by Ruth Lauren
Anastasia touches the queen’s arm with a gloved hand. “Mother, surely they wouldn’t send their only remaining child to do this, knowing the consequences. Not after Sasha.”
I picture my mother on the other side of the wall in the throne room, being dragged away, made to leave the palace. But the princess saying my sister’s name has given me strength and purpose. I hold myself up straight. “No. My parents know nothing of this. They had no idea.”
The queen nods. Her shoulders drop a little, as if she is saddened. “I will have word sent to them of what you have done. And where you have gone.”
My stomach clenches. This is it. I focus on the image of my sister’s face, not thinking about Mother and Father. They will understand, eventually. I think about Sasha standing here—perhaps in this very spot—three weeks ago, after she was arrested for stealing the music box from the palace. Returning the box to Lady Olegevna was to be the pinnacle of this day—a treasure finally delivered to its rightful owners.
Did Sasha look at Princess Anastasia as her mother handed down her sentence? She was apprenticed to Father as I was to Mother. In time she would have become the princess’s adviser, just as my father advised her mother.
Queen Ana stands to deliver my sentence. I know what she’s going to say. I know it, and I want it. And yet I can’t stop the shiver that goes from my scalp to the soles of my feet.
“For the crime of attempted murder of a member of the royal family in the realm of Demidova, I sentence you to life in prison, beginning in Tyur’ma.”
CHAPTER 4
The queen remains standing as she orders the Guard to take me away, but I don’t know how I manage to do the same. Everything inside me pulls in opposite directions. I’ve tried so hard to make my plan perfect, and it worked. It actually worked. But Queen Ana’s words—a life sentence—it’s like being hit by one of my crossbow bolts.
I’m marched back to my cell on legs that feel like they aren’t mine, not seeing the gold, not feeling the spicy warmth of the palace. Cold stone steps. Cold, stale air. I’m thrown back into my cell and have just enough presence of mind to move to the side closest to Feliks’s cell. Iron clangs, and it’s quiet and dark again.
“Where did they take you?” Feliks’s grubby face presses up against the bars. I shuffle over to the back of the cell to the straw meant to serve as bedding. It’s doing a better job of being mouse food.
“To the throne room.” I sit down, even though the floor is damp and the stone walls are rough.
His thin fingers wrap around the bars. “Before the queen?”
“Before the whole royal family.”
His eyes go wide. The dirt on his forehead creases. “You’re no thief. What did you do?”
I rub my hands up and down my arms. I’m used to the cold, but I can’t seem to stop shivering. “I shot a crossbow at Prince Anatol,” I say. I can hardly believe I did it, now that it’s all over. “Didn’t you see it?”
He shakes his head. “While all the fancy folk were conducting their business, I was conducting my own. You killed the prince?”
The hulking shadow in the other cell grunts and shifts. The boy lowers his voice. “Why?” He moves away from me, just a little bit, but I see it, and I feel it too; it cuts me inside. He’s shocked. A dirty-faced urchin who’s been arrested and thrown in the palace dungeon is shocked. By me. By what I’ve done. I knew this would happen; the royal family are loved.
I didn’t expect it to make me so sad.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t hit him,” I say. “Didn’t even mean to hit him.” Anatol’s always been a little serious, never smiling and ready to laugh like his sister, but neither has he ever sulked the way she could sometimes. And he’s as good a rider as I am, if not quite as skilled a marksman with his bow. I would never hurt him.
The torch on the wall burns brightly. They must have replaced it when they brought me back. Feliks moves closer again, cautiously. Black flakes of iron crumble from the bars under his fingers. “Why did you do it, then? Is everything all right up there?” He reaches through the bars and taps the side of my head with a grimy fingernail, then quickly pulls his arm back.
“Yes, everything’s fine up there, thank you very much.” I turn to him, and he’s grinning now, front teeth big and white in the torchlight. There’s something about him I can’t help but like. I feel like the old me when I talk to him, not the new me who keeps everything secret and plans and plots for weeks on end.
“I needed to do something bad enough to get myself in here, and I’m a good shot, so it seemed like the obvious choice. I don’t have anything against Prince Anatol.” I think about him staring at me in the throne room. I might not have anything against him, but he’s got something against me now.
“Now I know there’s something wrong with you. You want to live in the dungeon? You haven’t seen the food they bring yet.”
I shake my head. “Not the dungeon. Tyur’ma.”
His mouth and eyes go perfectly round in his face. “But why?”
I glance across to the other cell, but there’s no movement. The shadows are black and blacker. I lower my voice anyway. “Do you remember a few weeks ago, when the music box was stolen from the palace?”
He snorts. “Remember? It’s all anybody talked about. Wait a minute—that was you?”
I grip the bars between us, pulling myself right up close to him. Wisps of dark hair poke out from under his ushanka. “No. It was my sister, Sasha.” Saying her name out loud makes my throat hurt. I swallow. “They sent her to Tyur’ma. She wouldn’t confess where the music box was, and—”
The boy watches me. “And now the queen can’t give it back to Lady what’s-her-name?” he says.
“Exactly.”
“So now she’s in prison, and you’re going there too.”
I nod.
“Did she get a life sentence?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He swallows. “Did you?”
I nod again and try to rip down the creeping vine of fear that I don’t know what I’m doing, that there was some other way to help Sasha. Something else I could have done.
He huddles into himself and rests against the wall. I think he isn’t going to say anything else. The drip in my cell hits the floor with a wet echo.
“You must love her a lot to give up your whole life just to be with her.” He sounds sad and thoughtful.
“We’re sisters,” I say. “Twins. I don’t have a whole life without her.”
Sasha had a clockwork prince once. She loved it so much. She took it apart to see how it worked, and cried bitterly when she couldn’t make it whole again. It took me three days to put it back together. But I didn’t stop then, and I won’t stop now.
I’m not doing all this just to be with Sasha, though. At least not in Tyur’ma. I have much more in mind than that. But I’m not telling Feliks about my plans.
“Where is your family?” I ask him.
“Got none.” His voice is small now. “But it’s nice to meet someone who loves the one they have so much, Valor.”
“It’s nice to meet you too, Feliks,” I say. And I mean it.
I’m jolted awake by the clank of my door unlocking. The gloomy corridor outside the cells is filled with dark shapes that block the torchlight. I spring to my feet and back up against the wall, heart pounding. Suddenly four more torches blaze to life, and I see guards fitting the torches to sconces all along the dank wall in front of my cell.
Feliks is beside me. I wait for the guards to do something, but they only file out of the corridor and back up the stone steps. Feliks and I look at each other, confused. Then I see his face change, all the color slipping out of it. He backs away, and I spin to see a huge figure inside my cell.
His arms are banded with muscle so thick that it pushes them away from his body. They’re bare of the uniform the Guard wear, covered instead from shoulders that look like enormous glazed hams to thick fingers with black-inked tattoos—crisscros
sed latticed patterns, great eyes, and wild animals with bared teeth.
I stumble back again until I hit the cold stone wall. He steps forward so he’s towering over me. I’m not short for a girl my age, but my eyes are level with the middle of his chest. I look up and take in a sharp breath. Staring down at me is the red-eyed face of a sneering demon, its horns twisting up over the man’s chin and ending at either corner of his mouth.
Only Peacekeepers, the prison guards at Tyur’ma, have these marks. The more they have, the longer they’ve worked there. And this one has tattoos snaking down under the collar of his black garb. He’s come to collect me for transportation.
I remember, with a sudden rush, sitting in the dark at the top of the wooden stairs in our house five or six years ago, listening to my parents and Mother’s hunting party talk about the prison and its Peacekeepers. They’d caught a girl out poaching on the queen’s lands. My mother, as head huntswoman, had no choice but to bring her before the queen, who had in turn sentenced her.
The prison had been set up to keep child prisoners separate from the adults, who worked harder and longer hours in the mines deeper in the mountains. But my father wasn’t happy with the conditions there. Queen Ana’s stance on crime was popular with the people, but Father said heavy punishments made no difference. He wanted to overhaul the system and use education and greater numbers of apprenticeships instead. The adults discussed it for some time. It wasn’t until I was stiff and cold and falling asleep that I heard a sniffle in the dark, back by Sasha’s bedroom. I slipped away before my mother could hear, reaching for my sister and finding her curled against her door frame, sobbing.
I pulled her into her bedroom, where she shivered and clung to me. “What are you doing out of bed listening to that?” I whispered at her, worried that I’d be the one to take the blame. We were twins, but I was born first. She’d always been more sensitive than me, never suited to follow our mother into the hunt.
She rubbed her eyes and let me lead her to the bed. I pulled back the heavy quilts and got in with her. “You were listening,” she said. “I wanted to hear too. Why did Mama take that girl to that place? It sounds horrible.”
I shushed her, stroking the dark hair, wet with tears, at her temple. “The girl was a thief. She stole from the queen’s lands. Mother had no choice.”
“But, Valor.” Sasha looked up at me with big dark eyes, shining in the starlight. “What the hunters said about the Peacekeepers. Do they really chain the children and make them work? Do they really … do they kill them if they run away?”
“And what if they do?” I said. “It’s their job, just as it’s Mother’s to hunt the deer and the boar for royal banquets and keep the city and the villages safe from the mountain cats and beasts.”
She burrowed her head into my neck.
“Peacekeepers are just people, and you and I will never have to meet one anyway, so go to sleep and forget about it.”
Her chest was still hitching, but she nodded, her hair tickling my chin.
As I stand now in front of someone I told my sister we would never meet, I can’t stop thinking of her. How terrified she must have been.
I try to get myself under control. They’re just tattoos, I tell myself, but I still squeak when he reaches out and takes hold of me. He’s carrying a dark mass of metal. His huge, inked hands cover mine, and something cold and heavy drags my arms down.
Feliks sucks in a breath, and I hear him scuttle across his cell to a corner. The Peacekeeper’s gaze darts up and latches on to the movement as if he can see in the dark. He moves out of my cell, dragging me with him like I’m a cabbage leaf, and unlocks Feliks’s cell too.
“I’m not going to Tyur’ma,” says Feliks. “It was just food I took. But I’ll go back to being an apprentice and never steal anything again. I’ll go back, I swear. Valor, if we go into that place, we don’t come out again. I don’t think—”
The Peacekeeper steps toward Feliks, shockingly fast for such a big man, and Feliks rushes forward, the whites of his eyes showing as he twists his head toward the stone steps. He’s going to try to escape. And I know what Peacekeepers do to children who try to escape.
I lurch forward and snag Feliks with the chains between my wrists, holding on to him for everything I’m worth while he twists and bucks his thin body. It takes every bit of strength I have to stay on my feet. I can feel my shoulder bruising in the Peacekeeper’s grip.
“What are you doing?” Feliks hisses at me. Straw slips under my boots, but I don’t let go.
“We’re ready to go,” I say to the Peacekeeper. Not that he needs my approval or permission. He stares at me, still completely impassive. I didn’t expect him to be silent. But what is there to say, after all? We’re going with him whether we like it or not, and if Feliks gets out of my grasp and tries to run, he’ll be dead.
The Peacekeeper lets go of me suddenly, spins around, and clamps irons onto Feliks’s wrists, holding both of us by lengths of chain. Feliks wrenches himself away from me and says in a furious whisper, “I could have made it. Now I’m stuck, and it’s all your fault.” He’s breathing hard, his clothes bunched around him.
I don’t know what to say. He couldn’t have made it. I don’t think he could have, anyway. The Peacekeeper moves too fast; he’s too strong. Feliks would be lying in the straw now, and I’d be leaving the palace dungeon alone.
He’s right, though—if he had any chance, it’s gone, and it’s my fault. I don’t know why I grabbed him. I’m doing this for Sasha. I had it all planned, and I told myself a thousand times to stick to the plan.
I stare at Feliks, who just stands there now, looking sullen. We’re both wearing thick iron cuffs around our wrists. There’s a longer chain between us that links us together, and yet another chain that connects to a spiked belt around the Peacekeeper’s middle. I have no idea how he moved so fluidly, so fast. The chains ripple out between us, heavy and cold.
“You will call me Peacekeeper Rurik,” he says, and he walks forward swiftly, dragging both of us along behind him while the depth of his voice reverberates in my head.
Feliks scowls at me as we’re led up the stone steps. The Guards who lit the torches before are waiting. They surround us as we march so we see nothing of the palace, only feeling its warmth until the great doors open again before us.
We stand on the threshold, looking out on the deserted square. Outside it’s dark, and it surprises me at first, but of course it’s nighttime. Of course hours have been passing for everyone else while my whole life changed. I can never change it back now.
I’m standing on the palace steps thinking about that, chained and surrounded by the Guards, when, through the gaps between the black uniforms around me, I catch a flash of blue and gold. Prince Anatol stands in front of the glass doors of the hothouse, staring at me.
I try to steel myself against his stare, tell myself that soon I’ll be with Sasha, but heat floods my face anyway. Something about the way he looks at me makes me suddenly glad that we’re leaving the palace. Soon I’ll be at Tyur’ma, away from Anatol’s cold, curious eyes.
The Guards move forward as one, Peacekeeper Rurik with them, and Feliks and I are jerked out into the biting cold to Tyur’ma, where I’ll be spending the next three years of my life, if I live that long. Or so they think.
CHAPTER 5
The night is clear, thousands of stars studding the deep purple sky. My breath spreads in icy clouds in the frigid air. At the end of the palace garden, a guard opens the golden gates, and it’s only Peacekeeper Rurik, Feliks, and I who step through into the deserted cobblestone square, our boots silent on the fresh snow.
I wonder if the order to stay inside has been extended until I’ve been taken away. I don’t think I could bear to see my parents’ faces anyway. It’s better that I extinguish the little girl inside me who wants them to come and take me home. I glance across at Feliks, but he stares straight ahead, his cuffed wrists out in front of him. Our chains make a soft c
lanking where they meet each other at the back of Peacekeeper Rurik’s belt.
We go through the empty market, stalls now covered in heavy sacking, into quiet, dimly lit streets, out past the business district and into narrow streets lined with homes, until we reach the city limits.
Roads lead off in several directions to other towns, cities, and villages, but straight ahead lies the road to Tyur’ma—and in the distance, the prison itself, fiercely lit by a thousand torches, as it is every night. There is no darkness around Tyur’ma. No shadow to hide in.
“Halt.” Peacekeeper Rurik reaches around and takes a chain in each hand. He leads us to a solid wooden cart pulled by a pair of monstrous black horses wearing blinders. They snort and stamp, their coats inky black against the snow.
On the back of the cart is an iron-barred cage. Peacekeeper Rurik pulls us in like fish on a line. I have to try hard not to pull away. I don’t want to be close to him again.
He runs the chains through the loops on his belt, shoving us through the door and tethering us to either side of the cage. Feliks watches everything he does, taking in the locks and the keys, which are hanging from the thick, spiked belt around Peacekeeper Rurik’s waist.
I shake my head at him, in case he’s thinking of trying something else, though I desperately want a good look at those keys myself.
“Leave me alone,” Feliks whispers. “Haven’t you done enough?” He stares at me defiantly as the cart lurches forward and out onto the road.
“Prisoners speak only when spoken to,” says Peacekeeper Rurik. His massive frame fills the seat on the front of the cart, the reins grasped in his hands looking like the delicate hair ribbons Sasha used to wear before she began her position at the palace. After that Princess Anastasia insisted Sasha use her own personal hairdresser. It was really more favor than she should have shown, which is why I try not to think about Sasha betraying that trust and stealing the music box. I still don’t know why she did it.
