Chapter 3
COLD WATER STUNG Corin’s skin as she splashed her face beside the river. Fat bruises the size of berries bloomed on her cheeks, and her left eye was swollen shut after the soldier had beaten her.
But she was used to looking like crap, and really, she was more concerned that Elly had nowhere to return. If her sister tried searching for their ramshackle house behind the railroads, she would find only a mountain of rubble and an army of soldiers who would sooner protect land than their own people.
When most of the blood and grime washed off, Corin limped down the rocky path by the river’s edge. The water had turned to a muted gray, reflecting the dull clouds of a washed-out sky, though most of the riverbank was covered in dead leaves and weeds that grew along the edges. Autumn should have killed her memories of this place alongside the trees, yet reminders lingered on every corner. The soft murmur of stream that once lulled Corin and Elly to sleep in their tent. The patch of grass where their friends lay freshly washed clothes to dry under the sun. The gritty pile of rocks that children collected to skip across the water. That time felt like the closest thing to peace, which was why Corin shouldn’t have expected it to last at all.
She passed by the area where she had last seen her friends, marked now by churned mud and shattered stone. The commune moved their tents along the river trail throughout the seasons to avoid capturing soldiers’ attention, but she remembered the place she’d stayed the night she left for good, the gentle slope of wildflowers her boots had crushed to death when she fled under the moonlight. A year was enough time to turn her friends to dust, but she couldn’t stop smelling charred flesh as if she’d been with them.
She quickened her pace to leave them behind. Dryness thickened her throat like the scream she swallowed every morning after waking up.
When she thought it would come up again like bile, she steadied herself at a wooden pole. Her blurred gaze fixed itself to something simple:
The mud on her boots. The scattering of gravel. The curved lines of chalk on the rocks’ surface.
The familiarity of it struck her. Most of the drawings had faded from rain, but she recognized the rough scribbles of white and the uneven bumps of paint.
She had taught Elly to soak chalk in water to create a paste, and had seen her sister cover sidewalks with drawings.
The day before they left the commune, despite Elly’s protests, Corin had stamped them out. At least, she thought she did.
Corin knelt down to turn over the rocks. Each drawing revealed underside was a tiny stab of betrayal.
There were ruffled petals colored in white, as if in mid-bloom, and broad circles that spiraled around a stem like full moons.
A few of the stems turned into wavy lines, which Corin guessed were locks of hair, a childish depiction of a flower crown worn by a girl. Except, to Elly, these were not ordinary flowers, and this was not an ordinary girl.
Anger pulsed against Corin’s temple as she kicked the rocks into the river. She had told her sister to stop listening to fairy tales.
That stories were shared to placate and distract from reality, but they would never be tools to survive in it.
All this time, she feared Elly would die in the crossfire of soldiers, be snatched by men with leering eyes, keel over from hunger and poverty. But she hadn’t lost Elly to any of those things.
In the end, her sister had run away to chase the most dangerous thing of all: hope.
? ? ?
SUNSET BLED INTO the mountainside by the time Corin reached Gyldan’s borders, and she understood then why a castle had been built here centuries ago. The rocky terrain overlooked the surrounding forests, and if any god had favored her enough to have her born in wealth, she would have wanted her windows to oversee the towering trees and changing colors of the leaves as well. But the castle was long gone, rumored to be buried with its sleeping princess, and the only sight left was dead foliage and patrolling soldiers. They stood along the border with rifles and sharp eyes, keen to pull the trigger if they spotted Corin as they would any animal.
She stayed away from walking trails, ducking behind a boulder to evade a passing military tank. Once the roar of the vehicle faded, she continued stalking along the mountainside as she had for the past hour, tearing down vines that wrapped around the rocky walls, and rubbing mud over her clothes for camouflage. Thorns ripped holes in her gloves, and her palms prickled with splinters.
When she thought her chafed skin couldn’t handle more, her fingers dug into a rock crevice that finally felt different from the rest.
Cold air wafted through the small cracks. The change in temperature raised bumps on her skin. She cut through the thick vines with her dagger, shearing the tendrils that twisted around each other until a gaping black mouth opened before her.
Corin stepped back, staring into the darkness. The wind whispered around the rocks like a secret. She thought about the ones that would never be uncovered by the world, lost in time.
A century ago, refugees from Zilar dug tunnels connecting to their neighbors in Gyldan while evading the dangerous forests that surrounded the kingdom. Corin’s grandmother had been one of hundreds who survived traveling for miles by foot. But monarchy dissolved into war after the royal family died out, and as neighboring kingdoms fought to take over the land, military forces found and demolished several passageways. Now, desperate travelers used the remaining network of tunnels for a different purpose: to find the princess who fell asleep one hundred years ago.
Corin knew the story well, because it was Elly’s favorite. The other artists in the commune had told Elly about the legend, and she loved repeating it to Corin. On rainy nights when they hid inside their tent, Elly would whisper in Corin’s ear the tale of a princess cursed by a demon. As midnight struck on the princess’s eighteenth birthday, the girl pricked herself with a spindle and fell into eternal slumber. Her faerie godmothers gifted true love’s kiss as a cure, yet when time came for the prince to kiss her, she never opened her eyes. The prince was so consumed by grief that he asked the faeries to bury the castle underground, taking him with it, so that he would never live in a world without his true love.
“That’s why Gyldan is so terrible now,” Elly had whispered.
“Because some princess pricked herself with a spindle?” Corin remembered saying. “That’s stupid.”
Elly had shaken her head. Her face had been tucked in the crook of Corin’s neck, so her hair tickled below Corin’s chin whenever she moved. Corin had retaliated by tickling her stomach. Elly had shoved her elbow into Corin’s face with a huff.
“There were people who visited her tower before the castle was buried. In all their drawings, she wore a crown of moonflowers. Those only bloom every hundred years, and they bloomed on the night she fell asleep.”
“Is there a purpose to this story, or are you just rambling to annoy me?”
Corin had known the flowers were Elly’s latest fixation, their concrete surroundings etched in clumsy chalk recreations. She didn’t like the way the story clung to her sister like false hope.
“I counted the years. They’re going to bloom again in three days’ time,” Elly had said, wide-eyed and breathless. “What if that’s when the princess will wake up?”
Corin had diminished her sister’s beliefs by stamping out her chalk drawings and reminding her of reality. No one could fall asleep for centuries, let alone be the savior to a kingdom overthrown by war. Desperate travelers who ventured inside the tunnels chased after a fantasy, where skies were filled with magic and faeries instead of warplanes and smoke. Not only were these ideas foolish, but they were also dangerous. Despite hundreds of people attempting to find the princess, no one had ever made it out of the tunnels.
Corin stared at the abyss and pictured Elly walking into the darkness, motivated by inane stories and imaginary flowers. As she rolled up her sleeves, gripped onto the rocks, and climbed down into the hole, she thought about how she’d underestimated the gall that a child of twelve could have. She would not let her sister pay the price of stupidity with her life.
The tunnels turned colder the deeper Corin traveled, goose bumps prickling her flesh even as she massaged her arms with muddied gloves. She tried marking each turn she made with lines of gravel, but there were other stones in each corner, trails left behind by those who’d inevitably become lost.
“El?” she called out.
No one responded but her own echo. Corin inhaled a deep breath, gritting her teeth.
“When I find you,” she called again, “you’re going to be in so much trouble.”
? ? ?
SHE DID NOT find Elly.
Corin lost count of the hours, her awareness of time ebbing and flowing like the wash of a tide. Blisters oozed between her toes, each step in the endless tunnel laced with pain. Rocks cut through her gloves and scraped her skin.
At first, the excitement of following Elly’s trail had propelled Corin forward. She’d recognized the chalk drawings of moonflowers on the walls and the clumsy scribbles that could have only been etched by her sister’s hand. But as the hours stretched along endless passageways and wore down her body, she wondered how Elly could have survived this far. She dreaded turning a corner where the chalk no longer remained and finding her sister’s body instead.
A jagged stone cut her back as she leaned against a wall. Even breathing was difficult, the stale air thick with dust and dirt. She wanted to give up and cry. Not because she was tired, but because she could only imagine Elly walking this same path, her body hollowing from the inside out until she was nothing but bone.
“We can’t survive without each other,” their mother had told her when Elly was born. “You have to protect your little sister.”
And she’d tried, hadn’t she? After their parents died, she’d kept Elly out of trouble, steered her away from open streets when the warplanes came, traded favors with other artists in the commune so they’d look after Elly while Corin looted shops during air raids. She threw herself into destroyed homes and threw fists at strangers who gave her broken ribs and black eyes while calling her a low-life thief.
That was what eldest daughters were supposed to do. Their survival was her responsibility, because she was born first.
“Hmm . . . I don’t think that’s the full story, Corin.”
A familiar voice echoed through the cavern walls. A young woman sat on a rock beside her, dirty chestnut hair strewn over sunken cheeks and black eyes. Her skin was summer brown, her mouth set in a hard line, the way Corin recalled her a year ago. The woman picked at dirty nails through her fingerless gloves, a matching pair to the set she’d gifted Corin when they first met.
“I don’t remember you being so responsible when I found you,” said the woman. “Or have you already forgotten?”
Great. Corin was so hungry she was hallucinating the dead. She clenched her jaw, trying to shut out Harlow’s figure, but ended up drawing the memory closer instead. Corin was barely a teenager when the artists found her beneath the bridge that spanned the river, her body curled around a shadowy recess where concrete jutted over the ledge. They’d tried getting her attention, but she couldn’t lift herself from the ground to tend to the dirty child beside her, couldn’t even bother responding to Elly shaking her shoulders and whining that her head was itchy from their filth.
They’d carried Elly across the river, while Corin had to be dragged like a corpse. They’d cut Elly’s hair and massaged soap into her scalp. After, they’d ripped pieces of bread and hand-fed Corin while she sat blank-eyed and silent.
Corin was twelve, and her parents had been dead for a year, and she couldn’t muster the strength to try anymore. It was easier to tune out Elly’s crying and pretend she was no longer a person, but a ghost.
“You were a wreck,” Harlow said. “Maggie told me your body was there, but your mind wasn’t.”
Corin hadn’t bothered learning everyone’s names those first few months, because they didn’t feel real. She saw herself living among them as if she were a distant entity, watching from above. There was her body, carrying tables along the riverbank, washing berries to share with the others. They were a group of ten to fifteen vagrants, some young, some old, and a few came and went throughout the seasons. Memories of her new beginning and acquaintances were a blur. They didn’t crystallize until the morning she woke to Elly and Harlow’s laughter, the two of them skipping rocks down the stream.
Seeing Harlow’s gentle gaze toward her sister, Corin had realized it wasn’t that she resented her parents for making her the eldest daughter. She just wasn’t cut out for it.
“I’ve thanked you countless times for everything you did,” Corin muttered to the empty space beside her. “But I’m better now, and I don’t need you anymore.”
She forced her aching bones to move, if only to ignore Harlow’s ghost. The flame on her torch was nearly dying, but she saw enough of a path ahead and touched the rocks beside her to feel the wide artery of granite. The passage covered with Elly’s drawings turned lower, forcing her to crawl. A rotten-egg smell struck her face, rank and pungent. The longer she crawled, the stronger the stench of decay wafted in the air.
Corin dragged her match across a rock and lit the torch brighter, raising it to the ceiling to illuminate the rest of the path only to discover she was no longer alone. Skeletons lined the narrow passage, draped in yellowed bones and ragged clothes. Her nostrils flared at the foul stench thickening the air, as if death had been sealed in a jar for years and she had twisted the lid open.
She buried the back of her hand against her teeth and muffled the urge to scream, letting it die in her chest. None of these people had made it. They could have been her. Or Elly—
No. Corin’s eyes scanned the dead, searching for details to identify her sister. The shape of her body, the jut of her bones, the fabric of her clothes. They did not match the bodies here.
“C’mon. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Harlow said dryly. “Oh, wait. You weren’t there.”
Corin fought the urge to vomit as her imagination brought forth familiar bodies strewn across the rocks. She had not been there, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t picture it. Their hands tied behind their backs. Maggie howling like a feral animal whenever she was threatened. Rowan using his broad torso to shield the women. And Harlow, that damn stubborn rebel had who planned everything, shouting at the soldiers until gunshots silenced her forever.
Corin knew, logically, that this was not the same passageway where her friends died. The army had sealed the tunnels after their capture. She didn’t know what was worse: if she had been a rebel foolish enough to believe she could join her friends and stay alive, or being the coward who abandoned them to save herself.
She paced quickly in the tunnels, frantic eyes searching for familiar relics to identify her sister. Dehydration and hunger overshadowed her senses, turning her vision dizzy as darkness closed in. She kept seeing it: the wet mess of Harlow’s open skull. The white sheet of Maggie’s sunken face. Rowan’s stiff limbs, unable to shield everyone from the bullets. She stopped at someone’s foot, cursed the memories that kept flooding to her mind, warping the bodies in front of her. The tunnels shrank, the walls caving in from the corners. She couldn’t breathe. Faces blurred together, strange and familiar. Blue lips, sallow skin, maggots crawling beneath eyelids, digging into her skin.
Corin had told Harlow not to go to the tunnels. It wasn’t enough. She had warned Elly not to chase after fairy tales. Now she would lose her sister too.
The weight of her grief became too heavy. It forced her to her knees and made her give in to her hallucinations. Crying, she bent over a body and let the small shape fit itself in her arms. She kept saying she was sorry, so sorry, as she rocked back and forth, despair consuming her like a tidal wave. Her head pulled back too far, and then she felt the wet patch of rock, the hard thud of her skull against the low ceiling, the loss of gravity in her limbs.
Her body tumbled backward. Darkness took her like the bite of teeth. Even as she disappeared, she was still screaming.