42. Astra
Astra
We left Caspian kneeling beside Magnus while Aldric and two defected stewards held the bolted door. Kieran had the lamp, Jonah was already studying the stair, and the water below us was getting louder. I followed them down.
The first flight was Court stonework: dressed block, mason’s marks, a handrail worn smooth by centuries of gloves. Three turnings down, the mortar ended and the passage lost its right angles. Cut steps became uneven shelves hacked into the rock, some scarcely deep enough for a boot.
Delphine took my elbow when one riser dropped farther than the lamplight showed. She let go as soon as I found the next foothold. Behind us, the sounds from the witness floor had faded until all I could hear was our breathing and the water.
The channels along the floor were nothing like the Court’s narrow drains.
These ran wide and deep, their edges rounded by long use.
Water crossed beneath our feet and vanished through cuts in the wall that no mason had squared.
When I touched the stone, vibration climbed through my fingertips and settled in my wrist.
We passed a spiral scored into the wall at knee height, nearly worn away, then a row of short notches beneath it.
Later mortar crossed their edges. Delphine stopped long enough to trace the marks with two fingers.
“Older than the Court,” she said, then looked back toward the nearest turn before moving on.
The pull strengthened with every turn. My three lines drew lower against my skin, not painful yet, but tense. The water in the channels ran in the same direction we did, gathering speed as smaller cuts joined it.
Our pace shortened. Jonah tested each landing before letting the rest of us put weight on it. Kieran kept the lamp high when the walls narrowed. Delphine trailed her fingers over the stone and counted the turns under her breath.
By the time water covered our boot soles, the roar had become strong enough to blur speech.
We crossed the first flooded stretch in single file, Jonah leading and Delphine bringing up the rear.
The floor dropped twice beneath me. Both times the water reached my thighs before someone caught my arm and hauled me onto firmer stone.
The cold found every tear in my clothes. Loose gravel rolled beneath the current and struck my ankles hard enough to change my step. Jonah moved sideways through the worst of it, one hand on the wall and the other extended behind him, so each of us crossed with a grip already waiting.
The corridor narrowed again where the water reached our shins. Jonah’s hand went up. We stopped mid-channel beneath a ceiling low enough for Kieran’s lamp to blacken it with smoke.
Metal moved against stone ahead of us. Quietly, but not quietly enough for Jonah.
Five guards came out of recesses cut into both walls.
Water-slick leather covered old Court gray.
They carried short blades instead of the hooked poles stacked farther up the passage, weapons chosen for a corridor where a full swing would strike stone.
No one challenged us. They closed from both sides.
They had chosen the ground well. The deeper channel ran behind our heels, making retreat slower than advance, and the ceiling forced Kieran and Jonah to shorten their reach. Two guards stayed low while the others crowded the light, using their own bodies to throw shadows across the floor cuts.
Kieran reached the nearest before the man finished raising his blade. He stepped inside the guard’s arm, drove one shoulder beneath his jaw, and used the low ceiling for leverage. The man struck the wall and slid into the channel. Kieran kicked the fallen blade behind us and turned.
The lamp struck the water during the collision and went out. Darkness covered the corridor, broken only by the pale light running under the skin of my wrist.
I heard boots strike stone, a blade glance off the ceiling, someone’s breath leave in a grunt. The current swallowed the smaller movements; every footfall echoed off stone and water. I kept my injured hand against the wall so I would know which direction was forward.
Two guards came from the left. Jonah caught the first wrist, drove the blade into the wall until the man’s grip broke, and forced him face-down into the current with one knee between his shoulders.
The second tried to step around them and found the footing Jonah had left open on purpose.
His boot dropped into a deeper cut. Jonah struck behind the knee, caught his wrist as he fell, and twisted the knife free.
“The channels,” he called. “Make them step where you want.”
A fourth guard came straight for me. I turned the first cut with my forearm and lost the second in the dark. Delphine found it for me. She stepped into the gap, took the blade high across her own forearm, and hit the guard in the face with the heel of her other hand.
The woman fell back into the water. Delphine stripped the knife from her, set its point beneath her jaw, and spoke close to her ear. “Stay down.” The woman looked at the blood running from Delphine’s sleeve and obeyed.
The last guard reached Kieran while he was still turning from the first. There was no room for Kieran to bring his arm up. The guard’s blade angled toward the space beneath his ribs.
I reached for the guard’s oath the way I had practiced: find the taut place in the Mark, pull just enough to break concentration, release. One clean interruption. Half a second for Kieran to move.
This close to the basin, the current did not stop where I aimed it. The water around my legs caught the force and carried it past the guard. My grip slid from one bond to the next before I could close my hand.
For an instant I felt both Marks at once: the guard’s oath, rigid and unfamiliar, and Kieran’s line opening toward me because it always had. The current took the easier path. I tried to release them, but the pressure coming up through the channel held the connection open.
Kieran’s green-gold line flared white beneath his skin.
He dropped into the channel with one hand clamped around his wrist. Jonah shoved both disarmed men toward the wall, caught Kieran by the collar, and dragged his face above the water.
The last guard stumbled too, but stayed upright.
I stood between them with both hands raised and no idea what another reach would strike.
Kieran coughed, drew one ragged breath, and swore. The swearing told me he could breathe. Jonah braced him against the wall while Delphine turned the captured blade toward the remaining guard.
The green-gold line came back dimmer, then steadied. I could feel Kieran’s pulse through it, too fast but regular. I kept my reach closed and my hands where I could see them.
The last guard looked from the light under my wrist to Kieran’s burned skin. Then she lowered her blade into the water and opened both hands. Jonah bound her wrists with a strip torn from the first guard’s sleeve. The two men he had disarmed did not try to rise.
Delphine collected the five blades and wedged them behind a stone lip above the waterline. Kieran checked the first fallen guard for breath before rolling him onto his side. Jonah and Delphine bound every guard still capable of moving and drew them together where the channel was shallowest.
We treated the injuries where we stood. The current tugged at every loose end of cloth while I cut a strip from my sleeve and wrapped Delphine’s forearm. The wound ran a handspan along the outside, deep enough to gape when she flexed her hand but clear of the artery.
“That’s the arm you write with,” I said.
Delphine tested each finger. “They still work.” Her voice tightened on the last word, the only sign the movement hurt. She pressed the bandage in place with her other hand while I tied it off.
Blood soaked through the first layer before I finished the second. I packed another fold over the center of the cut and made her raise the arm while I tightened it. She objected only when I reached for a third strip. “Kieran’s wrist,” she said, and pulled her sleeve down over the bandage.
Kieran found the lamp by touch, shook the water from its chimney, and trimmed the wet end of the wick with one of the captured knives.
The striker caught on the second attempt.
In the returning light, a raised white mark circled his wrist where our bond had flared.
The skin around it was already blistering.
The burn followed no fold or seam from his sleeve. It made a narrow band on the inside of his wrist that forked once toward his thumb. When I brought my fingers near it, the line beneath my own skin answered. I stopped before touching him.
He opened and closed his hand. “Still attached.”
“I hit you.”
“You did.” He looked at the corridor ahead rather than at me. “We can discuss it when we’re out of this current.”
He wrapped the wrist himself, loose enough that the cloth would not catch the blisters. The knot slipped twice before he caught it. Caspian’s line was still absent from the bond beneath my ribs. Kieran glanced back toward the stair, then hid the burned hand inside his coat.
Jonah checked Kieran’s pulse, then came to me. Two fingers pressed inside my elbow. “Anything numb?”
I shook my head.
“Then keep your reach close until we know what the basin is doing to it.” He tightened the knot at Delphine’s bandage and moved ahead to test the next stretch of floor.
We had gone less than fifty feet when the bond beneath my ribs changed. Cold marble and burnt sugar joined the other lines, distinct even through the pressure of the basin. Boots struck water behind us, fast and uneven.
Caspian came out of the dark with Magnus’s blood dried black along one forearm. He carried no lamp. The Ashford ring showed briefly beneath his cuff when he pushed the wet fabric back from his hand.
Blood remained beneath his nails. His face was still. Water struck his boots and broke around them; he did not react to the cold.
His eyes went first to Delphine’s bandage, then to the burn around Kieran’s wrist. He took in Jonah’s soaked coat and the bound guards behind us. I opened my mouth. His gaze met mine, and I let the question go.
Caspian stopped in front of me and pressed his palm over my pulse. He held it there until it beat against his hand, watching my face. Then he let go and stepped into the open place beside Jonah.
His touch left a smear of cold water across my wrist. I almost caught his hand before he stepped away.
“How far?” he asked.
“Close.” The word came out rough from shouting over the water.
We left the guards bound above the flooded stretch, out of the strongest current, and moved on with Caspian in the line.
Jonah led. Kieran carried the lamp in his uninjured hand.
Delphine kept her cut arm against her chest and counted the turns.
Caspian stayed close enough that I could feel the heat of him whenever the passage narrowed.
Jonah waited at every change in depth. Kieran’s injured hand drifted lower whenever he forgot to hold it up.
Delphine’s fingers left occasional dark marks on the wall despite the bandage.
Caspian caught my belt once when the current shoved me sideways, released it when I recovered, and kept walking.
The last corridor widened until the lamp no longer reached both walls. The ceiling rose out of sight. Water stood above my knees, warmer than it had been on the stair and clouded with pale mineral threads that caught the light when we moved.
Pressure filled the cavern. It pushed against my ears and tightened every line at my wrists. I could taste metal, apple, leather, and burnt sugar. With each surge, the tastes blurred together.
Beneath the roar ran a slower rhythm. A woman’s voice spoke too low for words, pausing at measured intervals. The sound traveled through the water more clearly than through the air. The lines at my wrist lifted toward it before I chose to reach.
The lamp finally found a door set directly into the rock. It had no visible hinges and no handle, only iron blackened by constant damp. Water streamed beneath it toward us.
I stopped one step away with the others breathing behind me. Then I put my palm against the iron. The current on the other side pressed back.