Chapter Forty-One #2
Perhaps…I hesitated, an idea springing to my mind. Perhaps the mouse might lead the cat to a rabbit. Larger, more tempting prey.
Perhaps the mouse might change the game.
Course decided, I hastened my steps. After witnessing how these passages extended the previous night with Eliot, I did not feel anything close to confident in my ability to navigate them.
Yet if I followed this one until its end, there was a good chance I’d find an intersection point—an atrium, like the multiple Eliot and I had passed through during our last journey.
And from there, I stood a much more plausible chance of following the archway markings back to the moonless door.
I did not yet know what Bastian Alaire was hiding in the depths beneath Fortblanche—his boon and his bane, as Noé had phrased it during our correspondence.
But Clio was a silkwitch like me. Whatever our differences, if I could show her the mysteries that lived in these tunnels, maybe I could make her think twice about killing me.
Maybe I could convince her we were on the same side.
My nerves were so fraught that the burst of a light in front of me was like a gunshot, making me clutch a hand to my chest. I blinked, panting hard, my vision unaccustomed to the brightness.
A few steps ahead of me, the tunnel walls ended in an arching mouth, a solitary lamp burning in the vast space beyond it like a candle held up against the night.
I recognized it from its size as the central atrium—the first one I’d discovered during my explorations. Triumph welled in my throat.
I’d been right.
Ears pricked for any hint of movement around me, I gathered the folds of my skirt in my hands and crouched low.
My options were limited—if I did not take this one chance, however slim, at winning Clio over, we would be stuck chasing one another in loops around the tunnels until one of us finally bested the other.
And without a weapon of my own, nor any doors to duck behind, I had no doubt that the winner would not be me.
Either I made the leap and risked death, or I lingered here and assured it. In the end, the decision was simple.
I ran.
The lantern blazed behind me like a signal fire, its Woven glow far more powerful—more conspicuous—than the one I’d left behind in the passage. Still, its illumination only reached so far; a few pumps of my legs, a few strides, and I was out of it, plunging back into the wild, inscrutable dark.
My vision went out like a snuffed match; it was like running through midnight, the atrium a great black pupil stretching around me, depthless and observant.
A few feet ahead of me, another light flicked on as I neared it, affixed to the door bearing the full moon carving above it. The rabbit. I’d almost made it—
I felt her weight before I sensed her, her arms encircling my waist like a stone tied to my middle.
Her momentum carried us both down, a sharp crack echoing through the space around us as my skull collided painfully with the floor.
Threads of hot agony wound along my jaw and up toward my temple, and my vision blurred.
Somehow, I managed to heave myself onto my back, my knife—which I’d kept hold of during my fall—clutched in my hand and half wedged beneath my torso.
Clio was hovering above me, straddling me with her thighs clamped tight on either side of my middle.
Even with the pale moth-fuzz of the lamplight to our side, the darkness claimed enough of us that only her grin was distinct: broad and fearless, glinting like a white scythe.
It widened as our eyes met. “Got…you,” she panted.
In a single sweeping motion, she raised her knife.
Acting on instinct, I lifted my own just as she swung hers down toward my heart, driving my knife’s hilt into the underside of her wrist and the delicate tangle of nerves there.
She shrieked, half in agony, half in frustration, as her fingers gave an involuntary flex, her weapon slipping from her hand and skidding off into the darkness.
The clatter of the metal blade against the stone was briefly hypnotizing, like a coin tossed high in the air.
We both froze for a moment; then, in unison, our heads snapped to the side, peering in the direction it had gone.
Locked around my middle, Clio’s legs clenched harder, tensing in preparation to leap.
I didn’t think. My body moved independently from and ahead of my mind, as if the two had become somehow unlatched. Reaching up, I grabbed a fistful of Clio’s hair gathered in its usual caul and yanked with all my strength, nausea rolling my stomach as her head jerked unnaturally backward.
Her weight lessened, her body lifting along with her chin.
Shoving her off me, I scrabbled up on my hands and knees and leapt in the direction of her fallen knife, my own weapon still clutched in my grasp.
My skull ached with a slow, throbbing pulse where it had met the floor, my thoughts lethargic and as sticky as sap.
She was on me again in a minute, grabbing the skirt of my dress and roughly hauling me back.
I collapsed onto my belly with a huff, the breath leaving my lungs—then flipped over as I sensed her crawl past me, and grabbed on to her leg.
Grunting, she tried to shake me off, but I only gripped her tighter, holding on even when my teeth juddered with the force of her kicks.
Neither of us was a trained fighter, and our inexperience showed in the messiness of our attacks—our blows flailing and uncontrolled, dangerous in their inelegance, like the erratic buffet of the wind.
With a wild sweep of my arm, I managed to knock her knees out from under her, sending her crashing momentarily to the ground. It was all the time I needed—propelled by adrenaline, I surged forward, a swell of victory unfurling behind my ribs as my fingers closed over the hilt of her dropped knife.
I sat on her back before she could rise, my legs pinning her arms to her sides, one blade pressing against her throat, the second tucked securely into my waistband.
“Clio,” I breathed, “stop fighting.” When she writhed, swearing, beneath me, I hissed, “Please.”
Stilling, she laughed, her rib cage expanding between my thighs.
“Begging, Cecilia? I thought you’d be too proud.
” Turning, she rested her cheek against the floor, her eyes rolling up toward me.
Torn from her caul, her hair lay tangled over her face, strands crisscrossing her features in a matted web. “Let’s end this with honor, shall we?”
Abruptly, she bucked her head back. A white pulse of agony seared through me as the dome of her skull clipped my chin. I screamed, my thighs relaxing where they held her down.
The second my grip lessened, her nails bit into my wrist, curved and vicious like a row of teeth. I let out a choked, desperate sound as I felt my grip loosen at their sting, the hilt of my weapon sliding through my fingers—
She caught the knife as it flashed in the air, the swipe of her hand through the darkness so neat, it was as though it were choreographed.
A noise ripped from her throat, half pleasure, half effort, and then her elbow was around my neck, pulling me against her as if in a violent embrace.
I swallowed as I felt the ridge of the blade come to rest against the soft flesh beneath my chin, its metal tip digging into me.
“I…” I faltered, my voice breaking against the blade. “I found the door. The one that the key Dorian had you look for opens.”
Ever so slightly, Clio relaxed her choke hold, allowing air to flood into my lungs. “What?”
“The Alaires have been keeping secrets from us,” I said around gulping breaths. “I got close to one, and now they’re punishing me for it. Why do you think this trial is tailored to your Wit and not mine? They want you to kill me, Clio. They’re using you to ensure my silence.”
“Want to kill you?” Clio scoffed. “You’re Noé’s favorite.”
I thought of his ransacked bedroom, Bastian’s voice behind me, and grimaced despite myself.
Had the Weaver King known of his son’s correspondence with me—or had he dipped into my mind while I’d been unconscious and taken the information for himself?
I wasn’t certain, but whatever assurances Noé might have given me this morning, I knew they’d mean nothing now.
Any chances of victory were long gone. “Was.”
I felt her chest dip as she smiled. “That’s right—you were his favorite.” She cooed. “I’ll be his wife.”
With a vicious slice, she dragged the blade across my throat. I felt her breath hitch as the dagger grazed harmlessly over my flesh, its edge glancing off my skin like a toy sword.
Or, I thought with a swell of victory, a dull one.
As she raised the weapon higher to examine it, I twisted, shoving against her chest and allowing the force of my weight to bring her to the floor.
Sprawling over her, I knocked the useless knife from her hand, then removed the sharpened one—Clio’s dagger—from my waistband, where I’d stowed it after grabbing it from the ground earlier.
“I told you, this test has been rigged in your favor. They gave me a dull blade,” I said, pressing the edge of the weapon to her throat. “I’m betting yours is sharper.”
Clio tensed as I nicked her skin with the tip of the dagger, but she did not cry out.
Meeting her eyes, I smirked. “I’d like to revisit the earlier favor I asked of you,” I said evenly. “I know you denied me the first time, but I feel the conditions have changed. Tell me what Dorian shared with you about the key he was searching for.”
Her gaze darted into the darkness as if searching for the second blade. Clearing my throat, I shifted my own against her neck, eliciting another wince. “I don’t know much,” shespat.
My pulse sped. “But you know something.”
“It opens a door—which you know, obviously, if you’ve located it,” Clio answered through clenched teeth. “Dorian wouldn’t tell me what was behind it. He didn’t seem too concerned with being locked out—more desperate to ensure no one else got in.”
“What do you mean?” I asked impatiently. “What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know ,” Clio snapped—then, when my grip tightened on my weapon, “I don’t , I swear it.
He said…He told me the door guarded one of the Weaver King’s most valuable secrets.
And that if the key fell into the hands of his enemies, they would use it to bring him down.
” Clio swallowed, blood smeared on her skin where I’d cut her.
“He insisted that if I wished to marry into the Alaire family, I needed to help him recover it before that happened.”
I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs. Focusing on Clio, I adjusted the dagger in my hand so it pressed harder against her skin. “Are you certain that was all he divulged?”
Clio hesitated, as if considering my question. Then, with a ragged grunt, she grabbed at my arm, forcing my blade away from her throat. Howling, she started to sit up—
I flipped the knife around in my hand, ripping my arm away from her, and brought its hilt down with a harsh crack against her skull.
Like a limp doll, she flopped to the ground, unconscious.
I watched her for a minute, monitoring the steady rise and fall of her breast through the dimness, then—once I was confident she wasn’t tricking me—I took her hand in mine.
Cautiously, I drew the blade across the curved well of her palm, a seam of crimson opening beneath its tip.
Turning her hand over, I let the red drip from it, spattering against the ground.
The way out will be revealed when the stone is fed with blood. The rules of the trial were stark in my mind. I prayed my loophole would be enough to satisfy them.
As if in answer, a spark popped in my periphery.
Twisting in its direction, I exhaled when I saw a lamp along the far curve of the atrium had lit, its pale glow pulsing gently as if underwater.
Like a row of matches catching, additional globes of illumination shivered into being behind it, trailing past the archway and into the tunnel beyond.
A path. And all that was left for me to do was follow it.
But before I did…there was one other place I needed to visit first. One final mystery to solve.
Panting, my dress filthy with grime and discolored water, I stood, leaving Clio behind me, and walked back into the dark.