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Chapter Seven
Istumble blindly up the endless set of stairs, Boaz’s viselike grip on my arm the only thing keeping me on my bare feet. Only when we reach a landing does he remove the blanket from my head. He shoves me forward.
I falter several steps before tripping over the hem of my dress and falling, smashing my knee against the stone floor. I bite back my howl.
“You will explain yourself.” He tosses the blanket onto the ground beside me.
Gritting my teeth through the pain, I drag myself to the farthest corner from him like the wounded animal I am, and quickly survey my new surroundings. He’s brought me to a semicircular room with nothing but a small pile of furs over hay on one side and a bucket on the other. A small opening in the wall reveals the night sky.
Boaz fills the doorway, his helm removed and tucked under his arm. He’s older than I expected for a man with such strength, a dusting of light gray touching his cropped, mouse-brown hair and frown lines zagging across his forehead. A streak of blood paints his golden cheek. More streaks coat his breastplate. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Do not toy with me,” he growls. “I put that arrow through your heart. I saw you fall in the rose garden. You were dead.”
An arrow in the rose garden …
I recall the blood-soaked weapon I picked up. Is he saying that was my blood? That he shot me with that? I peer down at the dark stain in the bodice where the material appears torn. The throb in my chest is not nearly as sharp as it was when I awoke, but it still hurts. But I came to in the cedar maze. How did I get there? I must have crawled. But he didn’t shoot me …
“How are you alive!” Boaz’s deep voice ricochets off the stone, severing my wandering thoughts. He charges forward, his armor clanging with each step.
“I don’t know, but I’m not who you think I am!” I curl into a ball, wrapping my arms around my head, bracing for an assault. When it doesn’t come, I hazard a glance upward.
He studies me through narrowed eyes. “I do not know what new deception you are concocting. Perhaps you think you can buy time until you are rescued by your accomplices? It will not work. Muirn is dead. The insurgents have either been killed, caught, or have fled the city. No one is coming to free you.” He spins on his heels and marches out, slamming the barred door behind him.
I listen to his footfalls fade down the steps, waiting until they’re beyond earshot before I allow myself a sigh of relief. Though there is nothing to be relieved about. I’m in a predicament that I can’t begin to figure a way out of. I should have run like that man said. I’d be living with Annika’s death, but I’d be alive and not in this cell.Boaz’s threats of dismemberment did what he intended. I’m terrified.
And my hand throbs. I cringe as I inspect the sizable, deep gash across my palm. That will take at least ten stitches to close, maybe more, and something tells me they aren’t in a rush to fetch a doctor for me. I need to staunch the blood.
The hem of my dress is ripped. Using my teeth and my good hand, I tear off a strip and wind it around my injury as best I can, trying to ignore the dirt that’s begging to climb into my wound. People have lost limbs from basic infections. Sometimes more. A homeless woman who lived down by the Hudson—we called her Sally Rivers—cut her thumb on a tin can and later died of sepsis.
I pull myself off the hard stone floor and head to the tiny window to get a better grasp on my surroundings. Boaz has locked me in a tower, I realize with dismay. The top of a tall tower, the ground at least a fifty-foot drop. Even if I could fit through the opening, I’d break every bone in my body jumping. Fitting my head into the small space, I spot a helmet. A soldier guards the entrance.
Boaz marches across an enormous courtyard with purpose, pausing to speak to two men who are busy hauling logs and dumping them in a pile, directing them with a pointed finger and words I can’t decipher. Aside from them, I don’t see anyone else. It’s quiet here—far more so than along the city streets we passed through.
Despite the warm summer air, this cell is cool, and my dress is sopping wet from the river. My teeth chatter as I attempt to ring water from the countless layers of skirts using my uninjured hand. I can’t help but chastise myself for it. But death by hypothermia or pneumonia might be preferential to whatever they have planned for me.
When I can’t squeeze another drop of water, I gather up the blanket Boaz left, finding an odd comfort in the earthy smell. The pile of hay layered with sheepskin is my bed, I guess? I’ll admit, I’ve slept on worse, but it’s still unappealing.
There is nothing to do now but stare at my muddy feet and wait.
A faint scraping sound carries from somewhere within the tower nearby, prickling the hair on the back of my neck. I move cautiously toward the cell door, searching the darkness beyond the bars. Across the landing is another cell.
“Hello?” I hold my breath, listening intently. Might there be someone hiding within the shadows who can fill me in on where the hell I am? “Hello?” I call again, louder.
A rat scurries out between the bars, startling me. It halts abruptly when it sees me standing there and then veers down the stairs. Otherwise, no one answers.
I test my cell door with a push and a shake. It rattles noisily but does not budge, confirming that it is locked.
I’m trapped and utterly alone, save for the rodents.
How did it come to this?
Moonlight reaches in through the window to bathe the makeshift bed in its silver glow. How many others have waited for punishment beneath that light? Wrapping the blanket tighter around myself, I pick through everything Sofie told me in her frantic march to the vault, and the insanity since I woke up in a maze.
Sofie was adamant that these people couldn’t find out who I am. What I am. If they do, I won’t survive. But this version of Romeria they think I am? Apparently, she killed a king and queen and started a war in their city. I’m pretty sure they’re going to kill me anyway.
I study the ring she slipped onto my finger. I thought the gem dull, but beneath the moonlight, it shimmers. She said this would protect me, and maybe it will. I still don’t understand how it lit up like that in the river, but I guess I’ll have to add that question to a long list of events that doesn’t make sense.
