Nocturna

by Maya Motayne

  This chamber was full of an incessant ticking. Above this endless pillar of cells was the enormous clock. It took up the entire ceiling, glaring down at the prisoners like a ticking moon.

  The groans and cries of prisoners swaddled Alfie in agony. At the sight of him in his dueño disguise, prisoners clawed at their bars, begging for forgiveness, for salvation, until a guard barked at them to keep quiet. Alfie looked away from their dirty, desperate faces. He felt Finn shudder beside him. The guard led them across the ground floor of cells, through yet another nest of twisting corridors and down a staircase. They were now on the lowest floor of the prison, just below the first floor of cells beneath the ticking clock.

  The air suddenly grew sweltering. Heat clung to Alfie’s face like a mask. He heard the clanging of pots and pans.

  The guard led them to the kitchens of the prison, where dueños stood stirring vats of food for the prisoners. Alfie’s eyebrows rose. Paloma had told him that to rise in the ranks, one had to do years of penance, but he had imagined them doing something with a bit more gravitas.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” the guard said before turning on his heel and walking away.

  Alfie watched the dueños silently cooking and ladling unappetizing, thick stews into bowls for the guards to deliver to cells.

  “I’ll be back,” Finn whispered beside him, her breath tickling his cheek.

  “Be careful,” he murmured. “And hurry.” It shouldn’t take her long to lay the fireworks, but worry still tightened his stomach. They’d already wasted too much time with the funeral and Alfie’s rest in the lavatory. The longer they spent here, the more time the magic had to harm his people. He and Finn would need to move quicker than ever to make up the time.

  He waited for her to demand five gold pesos for him telling her to be careful, but he heard nothing. She was already gone.

  Only in her absence did he realize how part of him yearned for the sound of her voice curving with the punch of a joke—a sound that made her face bright in his mind’s eye even when she was hidden by the cloak.

  28

  The Reunion

  As the darkness purred within him, hungry for the hearty meal ahead, Ignacio stepped before the bridge that stretched over the Clock Tower’s boiling moat, his gray cloak flicking in the steaming breeze.

  The two guards posted at the bridge’s entrance startled at the sight of him, pulling their blades from their scabbards.

  “State your business!” one said, brandishing his blade. “You’re not allowed—”

  With a flick of his wrist the man flew backward, skipping down the moat like a stone before sinking into the searing hot water.

  The remaining guard watched his comrade shriek in agony before sinking silently into the depths, his mouth filling with boiling water. He dropped his sword and raised his hands in surrender. He was young, not yet twenty. Still a boy.

  “Please, señor,” he begged. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  Ignacio stepped close to the quivering guard. He gripped him by the neck and raised him high off the ground. The boy choked and kicked, his eyes bulging as he struggled for breath. “Whether or not you want trouble is hardly important when trouble wants you.”

  Ignacio twisted his fingers and a coil of magic bloomed in his palm. He pushed it down the man’s throat and watched him convulse in his hand. His shadow drew inward, his eyes blackened, and then he fell still.

  Ignacio put him down and felt a sliver of new power squirming through him. He breathed a long sigh of anticipation. There were so many waiting in that prison to feed him. He could hardly wait.

  A battalion of ten guards rushed across the bridge to apprehend him, but Ignacio made quick work of the men, forcing his magic down their throats as they thrashed and whimpered only to rise as extensions of himself. Many of them were too weak for his power and crumpled to dust before Ignacio’s eyes, but enough of the guards carried the darkness as if they were born for it. They looked to him, awaiting his command. At the sight of them, the magic within Ignacio prowled and paced, yearning for more bodies to claim as its own.

  Together, he and his newly minted men walked across the bridge. When they stood before the prison doors, Ignacio raised his hand and the bridge exploded in a burst of wood and smoke behind them. No one would be leaving this place without feeding him first.

  The power of the men he’d just taken sent a prickling sensation through his body, leaving his senses sharpened once more. When he touched the handles of the towering double doors of the prison, he felt the resin that sealed the wood. He sensed the mice that ran through tunnels they’d dug in the prison walls. He heard the groans and cries of prisoners deep in the tower, begging for freedom.

  Today their prayers would be answered.

  He gripped the towering doors of dark wood. In his fingers they felt like curtains waiting to be pulled apart, to open and pour victory over his skin like sunlight. Ignacio tore them off their hinges and tossed them behind him.

  He took one step into the dank prison and stopped. As his foot touched the floor it was as if he’d bonded with it, each brick an extension of his flesh. An awareness flitted over him, like fingers through his hair, like a spider over its web.

  She was here.

  In the tangle of sweat and sorrow that filled the Clock Tower, he could smell her on the breeze as if he were standing in a field of her, a field ripe for a long-awaited harvest. He closed his eyes and he could hear her heartbeat tapping out its stubborn rhythm, a rhythm he wished to conduct.

  A smile tugged his lips wide.

  Dark hearts, the magic reminded. We must focus.

  Ignacio stepped into the prison. “I will do as you wish,” he said, his smile sharpening.

  But who was to say that he couldn’t serve the magic and himself all at once?

  29

  The Library

  Luka accidentally tore the thick leather cover off yet another book. He gave a gusty sigh and let his head drop onto the desk before him. The sound echoed in the palace’s nearly empty library. “Gods damn it.”

  All day Luka had been breaking things left and right, leaving a path of destruction in his wake. He wanted to tell Alfie about it, to ask him what it meant, but now seemed like a bad time to write on their shared parchment, Greetings, it seems I’ve suddenly gained inhuman strength ever since you saved my life with the help of an evil magic. Thoughts? He didn’t want to distract Alfie, and, truth be told, he was afraid of the answer, afraid that it meant a bit of Sombra’s magic lived inside of him, strengthening him.

  This morning he’d broken the hourglass and yanked two sets of doors off their hinges. By the afternoon he’d broken a side table in Alfie’s room along with an ottoman and an armoire. When a servant had come in with his freshly pressed clothes for the ball and seen the damage he’d done, Luka had said, “Do you ever just walk into your room and hate all the furniture?”

  And now, while he tried to research Sombra in the library as Alfie had asked, yet another book suffered by his hand.

  The quiet of the library made his skin crawl. On any day, it would bother him, but today, when he so longed for noise and chaos and distraction to keep him from thinking about Alfie, the silent library was the last place he wanted to be. But Alfie had asked him to do research to try to discover if Sombra had any weakness that would help him and Finn, and so he’d called upon the library attendants to pull every book on Castallano mythology that the library had to offer.

  Two new books floated down from the shelves behind him to rest on the dark wood desk, sent by the only librarians who remained here instead of celebrating the festival like everyone else. The books opened before him and their pages fluttered open to Sombra’s myth. Luka bit back a sigh in frustration as he read. The attendants kept finding more maldito books about Sombra, but each one he read held nothing of value. Nothing that he and Alfie had not heard before. This was pointless. All the while, with every passing minute his fear for Alfie’s life hollowed him
out, leaving a husk of panic in its place.

  He reached for the warm mug of spiced cocoa beside the piles of books he’d stacked for research. When he’d arrived at the library, a servant had asked him if he wanted something to drink. Alfie would never ask for spiced cocoa, he found it too sweet, but Luka needed something comforting to calm his nerves, Alfie’s boring taste in drinks be damned. He closed his eyes, letting himself fall into the honeyed taste of it.

  “Prince Alfehr, it’s been too long,” a hushed voice intoned at Luka’s side.

  Luka choked on his gulp of cocoa at the sudden sound in the library. He looked up to see the scholar who had taught him and Alfie Castallano history as children. The elderly man bowed and smiled down at Luka, unearthing a maze of wrinkles in his cheeks. He was a kind man but his lessons had put Luka to sleep on a daily basis. Of course he was here, in the library, the most boring room in the whole palace, in the whole kingdom too, probably.

  “Hello, Maestro Guillermo, wonderful to see you.”

  “I am glad to hear that my favorite student has returned home at last.”

  Luka nearly rolled his eyes. Was there any teacher who didn’t see Alfie as their favorite student? He longed to tease Alfie about being every teacher’s wildest fantasy. But he wasn’t here to be teased and made fun of. To roll his eyes and call Luka every teacher’s nightmare. His heart sagged in his chest at the thought of Alfie and the dangerous things he was doing while Luka sat here, safe in the library. Would Alfie ever return to sit here and be boring in the library? To deflect Luka’s jokes with a pointed turn of a page?

  “I’m surprised to see you here, so late in the day. Should you not be dressing for the ball?”

  Luka glanced at the library clock and grimaced at the time. He really should be getting ready, but dressing for the ball hardly felt important in the face of all that had happened.

  “Prince Alfehr, estás bien?” Maestro Guillermo said, his face pinched with concern. “You look troubled.”

  Luka forced a smile. “Not troubled at all, only lost in thought. I’m doing some research on Castallano mythology,” Luka said, trying to conjure Alfie’s honest enthusiasm for all things book-related. “It’s . . . riveting.”

  Guillermo’s eyes scanned the books and their titles. “Ah, and not just any mythology; your and Luka’s favorite tale as children.”

  Luka caught himself before he started at the sound of his name. He looked at the open book and grimaced. “The Birth of Man and Magic” certainly was no longer his favorite.

  The elderly man leaned over and tapped the page. “You see that there,” he said, pointing at the end of the tale where Sombra was turned into a mere skeleton, his bones spread far around the world over so that his body might never be made whole again. “Many scholars believe that is a mistake.”

  Luka’s brow furrowed. “You’re saying he wasn’t turned into a skeleton when he was severed from his magic?”

  “Well,” Maestro Guillermo said as he sank into the plush chair beside Luka’s, excitement lighting his eyes. “Most myths were told orally for quite some time before they were preserved with the written word. You remember this from our lessons, of course.”

  Luka did not. “Of course,” Luka said.

  “Tales told orally often change with each telling, becoming more ludicrous with each performance. Small, inconsequential arguments become battles of good versus evil, horses become dragons, it’s quite fascina—”

  “Yes, all fascinating,” Luka said hurriedly, hoping to pull Guillermo back to the point. Maybe he knew something useful that would help Alfie. “But what about this legend changed, specifically? What do scholars think actually happened to Sombra’s body in the original tale?”

  “Many claim that in the original tale, when Sombra was severed from his magic, his body did not turn to bones, but to stone—a statue of sorts. Then the statue was cleaved into stone pieces and spread throughout the world over. In oral tales it’s common for words to change into others, particularly words that rhyme. Stone and bone sound quite similar. Understandable that they would become interchangeable, no?”

  Luka nodded at his former teacher, a frown tugging his lips. As if that would be useful, but maybe Guillermo knew the information that Alfie needed. Maybe Luka need only ask.

  “Maestro Guillermo, in your studies, have you ever heard of Sombra having any weaknesses? Vulnerabilities?” When his former teacher stared at him, an eyebrow raised, Luka added, “Just curious, is all.”

  The elder man’s brow furrowed. “Not that I know of. In every incarnation of the fable he seems quite invincible.”

  Luka deflated. “Yes, of course.”

  “He is a god, after all. They don’t usually have any weaknesses to speak of.”

  Luka massaged his temples, resisting the urge to pound his forehead against the desk. “Right.”

  “But these are all just tales,” Guillermo said with a laugh. “Nothing to be taken seriously.”

  “Sí, nothing but tales,” Luka said as he reached for the roll of parchment from his bag. After what Alfie had told him, he would never believe that anything was just a tale again. And though he doubted it was what Alfie wanted or needed to hear, he should probably tell him about what Maestro Guillermo said about Sombra being turned to stone instead of bone, just in case. “One moment, please; I just need to write something down.”

  Luka unfurled the parchment, turning and angling it away from Guillermo as the man leafed through the books Luka had been studying.

  Luka’s thoughts fell into a numb silence at the sight of the parchment. It was flecked with blood. His best friend’s handwriting was scrawled messily, his fear in every stroke.

  We’re fine, hurt but all right. Don’t worry.

  Luka swiftly reached to grab his quill and scrawl a message demanding to know what had happened, but his forearm toppled the mug of spiced cocoa, sending the thick brown liquid spilling across the magicked parchment.

  “No!” Luka shouted as he tried to sop up the cocoa with his sleeve.

  The librarians scouring the shelves turned to look at him, their eyebrows raised. One nearly fell from his ladder at the sudden sound.

  “Secar!” Luka shouted at the parchment. He knew that the drying spell would not be able to save it, but he had to try. It was one thing to speak the drying spell to a soaked piece of cloth, a material that was changed but not ruined when wet, but to use it on a piece of parchment that had already begun to disintegrate was quite another. The parchment grew slightly dryer, but it had already crumbled to a mushy mess.

  “Are you quite all right, Prince Alfehr?” Guillermo asked. He put a weathered hand on Luka’s shoulder, his eyes wide. “It’s only a piece of parchment, after all.”

  Luka stared down at the soaked parchment, his throat thickening with fear. There was a corner of the parchment that was damp with cocoa, but still dry enough to write on if he did so carefully, a sliver left intact. He had only a few moments to write a last message. The parchment’s integrity was crumbling and once that happened the spell would break; there would be no way for him to reach Alfie. Luka took up his quill and carefully wrote.

  Sombra turned into stone not bones. A statue.

  His words cramped and small, the quill shaking in his hand, he added to the dissolving parchment, Be safe.

  30

  The Fireworks

  The giant clock above Finn’s head ticked relentlessly.

  She imagined herself jumping up and punching it with a stone-cloaked fist, shattering the glass and ripping its hands off. It was close enough that she might reach it if she really leaped for it. Blowing a stray curl out of her face, Finn abandoned that plan and focused on what she was here to do. She placed the final pair of shrunken explosions, which were no longer than her index finger, against the strip of adobe brick between two cells. The fireworks were tiny now, but once the prince set them off, they would pack a big punch.

  Nearly half an hour ago she’d left the prince to reco
ver in the basement kitchens and dashed up a steep staircase to get back to the ground floor of this dank tower. Here, stacked floors of prison cells sat beneath the heinous clock. After carefully placing bundles of fireworks on each of the floors, she had finally reached the highest one. Sweat dripped down her temples, her thighs burning from the endless flights of stairs she’d climbed.

  Leaving explosives all over a prison should’ve been more of a fun occasion, but as she moved through the ticking tower, Finn could think of nothing but the prince. It was mostly out of jealousy, she was sure. After all, he was waiting for her eight floors below, stationary and calm instead of sweatily running up flight after flight of stairs. She bet there was a place to get cool water in the kitchens too.

  “Lucky pendejo,” she murmured.

  But the envy withered away at the thought of how he swayed on his feet, his shadow shedding shades like a tree shed its leaves, left bare and vulnerable. How much longer would he last?

  Finn blinked at that thought. When had she started giving a damn about the prince? This was his fault anyway; so what if he died? While that thought had once skimmed the surface of her mind and sunk in without a splash, now it clattered like something that no longer belonged there.

  That renegade thought gave rise to others, like waves curling up toward the shore in a rush of froth and salt. She thought of the worry etched on his face as he’d given her the dragon. He’d bitten the inside of his cheek, his face falling lopsided as his teeth found purchase. The prince felt too much, too often, and though he tried to keep it locked within him, it always showed up on his face—in a furrowed brow, a flush rising up his neck, the soft indent of a sucked-in cheek. Just before the dragon slipped from his hand to hers, he’d mumbled something, his lips moving as if in prayer. And she’d known without hearing that it was her safety that he’d asked for.