Chapter 27
CHAPTER
The moment darkness bathed the blue rugs and stone hallways, Vaasa slipped from her room and found Roman waiting, just as he’d promised. In the winter, night fell early on Mekes, and Vaasa had every intention of taking advantage of that.
The two walked through the night, and they didn’t speak about the evening prior.
Didn’t speak about the full day she’d just spent with Sachia and Melisina.
In secret, she had basked in the feeling of her magic.
Had spent all afternoon releasing it, hoping that would be enough to quell it for tonight.
Vaasa was dressed in royal blue breeches, the same ones the sentinels wore, her hair pulled up and folded tightly at the nape of her neck.
She donned their coat and even a fur hat.
Though the disguise was a bit bulky, it would do.
Colder and colder the air became, the hallways narrowing until they found the large staircase Ozik had stopped them on last time.
He wasn’t waiting for them. She’d considered that outcome, had weighed it as a possibility. Relief came quick, her magic seeming to duck back into herself as if it no longer felt the need to be alert.
Roman reached a heavy door at the end of the servants’ halls. He used an iron key—one of many—on the small metal loop he kept latched at his hip. Vaasa made a silent note of the key’s shape, tucking the information away.
He turned to her. “Are you ready?”
“I’m not actually jumping from the bridge,” she told him.
A rite of passage, Roman had called it the day he and his friends had leapt over the side of that bridge into the frigid waves, as every sentinel in Mekes someday did.
It was a dangerous initiation into their ranks, but one Roman had passed with flying colors.
“We just need these men to believe I am.”
He gave her a brilliant smile, one that would have had her heart melting ten years ago. He gently pulled a brown sack over her head, completing their disguise, and dragged her into what Vaasa could only assume was a smuggler’s den.
“We’ve got a jumper!” Roman exclaimed, and the guards waiting all cried out in unison.
Roman didn’t have to explain himself to the men stationed at the private entrance and exit—they were his friends, Vaasa quickly realized.
Men who felt a kinship to him for their roles in this place.
Though she couldn’t see through the gauzy sack he had pulled over her head, she heard everything.
She could feel them all—their ease, their humor, even their hunger. Magic stirred in her body.
The sentinels didn’t question him as he dragged her into one of the skiffs used to carry goods back and forth from the prison.
Vaasa tripped over the lip, and Roman let her stumble, not daring to break their characters as she slammed into the boat.
Her knee collided with the bench and she bit her tongue, but she stifled her grunt of pain.
Her magic lurched, but she clamped down on it.
The men around them hollered with laughter.
“You think an unbalanced lad like that’s going to survive the jump?” one of the guards asked.
The others kept laughing, tossing out their own jokes. Vaasa used her hands to guide herself up and onto one of the benches, keeping silent and hanging her head as if she were embarrassed.
“Says he wants to try,” Roman said as men presumably pushed the skiff into the water. “Who are we to deny him the embarrassment?”
The men threw out their agreements, some mocking, some more sincere.
Their voices faded as the boat rocked in the water, the smell of brine and fish stuffing up Vaasa’s nose.
Eventually, Roman tucked his fingers under the brown sack and pulled it from Vaasa’s head.
He smoothed out the strands of her hair that flew around her face. “You did well,” he said.
She scanned their surroundings. They paddled into the Iron Bay, wind rocking their boat. “You sounded just like them,” Vaasa remarked.
“It’s just a language among men,” Roman clarified.
Vaasa quietly looked out at the water, at the lights of the city at the shore, and thought that she knew plenty of languages, and men who didn’t speak like that.
Waves lapped at the side of their boat, the ocean churning with the cold, salt water spraying up and onto Vaasa’s face.
She pulled her borrowed sentinel’s coat tighter around herself as Roman rowed.
Minutes felt like hours. She remembered this trip feeling shorter when they’d forced her to return to the fortress.
The island grew closer, larger, more ominous.
Roman maneuvered their boat to the backside of the prison, aiming for the Last Crossing.
As she eyed the towering bridge, she thought of the night Roman had made the jump.
Of the way he had snuck into her room afterward, cold and emboldened, and it was the first time she had ever taken him into her bed.
She looked at him then. He tilted his lips into a remembering grin as he spotted those very same lights, this unexpected memory coursing between them as he felt more familiar to her in that moment than anyone in Mekes ever had.
But the man who sat before her now… he was no longer that person.
“It’s a foolish tradition,” she chastised him.
“It earned me you,” he said in return.
With an amused shake of her head, she let the comment pass. He pulled into a dark crevice beneath the bridge. It must be the place all the sentinels went when they wanted to jump. A weak spot in their rotations, or one they purposefully ignored to make the leap itself possible.
He tied their boat off on a small wooden post that had been dug into the ground there, likely by other sentinels. She heard the jingle of keys in Roman’s hands, and she wondered—did he have the ability to get Amalie out of her cell? Surely Ozik hadn’t provided him that kind of access.
Roman jumped into the frigid water without a care for the cold and then reached for her waist. He lifted her up and out of the boat, putting his arm beneath her legs and keeping her from getting wet. Once on the sand, they took care to stick to the dark places and slunk up to the prison.
Roman gestured toward a rickety, terrifying ladder that had been built into the cliffside.
Wooden planks were spread at different lengths and widths, makeshifts thing that sent a small tremor through her.
She hated heights. Still, he insisted she go first, so she started the climb.
Vaasa held her breath, fighting back the magic that still churned like the ocean.
Vaasa hauled herself over the sharp lip, silently thanking the lack of snowfall today.
She scrambled to her feet, pressing her back against the remaining cliffside next to an opening to a small tunnel.
The guards must have created a passageway here.
Roman climbed up and stood next to her, pressed almost chest-to-chest with her on the narrow ledge.
“Are you ready?” he whispered, holding up the brown sack again.
When she nodded silently, he slipped it over her head.
Taking her elbow, he guided her into the tunnel.
“Stairs,” he said under his breath. He guided her up, never slipping, while Vaasa had to focus in order to keep her balance.
He still held her elbow tightly, keeping her upright.
Faintly, she heard him unlatch either a door or a gate.
She did her best to memorize the feel of everything around her, knowing she would need to communicate this all to Sachia.
The eerie quiet of the island made Vaasa shiver, but it was more than just the cold. Roman gripped her arm, pulling her around a corner suddenly and closing a door behind them.
“Got a jumper?” a voice asked.
“Staněk, what did you do to get tunnel duty?” Roman asked, a light laugh following his words.
“I don’t mind a boring post,” Staněk responded. “I value glory far less than getting to go home.”
“Fair point,” Roman said, and he kept walking.
“No shame in seeing me again, boy,” Staněk called after them. “Don’t rush the jump. You can always try again.”
Roman tightened his grip on her elbow. “You hear that?” he said, speaking before Vaasa had to respond, alleviating her of that problem.
She nodded, stumbling on a stair purposefully, and Roman held her upright even so.
“Get your nerves under control,” Roman snapped as he pulled her around the corner, one last part of their roles before they were officially out of earshot.
A few more steps and Roman stopped. He removed the brown sack from her head, folding it and tucking it into his jacket.
Vaasa immediately glanced around at the dark tunnel they had carved into the island, the steps beneath her feet nothing but slippery stone.
One door lay in front of them. Roman slid it open and glanced around, then gestured her forward. “This way.”
Vaasa stepped into a minimally furnished common room, one she realized was likely reserved for guards when they took a break or if they waited between shifts. At this time of night, it made sense that it was empty. Men were either on shift or they were home.
“Careful,” he reminded her, “and stay behind me.”
Roman led the way, and it wasn’t lost on Vaasa that he knew precisely where Amalie’s cell was. He’d been coming here at least every few days.