“I followed you from the beginning. Bumped into you at the gate and befriended you. Kiyan had me watching you since you first arrived.”
Air was trapped in my lungs, and my fists curled tight against my sides. “This whole time, you weren’t my friend?”
“I can’t afford to have friends, not right now. Not when the people I love are dying. Surely you understand that?” She tilted her head, suddenly looking quite different.
Instead of looking guileless and gentle, she now had a cunning air, her eyes narrowed, her mouth a flat line. “And that’s why I can’t let you leave the palace. Not when you have the crown.”
I ran for the window, but fire from the candle leapt toward me, igniting the curtain. The same fire I’d seen her whisper to in the kitchens, conjure with her limited magic.
I pushed the curtain aside, but she tackled my legs, throwing me to the floor. She was strong, had the innate strength of the fae, and her long black hair curtained around us.
“Give me the crown, and I’ll let you go.”
“I can’t. I need it.”
“Not more than we do. It belongs to us.”
I blinked at her, realizing I had thought she was working for the Salt Guard, for Kiyan. But she wasn’t.
“You’re a rebel.”
She smiled then, a sad smile. “I’m a rebel to Reza. A traitor to Salt. But I am loyal to my own Court. To River, I’m a freedom fighter.”
The curtain was ablaze above us, catching the other one alight, and spreading fast. The inferno was a roar in the room as we struggled on the floor.
Mishah may have had her fae magic to fight with, but I had my mother’s bangles. And I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I pulled them to me, inward like I had done with Kiyan when I’d healed him, using them as a conduit for my magic.
This time, my magic threads were more than just light in the air. They curled around her body, binding her hands and ankles, ensuring that she couldn’t stop me.
Mishah struggled on the ground, shouting. “You take it, and you condemn us to hundreds of years of his reign. More torture, death, control. We will never be free.”
“I can’t give up the only chance my family has at freedom, at life. I have to finish what my mother started.”
I dragged her away from the flames toward the door of my room.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, her black eyes finding me through the smoke.
I had to hurry.
My skirts flowed behind me as I swung over the edge of my window and planted my boot into the side of the wall. I slowly lowered myself down the stone tower one foot at a time, until I had made it to the bottom and jumped down into solid ground.
Soon they would know I escaped. The Viceroy wanted to keep me as his tool, to keep ferreting out powerful magical objects, and the minute he knew I was running, he would be after me.
I didn’t even want to think about what Kiyan would think when he discovered I was gone. About what Mishah would likely tell him.
Kiyan had me watching you since you first arrived.
Which meant he’d known about me since the beginning, if Mishah had been communicating with him.
But Mishah was a rebel. Was she double-crossing Kiyan? Or working alongside him?
As much as anger fueled my blood, I still couldn’t bring myself to not care about him.
I placed my shaking hands to the stone of the palace. It felt as though my heart was ripping out of me.
But if I didn’t leave now, if I didn’t destroy the wall, I’d never get this chance. I’d never be able to finish what my mother had started, to feel like somehow, some way, I had followed in her footsteps, in my father’s footsteps. To feel like I had defied the path the Empire had laid out for me in blood and instead burned it to the ground.
