Chapter Forty-One
I didn’t think I would wake again, but I did.
I opened my eyes to darkness, living and tentacled, enwrapping me curiously like a deep-sea creature.
I was lying on the ground, my body prone and stiff with cold that seeped into my dress from the stone beneath me, and when I drew a gasping breath, my mouth filled with a brackish taste, like salt and stagnant water.
All around me, there was silence; I could not see the space I’d been deposited in, did not know its shape, nor how far it extended, but I recognized the crouched, breathing nature of the blackness.
How it leaned over me, faceless and panting, waiting for me to stand up and fight it.
I was in the tunnels again.
The realization was unnerving—more so, in some ways, than if I’d woken in the hollow belly of a tomb. Sitting up, I massaged my sore head, my mind running backward: There had been the candle, and then the sound of a door, and finally a voice calling out to me—
Bastian. The memory rattled through me like a tremor, making me lift my fingers from my neck. The Weaver King had found me as I’d been searching his son’s room. He must also have been the one to place me here, but why? Because of what I’d discovered in Noé’s bedside drawer?
Through the pounding in my skull, I thought back to my final conversation with my correspondent—their bitter words spitting from the fire like thrown embers.
I dislike playing unwinnable games…I make it my business to learn all the Weaver King’s weaknesses.
Had I not seen for myself the candle rattling in Noé’s drawer, I’d have doubted that Bastian’s son could be the one behind those acidic messages.
What, exactly, was his role in all of this?
His favorite poem, hidden in her room. A matching candle to the one I’d found tucked away in his.
Eliot’s voice: “He’s been in love before.
” Manon, whispering to me about an affair, spectacles perched on her nose.
Had it been Ophelia the younger Alaire was in love with?
And if so, did that also make him her killer?
On only one point was I absolutely certain: the lackadaisical, droll boy I’d gotten to know over the past days had not been Noé at all. Like me, he’d worn a mask; unlike me, he’d carved it so well, I hadn’t even realized it was a disguise.
My mind cleared as my hand knocked against something in the darkness —a lantern , I realized as my fingers traveled over it . Adrenaline surging through me, I fumbled until I found the knob which controlled its gas flow, then breathed a sigh of relief as a Woven flame leapt immediately to life.
Bathed in its pale light, I rose and took in my surroundings.
As I’d guessed, I was in a tunnel: Ahead of and behind me, a dark passageway stretched, lacking any sort of identifying features that might have helped me place it amongst the number that wove beneath Fortblanche.
In the pool of illumination cast by the lantern were two other items. Stooping, I picked up the first—a curling piece of parchment—deliberately ignoring the second.
On the paper was a short message, the ink spreading and blotted where water had run into it:
Two have entered, but one shall leave.
The way out will be revealed when the stone is fed with blood.
The final trial has begun.
Rolling the parchment in my hand, I looked down at the remaining object, its curved tail gleaming wickedly in the firelight.
It was a knife.
At once, I understood my situation. I recalled the stab of Bastian’s magic piercing my mind just before I’d faded into unconsciousness.
Without speaking to him, it was impossible to know what he’d found while sorting through my thoughts, but it must have been enough to convince him I’d seen too much.
And yet…after the drama of Sybil’s death, I was certain the Weaver King was eager to avoid any more unsavory stories coming out of Fortblanche.
A single accident was a tragedy; a second was a misfortune; introduce a third, and conspiracy could start to bloom.
But if a maiden’s death came wrapped within a spectacle—if it was not an Alaire’s hand that committed the deed at all, but another acting on his behalf…
This was not a test. It was an execution.
I was not alone in these tunnels. Elsewhere, Clio must be waking up in the same way I was—with the same set of instructions arranged in front of her, the same epiphany settling like ice into her bones.
If either of us wished to live to become Noé Alaire’s bride, the other must die.
My fingers shook as I took the knife in my hand.
It was compact, with a rounded, squat hilt like a root bulb and a bronze cross guard above it.
Its blade was oddly shaped, clawlike rather than straight, like a sloping, villainous grin.
Cautiously, I pressed the pad of my index finger to its edge, then pulled it back, frowning.
The knife’s bite was dull—not even sharp enough to break through the thin callus of my fingertip.
Taking my bottom lip between my teeth, I tried again, wedging the blade harder against my flesh, but to no avail.
The knife glanced harmlessly off my skin as if it had been dipped in wax; I may as well have been holding a letter opener, for all the defense it would giveme.
Wonderful. I wondered if Clio had been given a similar decorative paperweight, wherever she was. Somehow, I doubted it.
Giving up, I lowered the weapon, though I was careful to keep its blade in my line of sight.
Useless or not, something about the way the lantern glow danced teasingly along its curved surface made me feel as though the knife were laughing at me; there was a sentience to its metal smile, a decided unfriendliness, that I disliked.
I drew in a breath, then exhaled, steadying myself.
The Alaires meant for Clio and me to become hunters, that much was clear—had equipped us with a way of dispatching the other and left the two of us at it, like a pair of rats in a maze.
And, it was clear, too, that Bastian did not mean for ours to be a fair fight.
I’d been given a blunt knife and no directions with which to find my way back to the surface; my competitor, by contrast, possessed the uncanny ability of perfect targeting.
A Wit that allowed her to track down any item, human or inorganic, which she sought.
She would find me, and when she did, I had no doubt she would carry through on the parchment’s demand and kill me. Which meant if I wished to survive our encounter, I could not afford to view myself as her rival, an equal in her game.
If I wanted to live, I needed to think like prey.
Still clenching the knife in one hand, I retrieved the lantern from where I’d set it on the ground, holding it up to eye level to examine it.
The Woven light was like looking at a star; tensing in preparation for what I had to do, I found its knob once more and twisted it off this time, causing the glow within to flicker, then go out entirely.
In its place, the dark rushed hungrily in.
I forced myself to relax as the gloom embraced me, clenching my teeth against the claustrophobic panic that rose up my throat.
Clio would have a simple enough time tracking me already—giving her a beacon with which to identify my exact location would only make death come more swiftly.
I would travel in the shadows, unseeing—but also unseen.
Settling the now-dead lamp back on the ground, I stepped around it, using my free hand to find the tunnel wall.
The stone was slick with lichen, and I felt an instinctual aversion to its clamminess, like resting a palm on a fevered person’s brow.
Swallowing down the swell of nausea that rolled through me, I pressed my fingers more firmly against the rock, drew my right leg back, and gave the floor a hard kick.
My toes smarted, my feet ill protected against the unyielding rebuff of the stone floor in their flimsy slippers.
Still, I felt a surge of relief at the sound of a pebble dislodging from the ground’s granite flank, skittering further into the darkness to my left.
I listened to it skip off the rock for as long as I could before it fell silent, its momentum expended.
I now had another tool to add to my arsenal: a sense of direction.
The path of the pebble was down.
Step-by-step, I advanced through the blackness.
Without the lantern shine to cut it, the darkness was as thick as water.
I almost felt as though I were drowning, the farther I descended into it.
My eyes widened in a feeble attempt to combat the dimness; I held my breath, waiting for the moment something would swim in front of them—a long-finned, gape-mouthed monster, surging up from the subterranean depths.
Was this how Ophelia had felt the night of her death? She had fallen during a ball, not a trial, but still—I did not doubt the Weaver King’s ability to arrange that, too. Perhaps, like me, she had witnessed something she should not have; perhaps she had also been punished for it.
It would have been far simpler to turn around and go the other way—toward the surface, where I might theoretically find an exit—but my instincts told me otherwise.
If I had a single advantage over Clio, it was that as her quarry, I was leading the chase.
Wherever I went within the tunnels, she would follow me until I was caught.
All I needed to do was move fast enough to stay out of her reach and decide where to take her.
I considered it. What would a mouse do, left alone with a hungry cat?
Hide, I suppose, but that wasn’t an option, since Clio would find me no matter what hole I buried myself in.
I could draw her into a trap, only I had set none, and there was little chance that I could do so without light to work by.