Once I stare into those glacial blues, I can’t look away no matter how hard I try.
There’s a magnetism I don’t understand, like he’s rummaging through the pit of my soul, examining me from the inside out.
My breath catches, held in the grasp of paralyzed lungs.
The slightest line forms between his brows, and his steps slow, while mine become a frantic, churning beat, passing him like wildfire breezing past a stone.
I don’t dare look back and seek the source of the burning point of perusal between my shoulder blades—a red-hot poker threatening to push through me. He’s likely realized who I am and is drawing his own conclusions about the girl who lives in Rhordyn’s tower and never leaves the castle grounds.
The child-survivor.
Perhaps Rhordyn will count this toward my progress chart.
It’s not until I veer around a sharp bend that I can finally breathe.
Ahead on my right is a wooden door, and I steal a glance over my shoulder before pressing into it, letting it swing on silent hinges that have always allowed me to move into this elbow of The Tangle inconspicuously.
The pokey tunnel is roughly hewn rock, and very few torches line the wiggly hall. Those that do burn as though barely clinging to life, choking on air that’s thick and damp.
I don’t waste time checking to see if I’ve been followed. Whoever that man was, I doubt he knows this castle like I do.
I pick my way along the tunnel until I come to a fork in the path, then steal a torch from a wrought metal sconce. It gives me a bobbing aura of light as I veer left, rounding on a sudden dive almost steep enough to slide down, but not quite.
I’ve tried.
Once the path flattens out, I stop and lift my torch, illuminating the tapestry hung across the wall to my left. Hundreds of vibrant, delicately stitched flowers pock a lonely hill, sprinkling it in bright pops of color.
The solemn vision of beauty almost makes me cry every time my eyes hunger over it.
It’s exotic and so full of life ... yet it’s hidden in this dark tunnel.
The center of the masterpiece dips as if the hall behind it just took a breath, and I peel the corner back, thrusting my torch into the throat of darkness beyond.
I step into the gloom, let the tapestry thump back into place behind me, then make my way down the long, slender hallway that’s as dusty and unkept as the first time I walked along it.
Discovering this passage just shy of my thirteenth birthday was my most exciting find in years—something I knew from the moment I stepped past the heavy tapestry and saw the distressed state of my surroundings.
Neglected tunnels always lead to interesting finds.
I round on a small booth pressed into the wall with a seat skirting its length. It could easily pass as a strange little resting spot, but it’s so muchmorethan that.
I can hear the distant burr of a voice radiating through the wall, and I stab my torch into the empty sconce, freeing my hands.
Kneeling, palms flattened against stone, I seek the wound in the wall—a hole the size of a large plum, perfect for garnering a full, overhead view of the people crammed into the throne room. They fill the entire room to my right, bar a crescent of space that separates the dais from the crowd.
SeparatesRhordyn.
Ceiling aglitter with hundreds of chandeliers that sit not far above my eyeline, the room looks like it was carved from a slab of night sky. It’s beautiful, I’ve always thought that, but beautiful things don’t always bring you happiness.
Somehow, and despite the ocean of bodies all garbed in Ocruth black, the room still gives me the sense of a vacant chest cavity.
My gaze darts to Rhordyn, sitting atop a throne made of cleverly placed silver stems soldered together to form an elegant dais. Beside him is a pile of offerings almost taller than himself: crates of chickens, jewelry, fine materials, baskets of herbs, and much more.
A man’s standing within the arc of empty space—years etched into his face and stacked upon his shoulders in bricks of brawn. A farmer perhaps, considering the crate bulging with fat, yellow fruit on the ground beside him.
He’s dropped to one knee, shoulders hunched, revering Rhordyn with dull eyes rimmed in shadow.
“It was a monster that destroyed the fence. A great beast of a thing. And now there’s a gaping hole welcominganythingto slip through!”
