The Secrets of Solace

by Jaleigh Johnson

  Then, as quickly as her excitement had built, it faded. Nirean had said Ozben was in danger here. He might be perfect for her task in some ways, but there was also a large obstacle where he was concerned.

  “If we’re going to do this,” Lina said, tapping on a section of the map near where Ozben’s room was, “we need to figure out how we’re going to handle the assassins.”

  Ozben’s brow scrunched up in confusion. “What do you mean?” he asked. “There are no assassins coming after me. Not here.”

  “Of course there are,” Lina said, exasperated that Ozben could be so smart one minute and so dense the next. “Assassins don’t just give up on their targets. In fact, they might already be here disguising themselves as refugees just like you are, waiting for a chance to strike. If we’re going to work together and move around the stronghold without Nirean or Zara watching out for us, we have to be prepared to deal with these people on our own.”

  “So, let me get this straight.” Ozben crossed his arms and looked at her askance. “You crawl around in hidden tunnels, you’re keeping a secret airship in storage, and now you’re telling me you’re also an expert on assassins?”

  “I study a lot,” Lina said. She grinned, rubbing her hands together. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to thwart an assassination attempt.” When Ozben’s eyes widened, she laughed. “Kidding. But we do have to be prepared.”

  “All right—whatever you say.” Ozben raised his hands in surrender. “What do you suggest?”

  Lina thought for a moment, then she began ticking things off on her fingers. “First, when you go back to your room tonight, I want you to make a note of where every object is—I’m saying the exact spot. That way, if someone sneaks into your room to lay a trap, you’ll know about it if they leave anything out of place. Second, don’t eat or drink anything unless it comes from someone you know. Assassins love to use poison. Third, don’t go anywhere by yourself—wait for me or Nirean to go with you.”

  Ozben nodded, though Lina thought he still looked a little skeptical, as if the only assassins were in her own imagination. “I can do all that,” he said. “Let’s talk about this hand winch.”

  “Getting the hand winch is going to be difficult,” Lina admitted. Ozben wasn’t the only one who came to this scheme with problems. Lina had to figure out how she was going to work around the punishment Zara would assign her for eavesdropping on the council meeting. According to her teacher, she would be too busy to sit down for the next few weeks, let alone work on breaking into the airship. And even after she dealt with her punishment, her troubles still weren’t over. “We have a Simon problem,” Lina said, plopping down on her stool beside the table.

  “What’s a ‘Simon problem’?” Ozben asked. “Is that code?”

  Lina laughed. “I wish it were. Simon’s one of the senior apprentices. He goes from workshop to workshop supervising the younger apprentices. He doesn’t like me very much on account of what I did to his teacher, Councilman Tolwin.”

  “Oh?” Ozben said. “This I have to hear.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” Lina said, but she flushed guiltily. “A couple years ago, I was studying dralfa moss, which is this thick purple cave moss that thrives in cold, dark places and actually doesn’t like the light. It used to grow all over the cave walls, but as more people came to inhabit the mountain, they generated more light and heat, so the moss started to wither and die off. I was experimenting to see how much cold and darkness it would take to make it grow back, and I needed an empty room close to my teacher’s workshop. When I found one, I planted a little patch of moss in the corner of the room.” She winced at the memory of what had happened next. “The room I chose turned out to be Tolwin’s private study—but he hadn’t been in there for a month, I swear!” Lina said when Ozben started to laugh. “I thought he wasn’t using it. How was I supposed to know he took private meetings there with potential donors to the museum?”

  “Oh no.” Ozben’s face was turning red from laughing so hard. “What…happened?” he wheezed.

  “Well…” Lina had intended to leave the room sealed and dark for a couple of days to see how much the moss would grow in that time, but then she got distracted by her other projects, and it ended up being more like three weeks. “I slightly underestimated how fast the moss would grow,” she admitted. “It was pretty spectacular by the time Tolwin saw it.”

  “I’ll bet,” Ozben said, wiping tears from his eyes. “How far had it grown?”

  “Pretty far,” Lina said, “and pretty much all over everything in the room. It covered his desk, his chairs, the bookshelves—you name it, it had a coat of fuzzy purple moss on it. But the worst part was—”

  “It gets worse?” Ozben said.

  Lina scowled at him. “Even after I’d scraped all of it off, the moss left behind this weird purple stain. I never could get it out of the furniture. Tolwin was furious. He really loved that desk,” she said, sighing. “He’s hated me ever since, and because he hates me, Simon does too.”

  “All right, then, so we have a Simon problem to deal with,” Ozben said, still chuckling. “Why don’t we just sneak up there now while everyone’s asleep and get the winch?”

  Lina shook her head. “Tools like that are locked up at night in the Haystack,” she said. “It’s this huge messy storeroom right next door to the Gears and Steam room.” She pointed to it on the map. “I’ve tried to sneak in before, but the locks are unbreakable, believe me. The best we can do is sneak in during the day while the storeroom’s open. There are so many tools and machine parts and so much scrap lying around, chances are no one will even notice the winch’s gone.”

  “Which brings us back to needing a plan.” Ozben glanced at the little clock on the worktable, and his eyes widened. “Wow, it’s almost dawn,” he said. “I didn’t realize that I’d…I mean, I’d better get back up to my room before Nirean comes to check on me.” He stood straight and stretched. A thoughtful expression crossed his face. “We’ll work on it—give it a week maybe. We can’t act now anyway—I’ve already made Nirean suspicious by running off once. She’ll be watching me closely.”

  “All right,” Lina said, stifling a yawn. She didn’t like the idea of waiting, but maybe after a week she could persuade Zara to let her out of the rest of her punishment. She rolled up the map and held it out to Ozben. “Here, you take this. Study it; memorize every landmark you can. And sorry about my messy writing.”

  “Thanks,” Ozben said, taking the map. He looked at her for a moment as if he wanted to say something. Lina waited expectantly, but in the end, he just gave her a brief smile and said, “I can’t wait to get started.”

  —

  After Lina had guided him back to his room and left, Ozben sat on the bed, the rolled-up map resting on his knees. Sleep would be a long time coming. He lifted one of the blankets and draped it over his shoulders to banish the chill of being in Lina’s workshop. His thoughts raced with everything that had happened that night.

  He had missed his chance to escape the stronghold. He berated himself for that, but on the other hand, he’d been completely unprepared for the amazing secret Lina had shared with him and the opportunity it had created.

  Lina had an airship. Lina Adelia Winterbock—that beautiful, wonderful, dirt-smudged girl. In Ozben’s wildest dreams, he couldn’t have come up with a better solution to his problem of how to get home than what she had just presented to him. Sure, there were several monumental obstacles between him and his vision of flying an airship to Ardra. The two biggest ones: Ozben didn’t know if they could get the ship to fly, and even if they did, how would they ever get it out of that cavern? For the former, he had to rely on Lina. He didn’t know the first thing about steam engines or piloting. As for the latter, Ozben was convinced that if somebody had gone to the trouble of reconstructing an airship inside a mountain, they had to have thought up a plan for how to get it out again. A hidden door or a secret tunnel leading out of the mountain that Lina just hadn
’t found yet. He would work on that angle.

  But Ozben frowned as a new thought occurred to him. His plans sounded great in his head, but all of it relied on Lina’s cooperation. For the first time since he’d seen the airship, his excitement faltered, replaced by a pang of guilt. What would she say when he told her he wanted to fly the ship all the way to the Merrow Kingdom? She’d been so vehement about not letting the archivists take the ship away from her. But surely, she couldn’t argue with what he intended to do with the ship. He needed to get back to his family. Wasn’t that worth her giving it up?

  But she might not see it that way, and Ozben couldn’t take that risk. I won’t tell her, he decided, not until the time’s right. He tried to push aside his guilt. He was getting ahead of himself, anyway. They had a lot of work to do, and neither of them could do it alone. More than anything, Lina wanted to get inside that ship, and Ozben would help her make that happen. He was doing the right thing.

  His decision made, Ozben stood and shoved the map underneath his mattress to hide it from Zara and Nirean. Then he started to shed his clothes to get ready for bed. While he struggled with the laces on his boots, his gaze fell on the flask of kelpra juice on the table across the room. He’d left it there after pouring him and Lina each a glass. Except, he was almost sure he’d left the stopper out of the flask.

  Ozben stopped fiddling with his bootlaces and walked over to the table. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, and the room seemed suddenly much colder. He picked up the flask, sniffed the contents, and swirled the liquid around in the bottom. Lina’s warning about assassins and poison rang in his mind. Was it possible someone had been in his room?

  No, it couldn’t be. Nirean or the other guard would have seen them. He was just tired, and Lina’s imagination had him seeing invisible enemies. Assassins would never risk coming after him here. What would be the point? He was the spare heir, the backup—his father and mother and Elinore were far more important to the kingdom.

  Ozben shook his head. He really needed to get some sleep. He put the flask back on the table and finished changing into his nightclothes.

  And yet the last thing he did before climbing into bed and blowing out the candle on his nightstand was pour out the kelpra juice in the washroom sink. The juice was getting stale, Ozben told himself. That’s all.

  Lina mopped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve and turned to skewer another pitchforkful of hay. To say it had been a long three weeks was the understatement of understatements.

  Ozben had predicted it would be a matter of days before Nirean and Zara began to trust him again, enough to let him wander around the less crowded common areas of the stronghold in disguise. Lina had predicted that Zara would let her out of her punishment early also. As it turned out, they’d both underestimated the councilwoman.

  It took two weeks for Nirean to stop watching Ozben’s every move like a hawk, and Zara made it very clear that she wasn’t going to go easy on Lina. She was to work in the Menagerie every day for three weeks, cleaning up after the animals and helping the archivists with whatever they needed. There were worse jobs, but, as Zara had promised, the task would keep her too busy to do much of anything on her own during the day. And she still had to attend all her regular classes.

  Although, as it turned out, the extra time was good for their plans. In order to throw off Nirean’s suspicion, Lina encouraged Ozben to develop a daily routine. He’d get up in the morning, take breakfast in his room, and then don his disguise to take a walk along the corridors between his room and Nirean’s. By staying out of sight and behaving himself, Ozben eventually persuaded the chamelin to let him wander farther, edging into the common areas. As the days passed, his disguise held, and despite Lina’s caution, no assassins materialized. On the strength of that—and possibly the fear that he would revolt if he was watched twenty-four hours a day—Nirean allowed Ozben more freedom, and he eventually ended up in the stronghold’s library. There he had the perfect excuse for long absences from his room.

  The library spread out across two huge caverns, shelves upon shelves built into the cave walls, soaring out of sight toward the stalactites clinging to the ceiling. A series of bridges and spiral staircases connected the various levels of the library, and there were dozens of tiny study rooms where the archivists could hide away and work undisturbed.

  Testing the limits of his freedom, Ozben took to spending long hours each day in the library, reading books on a variety of subjects, so that when Nirean came to look for him, he was never in the same place twice. When it became clear that the secret of his identity was safe, Nirean checked on him less frequently, until finally there came a day when Ozben didn’t see her at all until dinnertime, when he returned to his room. Lina was relieved. She’d been worried the chamelin would never let the prince out of her sight.

  During those weeks, the only time Lina and Ozben could talk to each other was late at night, when Lina used the ventilation shaft to sneak into his room. When she wasn’t with him or in the Menagerie cleaning the animal pens, she spent her limited time spying on Simon and the other senior apprentices to see what their routines were during the day. As she’d feared, Simon spent an awful lot of time watching out for her, looking for an excuse to assign her some menial task in addition to her punishment from Zara. But it was better than the alternative, she’d told Ozben.

  “If you think about it, it’s actually kind of your fault that I almost lost my apprenticeship,” she’d told him calmly.

  “My fault?” Ozben said, incredulous. “What did I do?”

  “You were the reason Tolwin and the other council members looked so upset that night,” Lina explained. “I mean, I know Tolwin and I aren’t exactly best friends, but I thought it was a little harsh of him to want to kick me out just for eavesdropping. But what if they’d mentioned you and I’d overheard? They almost gave away the whole game, and I think it really shook them up.”

  “And then I went and gave the secret away anyway,” Ozben said glumly.

  “That’s true,” Lina said with a grin, “but only to me.”

  They’d decided to implement their plan as soon as Lina’s punishment ended, and even though today was her last day, the day of liberation, she felt as if time had slowed to a crawl just to spite her.

  She jabbed her pitchfork into the hay impatiently, then suddenly the whole pile shifted and Ozben poked his head out at her.

  “Gah!” Lina fumbled the pitchfork, catching it by the handle. “You scared me to death! I could have stabbed you in the eye!” A wide grin spread across Ozben’s bandaged face, and Lina looked around to make sure no one was watching them, but the closest archivists were intent on their inspection of a horse’s hoof over by one of the barns. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Taking a lesson from you,” he said cheerfully. “I can see how you manage to get so much eavesdropping done around here. Ortana has a million places to hide, if you take the time to look for them.”

  “Yeah, as long as you make sure you don’t end up getting stabbed,” Lina said dryly. She stuck the pitchfork into some loose hay on the ground and leaned on the handle. “Nirean’s not looking for you, is she?”

  “She thinks I’m in the library right now,” Ozben said. He flicked a piece of hay out of his eyes. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, I had no idea you had such an amazing collection of books. And this Menagerie…” He looked around the cavern at the grazing animals and gardens. “Wow, you know, I wouldn’t mind living here, if only I could see the sun. Living underground is cold and creepy.”

  “Creepy?” Lina repeated, aghast. Had he really just called her beautiful mountain home creepy? Now she was tempted to poke him with the pitchfork. “We can see the sun whenever we want to,” she informed him stiffly. “There are four towers built into the side of the mountain with glass turrets where you can go and get as much sunshine as you want. And we have a huge outdoor terrace that overlooks Gazer’s Gorge. The astronomers go there with
their telescopes to study the stars. Not that you really need one—a telescope, I mean,” she said. “You can see millions of stars from up there. Sometimes the archivists hold parties out there too. Everyone bundles up in thick coats, and they serve hot punch, and there’s music and sometimes dancing. The apprentices aren’t allowed to go, but I snuck up there once with a blanket and watched. Oh, and then there are the aeries,” she went on, juggling the pitchfork from hand to hand as she got more excited. “They’re open to the sky so the chamelins can fly in and out whenever they want. So we get plenty of sun.”

  Ozben listened, but he didn’t look convinced. He picked at a strand of hay, twisting it around his thumb. “That all sounds great, but I still think it’d be lonely, being inside so much, away from the rest of the world. Just look at the way you are with the war.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lina asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “Nothing bad,” Ozben said quickly. “I always wondered why the archivists didn’t choose a side in the war, but I can sort of see it now. You’re so far away from everything. It’s like you’re in your own world.”

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about the rest of Solace,” Lina argued. Her face flushed. Ozben didn’t know what he was talking about. “We’ve followed everything that’s happened in the war from the beginning.”

  “Well, then what do you think about it?” Ozben asked.

  Some of Lina’s anger faded, replaced by sadness. “I wish it were over,” she said. “It’s disrupted everything here, and it’s all anyone can talk or think about.” She thought of the refugees in the dormitories. “I’ve seen little kids who lost their parents. They come here from the Merrow Kingdom and the Dragonfly territories. The archivists keep the refugees in separate areas so the two sides won’t go after each other, but if you ask me, by the time they get here, hungry, sick, and wounded, the last thing they want to do is fight. Everybody’s suffering, so why not end it already?”