Finally, the lock clicked and the door swung in.
The moment it did, the guards came into view.
“Hey!” said the first, spotting her. “You there!”
“Halt!” called the second. “What are you doing?”
With her heart drumming in her chest, Eris stepped into the tower, shut the door behind her, and jammed the lock with her pin. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not it would hold—she knew it wouldn’t. It was whether it would hold long enough for her to climb the steps, steal back Crow’s soul, and step across.
There was only one way to find out.
The only light here came from the stars, flooding through the windows. Before her stood a black spiral stairway that disappeared out of sight. Behind the door at her back, she heard the rushing footsteps and shouting voices of the guards.
Eris darted for the steps.
She climbed fast. Every ten stairs, a narrow window showed the view of Axis below. Soon, she could see the citadel. Then the harbor. Then the cliffs to the east beyond the city.
The higher she rose and the farther the city fell beneath her, the heavier her legs grew. Soon her breath came in quick, burning gasps. By the time she neared the top, her heart pumped hard and the air felt thick in her lungs. Looking out the next window, the lights of the city seemed as far away as the stars.
When the stairs abruptly stopped, a door stood before her.A steel one this time. For a moment, Eris wondered if it, too, would be locked, but it wasn’t even shut. The door stood a little ajar, letting pale light spill onto the stair where she stood.
She heard shouts from below.
Peering down through the window, she saw several black shapes swarming at the base of the tower. Lumina soldiers.
Eris’s pulse pounded in her ears.
They hadn’t broken in yet. She still had time.
When she pressed her palm to the door, it stung like a jellyfish bite. She flinched away, hissing through her teeth.
Stardust steel,she realized, recognizing the pale silvery sheen.
So, using the sole of her boot, she kicked the door open. It was only when she stepped inside that she realized something was wrong.
The room was... deserted.
A broken loom stood directly across from Eris. Smashed in three places, it caved in on itself like a wounded spider. She could see the cobwebs that had formed over it, glittering in the starlight.
The weaving bench was toppled. The windows were cracked. And Eris saw spots of blood where the glass webbed.
There’s no one here.
Everything was coated in a thin layer of dust, as if there hadn’t been anyone here in years. Perhaps decades.
It smelled like wood and dust and something else.Juniper berries,she thought. The scent brought a strange and sudden dizziness.
More shouts broke out from far below. Eris ignored them.She had her spindle. Even if they broke into the tower right now, she would be gone long before they climbed the stairs.
Eris walked quickly over to the smashed loom, her footsteps sending up dust clouds. Standing before the massive wooden frame, she reached to touch the broken pieces, and as she did, an image from the past rose up in her mind.
For her entire life at the scrin, a tapestry hung at the foot of her bed in that small, dark room behind the kitchens. Woven by Day, it depicted a small, knobby woman with meadow-green eyes set a little too far apart. The woman hunched at her loom, pausing in her work to look down at the tools in her hands, as if forgetting why she’d picked them up in the first place. Eris fell asleep every night wondering why she looked so sad.
She knew the woman wassupposedto be Skyweaver. But all the other scrin tapestries depicted her as a faceless god crowned with stars. This was a mortal woman.
Eris stepped quickly away from the loom. Shaking off the memory, she looked to the wreckage around her.
What happened here?
