Chapter Seven
SEVEN
The gardai explode through the door.
Terror paints my vision white. Rough hands grab for me, and pain erupts where one of the gardai seizes a handful of hair and rips me out of bed onto the dirt floor.
He yanks me up with a savage growl and shakes me so hard my teeth clack. One catches the inside of my mouth, and blood bursts across my tongue.
How did they find me?
“Let her go!” Finn’s furious roar rips from her side of the room, but a deep cough follows. Blankets go flying, and she stumbles, legs still shaking and weak.
Our father clatters in from the back room, takes one look at me, and slinks back, barring the door to his room behind him. I instinctively look for Keeva, then remember she left to open her stall for the day.
But Finn, she lunges for the table in the middle of the room—and her short sword there.
“Let. Her. Go.” This time, her words are deadly soft.
Her eyes move across the room, assessing the gardai.
My stomach lurches.
Eight against two is a death sentence.
For both of us.
Another pair of rough hands seizes me by the neck, choking off my air and lifting me up from the ground. My toes dangle, desperate and straining to find earth.
“Think very carefully about your next move,” warns the guard with his hands around my throat. The cold kiss of metal presses into the flesh at my neck.
A copper-haired guard silhouetted in the doorway takes a half step toward us, drawing out a paper scroll and shooting a dark look at Finn. “This arrest warrant only names one, but so much as a whisper and we can easily make it two.”
Conflict carves across Finn’s face.
Her hands tighten on the side of the table, an inch from her sword. But if she moves for it, if she attacks any of the gardai, then everything I risked for her was for nothing.
“Finn,” I plead, and our eyes meet across the room. There’s nothing left for me to say—no space for explanations or apologies. Just one word, and it shatters me. “Don’t.”
“Maeve,” Finn whispers, shame cracking her ragged voice. Her eyes flicker over the gardai, searching every one of their faces like she can mark each one in her mind.
I swallow a sob. “I love you.”
I hear dirt crunching and something shatter against the walls as the gardai haul me out of my home.
With a laugh, the one with his hands still fisting my hair kicks the door shut behind us. He hauls me over the dirt, over hard earth and sharp rocks scraping my bare ankles, my palms.
The world blurs. My eyes burn, and every breath escapes me too fast.
Like even the air in my lungs knows to flee.
The guard spits in the dirt beside a cloudy mass of brown and iron gray taking shape in front of me through the blurring tears, and throws me down.
“Get in,” he barks, then kicks me in the ribs.
My sides seize up, and I curl in on myself, my back finding the edge of a wheel yoke. Iron bars hardly big enough to fit a hand through rise above me, the cold metal so grim even the first thin haze of dawn refuses to stick.
Something splinters in my heart as I recognize what looms above me.
A prison cart.
With a grunt, the large guard jerks, and his boot finds my side, again and again. Pain explodes, and my vision flashes white. Hard fists dig into my arms and heave me up; the movement is sudden enough I feel my head lolling. I land in a mess of crushed straw and grime.
It smells like death.
The lock clicks behind me. A whip cracks. The cart jerks forward, rattling hard through dark and empty streets. My breaths come in shallow, rough gasps. My ribs scream when I try to gather myself, to push myself up, and I let myself collapse against the metal bars.
Each rock of the cart is agony, and when we hit the place where the streets become stone, that is a whole new world of pain.
And to think, I was fool enough to let myself believe that I might get away with it.
That I could strike a bargain with the Whisperers, and that no one would see me going to them for help. That they’d keep their word.
Whether that asshole turned me in himself, or let someone else do it for him, what happens next will be the same.
The cart keeps rocking, tilting uphill. Hollow dread roots down deep in my bones.
I count each second. Every heartbeat slipping away. I look up and find a faint hazy glow blurring and limning the passing rooftops as dawn rises—the last one I’ll ever see.
The farther we go, the less the sea scents the wind. The incline grows steeper beneath the cart, and stone walls already slick with the damp beads of mist rise up around me. A howling chill whips through the iron bars, and in a cruel twist, my body refuses to go numb.
Castle Mount looms at the top of the hill.
We pass inside a ring of defensive walls; black-and-crimson banners unfurling in the air snap harshly in the bitter wind. The scent of the air changes.
It smells of rock and steel and iron.
It smells of blood.
No one from Quayside passes beyond these gates—no one except for the condemned. No one sees the rubies and onyx rumored to be embedded in the hewn gray stone of the castle’s interior walls, thick enough that no battering ram could ever slam through, thick enough to withstand any storm.
The gardai don’t even bother to blindfold me.
We all know I won’t be coming back out.
I’ve lived alongside rats all my life. Usually, they won’t bother you as long as you stay out of their way. But the rats in the castle dungeon aren’t like that.
These rats come right up to me, hissing every time I so much as dare to move an inch from the crumbling corner they’ve backed me up into. Bits of rock flake onto my shoulders, cold stone pressing into the back of my neck.
I run my fingers over names etched in crude lettering on the walls.
There are years of them. Decades. Centuries, maybe. Each initial, each name, each bit of runic ogham carved into the stone is a memory of someone just like me.
There are no windows, just one solid wood door as thick as my palm, with a small metal latch for the gardai to slide open and watch me through.
There’s no way out, no sunlight to gauge how long I’ve been here.
The rats, at least, have something other than me to chew on.
Skittering, they gnaw at a gray bone in the other corner.
I force myself to close my eyes and fight a losing battle not to imagine who it came from.
I fall in and out of a restless sleep. At one point I swear I hear the metal latch creak open just an inch and can glimpse a flash of copper and green through the torchlit shadows beyond… but it’s just my desperate imagination.
A little later, hard voices bark and snap outside my door. There’s a rattling sound that reminds me of throwing dice. I strain but can’t recognize any of their voices from the gardai who brought me here.
“I don’t know why we can’t just kill her,” a rough voice snarls.
My blood freezes. I don’t dare make a sound.
“It’s been five damn years. That blue blood’s the only reason she’s still breathing, I wager.” That’s another voice, this one lower and curt.
“Don’t matter who she is.” A third voice. “She’s a traitor. A dirty, lying traitor. Should be up on one of those pikes just like the lot of them for trying to replace a king.”
“They’re keeping her alive for a reason, I’d bet. Leverage over the others? They never did find…” The curt voice dies out.
There’s a sound like a shudder and another rattle thrown down.
It’s clearly not me they’re talking about… so who? Nobles might not go to the Black Quay for treason but can still be executed, just like us. Just… somewhere else, wherever that is.
And why would the royals need any kind of leverage? They crushed the uprising. No one escaped their wrath, not even the nobles involved.
Despite the fear wrapping around me, I inch closer to the door and press my ear against the hard wood. Straining, listening for any other fragments of talk in the darkness…
The first High King’s royal line hasn’t broken in all these centuries.
Who could even make a claim?
Cold shadows cling to me as I settle back onto the hard ground. The wordless memory of my mother’s hummed lullaby weaves in my mind. Old Ones, what I would give to remember the words. To hear her voice, just one more time before I die…
A minute passes, or an hour, or days.
There’s no way to tell which.
The voices outside my cell trudge away, bootsteps fading into the dark. After a long while, the tread of more boots pad in the grit again.
Metal keys rattle against a lock. A faint click sounds, and cold sweat breaks out down the back of my neck.
My hand presses tight over my mouth, trapping the scream.
I’m not ready to die yet. There’s a muffled sound I can’t quite place. Near but not right at my door. Maybe the next cell over? A small voice rises in the damp air. “Is it time?”
Hinges creak, a door inching wider. Boots shuffle in the dirt, and the small voice sucks in a quick breath, cries, “Wait!”
But bone cracks, and I hear a soft weight slump to the ground. I can just make out the heavy rasp of rough breathing, then the sound of something dragging across dirt. The uneven gait of boots under a heavy load echoes in the dim light.
It’s coming closer, closer…
The lock on my cell door clicks, and candlelight slivers through the thin crack as it opens.
I cover my eyes against the light and scramble, racing to put solid stone at my back. Panic coats my mouth, my tongue. My senses strain, and I peer out from around my hand.
A crimson-and-black uniform fills the sliver in the door of my cell. A copper-haired figure with broad shoulders stands silhouetted in the faint glow from the empty hall beyond, a girl’s body slung under one arm.
Long, dark hair brushes the dirt, the body’s neck hanging at a gruesome angle.
Without a word, the guard lays her down gently on the cold earth of my cell, exposing a streak of blond hair against the dark brown.
She reminds me of a broken bird, lying there.
Hunger’s marks are clear on her, pulling her skin tight against the bones. I don’t move.