Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
The goal of a Venusborn is unification and satisfaction. Perfect harmony. This is why Venus sorcerers can guide desire: For what is desire, but the need for something we believe will complete us at last?
—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES
“When did this happen?” I demanded.
“Let’s see … Yesterday? I saw Charles Guildford leading the guards to arrest him. Ed Guildford was forced to go with him to the Tomb.” She tutted. “Poor thing.”
I bent over my trunk, searching for coins, jewels, anything that would pay for passage through the city. My gaze caught on the open window, slightly ajar. Bess eyed me curiously, then returned to her stitching.
I climbed into bed, resting my chin against my knees and watching Bess thread her needle. I would have to wait until nightfall. In the meantime, Roland was probably pacing in his cell, assuming he’d lost everything, that no one would come for him.
He’d said as much in Lionesse.
And so, when Bess finally bade me good night and blew out the candles, when the Moon cast milky light across the courtyard, I snapped away the covers and tore off my shift.
I had to be quick—Bess would be reporting to the newly crowned Queen Cecily that I’d returned to Alvion.
The window was still ajar, a gentle wind blowing across the river.
I packed a small leather satchel with a knife and a simple gown worn by maids or servants, so I could change after transforming back into a human. I’d carry the bag in my talons.
There was only one thing I needed my body to do, and it powered the transformation that swept through my limbs: Fly.
I leapt through the open window and into the courtyard, the weight of the bag almost pulling me down to the cobblestones, but I grunted and extended my wings, pushing my falcon body as hard as I could until I curved up and over the roof.
I pushed myself higher, higher still, soaring above Redhall, battling against the pain of my wings. My arms would surely be sore tomorrow.
It was the first time I’d flown since Hal’s death.
The wind was strong, but I remembered these currents.
My wings beat urgently. I banked and dipped just above the canopy of the woods, skimmed along the river, tilting a wing and sending a spray of water up into the sky.
Someone rowing below nudged his companion, shouting, “Have you ever seen a falcon that color?”
All knew what lay on the tightest bend in the Snake, where the forest was craggy and dense and even the river struggled through it, barely deep enough for a barge to pass by. Oars must scratch the riverbed as they churned to deliver traitors through the gatehouse.
I landed on a high branch, tucking my wings to my body. A harsh gust of wind shook through the trees. Moonlight chased away the shadows, revealing a monstrous spread of granite.
The Archimago Tomb.
My falcon eyes were sharp. With the help of lit beacons, they swept over the Tomb.
First, along the ramparts. A fall from the top—ten feet, at least—would snap a limb.
Down to the courtyard, where a dark stain of ravens preened their feathers near the scaffold, a wooden platform coated with dried blood.
The spiraling staircase of the pit, steps leading down to cells carved deep into the bedrock below.
At the bottom of this chasm, legend told, rested the bones of an ancient king.
Beside the pit was a graveyard with a single charred tree guarding it, and a timeworn, sagging Saturn chapel for final prayers, a section of roof caved in. The beacons flickered over rows and rows of gravestones and a freshly dug pile of earth. They were making space for another body.
Roland’s body.
Gertrude, Alice, Eleanor, Prospero—all buried here too.
One by one, they would have been led up the winding staircase from their cells blindfolded and made to kneel on the scaffold, anticipating the kiss of metal against their neck.
A crowd would have gathered to watch, courtiers and ravens, waiting for the swing and the traitor’s head stabbed onto a pike on the gatehouse.
I tore my gaze away from the clumps of soil. How, how could his eyes and his grin ever be severed from him? How could I stop it?
The sheen of a Saturn barrier surrounded the stone ramparts, extending about a hundred feet from the ground in every direction. The final ward.
If a prisoner somehow managed to escape the cells of the pit and heave themselves over the ramparts, the barrier would stop them.
Its power was an extension of the king’s will.
No traitor could pass through it unless the king decided to release them.
And no weapon could destroy a Saturn-drawn wall, not cannon blast, not fire.
Hundreds of years ago, when Archimago ruled, the use of Saturn boundaries had even staved off plague.
But the ravens could fly right over it.
A falcon could too. Or a dragon, carrying a prisoner on her back.
Only a single guard strutted along the ramparts, lazily throwing his sword up into the air and catching it. And why should he be on alert? No one was mad enough to break someone out of the Archimago Tomb.
Until now.
I pushed off from the tree. Flew higher and higher, until the air thinned, then dove over the gleaming edge of the Saturn barrier, spiraling down.
The guard on the ramparts didn’t have time to shout before I’d grasped his mind and knocked him cold.
I shifted back to my human body, stole his sword and his boots, slipped my plain gown over my head.
There, I crouched on the wall, watching for any movement through slits between stones.
The only sound in the Tomb was the croaking and pecking of ravens.
With my new sword in one hand and my knife tucked into the guard’s boot, I walked the perimeter.
The boundary was so close behind me I could lean off the rampart wall and brush it with my fingertips, the magic as intricate and thin as spider’s silk, only visible at certain angles. My flesh passed clean through it.
As an experiment, I transformed my hand into Roland’s, my fingers lengthening elegantly, and tested it again. This time, the boundary rippled, as if I had disturbed water. I was thrown hard onto my back, my tailbone bruising.
So it was true. Roland, now deemed a traitor, could only be carried over it.
I had just risen to my feet when a door groaned open across the courtyard.
With a sharp gasp, I ducked behind the wall again.
A pair of guards swung cups of ale through the air, spilling onto the cobblestones.
They’d climbed down from one of the four rampart towers and were striding over to their post at the entrance to the pit, the staircase winding deep into the earth.
One loudly boasted of a favored brothel upriver.
“Well, you won’t get any pleasure tonight,” the other said. And then, more quietly, “Not with her here.”
They broke into a fit of laughter.
Along the walls, a long shadow rose and spread.
Miranda emerged from a tower across the yard.
Torchlight shone on her bald head, the puckered scar across her face.
Her blood-tinted eyes were narrowed slits as she surveyed the courtyard.
Her gaze roamed across where I was hidden, then down to the graveyard and chapel, as if it could turn over each stone.
I remembered, with perfect clarity, the agony of her tearing through my flesh.
She barked an order to the guards to be quiet.
When she’d shut herself back inside the tower, the first guard cursed at his companion, batted his cup of ale so it clattered to the ground.
I took a single, shaky breath, then called on my magic.
It tiptoed forward, stretching toward their minds.
Fatigue hit them at once—they collapsed in a heap.
I raced down the rampart steps and dragged their limp bodies into the graveyard, laying them side by side beneath the burnt tree.
Then, with mounting dread, I turned to the pit. It swallowed all moonlight.
The stairs that led into the foreboding dark were narrow, damp, covered in moss.
I nearly lost my balance, my nails scraping against the slick wall, my body wavering over the drop.
Once I’d found my footing, I pressed my brow against the stone and allowed myself another deep breath before I continued on.
If only I could summon the bravery I felt in others.
Sconces were carved into the rock every twenty steps or so, but the torchlight was dim.
When my eyesight adjusted to the gloom, I realized that the sconces were each beside a door.
One was cracked open, the cell empty. Inside was a four-poster bed, a washing bin, a writing desk, a rug.
It was only missing a window and a hearth.
If not for that, and if not for the crude stone and the bite in the air, it might have been a chamber in Redhall.
Most of the prisoners of the Tomb were not common thieves and murderers.
These were the king’s enemies—many born into nobility—who had displeased or betrayed him.
Perhaps he allowed them to live in relative comfort as a final cruelty.
As they lay shivering on the same fine sheets they always had, they would think the king merciful.
A last-minute pardon would surely arrive any moment.
It was a horrible trick.
Another guard sat in a wooden chair nearly fifty meters down. He glanced up when he heard my foot slip. Our eyes met. My power shot like an arrow into his mind before he could shout, and he slumped over.
I tried a few doors as the stairs wound deeper, all unlocked and empty. That unnerved me. I hurried down to where the guard had fallen and searched his doublet for a key ring. Nothing.
Inspecting a cell door, I found a small latch for trays of food, but no keyhole. The opening was just large enough for a hand. Only when I peered closer did I notice the etchings on the wooden doorframe.
It was a list of names, crossed out in what appeared to be dried blood.