by Sara Holland
She just reaches into her dress and brings out a vial full of what looks like brown salt. Before I can move or think, she holds it up to my nose—and when I draw breath, a kind of shimmering fog steals over me, sapping what little strength’s left in my body. Then a sharp finger of pain runs down the center of my scalp, as if my mind has cleaved in two.
I can’t resist at all as Caro slides me off her lap; I flop to the floor like a rag doll.
Through the throbbing pain, I hear Caro’s voice, high and sharp and confident, call down the stairs. I can’t tell what she’s saying, but a moment passes and then she’s gone, her footsteps receding away, her voice blending into the orchestra.
Two billowy, dark shapes approach—I see, through my blurred vision, two palace guards coming cautiously toward me.
I can’t fight back as they pick me up by my arms and fasten my hands behind my back with a length of roughly hewn rope. I attempt to cry out, but I can only manage to mangle the words. It’s as if Caro’s cast a heavy shadow over my mind, hiding what I need to defend myself.
It doesn’t matter, I think miserably, because who would come to help a murderer?
Liam’s face flashes in my mind. I should have listened to him, I think dimly. I should have escaped to Ambergris. Now our plan is ruined.
My mumbled speech seems to give the guards confidence. Soon, they’re hauling me to the door, down the stairs, down a hall; whatever drug Caro forced me to breathe makes my limbs weak and useless. All I can do is try to remember what paths we follow—down stone staircase after staircase, through halls that grow darker and narrower as we go—but there’s a persistent whisper in my head that sounds half like Caro’s voice and half like my own, and it asks, Why bother? Why try? You’ll never escape her.
Even that falls silent as the guards shove me inside a cramped cell, then slam the door shut behind me.
5
In my dreams, I become a snake, my long muscles coated with scales that gleam like emeralds. I slip through darkness and shadows that reach out long fingers and try to catch me. Gold races past. A slender form, amber eyes. Fox, I think, my thoughts whittled down to nothing but flashes of sensation and feeling. Freezing air across my body, light ahead as the fox looks back. Fear, terrible fear, and a noise behind me, like the howling of a great wind, or a hound baying, its jaws snapping and snarling at the heels of its prey, getting closer—
Fear jolts me awake. At least I think I’m awake; it’s too dark to be sure. I blink. My eyes focus on a strip of light cutting through blackness. The glow is coming from under my cell door. Adrenaline courses through me, left over from the nightmare. That awful howling.
I push myself up on my elbows, trying to shake the dream away. I blink again as my eyes adjust. These must be the dungeon cells inside the guts of Sempera’s palace—the ground beneath me is the same ivory stone as everything else but dimmed by dust and grime. In the near darkness, I can make out tracks worn in the floor where prisoners have paced back and forth. My limbs cramp painfully as I lever myself into a sitting position.
It’s quiet, but the quiet isn’t absolute. If I listen hard, I can hear faint voices outside the door, see the light broken up when guards pace in front of my cell.
Time passes, slips through my fingers like sand. I stare out the small opening in the cell door for hours, willing my eyes to focus on its rectangle of light. I count the motes of dust that swirl in and out of shadow. I devour the guards’ every word, each more muffled by the slab of wood that separates us. I try to hear the lilts of their accents and guess where each is from. Anything to focus my thoughts after whatever drug Caro made me inhale. Anything not to think about the glint of Caro’s blade, Ina’s ice-cold stare and the way her eyes have changed now that the light has gone from them.
When a new shadow disrupts the glow that spills over the floor of my cell and stops there, my whole body tenses, alert.
“You two are missing quite the feast downstairs,” an unfamiliar female voice says. “You might as well go down, this one isn’t going anywhere.”
“Captain,” one guard says, his voice gruff but nervous. “We have orders from Lady Caro to guard her here.”
“She’s dangerous,” the other man adds, kicking the door with his boot. “Tried to go for the Queen with her bare hands. Saw it with my own eyes.”
Gently, using an elbow to prop myself up, I shift toward the door to listen better. I feel anything but dangerous—but the drug seems to be wearing off, my senses returning, even blearily.
A woman—the captain?—cracks the door open as much as a chain will allow and peers into the cell. She cuts her eyes at me, appraising me critically. Then her face changes. She widens her eyes at me, mouths something.
I stare at her, bewildered. She repeats the silent words, and this time I recognize the shape of the words.
Stop time.
My mind is still dull, aching, but that means I don’t pause to question why this captain is telling me to use my magic. My heart is beating fast. It’s easy to press my palms to the floor and will time to slow around me. In my haze, I can almost imagine strands of it tunneling out from my hands, skirting the woman and winding up around the two men. They still, two windup dolls whose mechanisms have wound down.
I can’t hold it for long, weak as I am. But I don’t have to. The woman crosses the hall and pinches out the torches’ still flames. Her movements are efficient. Then she returns to her place, just as I lose my hold on time.
The world speeds up. The flames gutter out in the span of a heartbeat.
Dark falls, and she cries out in passable fear. Then there are two thuds, and then larger thumps. The second guard has time to cry out—a short, strangled noise—before he goes down too with a massive thud on the floor. My breath catches. I hear the sizzle of the torch being relit.
The woman’s steps sound on the stone floor, and my cell door creaks open.
I squint against the light to see a Shorehaven guard with a long braid down her back, in the same uniform as my captors. I don’t recognize her. As the woman stands there, breathing hard, someone else emerges from the shadows at the other end of the hall.
It’s Liam.
I almost think it’s a hallucination caused by whatever Caro gave me in Ina’s room, but as he hurries into the cell, I know he’s real. Liam, who told me I was the Alchemist, who spirited me away from Caro at Everless. I could never dream up that precise, efficient way he moves, the way a few locks of hair escape from their queue to curl around his face. He’s paler and more drawn than he was at Everless, but polished in a bottle-green military waistcoat, gleaming with gold buttons and epaulets. The Gerling insignia glitters on his breast.
He nods at the captain, who vanishes silently down the hall, her braid the last piece of her to disappear around the darkened corner.
The old fear—of the Gerlings and especially of Liam—stirs in me as he crosses the cell in three long steps. I draw back a little. I’d known he might be here at Shorehaven, but that’s entirely different from his standing in front of me, right now.
I swallow. Though my vision is still bleary, fraying at the edges, his face stands out against the wash of light. His eyes flicker from remoteness to relief to fear.
“Jules,” he says, and it sounds like a breath he was waiting to exhale. “You’re alive.”
The last time I saw him, he helped me escape from the Everless dungeons and sent me on my way, with instructions to meet his unbound friend in Ambergris. He saved my life. He didn’t have to, but he did. He crouches in front of me now and takes me in: my ragged clothes, the wound seeping at my hairline. Heat pours off him, and concern with it. “You never made it to Ambergris, like we’d planned. I thought—maybe bleeders . . .”
I cast my eyes down again. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be worried. “I’m fine.”
Show nothing.
There was a reason I left Everless without saying more than thank you. I scarcely know Liam—but I scarcely knew Ro
an either, and Caro still killed him. Too much has passed between Liam and me in the short time we’ve been allies. This silence feels heavy. Dangerous.
I put a hand on the wall for leverage and try to push myself up, not wanting to appear weak. Liam reaches out as if to touch me, and I flinch away without meaning to. If Caro finds out he’s helping me . . .
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say.
A wounded look crosses his face but only briefly. “Well, that makes two of us. All the more reason to get out now.” He takes my arm and helps me to my feet, then drops his hand quickly and busies himself with undoing the bonds at my wrists. “What happened? Did Caro hurt you?”
This time, I meet his eyes. I know he’s referring to the wound on my temple, but that’s only the start of what Caro’s done. “She had Crofton burned,” I say. My throat closes again, thinking of it—the cries, the smoke. The hate from the people who remained. Amma’s body.
The color drains from Liam’s face. “Burned? What do you mean?”
“Burned down.” My blood seethes. “You haven’t heard? No Gerlings were present.”
His eyes flick to the ground in shame, but his voice is harsh. “I haven’t been keeping account of Gerling interests. I haven’t spared a thought for anything but you. Your safety,” he adds quickly.
“Ivan was there,” I say softly, my throat thick with old anguish. “There’s nothing left.”
Liam goes still, his hands motionless at my wrists. His chest moves once, silently. Then he seems to gather himself and the bonds drop to the floor. He checks the hall outside the door and then beckons for me to follow, looping a hand under my arm.
“We had a plan,” he says in a low, brusque voice.
“You had a plan,” I reply, wanting to push him away. I imagine Caro’s eyes on me, watching from some unseen hiding place. The words come out louder than I intended them, annoyance swelling in my chest and pushing them from my lips. Even after all that’s happened, his officiousness still irritates me.
Liam helps me out of the cell and into a dim, narrow hallway, his hand on my arm firm. “It doesn’t matter now. We have to leave.”
I lean against the wall while he drags the two guards inside the cell, lifting the keys as he does, and locks the door. His eyes meet mine for the briefest moment. Though his face is controlled, I see another flash of emotion there, like the glint of a coin at the bottom of a well. Fear, for me. It’s gone in an instant, but it makes my stomach clench.
Liam unhooks an oil lamp from the wall and carries it as we walk. “At least tell me Caro hasn’t seen you.”
My silence is its own answer.
Liam’s voice is hard-edged. “Jules, Crofton was probably a trap for you.”
Anger flares through me. “I picked up on that.”
“She knows you—”
“She knows the Alchemist,” I hiss, though the grain of truth sits uncomfortably under my skin. Caro did set a trap. She knew I’d come if Crofton were in danger. Only hours ago, knife leveled at me, she taunted me for my sentimentality. Still, I say, “She doesn’t know me.”
The nightmare from the cell flashes into my mind, the slices of my past lodged deep. Flashes of blood and magic and weakness and strength, fox and snake and something howling.
“What is it?” Liam asks softly. I’ve slowed without meaning to.
I pick up my pace again. “My memories are starting to come back. Of other—other lives.” I try to sound detached. The truth still feels unnatural, wrong somehow. “How did you know I was here?”
“I found this on the palace grounds.” As we hurry through the eerily quiet corridors, he withdraws something from his coat pocket and shows me. My journal.
“You shouldn’t have carried this,” I say, my voice shaky. “Someone could see you with it and know that you’re helping me.”
“Think, Jules,” Liam says, slipping the journal back into his jacket pocket, over his chest. He slows, opens a door off to our right. We slip out into another quiet hall, lined by doors at wide intervals. A residential area. At any moment, one of these doors could burst open, and we’d be ruined. I can only pray that all the guests are downstairs celebrating. “There’s another reason I would be looking for you. The story goes that you killed my brother. No one thinks we’re allies.”
A chill goes through me as his meaning sinks in. Caro and Ivan think Liam means me harm. And he should. He should hate me. I didn’t kill Roan, but he would still be alive if it weren’t for me and my childhood infatuation.
Liam doesn’t speak again until we reach an upper level carpeted in plush silver and blue. Tapestries depicting Sempera’s history line the walls. I follow Liam as the Queen’s life plays out in thread around me, intricately woven battle scenes with swaths of glittering red blood, grotesque to look at in the low light.
But a figure in one of the pictures snags at my gaze. A middle-aged man seated on a black horse hoisting a green-and-gold flag while battle rages around him. A silver hound stands proud at his feet. The man is unremarkable enough, except for the expression on his face: even in miniature, he looks almost bored.
I stop. My hand lifts without my entirely meaning it to, moving toward the tapestry. Then a woman’s distant laugh snaps me back to reality, and I hurry after Liam.
Near the end of the hall, Liam fumbles with a key and ushers me through a blue door. We slip inside, and I finally take a breath of relief.
It’s a noblewoman’s room, littered all over with discarded dresses and trinkets, as if someone spent hours trying on clothes and tossing each reject mindlessly away. I nearly step on a string of pearls lying on the floor. Anger at the careless opulence pricks at me, but it’s more muted than it once might have been, my head still full of fire and smoke.
I find a cushioned chair and sit down—my limbs are heavy and stiff—while Liam goes to a wardrobe on the far side of the room. It’s open, vomiting velvet and silk.
Now that I’m still, the full weight of the danger we’re in sinks down on me. “Why risk this, Liam?” I ask quietly as he rummages through clothes.
It takes him a moment to respond. “The fate of Sempera is tied to yours,” he says at last, his back to me. I remember what he said when he took me from Everless and told me I was the Alchemist, when he tried to convince me to run.
If you die, we are all lost.
A shiver sweeps over me like a cloak, remembering Caro’s voice, describing how she was going to break me, then inhabit me, just as she did the Queen—slipping on my magic like a glove to bend the world to her will. I push the thought away and am almost grateful for the distraction when Liam turns around, his hands overflowing with something made of indigo velvet and lace.
“What is that?” I say, nearly laughing.
Liam blinks. He starts to cross the room toward me, then stops and lays the dress on a side table instead. “Shorehaven will be on high alert with you here,” he says. “It won’t be long until they find the guards we knocked out. The rest will be on watch for anything amiss, but Ina and Caro will be busy with the coronation for the rest of the night. They won’t be expecting you to slip out among the guests, in plain sight. It’s our best chance at escape.”
“Ina’s coronation,” I echo. Even after seeing her, it’s a strange thought: Ina—my friend, my sister—the new queen of Sempera. Then the rest of Liam’s words catch up with me, and I scoff. “Do you think just because I’m in a gown, Ina won’t recognize me?”
Liam lifts something dark and gauzy from the top of the pile of fabric. A veil, I realize.
“All the women are wearing these,” he says quietly, with an undercurrent of emotion I can’t identify. “A sign of respect. For what should have been a wedding.”
Roan’s wedding. I swallow down the sudden lump in my throat. “If we’re discovered, even you won’t be able to explain this away.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Liam’s voice is testy. “I know I’m dead if this goes wrong. That’s why you should trus
t me.” He picks up the dress again and tosses it into my lap while avoiding my eyes. “Get ready, so we can get out of here and get you to Ambergris.”
I fold my hand into the cool fabric, but don’t move to put on the dress. “You should leave before we’re caught.”
I try to summon my old impression of Liam: of my days in Crofton and at Everless when I saw him as an enemy—his posture perfect, his face stone, his eyes cold. The old Lord Gerling, feared, invulnerable, a suit of armor made of flesh and bone, selfish and cruel.
It almost works, until he tells me, “I don’t care about the danger.”
“Don’t say that to me,” I snap, casting my eyes somewhere over his shoulder. He’s close enough for me to reach out and touch him.
But I don’t. I can’t. I need to push him away, just like I did with Ina. It’s the only way he’ll be safe.
Words flow from my mouth like hot poison. “I just— I don’t want more blood on my hands, even yours.”
“No,” Liam says quietly. “I expect not.”
A cold weight settles on my chest. I pull my sleeves over my hands and clench my fists tight, focusing on the pain of my fingernails pressing into my palms instead of the thorn burrowing deeper into me with every word uttered. “I hated you for years. I was afraid of you. Can you understand why it’s hard to believe you now?”
Liam’s eyes search mine as if he’ll find an answer there. But I give him nothing.
Finally, he says, “We aren’t children anymore. Love me or hate me, we have a common enemy now.”
I fold my arms to keep myself from visibly shaking. I hope Liam mistakes it for anger. “That’s all we have.”
I gather the clothes Liam gifted me into my arms and walk straight-backed to the adjoining washroom—forcing myself not to look over my shoulder at him, though that’s all I want to do. On the way, I snatch up a slender dagger in a sheath sitting on one of the cabinets.
Not Amma’s butcher knife, but better than nothing.
