It was a long swim back to shore.
She was strong, but she hadn’t been training every day, not like when she was in the Guild, and she grew tired as they swam, her muscles screaming at her in pain, and her chest tightening with the effort.
But they swam on, working hard, fighting the ocean currents, even as they were pulled sideways.
The storm that had sprung up behind them seemed to have stopped as soon as it had begun, and the air was crisp and clear overhead.
They swam and swam, and she was exhausted, and the water was cold, and her limbs didn’t want to move, and she struggled to pull in air.
But eventually, finally, they reached the shore.
When they did, they just lay there in the sand, gasping for air as waves lapped at their feet.
For a long time, they didn’t move.
She would have slept there, but Eithan got up and pulled her to her feet.
Together, they staggered off to a small cavern he’d seen. They climbed inside and she barely had the energy to try to brush the sand off her body and her clothes.
She was cold.
Eithan pulled her into his arms, but he was always cold, and that was no help.
So she shivered and the sand was everywhere and the ground beneath them was hard.
But she slept.
Sleep was like a welcoming balm, and she dove down into oblivion gratefully.
She woke to the sound of voices. She stirred, still wrapped in Eithan’s arms. She was warmer now. Her body heat had warmed his skin, and he was radiating it back at her now. She blinked hard, squinting, confused, as the events of the day before began to come back to her.
She sat up, and that was when she realized someone was standing at the mouth of the cavern where they slept.
Cassiel.
CHAPTER NINE
“They’re in here,” came Cassiel’s voice. He bent over and peered inside, making eye contact with Nicce.
“Who are you talking to?” Her voice was ragged.
Cassiel only chuckled.
He was joined by two other figures, who also bent over to look into the cavern.
Sullo and Aitho.
Nicce let out a little mewling sound.
Eithan stirred, sitting up at once. He took in their surroundings, blinking, his expression hard.
“Cassiel, you’ll never get paid now, you realize,” said Nicce.
“You were never going to pay me,” said Cassiel. “You destroyed me and probably killed my mother. I hope you suffer.” He glowered at them both.
Nicce got to her feet. She couldn’t stand upright in the cave. It was too small for that. She walked, bent over, towards Sullo, her hands outstretched. “Father, I know you don’t want to hurt me.” Hadn’t she heard him with Aitho? He was horrible and he treated her badly, but he cared about her in his own twisted way.
“You’re not going to be hurt,” said Sullo. “But Aitho is right, sweatpea, you need to be punished.”
“Don’t hurt Eithan,” she said. “I’ll do anything you want, just don’t hurt him.”
“Nicce.” Eithan’s voice was a warning growl.
She glanced at him. “He’s good, Father,” she said to Sullo. “You don’t understand how good. How much he’s sacrificed for the people he cares about. What he’d do to keep them safe. I’ll be anything you want. I’ll do whatever a daughter of a god is meant to do, but you leave him be.”
She was close to the mouth of the cave now.
Sullo reached out and snatched her by the arm and tugged her out. “Stop thinking about that hunter. Ciaska changed those people into abominations—”
“Please,” she said. “If you care about me at all, leave him alone.”
“Sullo,” said Aitho, “I can lock him up too.”
Sullo turned to Aitho. “No, I said I’d kill him.”
“Well, it will be nothing to indulge her in this,” said Aitho. “There is more than enough room in my dungeons. We won’t put them near each other, of course, but I’ll throw him in there, leave him alive, let him waste away. I don’t have to let him out. It’s just as good as being dead. Besides, when you take her out in fifty years, she’ll have forgotten all about him.”
Nicce looked back and forth between the two gods, horrified. What was Aitho saying?
Sullo took a deep breath. “Thank you for understanding, Aitho.”
“I have children too,” said Aitho, shrugging. He turned on Nicce. “A good stint locked up always does a wayward child good.”
Nicce didn’t have any weapons. They’d been lost to the sea. And weapons were no good against gods.
Still, she thought she should fight anyway.
She twisted, trying to get out of Sullo’s grasp.
“Stop that,” said Sullo.
Aitho reached over and thrust his palm into Nicce’s face. Suddenly, her eyes and nostrils and mouth were full of smothering earth. She struggled but it was no use.
She couldn’t breathe.
The world went dark at the edges and she lost consciousness.
CHAPTER TEN
She woke up tied hand and foot, being yanked out of the back of a wagon. Eithan was there, similarly tied. They looked at each other and then she looked up at a cliff face that jutted up to the sky, right next to them.
There was a door cut into the cliff, and they were being pushed through the door.
“Don’t fight now,” came the voice of Sullo. “If you do, I’ll change my mind and kill your Eithan after all.”
It was dark in here. She could barely see anything. There were creatures, strange-looking things that seemed to be made of earth, just as Aitho was. But they had no heads, just four bulky, earthy arms that sprang from their torsos. There were two on either side of her, holding her arms, Two more of them had Eithan.
They pulled her one way, down a dark tunnel, and they took Eithan down another one.
She screamed. She struggled against the ropes that bound her hands. She slammed her shoulder into the dirt-creatures. But when she hit them, dislodging chunks of dirt from their bodies, they didn’t react, as if it didn’t even hurt.
And like Aitho, no matter how much of the earthy parts of them fell away, they never seemed to lose any mass.
They carried her away even as she flailed and kicked and shrieked.
Soon the dark corridor gave way to rows of cells. There were people inside some, bones in others. Some of the prisoners came to their bars, which resembled joined stalactites and stalagmites, and gripped them to yell out things at them as they passed, unintelligible things.
Some looked up, tracking her movement with wide, eyes in their thin faces, skin stretched too tight over their bones.
But most didn’t react to her presence, huddling in the corners of their cells, hopeless and still.
Eventually, they brought her to her own cell. They threw her inside and a man in a long black robe came forward to lock her in with a key. He had a necklace of keys hanging around his neck. So many keys.
But he didn’t look at her or speak to her, and once she was stuck inside, the creatures and the hooded key man left her alone in the dark.
She didn’t waste time.
She went to test the bars. She spent time trying to move them, but they were strong. So then she looked around for something to pick the lock, but there was nothing in her cell at all.
It was completely empty. No bed, no blankets, not even a chamberpot.
She thrust her hands into her hair and she got to her feet and she paced.
She paced until she fell asleep.
She awoke sputtering, water in her face, a concentrated stream of pressurized liquid. It stung.
There was a creature outside of her cell, one of the headless ones. The water was rushing out of his hands, which were held together in front of his body. She could see that the cells were slanted a little, and that the water ran down into the floor between them, where there were small drains. So, she was meant to lie in her own filth unt
il they came to spray her down, was it?
She wanted to sob.
She wouldn’t let herself.
Another creature came behind the first and thrust a hard loaf of bread through the bars.
She ate it.
She spent that day pacing as well, trying to think of ideas to get out.
Across from her, the cell was empty.
She called out, “Hello? Anyone?”
No one answered.
She started speaking out loud to herself after three days. She thought it was three days, anyway. There was no way to be sure. She was surprised how quickly it happened. She thought maybe someone in another cell would engage her when they heard her talking. She didn’t have much to say, just throwing out ideas she was having.
“If only I had a sword or a knife. If only I could break the bars. If only the man with the key necklace would come back. I’d use my light on him, startle him, and maybe I could get at him, get his keys.”
No one answered.
Days passed.
She was surprised how quickly she stopped trying to think of ways to escape as well.
After that, the days blurred into each other and time began to mean nothing.
* * *
Time meant nothing, but sometimes she tried to apply herself.
She wasn’t sure when she had the idea. Maybe it came to her in a dream. Or maybe she’d had it so long ago that she simply couldn’t remember. She had tried, once, to keep track of days, making marks on the cell with her own blood, because she had nothing else to use. There was no light, of course, so she couldn’t mark the passing of the sun. She made a mark after she slept. That was her best approximation of days.
She had to use her teeth to break her skin to make herself bleed. There was nothing particularly sharp in the cell.
The first time she did it, she made the mark in a place that simply got washed away when the creatures came to spray down the cell.
It took her three tries to find a spot that wasn’t hit with water.
But then, after the span of nearly eighty days, she began to run out of space, and then there was nowhere to make new marks.
So, she resolved she’d simply remember how many days had passed and use water to erase the marks she’d made so that she could make new marks.
She thought she was able to track almost two years that way.
But then…
It was all pointless.
What did it matter?
The number that had been thrown out from Aitho was fifty years.
Her life would be over in fifty years.
Of course, she wasn’t sure if she was going to age. Feteran had been a half-god like her, and he didn’t age. Eithan had been changed by the gods, and he didn’t age. Maybe she wouldn’t either.
She wondered why she’d never thought of this before.
She’d grown up and matured just as everyone else, so she thought it only made sense that she’d continue to age. But she’d never given any thought to the longevity of her relationship with Eithan, for instance. If she didn’t age and he did, how would that have worked?
Was she going to age?
She didn’t seem to.
But she didn’t know how long she’d been there.
Eventually, though, she had the idea.
She first had it sometime when she was still tracking the days the first time. She had tried again to track days at one point, but she didn’t last nearly as long that time. Maybe she tracked six months that time?
She couldn’t remember.
It was hard to remember things. Every day was the same and she had nothing to do but talk to herself. She’d taken to telling herself stories out loud, stories about people she made up—knights and queens and kings, like the books she liked to read. She would tell herself a story, and then she would go back and tell it again, changing parts to see what happened. She would go over various scenes, thinking of what the knights might say or the queens might do. She tormented them, making them fall in love with people they shouldn’t love, making them break their hearts and fight battles and have children and stab each other to death.
The idea she had was about her light.
She didn’t know how the gods made crystals, but she thought having a crystal would be pretty useful here in the dungeon. She might be able to use it to pick the lock of the door of her cell, or maybe to chip away at the bars.
She was a half-god.
Could she make a crystal?
Feteran had never tried to make crystals, but whatever Ciaska had done to him, it had put out his light.
And Aitho… he didn’t seem to have light, not like Sullo and Ciaska.
But she wondered if Sullo’s and Ciaska’s powers were somehow connected, opposites like the sun and the moon?
She didn’t know.
There was so much she didn’t know.
And her attempts to make crystals always failed.
Sometimes, she got sick of trying and gave up for long stretches of time. During those times, she did nothing but retreat into her fantasy stories and her made-up people. She didn’t allow herself to think of anything she’d ever known, not her life before, not the people she’d killed, not the people she’d loved.
Nothing.
But then she’d have a stray thought about someone, like Xenia, and she’d wonder what had happened to her. She had to assume that none of them had made it across the oceans, not with those crystals out there.
Thinking about the crystals would make her think of her own crystals, and she’d start trying again.
Why not?
What did it hurt to try?
Well, what it hurt was her. Because it was hope, and hope was painful. No, hope wasn’t painful. Failure was painful.
It reminded her of being back in the Guild, Diakos’s voice low and sardonic, saying that he’d always known she was worthless. Everyone in the Guild had always expected so much from her, and she’d internalized those expectations. When she failed, it was the deepest cut. It roused within her the voices of her teachers and trainers, who insisted she try again, keep trying until she didn’t fail.
What the Guild had never seemed to realize was that there came a point in which more practice did not serve to help her improve because she was too exhausted to perform. Her attempts would become worse and worse and they would force her to train harder and harder.
Until something in her broke.
That happened over and over.
There were so many broken places inside her.
And when she failed at making the crystals, the broken places seemed to break open again, and sometimes the pain was too much, and she retreated from it.
But one day, after how long she couldn’t say, she figured it out.
It came to her as a strange sort of idea… her blood was liquid but it was also light, and she knew that liquids could be hardened. Water could become ice, and metal could become molten, and in both of these cases, the difference was heat.
Her first attempt was to bleed out the liquid light and put it against a lip in her cell, so that when the creatures came by and sprayed cold water into the cell, it would cool the liquid.
But this didn’t work, because the liquid light was simply washed away.
She tried various things to prevent this from happening, but the light liquid mixed too readily with water, and it was impossible.
So, her next attempt was simply to leave the liquid light out to cool away from her body, and the results of this were promising, but slow. Crystals did form, but slowly, and they were small.
She wanted a hardened chunk of crystal, like the ones that Ciaska had made. Ideally, she wanted a crystal blade, like the ones which had stabbed Feteran in his prison.
Frustrated, she wasn’t sure what she could do. She theorized that perhaps the crystals were formed because of evaporation of liquid in her changed blood, and she thought she might be able to speed that process up if she boiled the liquid, but she obviously had no acce
ss to fire.
However, she knew that when she had used Sullo’s crystals, the topazes, they would emit heat, and she knew that her own magic also elicited heat. If she could concentrate that heat somehow, maybe she could apply the heat to light liquid she’d removed.
In this, she wasn’t quite successful, but she did manage to heat up the liquid sunlight that she bled out of her, so that it was cooling from a higher temperature. Steam flooded off of it as she waited, and these crystals were bigger—nothing like the huge slabs of Ciaska’s crystals, but large enough that they weren’t worthless.
She couldn’t pick the lock with the crystals. It was impossible. But they were hard and strong, and she began a long and laborious process of scraping at the bars on her cells. She couldn’t say how long it all took. The days swam into each other. She had to hide what she was doing whenever the creatures came by, and she worried that they would notice the changes to the bars.
But the creatures seemed insensible, and she had never again seen the robed man, who had the keys around his neck.
So, she was undisturbed in her work. She didn’t want it all to be too obvious, of course. She thinned out several of the bars to a thickness that she could break if she kicked them, and once she had five bars thinned down, she was ready. She broke what was left of the bars and slithered out of the hole she’d made in her cell.
She was free.
She stood up and stared back into the cell she’d left, and she felt a strange urge to climb back in, because she hadn’t left the place in so long, in years and years—how many she couldn’t say. In some ways, it seemed like home, and she’d never had a home, not truly.
But the cell wasn’t home any more than the Guild had been home, and even though it was terrifying to be out of that cocoon that had housed her for far too long, she forced herself to walk away.
She went back the way she’d come, moving carefully through the corridor between the cells. Most of the people inside the cells didn’t acknowledge her, just as they hadn’t when she’d been brought in. And truthfully, she knew that she’d seen prisoners brought in during her time in her cell. She had never let on that she saw them either. Something about being locked away for so long had turned her solitary and hopeless.
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