Chapter Thirty-Eight
THIRTY-EIGHT
I come back to consciousness slowly, crawling up from the depths of the throbbing blackness behind my eyes.
Don’t look, the voice in my head pleads.
Just the smell of this place… tears sting my eyes, even as I clamp them shut. Terror cranks up every sense, no matter how hard I wish they would all just fade away.
I don’t want to look. I don’t want to know—but I have to.
I can’t prepare if I can’t see what’s coming for me.
I hear voices. One that’s vaguely familiar. The other a viper, dripping with poison and a haunting lilt that makes my skin crawl.
Slowly, so slowly, I force my burning eyes open.
The room around me isn’t so much a room as it is a carved-out husk of gray rock and iron bars. The walls, if they can be called that, curve in ragged slopes that make the space feel like a half circle, and a crudely drawn one at that.
Metal bars crisscross into a slatted wall some ten feet out of my reach. Between the bars and me is a wooden table that’s as stained and worn and cracked as the one on the Black Quay.
A horrifying array of metal instruments lies on it. Along with all my weapons, and the sword my sister gave me.
Fear swallows up everything I am, every thought. I jerk, but my wrists and ankles are bound in cold metal shackles, and a rusted chair creaks beneath me at the movement.
There’s nothing left to put up there after the Lady of Shadows finishes with us.
That’s what Wolf said, the confession that ripped him apart.
Old Ones, help me.
“Ah,” a figure in the shadows says from the other side of the iron slats. They tilt a cloaked head toward me, another smaller cloaked figure following close. “Our guest is awake.”
The figure steps through a narrow door in the iron, and I wrench back.
Pure instinct takes over me. Cold metal creaks and groans in the chair beneath me but refuses to give. It claws into my wrists, around the bones of my ankles in unforgiving shackles.
I choke on a sharp crash of terror.
“Come and say hello, my dear,” the shadowy figure says, waving her hand to the smaller one. “Manners matter, even here. And we aren’t really strangers, are we?”
The dank, foul air of this place closes in. But I can’t crawl back. I can’t get away, and the small figure steps through the iron hinges like she wants to be here just as much as I do.
The flicker of the only candle laid out on the table illuminates the nearing figure’s sweeping, long cloak.
Her fraying purple cloak.
Aoife steps into the light.
“She’s a clever girl, isn’t she? Realizing so quickly that helping me means her mother won’t suffer any longer.
” The Lady of Shadows runs her hand over the metal instruments on the table.
The sound she makes between her teeth sets every sense on edge.
“Honesty should be so simple. Yet it’s the one thing no one ever wants to give me. ”
She selects a tool that looks like something a normal person would use to crack nuts.
My muscles lock, trying desperately to fight back from her reach, but my knives are laid out on the table beside the savage metal tools. I can’t get to them.
I can’t do anything.
I’m trapped.
Her fingers, impossibly strong, unclench my fist. “Right one or left one first?” She studies my hands, voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “You choose.”
I can’t answer her. It takes everything in me not to vomit.
You’re not trained to hold up under torture, Talon said to me the morning of the Test of Wisdom. The morning I was poisoned. That’s exactly what will happen if the Lady of Shadows ever sets her sights on you.
And I know—this is her.
The High Queen’s spymaster. The woman who slit the young girl Caitria’s throat in the Test of Cunning.
The same one whose very name haunts the streets of this city.
And I can’t keep from wondering whether this woman is the one who killed the first woman Cash loved, the one Wolf said had eyes just like mine.
Whether she got the poison that killed her from Keeva—if Cash’s life has been intertwined with mine for far longer than I ever realized.
Even if Cash is on the throne now… who will hear me scream here?
Damp drips off the hewn rock of the walls, deeper and colder than the dungeon cell I was in when the Whisperers first brought me to Castle Mount.
I hear no one—not even gardai—outside the iron bars.
“Who brought you to the castle?” The Lady of Shadows tightens the pincer over the first knuckle of my right pointer finger. “Because I know you aren’t the peasant we brought here for the Assay.” Her other hand strokes my hair, exactly where that girl in the dungeon had a streak of blond.
Terror surges through every part of me.
My jaw strains, but I won’t let the words out.
I won’t give them to her, no matter what it takes. I won’t betray Wolf, or the Whisperers.
Whatever magic is left in the Seven Wells belongs to us.
The spymaster’s purr crackles with barely contained glee as the pincer crunches down on my knuckle.
Agony bursts up my arm. I hear the crack inside my head, and taste vomit before she moves to the next knuckle and crushes that one too.
Aoife watches without a single word.
Betrayal cuts deep. Time becomes nothing but heartbeats, and my own screams.
The Lady of Shadows alternates her methods. She works in blows that whip my head back and send blood bursting across my tongue, sliding in questions just as my resolve starts to crack.
Where are the Whisperers hiding? How did I get out of the castle?
Who is leading the caoranachs?
Is the Martyr still alive?
Not one of the questions is about the High King lying dead in his bed.
My cheek splits open. My lips, too. The skin all down my hands and wrists mottles with deep purple and crimson where the pincers split my flesh. But I don’t give in. I don’t break.
Hope is the cruel edge of a blade on my heart.
It cuts again and again, each time deeper than the last.
If Cash has the throne, then it’s only a matter of time before he has the gardai combing every inch of this castle.
Before Wolf can sneak back in and come looking for me.
I just need to hold on.
“I suppose I should thank you.” The Lady of Shadows wipes her hands on the length of her crusted dark cloak.
She sets the pincers down, what feels like hours later, and rummages in the far corner of the carved-out space.
Thin strands catch the candle light. My eyes strain, dread making my heart flutter, and she uncoils a bound length of glinting fiber.
“It’s been years since I had the chance to make sure these still work. ”
She holds the coils out in front of me, as if I care what they’re made of.
“Ingenious things, aren’t they? Silver wires.
They conduct lightning,” the Lady of Shadows explains, and sweat prickles down the back of my neck.
“That means every strike your mages have sent crashing down into our turrets, we collect that energy and channel it from the spires on the rooftop all the way down here to…” She cocks her head, sharp teeth catching on her bloodred lips. “Well, to traitors like you.”
I wrench back.
The shackles won’t budge. I heave so hard that something cracks in my right ankle.
“Nothing?” A disappointed frown twists the Lady of Shadows’ drawn pale face. “That’s all right. We have plenty of time. And you’re not going anywhere.”
She pinches the clamps onto my collarbone.
A sob wells in my throat.
“Please.” The single word shatters what’s left of my dignity.
Her lips curl into a knowing smile, and she steps back as the wire leading from the clamps up the ceiling heats to a molten red.
“I can’t watch this,” Aoife mutters, wringing her hands in the fraying purple of her cloak. The crack of her voice lights a wave of rage in my blood.
“Fuck you,” I try to scream, but the words come out cracked and broken.
Still, she turns to face me.
“You’re the one who let me hear your plans,” Aoife says sadly.
“What?” I gasp on the cracking word.
“Cash will do it, right?” She turns her sapphire eyes on me, cold and unflinching. There’s no hint of the blood shock I saw in her on the castle stairs after I killed the king. After I tried to protect her. “Take the crown before she does?”
Crushing, gut-wrenching defeat pierces my lungs.
If Aoife warned the High Queen, then Cash… Old Ones, he could be on the Black Quay by now, or butchered and buried somewhere no one will ever find.
The Lady of Shadows trails a long finger down my throbbing cheek. “Aoife only did what any good daughter would. Repaying the debt of loyalty her family has owed to the Crown these last five years, ever since that unfortunate attempt at an uprising. She is her mother’s last hope, after all.”
I blink back tears.
I was wrong. I was so terribly, horribly wrong about Aoife.
I let myself believe that because she knew loss, she would be like me. That because she’s seen the cruelty of the High King and the High Queen, she would want them gone and someone better on the throne. Her own second cousin, for fuck’s sake.
But I also know how far we’ll go to save the ones we love most.
The Lady of Shadows turns her cold gaze to me. “This can stop any time you want,” she says, as if her words are the only rational things left in this world.
Like they’re the only way to end this—and maybe they are.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to give in.
Finn is safe. My debt is paid. So if my life is forfeit, let it be forfeit for something.
I am my mother’s last hope too.
“No?” The spymaster twists what looks like a knob throttling the power of the upper half of the silver wire where it snakes down the wall. “Your choice.”
The smell of burning fills the air.
The wire turns white-hot.
And a scream rips my throat to ribbons as a bolt of agony locks every muscle and shreds my mind to tatters.
Strange, to think my skin once felt anything other than pain.
My mind remembers the soft touch of his skin on mine, and the warmth of his breath on my ear. Heat and relief and escape. I cling to the memories, to someone’s touch causing anything other than… agony.
Pain is all that exists now, and it’s everywhere. There’s no part of my body that isn’t screaming. No part of me the Lady of Shadows hasn’t found a way to punch or burn or shatter.
My hands are ruins. I look down to see my fingers jut out at sickening, impossible angles.
She took a hammer to my forearm somewhere between the third round of white-hot shocks.
The strange, tented skin where the hammer collided with my flesh purples with every heartbeat, and it feels like my pulse is pounding all over my body, in every swollen, broken place.
Blistering marks matching the ones branching out over Wolf’s body weep, raw and fresh, at every place where the shocks tore through me.
In the dying candlelight, I wonder—did she do this to him, too?
Wolf’s skin might’ve healed—mostly—but what’s underneath never did. I see that now. Like a once-broken bone set crooked inside him. And maybe it’s too late for those parts of him to ever heal right, but Old Ones, I wish I could live to see it.
A sharp ache blooms in my chest. I wish I could see him try.
And me, too.
I would watch the sun rise just one more time, and see my sister’s laughing face.
My mind plays tricks on me. Cruel tricks. I think I hear my sister, that familiar tenor of Finn’s voice, and the steady scrape of her boots. Metal clanging with each step, like when she used to arm herself to the teeth from our father’s weapons stall and sneak off with me for training drills.
Your father’s the one who betrayed your mother.
How could Finn not tell me?
My vision swims. Voices rise outside the iron bars. Rough, and I can hear the Lady of Shadows with them. I fight against the chair, against the shackles holding me in place. It accomplishes absolutely nothing other than more pain, and I vomit all over the floor.
There’s no light here. No window to gauge whether time is passing. The candle has burned down to a nub, and the silver wire climbing up the wall glows less often now than it did at the start of this torture. How much longer could it be before she kills me?
“Put her in there with the traitor.”
The iron door rattles, and the Lady of Shadows returns with two gardai and a woman with a bag over her head.
One of the gardai carries a wooden chair and an armful of rope.
She sets them down, and the woman’s head lolls on her muscled shoulder as the other guard drops her onto the chair.
They make quick work of binding her ankles and wrists with the rope.
Jealousy gnaws at the walls of my empty, aching stomach. I’d trade my shackles for rope in an instant, just for the chance that I could find a way to cut through and escape.
Not that I could go far.
My feet are almost as bad as my hands. I think the Lady of Shadows enjoyed shattering each toe on my right foot even more than my fingers.
She runs a hand over the woman’s shoulders and tilts her head at me.
“You’ve surprised me.” Her eyes narrow over my swollen face. “Most people break after the first shock, though one once lasted through a dozen. Since you don’t seem… cooperative, perhaps we need a little encouragement.”
She rips the bag off the woman’s head, and my heart stops.
Finn.
There’s not a mark on my sister’s face. Not a scratch anywhere on her, and that only makes the terror bite harder. I’ve taken every single thing the Lady of Shadows has done to me. Every scream, every split in my skin, every agonizing shock ripping through me.
Everything I’ve done has been to keep Finn safe.
To keep her alive.
My sister looks at me like I’m a ghost. “Maeve?”
The Lady of Shadows punches her across the face, and a cry bursts from my bloodied lips. My sister’s head whips to the side, the raw crack of Finn’s jaw rattling my bones.
“And to think, all Aoife had to do was follow you out of the castle and wait in the shadows. Your guard led her right to that hovel you call a home, after your pleas to find your dear sister. The gardai were more than happy to fetch her for us after Aoife told them where to go.”
The Lady of Shadows leans in so close I can smell her perfume. Roses, cloying and sickeningly sweet. Her black eyes gleam.
The light burns down to almost nothing. Just haunting spasms against the darkness, fighting a losing battle to hold out.
“You know exactly how to make sure none of this happens to her,” she hisses.
My resolve wavers. I could tell her one thing, surely. One thing wouldn’t put everything at risk. One thing might be enough.
Will it ever be enough?
A deafening crack seems to ripple through the rock, a shock wave from somewhere in the distance, and tiny pebbles of dust sprinkle over the table. I feel the grit in my wounds, see the smattering of them in Finn’s hair.
Then the wick of the candle flickers, darkness snuffing out the light as the sound of fingernails trail over metal.
And my sister screams.