Page 93 of The Crown’s Temptation

The path back through the outer grounds of the Darkway was darker than I remembered. It had the active dark of a place that generated its own absence of light, thick and directional, pressing against me from every side. I kept my hand against the wall where there was one and moved quickly where there was not.

I nearly jumped when I heard it.

A sound like a voice that had forgotten how voices worked. The words were right but the rhythm wrong, repeating without breath between them the way water repeated against rock.

"You cannot have him. You cannot have him. You cannot have him."

Something dropped from above and landed in front of me. I could not see what it was. I could see that it was large and that it was not moving toward me but was not moving away either, crouched in the path with its head tilted at an angle that suggested the neck had more joints than it should.

"He belongs to. He belongs to. He belongs to."

Belongs to whom? I almost asked.

The question formed and dissolved immediately because my head had started pounding.

I ran.

I did not look back. I ran until the path changed beneath my feet and the walls changed around me and the sound faded to something I could almost convince myself I had imagined, and then I stopped and pressed my back against the wall and breathed and understood that I was no longer outside.

I was in the tunnels.

The tunnels were not silent.

That was the first thing I noticed once my breathing slowed enough to notice anything. Somewhere distant, drums. Shouting, rhythmic and low, the kind that belonged to something ceremonial. I could not tell which direction it came from. Sound moved differently down here, bouncing off the walls and arriving from angles that made no sense.

I stood still and listened and found, unexpectedly, that it helped. The drums especially. Something about the steadiness of them.

I started walking.

The tunnels branched and forked and I chose directions without any real logic behind the choosing, following the one rule I had given myself which was to keep moving rather than stop. Stopping felt like an invitation.

Then I saw the light.

A corridor to my left, narrow, and at the end of it a pale glow. It was something that belonged to a room rather than to a place.

I walked toward it.

The wall at the end was not a wall. It was a ward. Transparent, thin, the kind you could press your face against and see through if you were close enough. I pressed close.

The room on the other side looked like the lower levels of a castle. Beyond it was another room that appeared to have a glass wall, because I could see everything in it. In it there was a stone floor, low ceiling, and the warm light of several lamps arranged carefully around two bassinets that sat side by side in the center of the room.

I stopped breathing.

One of the bassinets moved. A small sound came from it, thin and insistent, the sort of cry that meant not distress exactly but the beginning of considering it. Saurin appeared from the adjoining room, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, still in her nightclothes. She reached into the bassinet and lifted Fiorakis, rocking her gently until the crying softened. Then she crossed to the small stack of books beside the chair, opened one, and began reading in a quiet voice while she swayed with Kiss against her shoulder.

Ari slept through most of it.

I sat down on the floor of the tunnel with my back against the wall and looked through the ward at my children and did not move.

I did not know how long I sat there. Long enough for Fiorakis to calm and be laid back down. Long enough for the drums in the distance to change rhythm and then stop entirely. Long enough for Ari to wake once and be fed and sleep again.

I wondered where Colsar was.

At some point the tears came without me deciding to let them. I did not wipe them away. I sat in the dark of the tunnel and watched my children sleep and cried.

They were safe.

Whatever else was true, they were safe. I remembered Kentan telling me that Urasal connected to Umbrelai.