Chapter Thirty-Nine
THIRTY-NINE
Drip.
Drip.
I can’t clamp my hands over my ears. The shackles make sure of that. They make sure I hear everything. All the sounds I’d give anything not to know.
Finn screams. Again and again and again. I hear her bones crack, and I scream right along with her.
I plead, beg for it to stop. For the Lady of Shadows to turn the tools back on me instead.
There’s one moment, just one, where she leaves us, both strapped to our chairs.
I hear the creak of metal, and the slam of what has to be the iron gate caging us in here. The sound of Finn’s breathing is wet and horrible, but it’s all I have of her now. There’s no way to reach across the feet for her or even see her in the pitch black.
Pain pulses with every heartbeat. Never easing. Never fading.
Still, I manage to rasp, “You never told me.”
Shame sours in my mouth. That those are the first words that come out of me, after everything. But if we’re dying here…
Finn’s wheezing staggers. “Told you…” There’s a wet splatter, like Finn’s spit out a mouthful of blood. “What?”
That simple word is so ragged with pain, it steals what’s left of my breath. I try to force the words past gritted teeth, my shrieking jaw. “What our father did.”
For the first time since Finn was brought here, there’s only silence.
It’s just as painful as the screams.
Finn sucks in a sharp whistle of a rasp. “You would’ve run.” Rope strains, groaning in the dark. She doesn’t waste time asking how I know. “Couldn’t. Protect you. If you ran.”
“I wouldn’t.” I shake my head, not that she can see it in the pitch black. My cheek splits, fresh blood oozing from the torn skin where one of the spymaster’s punches slammed into me. “I won’t. Not without you. Not ever.”
Her shallow wheezes are the only answer, and it’s a thousand times worse in the darkness.
Sound amplifies. Every little noise carries.
Metal shrieks on rusted hinges.
The Lady of Shadows’ tongue tuts behind her teeth. “Ready to talk, are we?”
Wood shifts on the stone floor beneath us. Rope groans, and the hot sizzle of heating wires builds to a sharp buzz in the air.
Rock cracks, dust pattering down over my head. Sticking to the cuts down my cheeks, dripping with each drop of blood falling into my mouth.
“Get. Fucked,” Finn grunts, and something wet spatters again.
The Lady of Shadows hisses. I hear a cloak rustle, and there’s a slow, steady pad of boots on stone in the dark, toward where I think the table is.
Not again.
I can’t let them hurt Finn again.
“I’m the one you fucking want!” I scream, my throat too ragged from screaming to manage anything more.
“Then give me what I want,” the Lady of Shadows snarls.
I can’t give in. I can’t tell the Lady of Shadows what she wants. Any hope of saving whatever magic’s left in the Seven Wells, of protecting our very future, our freedom as a people—all of it dies if I betray Wolf and the Whisperers.
Everything it cost to get this far will have been for nothing if I break now.
But Old Ones, holding out feels impossible.
“Maeve,” Finn whispers, her voice thick.
A sob breaks free from me. Tears flood my eyes, and I taste salt. They pour down my cheeks, stinging in the cuts and mixing with dried blood and dirt and the places where Wolf once kissed me.
She’s going to ask me to break. I know it. Finn wants me to make it stop. She needs for it to stop, needs to know I’ll do whatever it takes. Just like when she was dying, and I saved her. I can save her again, right now. I can end this.
And if she says the words, Old Ones help me—I’ll do it.
I’ll fucking break.
Metal ticks, like a clamp pressurizing. Her breath heaves, and I swear I can see the familiar spark of her stubborn, fierce eyes even through the darkness.
“Don’t give in,” she wheezes.
My fingers reach for hers, straining against the shackles. The metal creaks, and for a heartbeat, there’s a groan like rope straining against taut muscle. “Finn—”
A spring releases in a sharp whistle of air.
There’s a sound like my blade makes every time it sinks into skin, and Finn’s breath snares in her throat. The heaving, wheezing sound stops.
In the darkness, there’s no light to fade out from her eyes.
But I hear the moment she stops breathing. The moment her chest stills, and her pain ends.
I feel the moment my soul, if I even still have one, splits apart.
My chest collapses. My lungs don’t work. There’s no feeling left in my skin. No pain. Nothing at all, except for the hollow swell of anguish crushing me alive. The air trapped behind my ribs explodes, and a ragged, guttural scream rips out of me.
It’s all that’s left of me in the darkness, and it’s not enough. Pressure builds unbearably inside me. Straining at the boundaries of my senses. My body can’t bear it. Can’t possibly survive it for one second longer.
Somewhere in the distance, rock cracks again.
The mountain trembles, shuddering through the chair caging me here. A hum fills the darkness as if the very foundations of Castle Mount are falling.
Like the battle that raged after the Test of Strength is back.
And if it is, I want it to bury me. I want the earth to swallow me whole. The despair is impossible to hold against my shattered heart. There’s no way to live with this.
Then I hear—
Boots.
Boots running on stone, and clanging metal.
Two sounds I know as well as my sister’s last breath, and wish I’d never had to learn.
Rough voices grow closer, but the darkness won’t yield. It suffocates me. Each rasping draw of my stubborn lungs scrapes against the shadows, and the iron hinges creak.
Bodies, there’s no way of knowing how many, shuffle into the space.
My mind imagines the scent of leather—and spice.
“Lady,” a hard voice shouts. It’s muffled, someone speaking through their hands, or a mask. “The High Queen needs you.” The words are low in an almost familiar growl. “The mages are back.”
A spindly finger caresses the split along my cheekbone. I close my eyes and let the answering flare of pain splinter through me.
I deserve to hurt.
“That’s not possible.” Her perfume chokes the air to the right of me. Metal clicks, like she’s laid whatever device she holds down onto the table again. “What precisely did she tell—?”
Bone splinters, a gut-churning crack.
The sharp draw of her hissing breath, and one syllable. “Door—?”
A slashing gurgle chokes off the rest. A wet spatter falls. “I swore once I’d be the last thing you ever see.” Dead weight smacks stone. There’s a sound like steel hissing into a sheath, and a furious, familiar voice. “And I keep my promises.”
My heart jolts. A sob swells in my throat. This is my brain playing tricks, now that Finn is… I can’t even say the word. This is my shattered mind clinging to the last faint shred of hope it can salvage for me in this darkness.
But I crack.
I break apart.
Tears burn down the open wounds and bruises covering my face, and the only air coming into my lungs is heaving gasps. Because the smell of him… Old Ones, that can’t be all in my head. That achingly familiar leather and smoke and sage is real.
He is real.
“You’re alive.” Those same awed words: the ones that tore from Wolf when he found me, hair loose and soaking wet in his room. “Maeve, I’ve got you. We’re getting you out of here.”
“Swear.” The word is all I can croak out over the splits down my lips, my swollen face.
His voice is a buoy in the dark, and I cling to each word.
“I swear, Maeve,” Wolf vows roughly. The warm promise of his touch hovers over my skin, but he hesitates.
I hear the catch in his throat, then the spark of a match at his back.
A burst of light blinds me, but not before the shadows peel back and I catch a glimpse through swollen eyes of Cash’s horrified stare.
Wolf leans in, filling my vision.
“Close your eyes,” he urges softly, and one hand curls around to cup the back of my neck. It’s probably the only spot on me that isn’t bloody or broken or bruised. “We need light to break the shackles. Trust me—you don’t want to see.”
I should be strong enough. I should be brave enough to bear witness. But I just know—this isn’t how I want to remember my sister.
If I even live long enough to get to remember her.
All the pain slams back into me at once. I can’t breathe past it, and my eyes fly wide.
“Shock,” Cash says under his breath.
“No shit,” Wolf snaps at him, and he leans in to press an achingly soft kiss to my forehead. “I’ve got you. I’m getting you out of here.”
He grabs for something from the table, and I close my eyes.
Let my body sag against the strong set of his shoulders as he works at the bolts keeping the shackles in place.
One pops free, but the other fights him, and the tool slips, jabbing at the shattered knuckles of my useless left hand, jostling the tented bruise above my wrist.
I stifle a scream in the worn, warm leather.
“Fuck, I’m so sorry.” Wolf tenses and positions his hand so it’s between my skin and the tool. So any slip will slice into him, not me, and yanks at it again. “Come on, you piece of—”
The bolt clatters to the ground and the shackle releases me. He makes quick work of the others, even as the flood of emotions and shock bring a surge of nausea rising in my chest.
I won’t be sick. Not after everything. Not when I’m the one who’s still here, whose heart is still beating.
The Lady of Shadows might’ve shattered me, but I did not break.
I didn’t give in.
Another blast explodes in the distance, and more dust scatters down from the rock above us.
Wolf loops an arm under my shoulders, helping me up. “Can you walk?”
My hands are useless, every knuckle crushed and the skin covered in blood and vicious bruises. My boots are missing—cold, damp stone chills the bottom of my untouched left sole, but not the other.
“My right foot—” I swallow hard, wincing as panic rises. “I can’t feel it.”
Wolf’s arm tightens around me, bearing my weight. All I can do is shake and test my weight on the foot the Lady of Shadows hadn’t gotten the chance to mangle yet.
My left ankle trembles but holds—barely. Pain spasms up my leg.
I bite back a cry again, but it still slips out. Wolf’s eyes fly to mine.
The sound of more boots slamming on dirt echoes from outside the iron bars, and his arm snakes around my waist, pulling me into his side. Cash raises his broadsword, cold menace chilling his navy glare as he pivots for the sound.
“It’s me!” a voice hisses out.
Talon steps through the iron door, flickering torch in hand, then stills at the sight of me. Their eyes flicker over my wounds, over to the other side of the table, where I can’t bear to look, can’t bear to see…
“Time’s up,” Talon says in a low voice. “You ready to face her?”
My ears ring, and Wolf jerks his head to the table—where the Lady of Shadows laid out all my weapons beyond my reach.
One by one, he grabs the Málmar steel blades he gave me, then my short sword that looks just like Finn’s, and slides them into the empty sheaths down my sides.
He levels a lethal glare at the edge of the room.
“If you’re wrong about this”—he points a finger at Cash—“in front of the Martyr herself, I will split you open and feed your guts to every fucking serpent on the islands.”
“Isle,” I croak out, correcting him.
Wolf’s hand brushes the matted, blood-tattered hair clinging to the sides of my battered face. I feel him shake with barely contained rage.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” Cash says coolly to him, and flicks his icy gaze to the iron door. “Let’s go. Before they bring this entire castle down on top of us.”
“Fang wouldn’t fucking dare.” Wolf flicks a hard nod to Talon. Something passes between them, and my guard—my friend—nods back. Short and quick, but sorrow flashes there.
Cash holds back the iron lattice door, and we leave the darkness behind.
I leave my sister behind with all the pieces of my sundered soul.
I bury my face in Wolf’s shoulder and lean heavily on him with each lurching step forward.
I can taste the sharp bite of stone and minerals in the air.
The walls outside the room that was my cage aren’t even really walls.
They’re pathways, tunnels hewn into the rock, just like the ones weaving behind the castle walls.
And Cash leads us through one after the next.
There are no gardai here, no one blocking our way. Just Talon, close behind us, their boots shuffling as if weighed down. And maybe it should make me feel better, but the suspicious absence of anyone else only roots the terror deeper in the wreckage of my heart.
Cash waves us down a twist in the narrow tunnel, around a curve where orange light throws shifting shadows over the walls.
Flame flickers from the torch lying on the ground, right in front of a lone door set into the stone.
The smell of torch oil stings my nose, and the light sputters as a lone figure turns to face us.
Aoife, an apple clutched in her palm as if she doesn’t have a single care. The fruit slips from her fingers.
Her fingers find the hilt of the knife I gave her, and her blue eyes dart from me to Wolf to Cash.
“Please.” Aoife shakes, but she holds the knife out in front of her as Cash takes a single, menacing step. “She swore the queen will let my mother go if I just—”
“You should know by now,” Cash says, raising his sword. His sapphire eyes darken with something cold, and cruel. “Her promises don’t mean shit.” Cash moves so fast, his sword blurs.
Aoife cries out and falls.
Crimson stains the faded purple of her cloak across her chest. Her fingers clutch at the edges of it as she falls to the ground, pulling the fabric close around her like an embrace.
Cash leaves her lying there and kicks open the door. “This way.”
I don’t look back.
None of us do.
The smells of rotting earth and long-dead things hiss out of the tunnel beyond the door. From behind us, I hear Talon’s heavy breathing, the shift of their weight. My stomach twists, trying to look back at them, and Wolf’s hand tightens on my hip.
I suck in a gasp at the pressure on my ribs.
Wolf’s green eyes find mine, and the dark worry there tears at my heart.
“I could carry you,” he offers quietly.
He would. I know he would. But I can’t let him. I can’t get the words out, but Wolf nods, eyes fierce. “Then you’ll walk. And I’ll help you.”
Together, we step into a foul tunnel carved beneath the belly of the mountain. All I can do is bite back against the pain of each step and pray we’ll come out the other side.