ARC: Stolen Songbird

by Danielle Jensen

  “Can you play?”

  I didn’t answer, but instead sat on the bench and began a quiet little piece I knew by heart. When the last note trailed off into the darkness, I rose and walked over to where Tristan sat in the dark. The only light was the one dangling from my wrist, but it was enough for me to see fatigue written in the shadows of his face.

  “She set you up,” he said. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

  “Once I found who she was, I figured it out.”

  Tristan tilted his head. “And if you had known from the beginning, what would you have done differently?”

  I chewed my lip as I thought. Even if I had known it was a ploy, would I have been able to walk away from a woman being whipped? The blood was real, and so was the pain. “I would have done the same thing,” I admitted. “Which is probably pretty stupid.”

  Tristan’s mouth quirked. “I’ve found that bravery and wise judgment rarely go hand-in-hand.”

  “What would you have done?” I asked.

  His smile faded. “I’d have walked away.”

  “Oh.” I shifted my weight from foot to foot.

  He rose, coming within an arm’s length. His coat was unbuttoned, and he seemed far more disheveled than usual. “But I’d have wanted to do what you did,” he said. “I suppose that makes you the brave one.”

  “And you the smart one,” I replied, raising an eyebrow.

  “I’m not so sure about that.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ve never seen Damia squirm. Ever. You made her confess everything without saying hardly a word. It was a clever bit of work. Reckless, mind you, but clever. I think my father was impressed.”

  Pulling his hands out of his pockets, he took hold of my hand and pushed back my sleeve. A ball of light blossomed, and he examined the growing bruises surrounding the welt. “How fearless must you be to step in front of a blow, knowing you would have to live with the injury for days, weeks, even. That you could die?”

  I remained quiet, sensing the question was not for me, but rather for Tristan himself.

  Carefully, he pulled down my sleeve and then adjusted my cloak so that it covered my shoulders more fully. Then he stepped back. “I need to go.”

  “Where?” I asked. It was past the dinner hour, and curfew would fall in another hour. Not that such things restricted him.

  “Here and there,” he replied, stopping at the base of the stairs. “I like to walk.”

  He would not tell me where, so I did not ask. What I did know was that Tristan paced the city throughout the days and into the nights, only resting when exhaustion pushed him to the brink of collapse. He walked, plagued by melancholy, anxiety, fear, and guilt. Except when I sang and he came to listen. I thought those were the only times he felt any peace.

  “Tristan,” I said quickly, before he had the chance to move. “Who is Lessa?”

  He exhaled softly and looked up at the blackness overhead. “Lessa is my half-sister. My father had an affair with a servant when he was a little older than I am now.” He hesitated. “Do not trust her – she is loyal to Angoulême.”

  I pressed a hand against my throat, shocked. “But your father despises half-bloods.”

  Tristan nodded slowly. “Perhaps he did not then. Perhaps Lessa’s mother was the exception. Perhaps he was drunk. Perhaps…” He shrugged one shoulder. “It is an event cloaked in a great deal of mystery.” He met my gaze. “Resist the temptation to simplify my father’s motivations. He is ruthless, but he is also complex and clever – one needs to be in order to rule this city for long.” He inclined his head to me. “Good night, Cécile.”

  I sat and played at my piano for a long time after he left. For weeks, I had spent my days learning about a myriad of topics, but perhaps my attention had been misplaced. I was starting to realize just how complex Trollus’s politics were, and how little I understood them. There were not two sides, there were countless. Not all the half-bloods were sympathizers looking to overthrow their oppressors. Nor were the full-bloods united against them – many were far more interested in their squabbles with each other. I had thought I knew whom I was fighting against, and whom I was fighting for, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  What I did know was that I needed to rectify this lack of knowledge, and soon. For there was no peace in Trollus. Beneath the cultured and austere surface, there was a battle brewing, and it was my greatest fear that I had aligned myself with the losing side.

  “This is a terrible idea,” Zoé moaned.

  “The worst,” Élise agreed. “If we get caught, we are sluag-fodder for certain.”

  “Nonsense,” I said softly, pulling my hood further forward to ensure my face was concealed. “We won’t get caught, and even if we do, I’d hardly let them feed you to the sluag.”

  “Because you’d be able to do anything to stop them?” Zoé asked, looking at me sideways.

  I didn’t answer – there wasn’t any point in arguing about it now. They’d already sneaked me out of the palace and we were halfway to the Dregs. It had taken days for the girls to set up this excursion, and another chance would not be forthcoming.

  We hurried through the side streets of the poorest area of Trollus, stopping in front of a home that blended in with all the other unadorned stone buildings. Zoé knocked firmly on the door, and after several long, nerve-racking moments, it opened.

  “Ah, there you are. I was starting to wonder if Her Highness had turned craven on us at the last moment.” The half-blood man who had opened the door winked at me, but my attention focused on the jagged scar running across the empty socket where his left eye had been.

  “Don’t call her that!” hissed Élise, pushing me through the threshold. “Do you want us to get caught?”

  “Ain’t no one in these parts that would turn on old Tips,” the man said, gesturing for me to start down the hallway.

  I glanced back at him, taking his measure. Behind the scar – and what seemed to be permanently embedded grime – was a young man. I’d eat my left shoe if he was more than twenty-five. “Old?” I remarked.

  He grinned. “For a miner, I’m practically a relic, m’lady. But you’ll learn about that soon enough.”

  The room we entered seemed to be a common eating area. It was filled with grey-clad half-bloods, mostly boys and girls around my own age. They all looked up when I entered, their expressions curious. “You all know who she is,” Tips said. “So I won’t bother with introductions.”

  “What is this place?” I asked, looking around.

  “It’s a dormitory owned by the Miners’ Guild,” Zoé explained quietly. “It houses two mining gangs. There are fifteen half-bloods in each gang.”

  “Thirty people live here?” The house seemed barely large enough to contain the fifteen miners in front of me.

  “Day and night shifts,” Tips explained around a mouthful of porridge. “We only cross paths to and from work.”

  “What about your days off?” I asked.

  The whole room erupted into laughter.

  Wiping porridge off his chin, Tips said, “If you get a day off from mining, you’re likely to spend it trying to outrun the sluag in the labyrinth.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Sure you do,” Tips said. “Now tell me, what’s His Royal Highness thinking putting you up to this?”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here,” I said. “He’s sleeping.” Which wasn’t precisely true… I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

  Tips’s eyebrows rose. “And you think when he wakes up to find you missing from his bed, he won’t wonder where you got to?”

  I refused to meet his gaze. “That’s not your concern.”

  “Oh ho!” Tips cackled. “That’s how it is. Separate sleeping for the royal lovebirds.”

  “He has business to take care of,” I snapped. “And you should keep your nose out of other people’s bedrooms.”

  “Perhaps the King should have found Tristan a boy songbird to fulfill the D
uchesse’s prophesy!” one of the other miners said, and the room echoed with their laughter.

  I glowered at them.

  “Just jokes.” Tips gave me a companionable swat against the shoulder. “Ain’t nobody more loyal to Tristan than Tips’s gang.” He motioned for the girls and me to follow him into another room. “You sure you wanting to be doing this?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure.”

  Tips’s remaining eye narrowed. “I need you to be sure, cause once we’re lowered into the mines, we’re down there for twelve hours, no matter what happens. If one of us gets hurt, we tend to it down there. If you get hurt, we’ll help you the best we can, but understand, there is no way out before our shift is over.” He waited to see if I would react before he continued. “We’ll be going further down into the deeps than you probably ever thought possible. The air will taste foul, and there will be times you’ll feel short of breath. And you’ll feel it, the weight of all that rock and earth piled above you. There’s some who can’t handle it – some who’d rather be dead than spend five minutes at the bottom of those shafts.”

  Élise squirmed uncomfortably next to me. She’d already told me that it would be Zoé who would come with me into the mines. She hated tight spaces.

  I swallowed hard. “I can do it.” I met the miner’s gaze. “I need to know what I’m fighting for… who I’m fighting for.” I squared my shoulders. “I need you to give me a reason why I should risk everything for you.” This was part of the speech I’d used to convince Zoé and Élise to help me: I needed something worse than coddled lady’s maids or even forlorn street sweepers to motivate me. I needed to see the worst in order to understand why Tristan had chosen to lead a revolution against his father. The mines were the worst.

  “I reckon we can do that,” Tips said softly, then watched silently as the girls tucked a miner’s cap over the braids binding my hair to my head. They smeared black grease over the parts that showed and rubbed a bit of grime over my cheeks. I was already dressed in the grey trousers and tunic the miners wore.

  “Will do,” he said when they finished. “Mind you keep your face down – those pretty blue eyes of yours will give you away.”

  I walked in the center of Tips’s gang, doing my best to imitate their unconcerned amble while keeping my head down. Zoé walked next to me, providing a second ball of light as part of my disguise.

  “Has he noticed yet?” she asked under her breath.

  “No,” I whispered back. “It’s too early – he probably just thinks I’m at one of my lessons.” It was the one flaw, albeit a major one, in our plan. Tips’s gang’s shift ran from seven in the evening until seven in the morning. There was only another hour until curfew fell, and although I wasn’t subject to punishment for breaking it, he would wonder what business kept me out of the palace. And that was only if he didn’t notice that I was suddenly a league below Trollus. I had no doubt he would figure out what I was doing – the only question was whether he would interfere or not.

  The entrance to the mines was at the opposite end of the valley from the River Road. It looked innocuous enough – a wide set of white stone steps leading underground. The groups of exhausted and filthy miners coming up the stairs and making their way into the city were all that marked it for what it was.

  All that changed the moment I took my first step down the stairs. A cacophony of sound assaulted my ears: the clanging of metal against metal, the dull roar of explosions, and the din of countless half-bloods crammed into a too-small space. Dust filled my nostrils and it was a struggle to keep from coughing and choking.

  “There’s a barrier to keep the dust and sound from getting out,” Zoé said into my ear.

  “I noticed.” Wiping my nose on my sleeve, I tried to look around while still keeping my head lowered. I could see several half-bloods arguing with a guild member, gesturing wildly, their expressions angry. “What are they fighting about?”

  “Quotas,” one of the gang members answered. “Now keep quiet until we get out of sight of the guild.”

  We took a corridor leading to the left and joined a long line of miners standing on the right hand side. Every few minutes a gang of tired-looking day-shifters would pass us on the left, burdened with large crates of rock laced with yellow metal.

  “Next!” I heard someone shout. The line surged ahead. It wasn’t long until I could see what we were lined up for. A large shaft girded with gleaming troll-light lay in the center of a chamber. Two uniformed guild members stood on either side of the shaft, looking bored. Another stood at the head of the line with sheaves of parchment in his hand – it was he who kept calling, “Next.”

  I watched the shaft with nervous anticipation. A dull roar of wind rose out of it, and moments later, a platform loaded with miners and crates rose into view. The miners climbed off the platform, carrying their crates with a combination of magic and physical strength. The group at the front of the line grabbed empty crates from a pile against the wall and hopped on the platform. They dropped out of sight into the shaft.

  “Next!”

  There was only one group ahead of us. Tips abruptly appeared beside me. “Last chance to back out,” he said into my ear.

  I shook my head.

  When Tips’s gang rushed forward to grab their crates, I went with them and grabbed my own. They kept me in the middle of their pack as we ran over to the platform. The guild members paid only enough attention to note we were aboard before letting the platform drop.

  I gasped aloud, my stomach rising into my throat. Zoé grabbed my hand and smiled reassuringly as we hurtled downwards, rock and glowing girders flashing by on all sides. “Amazing,” I shouted over the rushing air. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. My excitement only faded a bit when I looked up and realized the top of the shaft had faded from view.

  “Is this the only way in and out?” I shouted.

  “The only way, Princess!” Tips shouted back.

  We fell and fell, then the platform slowed and we ground to a halt. Picking up my crate, I followed the others, keeping my head down so the half-bloods waiting to go up wouldn’t notice me. The air felt tight and close, so dusty it seemed like my lungs were choking on grit. I coughed softly as we walked through one of the narrow tunnels that branched away from the shaft, noticing with great relief that the tunnels were well lit by all the magic beams and girders that supported them.

  “You can relax now,” Tips said. “Ain’t no one but us down here. Guild only comes down when there’s a problem.”

  His words, I noticed, were not meant just for me. Everyone relaxed out of their postures of forced submissiveness. Where there had previously been slumped shoulders and lowered heads, I now saw straight backs and raised faces. I wondered if tension always ran high when they were around the guild or if it was only a function of my presence, hidden in their midst.

  We left the crates in a pile and walked over to a long row of metal carts sitting idle on rails that led off down the tunnels. “Get in,” Tips said.

  “I can walk.” I hadn’t grown that soft.

  He grinned. “No one walks. Not when we can ride. Now get in.”

  Zoé and I got into the dusty cart. “Hold on,” Tips laughed. Grabbing the handles of the cart, he gave it a hard shove. We started slowly, then picked up speed until Tips was sprinting. Then he leapt on the back of the cart and it surged forward. “Woo hoo!” he shouted, and shouts from the rest of the gang echoed after us as we all flew through the tunnels.

  At first I was terrified. The cart seemed out of control, and with every turn I was convinced we’d all meet our dooms, but my fear soon turned to euphoria. I was having fun. The miners shouted rude jokes over the squeal of the metal wheels, and Zoé and I screamed and clutched each other every time we surged down a decline.

  The ride ended all too soon. Tips pulled a lever on the side of the cart, and with the piercing wail of metal against metal, we ground to a halt. “Fun part’s over.
Now it’s time to get to work. You ready to pick up the slack, Zoé?”

  “I need to stay with Cécile,” the girl said, shooting me an apprehensive look. Clearly this had not been part of the agreement.

  “And we need to make quota,” Tips said. His voice was conversational, cheerful, even; but the expression on his face was not. “Two of my gang are having the first and only days off of their lives so that her Highness can undertake this little excursion. She can’t help, but you can. Prissy as you are, Zoé, and I mean that in the most affectionate way, you’re still stronger than three of my boys combined. Might be we even get ahead of the game with you down here today. Cogs!” he shouted. “Get Zoé started on detonations.”

  “What sort of quotas?” I asked, watching Zoé and the rest of the miners turn down another tunnel.

  “Production quotas are what we live and die for down here,” Tips said, settling down on the floor of the tunnel. “It’s the amount of product each gang is expected to deliver each month. Lean against the magic girding the tunnel, girl, it will keep you warmer.”

  I did as he said, and when we were both comfortable, he continued. “Product is mostly gold down this way, but there’s all manner of glittery things hidden in the mountain. The guild keeps track of where each gang is at and gives us the numbers at the beginning of each shift. If we make monthly quota, all’s good. If we don’t…” He shrugged. “Not so good.”

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  “If we don’t, then someone from the gang gets sent into the labyrinth as sluag-fodder.”

  I hugged my arms around my middle. “They kill one of you just because you didn’t mine enough gold? How do they decide who goes?”

  Tips chuckled. “They don’t. Those maggot-gobbling guild members are too clever for that. They make us choose who has to go.”

  Clever indeed. And cruel. “How do you choose?”

  Tips picked up a rock, tossing it from one hand to another. Which struck me as an oddly human gesture, although I couldn’t pinpoint why. “If we’re lucky, someone will volunteer. There’s those who have had enough of the never-ending toil, the fear of cave-ins… Those who’d rather meet their end now than go on another day in the mines. And if we’re not fortunate enough to have one of those optimists in our mix, then we choose whoever is holding the gang back.”