20. Link to the Shadows
Atlas
There was something wrong.
I couldn’t have said what. Only that my whole body seemed to be clawing its way up out of sleep, dragging me with it.
My heart already hammering against my ribs before my eyes had so much as opened.
Cold sweat sat slick on my skin. My gut had drawn itself into a hard, sick knot, twisting tighter with every breath.
And somewhere beneath all of it, beneath thought, beneath reason, an old instinct I had long ago learned never to ignore was screaming a single word.
Wrong.
I reached for her before I was even truly awake.
And my hand closed on cold silk.
My eyes shot open. I lifted my head, scanning the bed, the chamber, the grey half-light of dawn pooling across the floor. The space beside me was empty, the sheets long cooled, no warmth, and a stubborn weight curled into my side where it belonged.
No Alexandra.
I made myself breathe. Slow in, slower out, the way I’d taught a thousand soldiers to do before a battle. A way to calm so that I could reach for the simplest explanation, because the simplest explanation was almost always the true one.
She had done it again.
The thought arrived edged with something I was not proud of. Irritation. Because she’d promised me. Only a day ago, in the practice yard, with my brother’s bow in her hands and that defiant little tilt to her chin, she had looked me in the eye and promised.
Next time, I’ll wake you.
And I had let myself believe it. I had told her plainly how I hated waking to find her gone, had swallowed the part of me that wanted to make it an order, and trusted her instead.
And here I was. Reaching across a cold bed in the dark.
Again.
So, with a growl of annoyance, I whipped the covers back and started getting dressed to go in search of her.
She was with Lazaros, no doubt. Slipped off at first light to torment my brother into teaching her one more useless trick with a bow.
Most likely too caught up in it to think of waking me, or too certain I would not mind.
And the maddening thing was that I didn’t mind, not truly.
This castle, this whole kingdom, was as much hers as it was mine now, or would be soon enough. She was to be my queen. If she wished to roam every corridor, climb every tower, and learn every blade in my armory, she had every right.
Preferably with a guard at her side.
Or with me.
But the irritation was easy. The irritation was comfortable. It was the thing my mind reached for so that it would not have to reach for the other thing. The cold, formless dread sitting beneath it, and it held for exactly as long as it took me to reach for the pull.
That golden thread strung between her heart and mine, the one that had only grown since I claimed her.
Until I could close my eyes anywhere in either world and feel the exact direction of her.
And during the long battle, I did. And I felt her close.
Yet I didn’t trust it, blaming the growing intensity on my aching heart and longing for her.
But I understood it better now. As there she had been the whole time, battling through a labyrinth and bargaining with the Gorgon King in order to get to me.
So, trusting the pull this time, I reached for it.
And nearly went to my knees.
Because it was faint.
Barely there.
A thread worn down to a single fraying fiber, trembling, guttering, like a candle flame in a draught.
This consuming fear of not knowing if she was safe without me assaulted me yet again.
When we were apart, I had obsessed with thoughts of her, wondering if she were safe.
Whether there would be an attack Aster wasn’t strong enough to protect her from.
Or if she somehow injured herself or came down with an illness.
A million scenarios had played out in my mind as I was fighting my way across the kingdom.
The fear was my constant companion, but even then, it had not frightened me the way this did. This thin and failing thing, this sense of her not far away at all but somehow slipping away. As if fading out of the world by inches even as I groped after her in the dark.
The irritation died, replaced by bile rising hot in my throat, and I was dragging on the first clothes my hand found before I had decided to move at all, my own pulse roaring in my ears.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I told myself I was being a fool. I told myself the pull was due to exhaustion on her side, perhaps. That distance played tricks on it, that I would find her in the yard laughing at my brother and feel foolish for the panic. I told myself all of it, and yet…
I did not believe a single word.
I moved faster anyway, throwing the chamber door wide and striding out into the corridor, still pulling my shirt down over my head.
A servant flattened herself against the wall, eyes politely averted as her half-dressed king tore past her.
A habit I’d picked up in Alexandra’s world, caring nothing for who saw what.
I’d picked up a great many habits in that world.
It was the one place I had ever felt I could simply be, not the King of The?kós but a man.
A soldier, a creature with a heart that wanted things.
A General who hunted the girl he loved.
I had planned to give her this day. The thought came to me uselessly, even now.
Even as I half-ran toward the gardens. A plan to ride out to the great lake at the edge of the woods.
A picnic in the long grass. The whole of an afternoon with no crown, no court, and no castle watching us.
Because neither of us had ever quite trusted these walls, as though something in them still lay waiting for its moment to strike.
I had a gift for her. A horse of her own, glossy, bright and bad-tempered, much like its new owner. Acelin was healed, too; the healers had done well by him, and I had wanted to be the one to tell her, to watch the worry fade from her face.
A perfect day. I had wanted to give her just one perfect, ordinary day.
And then I came through the archway into the gardens, and the clash of steel rang out to meet me. Two voices rising over it, trading insults too fond to be meant, and my heart leaped up into my throat with relief, there, she’s there, she’s safe…
Both of the voices were male.
Aster and Lazaros, each circling each other on the dew-wet grass, blades flashing in the low red sun.
My brother grinning as he goaded the Minotaur into earning a victory they both knew was already his.
On any other morning, I would have leaned against the wall and watched, perhaps stripped off my shirt, put on my armor and joined them.
However, there was no red hair among them. No quick, clever shape ducking out of the way of their swords. My little warrior was missing.
The relief I’d first felt curdled into something far colder.
“Lazaros.” My voice came out wrong, scraped raw. They didn’t hear me over the ring of steel. “Lazaros!”
A parry sent the sound singing away across the gardens, swallowing my voice whole, and the last of my patience went with it.
I crossed the grass and stepped clean between them, Aster’s blade hissing past my shoulder by a finger’s breadth.
Lazaros’s already swinging too fast to call back.
I dropped, rolled, came up behind my brother and swept his legs from under him, caught his sword arm as he fell and slammed the guard down against the earth.
The blade leaped from his fingers to bounce across the grass.
“Brother! What the fuck!” Lazaros gasped, more startled than hurt, as I hauled him up by the collar.
“Where is she?!” I barely recognized my own voice. There was nothing of the king in it, nothing of the man who teased and bantered. Only the animal underneath, and the fear.
“What, Alex is missing?” My brother’s brow furrowed, the answer already dawning across his face. “Shit, I haven’t seen her, Atlas. I swear it!” And then, more quietly, the worry catching, “She should be with you.”
“She wasn’t with you?” I rounded on Aster, who had lowered his sword and gone very still. “Either of you? You haven’t seen her this morning at all?!”
“Not a glimpse,” Aster said carefully. “As far as any of us knew, she was exactly where you left her. Curled up warm in your bed.”
The ground seemed to tilt beneath me.
Because if she was not with Lazaros, and not with Aster, and not in our bed, and that thread between us was guttering like a dying flame, then she was somewhere in this castle. Or at least in its grounds, alone, fading, and I had wasted these last precious minutes being annoyed with her.
“Then where…” The words came out of me cracked and useless. “…Where in all the realms is she?”
I bent without thinking to retrieve my brother’s fallen sword, some part of me needing my hands to do something while my mind came apart, and Lazaros bent for it in the same instant.
My hand grazed his.
And the world dropped out from under me.
My vision suddenly went black. But then into the darkness came a beat.
A pulse. A heart, but not mine. One hammering, frantic and afraid.
Then light, just a flicker of it. A small stone room lit by a flickering fire.
A pedestal. A box of dark and polished wood.
Stone steps spiraling away into shadow in the corner, worn smooth by long-dead feet.
And a scream. A woman’s scream, ragged and teary, a cry for help with no breath left behind it.
Her.
My blood went to ice.
“ALEXANDRA!”
I came back to myself with hands gripping my shoulders, the gardens swimming into focus, my shirt soaked through, and sweat dripping down my face like tears.
Aster stood before me, holding me up, his face a mask of alarm.
And behind him, Lazaros kneeled in the grass, chest heaving, drenched in sweat, his eyes wide and fixed on mine.
“Something’s wrong,” I said… Hollow…. Quiet. As though whatever I had just seen had reached into me and drawn out all my strength through the wound.
And then I saw it.
Darkness. Rippling through my brother. A single dark wave rose behind his collar and crawled toward his jaw before it sank away into his hairline and was gone. There and gone in less than a heartbeat. My gaze cut to Laz, and I knew from the horror on his face that I had not imagined it.
He had seen it too.
“What the fuck just happened?” Aster’s voice boomed through the gardens, and I flinched at the sheer noise.
I shook my head, dazed, my mind scrabbling at the edges of the vision, at the box, the fire, the scream. The stone steps. Steps I hadn’t set foot upon in years and yet…
The memory surfaced slowly, then all at once, with the awful weight of a thing I should have understood the moment it happened.
The corridor.
Only yesterday, when I was walking her back toward the kitchens, her hand tucked into my arm and her cheeks still flushed from the archery yard. And the way she had simply… stopped.
In front of that plain, iron-banded door set into the old stone, the one I had passed ten thousand times and never once thought of as anything but storage.
Yes. It had once been our prison. But since my father’s day a new one had been built, far from the city, and the old one left to the dark.
I remembered, even as a boy, the haunted look that came over my father’s face every time he had to go down there.
He bore it for as long as he could, and then one day he could bear it no longer, and demanded a new prison be raised elsewhere.
The old one was given over to the kitchens, somewhere to keep the overflow through the winter months, surplus wine and ale, and little else.
My brother and I used to run riot through there as boys.
And our father, whenever he caught us at it, would fly into a fury unlike anything else could ever rouse in him.
We never understood it. His face, every single time, had not been angry so much as horrified.
As though he had caught us chasing ghosts and not each other.
I had not thought of it in years. And yet now, standing here, I could not understand why the memory of those days had risen up to assault me so suddenly.
Then I remembered the way she had tilted her head. Gone still, and distant. As though she could hear some sound rising up through the wood that no one else in all the world could hear.
As though she were hearing the ghosts of every soul who had ever died down there, in the dark, in payment for their crimes.
‘What’s down there?’ she had asked in a faraway tone.
‘The cellars’, I had told her. And I had not told her the rest. The stairs that wound far deeper than any wine store, down past the foundations, into the old dark of the place. I had taken her by the hand and led her toward the smell of fresh bread, and I had thought no more of it.
She had heard something, I was certain of it now. Standing at that door, she had heard something calling her, and I had told her it was nothing.
“Lazaros.” I turned to my brother, and the certainty was a blade through my chest. “I know where she is!”
He dragged himself up off the grass, pale and shaking, one hand pressed to his head, and his eyes met mine with the same dawning, dreadful knowledge.
“So do I,” he breathed. “The prison, beneath the castle.” He swallowed. “Atlas… there are things down there… I can feel them now… Old things. Things our father must have sealed away and forbade us ever to see for a reason. The darkness, perhaps he felt it too?”
But I was already moving.
Already running.
Because the thread between us was thinning toward nothing with every breath I wasted. And somewhere far beneath my own feet, beneath the castle I had sworn to keep her safe within, the woman I loved was screaming for help in the dark.
And I had walked her past that door, and told her…
It was nothing.