Chapter 5
“SHE’S TRAPPED BELOW the earth,” Elly often insisted, her ear pressed to the ground. As a toddler, her tiny fingers would claw garden soil, dirt caked beneath her nails, all in search of a girl who the world was uncertain ever truly existed.
Corin said that even if the fairy tales were true, sleeping comfortably in a big castle was no nightmare for a princess. Still, Elly insisted the castle remained underground. On the eve of the princess’s eighteenth birthday, the queen brought foreigners into the kingdom to assassinate her husband and stepdaughter. The invaders murdered the king while the princess escaped into the forest, only to cross paths with the demon who had cursed her as a baby. The demon tricked the princess into pricking her finger on a spindle and doomed her to eternal slumber. Among the roaring flames of their battle, the prince killed the demon and saved the princess. He brought her back to their castle, only to find it was too late. Even with true love’s kiss, she remained asleep forever.
Despite being the successor to the throne, grief blinded the prince from accepting his duties. He buried himself with the princess and their castle, so that even when rivaling kingdoms tore down Gyldan’s borders and erupted into war, they would never be seen again.
A hundred years later, Corin would disappear with them.
She woke with a scream clawing at her throat, as if she’d emerged from a nightmare. But she hardly remembered her dreams, and soon enough she forgot what she’d seen.
Sharp rocks stabbed her spine like tiny knives as she lay flat on the ground. Dust particles stung the back of her eyelids, as if ants had crawled through the slits and were now nibbling the skin underneath. Her eyes were so dry they burned, like she had been crying. Yet all she remembered was the darkness taking her when she fell.
Yes, that was it. She had fallen. Slipped over debris and slid farther underground. Her head had slammed against a rock, rendering her unconscious for what must have been hours.
Corin rolled over to her side, but the movement shot flashes of pain down her back. Her neck and shoulders had been locked in the same position for too long. A gagging noise burbled from her parched throat. She hunched over, trying to vomit the invisible sand that piled in her mouth, but there was nothing to heave from a hollow stomach.
There was nothing left inside of her. She was empty.
And she was going to die.
Corin had imagined herself dying before, pictured hundreds of gruesome deaths in her mind, but nothing like this. Stranded after wandering endless miles, buried beneath stagnant air and soil, it seemed so uneventful.
Harlow’s laughter echoed through the tunnels. “No, compared to your eighteen years living in Gyldan, it’s too gentle a way to die.”
Corin groaned. Even in near death, she couldn’t escape Harlow’s ghost. She supposed Harlow would have loved the irony. By the time their commune busied themselves making posters and protest materials, Corin had distanced herself from the artisans out of self-preservation, complaining to Elly that these efforts only made them look like criminals putting themselves in harm’s way. They had wanted to send a message to the army, but there was no point risking their lives for a war that would never end.
Now here she was, dying like the rest of them.
Darkness engulfed Corin in the tunnels. Her coiled body shivered in the cold as she waited for death to wrap her in its box and tuck her away. Surrounded by dust and debris, she would become part of the ground, a skeleton whose bones didn’t deserve to be unearthed.
The last words she’d hear from Elly would be a simple truth.
I hate you.
For a moment, there was nothing. Then a new thought emerged from her drowsy haze, like a dim light peeking through the dark clouds of near-death. Her hand roamed over her chest, fingers twitching for the ghost of an object. After her palm came up empty, her fingers jammed into the soiled pockets of her trousers and sifted through dirt.
Her necklace was gone.
Panic triggered her body to roll over. Splinters bit into her palm as she found the broken half of the torch that had slipped from her hand when she fell. She sucked out the splinter, blood dancing on her tongue. Bitter, it tasted. And alive.
She lit the last match in her pocket and held it to the cloth. The small flame radiated an orange glow over the walls. A shadow stretched above her head, inviting her to turn around and meet a skull staring straight into her eyes. The black grains that stripped the skull’s translucent skin looked like rotten sand had washed over his corpse. Nausea swirled in her stomach. Flashes of bad memories, blue lips, maggot trails. A familiar body in her arms. An echo of a scream.
Corin bit back her bile, breathed slowly, and focused on one point of clarity. The skeleton’s brittle finger glinted in the shadows, dangling her necklace that had been caught on bone. She snatched the chain and wrapped it around her neck. Her palm pressed against her chest as she counted the rapid beats of her heart and wiped the flashbacks from her mind. It was easier if she could focus on the cold metal against her sweat, the smooth touch of her mother’s hands when she’d given Corin this pendant, the story she’d told about Corin’s grandmother crossing these tunnels to Gyldan.
The necklace was the only reminder Corin had that a future was possible. And she couldn’t picture any future without Elly.
She pressed her palms flat on the cavern walls as she crossed deeper inside the tunnels. The torch’s dying flame turned fuzzy in her blurring vision. Perhaps it was better she couldn’t see clearly, so she could avoid staring at bodies draped over the jagged rocks. She wouldn’t think about Harlow or how she’d let her other friends die. She would leave them behind with the rest of the corpses in the tunnels, shutting them out, like her mind did with everything else.
By the time the corpses whittled down in numbers, the sour smell wafting under her nostrils died down. A new scent permeated the air, musky with mildew and notes of copper. Then came an invisible spark, something alive and tingling. The shift in the air remained even as she reached a dead end, the path stopping at a dirt wall that appeared to be a landslide.
It seemed too sudden, too abrupt of an ending. Dizzy from dehydration, Corin rocked back and forth and deliberated what to do next. When she looked down, she was shocked to find a torn piece of cloth stuck to her boot. Her fingers snatched the maroon cloth so she could stare closer at the bright blue stitching that clumsily ran along the inseam. She recalled how the needle had pricked her fingers, her annoyance at Elly for tearing a hole in her pants, forcing Corin to practice her shoddy sewing skills before Rowan called her hopeless and fixed it himself. The stitching was an exact match to the clothes Elly had been wearing when she ran away.
Elly was here. More importantly, she was alive.
Corin dropped to the ground in a panicked frenzy and started digging, searching for traces of her sister to follow her path. A stone floor exposed itself beneath the soil. The concrete had to be paved somewhere. She stared at the dead end of the tunnel, then grabbed the wall, clawing her way through the dirt. Her hands dug for several grueling minutes until the fabric of her gloves thinned to strings and her skin turned raw. She searched and searched until, finally, she found a wooden door on the other side.
Corin stepped back in disbelief. People came and died searching for a buried castle, waiting to be stirred awake. She couldn’t explain what stood before her, how the stories could have possibly been true.
Just as Elly had said.
? ? ?
THE CASTLE FROM the fairy tale shouldn’t have existed. At least, not in this condition. Most of the structure remained intact, but large, gaping holes peppered the sepia-washed wallpaper, as if gnawed by a monster. Velvet drapes had turned maroon from old age, covering cracked windows. Corin tried parting the curtains and coughed from the dust. Outside, the glass revealed dark soil surrounding the castle.
Surely, she was hallucinating. Hunger could do that to a person. Yet the air tingled with something peculiar, like a cold wind that had trapped itself inside and now howled in mourning. Goose bumps prickled her skin, and she clutched the torn cloth tight in her fist. No, it didn’t matter how this relic came to be. What mattered was that she needed to find Elly.
She pictured her sister walking through the castle, imagining what might catch her attention first. In answer, watercolors jumped from the hallway. She crossed the faded carpet that unfurled rows of paintings along the wall, where kings and queens of Gyldan’s past sat decorated in gold. Their bloodline was supposed to prove they were special, untouchable. Yet here they were, strings of parchment hanging off the edges of their destroyed features, every portrait slashed like an open wound.
She stopped in the middle of the hallway, where only one person remained unscathed. A tall woman sat next to one of the elderly kings and a blond child. White pearls clasped the queen’s neck. The bloodred fabric of her gown brought the same color from her pursed mouth. Her auburn hair was tied in knotted locks, and her sharp nose pointed to the air. She looked like someone posing to be royalty, resulting in a stiff upper lip and a set of unsmiling eyes.
Corin pressed her palm to the bumps of paint, drawing a line between the stiff queen and the blond girl whose face was destroyed. She kept hearing her sister’s stories about the royal family, doomed by curses and wicked stepmothers, and how this fate had brought them to ruin.
“El,” Corin murmured, “what if you were right?”
Light shone through the door from where she’d come, followed by a crash. She jumped at the sudden noise then stomped out her torch and tossed it aside. Shouts echoed through crumbled walls, forcing her to scramble toward the opposite end of the hallway.
She burst open doors to an empty ballroom and scanned for a hiding place. Dusty chairs had broken down and lay crooked, bleeding beige filling and feathers over the cracked marble floor, but there was a long sofa that still stood on four legs. As footsteps came closer, she rolled to the ground and ducked behind the sofa’s tapestry.
A group barraged the ballroom, stumbling over the marble.
“Ezran! You need to sit down. You can’t move too quickly after a ritual.”
She peered behind the sofa’s tapestry. A limping man barreled forward, followed by three women dressed in satin robes and laced veils. Light sparked from one of the woman’s fingertips as an armchair mended itself together and stood upright, catching the man when his knees buckled over.
Corin held her breath, forcing her body to freeze like a statue so her shock wouldn’t give her away. There’d been rumors that faeries once existed in the forests surrounding Gyldan, some even holding positions of council among the royal family. But with the monarchy collapsed, no faeries had ever been witnessed by human eyes. To Corin, this meant they were never real. Now she couldn’t explain the sight before her. Chairs did not move on their own, and ordinary people could not create light from their hands.
If faeries were real, and they had chosen to leave behind a dying kingdom after it no longer served them, there appeared to be at least one human who had convinced these faeries into providing him aid. The man named Ezran struggled to keep balance over the chair, as if the room were spinning and he had just landed in it. He looked pale and sick, the color of his skin matching his steel-white armor and cape. A breath hissed from his lips.
“We need to visit the tower now. The moonflower’s going to bloom.”
“We still have time before midnight,” one of the women said. “You need to preserve your energy before you cross over. We don’t know what will be in her subconscious until we arrive.”
The others nodded. “You’ve waited a hundred years for this. What’s a few minutes more?”
Ezran looked at them, jaw clenched.
“It’s a hundred years and a few minutes more without her.”
A heavy silence hung in the air. One of the women placed a hand on his cheek. Color slowly filled his pale skin, as if fighting for its place.
“You protected her when she needed you. Tonight, she’ll need you more than ever,” she said. “We’ll bring her back. I promise.”
“You know how I feel about promises, Dahlia. I don’t break them.”
Corin strained to make sense of their conversation, but none of them mentioned seeing a child. Either they hadn’t crossed paths with Elly yet, or they already caught her. That fear paralyzed Corin, preventing her from escaping even as the strangers left for another room. Elly was always good at hiding, but Corin didn’t know what these people were capable of.
She waited a few minutes after the room cleared before following their path. The door where they exited opened onto a winding staircase. She pressed her back against the wall, allowing her to glance in both directions in case more people came, as she climbed sideways along the stairs. The next floor revealed a shorter hallway filled with bedchambers.
She rummaged through each one in a frenzied rush, tossing aside sheets, opening every wardrobe, checking beneath bed frames. Every turn, she found nothing but dust and disappointment.
“Damn it, El,” she hissed, “where are you?”
Footsteps came closer from the hallway. Corin cursed under her breath and swiped a sharp toothcomb from the vanity as protection before climbing inside a wardrobe. Her hand gripped the tool so tightly she could almost see the whites of her knuckles in the darkness cloaking her.
The door creaked open, and she held her breath. There only came silence. Yet, if Corin strained hard enough, she could sense a presence on the other side.
His voice spoke, a low sound made of lilting ink that seeped into her core. So smooth and calming that if she could taste it, she wouldn’t even realize it was poison leaking down her throat.
“Let me guess what you are,” he said. “A peasant hoping to wake up the princess so she can fix your miserable life. A thief scavenging for whatever treasure you can find in old ruins.”
The wardrobe felt too small, restricting Corin’s breath and closing in on her. His footsteps clacked louder, closer, and suddenly there was too much dust inside her space, too many cobwebs hanging from corners that itched her skin and taunted her to make a sound and betray her hidden fear.
“But I’ve lived in this castle longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve searched every crevice, every place, and still the treasure cannot be found. Which leads me to one conclusion: Amelia has hidden it in her dreams. And I made a promise that I would protect her treasure with my life.”
The sound of a sword being unsheathed sliced into Corin’s ears.
“She won’t be sleeping for long,” Ezran said. “But you will.”
His sword plunged through the wardrobe as Corin jumped to the side and barely missed the blade. She kicked the door open to Ezran’s chest and lunged forward, slashing his face with the metal handle of the comb. She felt like she’d cut hard marble, some precious art that had been preserved for centuries, one so valuable that her life would be taken as penance for tainting it.
Blood spurted from his cheek as he reared back, buying her a fraction of time to escape the chamber. She ripped off the door handle behind her and jammed the comb into the hole to trap him inside.
At the staircase, she glanced back and forth between both directions, her mind screaming to make a choice. Go downstairs and run away. Go upstairs and find a sliver of a chance that Elly would be there.
She chose when Ezran’s sword smashed through the door.
Spiral steps spun in her dizzying vision as she ran up the stairs. Her body was failing her, too weak, too starved. Ezran’s boots slapped against concrete, charging close. His sword slashed her heels when they reached the top. She let out a cry as she rammed open a wooden door, the entrance bursting under the weight of her collapse. The three women inside the room gasped at the stranger bleeding before them, as if uncovering a malformed creature lunging from the dark. Corin had bruises and open sores everywhere, blooming like ripe plums over a wretched face. She looked worse than an intruder. She looked like a madwoman.
Maybe she had gone mad after all. Because as she looked up, she swore the girl sleeping inside the tower was the princess herself.
Satin sheets tucked the girl’s pale body in a billowing mattress. Blond hair spilled over pillows and lace, while a vine of flowers wrapped around her head like a crown. The flowers were the color of bruises, wrinkled and small and yet to bloom, too ordinary an accessory compared to the extravagance that surrounded her. In contrast, a garden of roses covered the wooden frame of the bed like a blanket. The largest one bloomed on the left side of the girl’s chest, bright red like bloodstain.
Everything was alive, while the girl looked like she was already dead. Her skin was ashen, her lips more gray than pink. One of the women had lifted the girl’s arm, so that at the tip of her finger, a drop of blood gleamed under the light. Instead of dripping down her hand, the bead floated in the air, a small, swirling orb of red.
Corin’s attention snapped to Ezran as he grabbed her by the collar. The slash she made across his face had already disappeared. She didn’t understand how marble could restore its cracks, while her broken body retained every wound in permanent memory.
His face, in its pristine condition, came closer to her broken one. His breath was cold as he snarled, “You don’t belong here, thief.”
Ezran swung his arm back, his sword ready to plunge into flesh, as she braced for the pain. It came not as darkness, but a blinding white flash. Instead of a blade puncturing, her skin tingled under light. The sound of a distant bell shook the tower, followed by the crackle of air being torn apart.
A hole opened like a glowing mouth. Not on the floor, or the wall behind the bed, but in the empty space above the girl’s head. The flowers in her hair lifted in bloom. Their purple bruises washed away into pure white. Petals swirled in the air, the smell of floral mixing with blood.
Then, from the other side, Corin heard her sister.
Elly’s voice came from inside the hole, breathy and far away. It reached for Corin’s skin, gripping onto her bones, tugging her veins like invisible string. Corin could recognize that voice anywhere, even as a distant echo. Her sister was there. Somehow, she was inside, calling for Corin.
Suddenly nothing else mattered. Not the cluster of women shouting, not the tightening grip of Ezran’s hand on her collar. He tried pulling her away, but she would not let him take this from her. She swung her fist, barely felt the hard crack against his face or the dent in his cold skin. Her legs sprinted forward, chasing Elly’s voice, as the tether between them tightened. She leapt to the opening and let light swallow her body. Ezran’s presence dissolved behind her like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. The sleeping princess vanished. The women’s shouts turned to echoes. The room spun in a blinding blur. Her vision filled with white, burning so brightly that she could not tell if she had met or escaped death.
As she crossed over, Elly’s voice turned clearer.
She’s real, Corin.
Corin could have sworn she heard her sister laughing.
I told you so.