are shut inside. We are in darkness again.
The transport jerks in motion, and the only sounds are short, panicked breaths.
“Where are they taking us?” someone whispers.
After a long moment, a voice I don’t recognize says, “The sea.” It’s definitely not Ronan or Finn, who I’ve heard debating for an entire day. Or Rhythe, whose chillingly low voice offering me an alliance still sends shivers up my spine. I haven’t answered him. This is someone else.
The sea.
I grew up with sand between my toes and salt water in my hair. If we’re heading to the sea, that could work in my favor.
“How do you know?” Mae asks. I’d know her voice anywhere. But whoever spoke doesn’t answer.
“He doesn’t know,” Talia cuts in. “No one needs your guesses, Kade.”
It was the veteran Mercyenforcer, then.
The bumpy downhill ride suggests we are moving toward the shore. But we could be going somewhere in the mountains or the Grainfolk hills. We’re also barefoot and in the clothes we slept in. My nails dig into my seat. The glimmer of confidence I almost felt is gone.
The transport jostles, lurching over something uneven, and Caelus’s arm slides against mine, his sleeve riding up. His skin is warm against me, like fresh bread or the covers when Serafina shares a bed with me.
Warm like his finger was against my mouth.
I am rigidly still. Our bodies are wedged so close together, his scent magnetic and sharp and uniquely him, like nothing I’ve ever smelled before.
I inhale deeply. It’s musky and rich, like amber and ash, or something lighter—a field of flowers after a long rain.
Despite my sleeve, I can feel his thudding pulse.
I try to shift in my seat, but it’s too tight.
I trace circles on my wrist instead, feeling my bare arms. I’ve felt my skin in the bath, or by accident without gloves.
But today, being out here, around others, every sensation is unfamiliar and either comforting or harsh.
There is no in-between. The guard’s rough hold on me.
Caelus’s body beside me. My fingers drawing on the back of my hand.
One feels like death, the other like possibility, like the beginning of an end.
We hit another bump, and Caelus’s fingertips brush mine, barely touching.
He doesn’t move his hand away. Neither do I.
The thought to pull away nags me. But he made a good point last night: The protections are off; I need to be prepared.
Today is the day to be brave. And here in this suffocating darkness, with so many unknowns, my heart thuds a little slower.
He told me the love piece of this tournament would be the part of all the tournament that I struggle with most. Which means, whatever is ahead of us in this trial, he’s confident I can survive it.
I know what I’m capable of, but he knows more about what’s coming.
I have to be brave. It starts now.
With the darkness wrapped around us like a secret, I ease out a slow exhale and let my naked fingers move on top of his, gently sliding down his hands.
The world is quiet and heavy, as if the air is holding its breath.
He doesn’t move. I can feel him looking at me, staring as if he’s willing himself to see me despite the darkness.
When my fingers drift to his wrist, gentle and trembling, I draw circles there.
My throat is dry, and I force myself to inhale and exhale evenly, resting my touch lightly on his wrist, barely there, like a question.
Is this okay? Should it feel like this? It doesn’t feel electric or bubbly or anything like I imagined.
It feels like something inside me is finally going quiet.
He still doesn’t move. But his pulse beats harder through his wrist.
He’s touched so many. I’m sure he feels nothing.
The transport bumps again, violently, knocking away my hand. I press back in my seat, my pulse racing.
I can do this.
I can do this over and over until the brush of a touch means nothing.
I’m cold and clammy all over. My nerves are frayed, blood pumping through me faster than it ever has.
Before I get the nerve to reach for him again, longer this time, the transport comes to a stop. The doors open, and hazy morning sunlight hits me like a dagger in the eyes. I blink, squinting in the brightness, trying to make out where we are. The world comes into focus, and my heart stops.
Outside is a cliff.
The cliff my mother’s body was rolled off of.
We’re pulled out of the transports, and I step down onto the rocky gravel, scraping my feet. One by one they drag us to the mountain’s edge.
She died of a nasty sickness before coming here. But this is where I saw her last. She died without enough medicine to heal her. We didn’t have funeral sacks and couldn’t spare any coins to get one, so Mercyenforcers took her away in a dirty old rug and brought her here.
I try to picture her face but still can’t. Wind gusts past, pulling at my clothes, pulling me away from the edge. It feels like my mother, warning me.
When the Mercyenforcers come for me now, I gather my courage, but I feel my body resisting.
I see myself digging my nails into their skin to peel their iron grip off of me, like watching some tragedy happen outside my own body.
It takes three Mercyenforcers lifting me off my feet and setting me on the edge of the cliff to get me in position.
Once we’re all lined up in rows, Rhythe steals a glance at me.
He doesn’t look worried like the others.
He told me to come find him when the trial opened, suggesting that I can’t survive whatever is coming myself, but I can’t move.
The other Saltbloods are gathered around him, including Lira, who is stone-faced and silent.
Talia is beside her, staring like she’s looking directly at death.
Does Rhythe somehow know what we’re about to face?
How could he? I hesitate. I don’t know him at all, and definitely not enough to trust him.
But the fact that he seems to know what’s about to happen, and I don’t, makes a small part of me want to join him.
Dreth addresses the group. “Being in love requires courage,” he says.
“It requires giving someone else a part of yourself. That is not for the faint of heart.” Another guard paces the length of the contestants as he goes on.
“To complete the Trial of Courage, you must jump off this cliff and swim to the shore.”
I stare down the side of the cliff, at the world dropping away beneath me. I’m breathless, not at the steepness of the plunge, but at the memory of my mother’s rug unrolling as her body plummeted toward the waves crashing below.
I have to focus. Dive and swim. I shade my brows with my hand to see the shore in the distance.
I’m a strong swimmer. I am. But the ocean stretches out like a living thing, vast and endless, and I notice its water gleaming in fractured sunlight, slate blue in the shadows where calm patches are between the breaking waves.
The contestants step forward.
“Wait,” I say.
There is a strange stillness where the water should be moving.
I scan for a better view. Waves thrash sharply, violent and hungry, not matching the rest of the sea.
And chaos beyond it. The current is a narrow channel of rushing water carving a path through the surf, slicing and merciless.
Foamy water moves seaward, dragging along debris.
The Mercyenforcers start pushing us forward.