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When consciousness returned, I recognized the place I had feared since the first time Lumi proposed we turn to theft. It was the year after the debt marks appeared. Kirill had taken us in the year previous and, in a chipped tone, explained Mother had belonged to him. She had borrowed money and paid the only way she knew—through her body. He gave us the marriage contract to read and as the words swam before my eyes, I imagined my gorgeous, ethereal mother with the brute before me.
By the time the fine dresses Mother had bought reached our knees, Lumi pointed out the silver bangle at the night market. Kirill had instructed us to stand outside the tent while he settled businessinside. By then he used us to run messages and threats, and we reflexively ducked when someone raised a hand.
Lumi had whispered that no one was watching. That it wasrightthere.
Her crisp green eyes had pushed me forward. Already, she was the thinker, I the doer. As my hand closed around the metal, I did not fear the busy merchant who manned the stall, for in Tal thieves, no matter their age, were sent to one place. That time, no one caught me.
Since my hand closed around the silver, I had known there was only one place this journey could end, even if the road here had taken four years. I had not anticipated the despair seeped into the very stones of the prison of Tal.
I would never leave this place.
Never would I see my own eyes in another’s face.
Rolled into a ball, I wept. There was no longer anywhere I wished to go except to follow Lumi in death as I should have in life.
Either someone had not noticed that I regained consciousness, or they no longer cared, because bells passed. I pulled the riding leathers closer around me. Dead women did not freeze, but my insistently clanking teeth could not be ignored any longer.
Heavy irons moved with my hands. I traced the chains back to the wall above the bare stone ledge serving as a bed. At least I had my own cell with light filtering in through holes which could barely be called windows. In the stories, only the most dangerous criminals got that, the rest were locked in by the dozen. Often, they never reached the hangman’s noose.
But being alone in winter would have been another kind of end. People froze to death here. It was considered a dignified way to go—the slowembrace of the Goddess—compared to the beatings, infections, or sudden drop that awaited the rest.
Singing drifted through the windowless stone corridor. A man’s voice. It pulled me out of my stupor, the jaunty tune about meeting a Rivertown lass so at odds with our surroundings. When one song finished, he started another. I shivered as he sang the first words of “The Undead Queen and the King.” A meaningless lovers’ lament I had known since my mother sang us to sleep. It told of the queen who would defy even death to return to her lover. How she bartered with the Goddess and in the end, they got a place in the stars.
I sweated despite the cold, as if my body no longer knew how to react. The parallels to Herebov and Ealhswip were hard to miss—still, I had. How many more clues had I danced right by? Marching steps interrupted the singer before he finished.
“Wakey, wakey, girl,” someone called and banged on my iron bars. “Time to provide answers. You don’t want me to throw water—the chill now’s only a taste.”
I pulled myself up and scooched into the furthest corner. The speaker, an aging woman larger than most men, with pallid skin that told of days spent in the dark, smiled without mirth.
“That’s a good girl, finally listening. Don’t try anything now. Your unnatural powers won’t work here. This is the mage’s ward. Nice, clean, and hardly used. Lucky girl, you are.”
I did not respond.Luckywas the last thing I felt.
More shoes hit the stones beyond my narrow view, and I wished the song would come back, no matter what realizations it brought.
Dimitri, in gold-trimmed royal blue instead of his familiar black or leathers, face impassive and hair cut short in grief, seemed a different person. Behind him stood Koshka—somehow impossiblyalive but lacking her bone armor. Only the boots, as red as blood, remained. Our doomed positions had been reversed and neither smiled as our eyes met. Mariska, the old man from the bridge, two more guards, and an older nobleman I did not recognize joined them on the other side of my bars.
The jailer bowed deeply. “Your Majesty. We’re honored.”
“Leave us.” He did not even look at her, disdain and suppressed rage dripping from his voice. The lanterns illuminated the sharp panes of his face, like cut ice.
My heart, which should lie dead with Lumi, beat faster in his presence, like an animal trained to expect something good.
That’s over, I told it.Everything is over.He tricked you. Left you on the steppes. If I’d been on the bridge from the start, it would have ended differently.
Lumi came disguised as a priestess,the disloyal part of me argued.She never wanted to talk. No one besides you wanted to cooperate.The jarring thud as the blade scraped bone replayed inside me.
“Time to give me real answers, Komarova,” Dimitri commanded without a trace of the laughing prince who taught me to brush a griffon.
Our eyes locked and the others disappeared.
“I can’t. You know I can’t.” My voice, hoarse from disuse, sounded strange in my own ears. “Why am I here?”
Ending up in this cell felt inevitable now, but flying together, sharing each other, I had convinced myself that even if the lies unraveled, Dimitri would still care for me.
It was the old man who answered, “Among other evils, you’ve been arrested for treason and conspiring to murder the crown prince. Everyone witnesses your duplicity and there’s nolack of evidence. Talk to help yourself. None of those who attacked him were priestesses, but one was your sister.”
By the glimmer in his eyes, he had no intention of helping no matter what I said. He was fishing for information to use against me and Lumi. No one would ever get another piece of us; we had both given more than anyone should have to. We had not asked to be pulled into this world of politics and danger, and now she was no more.
