Chapter Twelve
TWELVE
Steam hits me in the face like a wall.
The smell of it is so familiar, so much like the mist of Quayside that my heart flares, and for a second I can’t breathe.
Home.
The memory is like a physical pain, blooming behind my ribs and swelling, as Aoife leads me through a set of doors to where tiled floors split off in two directions.
“The men’s baths are that way,” she says, gesturing to the left. “Women’s are this way. We can all choose the one that fits us best.”
An attendant at the end of the women’s hall smiles a little too brightly. She sets me on edge, even though all she does is offer me a towel.
Everything in me tenses, scanning for danger.
The Assay’s first test hasn’t started yet, but could someone try to kill me even now?
Stripping down, I wrap the towel around myself and try to ignore the empty feeling where my blades should be against my skin.
More than a few eyes follow us from the women’s baths, whispers in their wake.
I keep my head down. At first I’m sure they’re staring at me; the way their eyes flicker draws up an unsettling certainty. But when I peek, I see they’re staring at Aoife, too.
The baths themselves are a grotto carved into the gray rock beneath the castle.
Spirals of steam swirl lazily up around the space.
There aren’t any hearths heating the water or pipes beneath the glacial green surface.
It’s as if each of the pool-like baths draws heat from deep within the mountain itself.
As if the mountain’s very core is somehow molten.
Aoife leads me to the only one of the pools with no one else in it. The whispers and mistrusting looks from the others seem to disappear as I lower myself into the water after her, the faint hiss of steam rising up around us to drown out every other sound.
Flickering candlelight glows from thick tapers set into the hewn walls, and baskets full of fluffy white towels and soaps the colors of gems wait at the edges of the bathing pool.
I sink in deeper, letting my body adjust to the heat.
And damn if my muscles don’t immediately start to unwind, despite the danger of not having my blades at hand.
The delicious heat envelopes me, and I reach for one of the jewel-like soaps.
I lather it between my hands, bubbles floating on the surface of the water and gentle sweetness reminding me of honey filling the air.
Aoife sniffs, and glances sidelong at me. “That used to grow on one of the western estates, you know. Rock rose. The sea cliffs were the perfect climate for it. House Doran made a fortune for generations—you can distill the petals into a calming elixir, too.”
“House Doran?”
Aoife’s nose scrunches in a look that might be adorable if it didn’t make me feel like a child. “You’ve heard of them, surely.”
“We don’t exactly get history lessons in Quayside.” I lift my head from the edge of the bath and toy with the soap. It slips right through my fingers, and I curse.
“House Doran was the noble family behind the uprising. They were…” Aoife’s brow knots. “Wiped out. Another family was disinherited but allowed to prove their loyalty.”
Her voice cracks on the word. She continues in a whisper.
“You really don’t know? It’s how Cashel became heir in the first place.
He discovered the plotting and told his father.
Until the uprising, he was just his father’s oldest child.
The inheritance wasn’t certain, especially if any of the new High Queen’s children had lived. ”
“The Bloody Prince,” I murmur, feeling my cheeks heat. “No wonder the name stuck.”
A flinch pinches the edges of Aoife’s eyes.
“He isn’t a monster. When the High Queen’s two sons were sick during the uprising, he was with them constantly.
Even after the healers left, he watched over them all night.
They both died, but he tried his best. I know he did.
He’s always done what’s necessary to protect the Crown. ”
But I know the sound of a lie when I hear one.
I glance at her, suspicion sharp. “Why tell me all this?”
There’s no reason for her to bother, or to care what happens to me.
Aoife runs her fingers along the surface of the water.
Her voice lowers, jaw tightening. “I know what happens in Assays. Killing becomes sport as much as a necessity. Yes, only one ever survives, because there can only be one queen and no one wants a surviving rival raising an army to challenge the winner.” She looks up at me sideways.
“It’s happened before. But this tradition of bringing in a peasant, and tormenting them just for fun…
” Her mouth twists. “I just don’t think making examples out of innocent people is right. ”
I laugh softly, bitterness like acid on my tongue. “Isn’t that what your kind does best?”
Aoife shifts, looking back at the other pools before sinking deeper into the water, and lowers her already soft voice to the tiniest of whispers. “Maybe some of us believe there’s a better way.”
It’s the complete opposite of everything I’ve ever been taught—everything I’ve ever seen to be true. No noble would ever risk their neck to help someone like me.
But… what if she’s telling the truth?
I want to believe things could be different. That there might be a chance of a better world once the High King is dead. What if the prince could be different? What if there were a queen who could stand up for the people and could convince him to let mages bring back magic, even from abroad?
Aoife’s gaze trails down my neck, to the bruise coloring my collarbone and the patches of them mottling my ribs from when the gardai brought me here. Somehow, it’s only been a week. “The gardai could help, you know.”
It takes everything in me not to roll my eyes. The gardai are the absolute last place I’d ever go for help—none of them would aid someone from Quayside. “They were the ones who did this. And I can defend myself.”
Aoife studies me, and her eyes move from bruise to bruise, to the faint curves of muscle lining my arm from all the training Finn has had me do over the years.
Pain flares in my chest at the thought of my sister—and gratitude. Without all that training, all the sweat and grit and muscle she forced from me, I wouldn’t even have a chance at surviving here. I would’ve been neck deep in a pit of despair by now without her.
Aoife’s brow works, like she’s trying to make sense of something. “Who taught you to fight?”
I freeze.
Dangerous.
If I give the Whisperers even a shred of a reason to think I’ll endanger their scheming, Wolf won’t hesitate. He’ll kill me, and he’ll kill Finn, too, if he thinks I’m saying anything that might let someone send the gardai after him.
A bead of sweat forms at my temple. The muggy air swims around me, thick with shimmering heat and the heavy scent of too many floral soaps. “My sister taught me.”
At least that information can’t possibly get me hurt.
Aoife’s brows rise. “You have a sister?”
I sit up a little more against the edge of the bath.
The heat has risen to a level that borders on suffocating.
“She’s back in Quay-side,” I answer. Old Ones, even sitting up doesn’t help my body get rid of the heat.
I taste salt, beads of it trickling along my upper lip, and my head spins.
“Is there somewhere to just…” I wipe at the sweat, dizzy. “Cool down for a minute?”
I need to get out of this heat, but I don’t want her to follow me.
Not while my head is still spinning.
“It can be a lot your first time here.” Aoife smiles and tilts her head to the tiled hall at the far end of the grotto bathing chamber. “There’s a cooling room that way, or your clothes are still where you left them in the changing room.”
The towel is soft as a blanket against my bare skin.
Still, the intense heat flushes up my neck, my cheeks.
All I want is to rip the towel off and lie down naked on the cool tile, but I’m not about to risk my neck alone in a cooling chamber where I know nothing about the exits and entrances and don’t even have a weapon on me.
Forcing my tunic and leathers back on over my damp skin is a battle.
By the time I have them on, I’m sweating even more than before.
In the heat-fogged mirrors of the changing room, chestnut hair sticks to my forehead and my hazy eyes stare back at me. Gray as slate and framed with long, dark lashes. A bright flush colors my high cheekbones.
My knives fit back into the sheaths at my side with practiced ease, and I force myself out of the changing room and stumble back into the maze of hewn halls we came here through.
Cool air sweeps over me.
The only sound is the padding of my worn boots on the stone.
Orange light flickers from the iron sconces.
My head swims, heat still clinging to my senses.
All along the hewn halls, tapestries hang from the stones.
There are none as fine, or new, as the ones in the upper parts of the castle—the tapestries here fray around their yellowing edges with the wear of centuries.
Maybe almost as old as the High Kingship itself.
A particularly long tapestry stretches down half the length of a hall. And with no one around—I check over my shoulder to make sure—my fingers itch to run over the delicate gems and silver threads woven through the fabric.
How has no one stolen them in all these years?
The specter of the Black Quay weighs at the back of my neck at the thought.
Right. That’s how.
Still, touching isn’t taking. And I let myself touch—running one finger, then another, along the carefully stitched figures depicting long-ago battles, tiny shards of rubies glowing in the torchlight to make the spilled blood of centuries look fresh.
The words across the top of the tapestry make clear why almost a third of the tapestry bleeds with red thread and ruby slivers.
The War of Wasted Blood.
The war after the first High King, Berach the Cunning, ousted the Old Ones and defeated the Cymrean attempts to invade in the chaos that followed.