by Evelyn Skye
Fairy looked up. Her face was solemn, without a trace of her usual laughter. It was then that Sora noticed the ferns in Fairy’s hands. The long leaves wove themselves into the shape of a dragon.
“Oh . . . are you all right?” Sora asked.
“Not really,” Fairy said as she loosened the ferns. The leaf dragon fell apart. “I broke up with Daemon.”
“What? Why? I thought it was going well for you two.”
“It was.”
“So . . . ?”
Fairy shrugged. “We’re not right for each other.”
Sora knelt in the dirt. “Why would you think that?”
“I probably would have been a bad girlfriend for him, in the long run. I’m not ready to settle down. I thrill in the chase of boys too much.” Fairy set the fern leaves on the ground.
“You would never have hurt him,” Sora said.
“I might have.”
“Not like that.”
Sora sat down beside her, looking straight ahead so Fairy wouldn’t feel too put on the spot. They’d done this many times over the years as roommates, as a way to lend support. The one with the problem could speak or not. It was up to her, but regardless, she’d know her friend was there for her. “Do you want to tell me the real reason you broke up with him?”
Fairy sighed. “Not really.”
“Then do you want to show me how to weave these fern leaves into a dragon instead? When we’re done, we can light it on fire. Like an effigy of Prince Gin.”
A surprised laugh escaped Fairy’s lips. “I think I’d like that.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Aki crouched inside the tunnel, scraping at the clay with her rock. She had dug far enough that light could no longer travel down the passageway from her cell, so she groped at the earth and worked in pitch black. Her fingertips were raw, her nails filed down by the rocks and caked with mud. The burns on her face continued to hurt. And she was haunted by her brother’s cruelty.
But ironically, the pain and sadness made her stronger. She was the empress, responsible to her people, in service to Sola. Aki would endure whatever Gin threw her way yet continue to fight for Kichona.
So she kept digging.
Of course, she still had doubts. There was no way to confirm she was going in the right direction. What if she was just digging deeper into these godsforsaken caves? Or what if she did make her way out—what would she do? Where would she go from there? It’s not like she could outrun the ryuu once Gin discovered she was gone.
But then she heard it. The ocean through the rocks.
It was faint but unmistakable, the rhythmic slamming of the waves against stone. Aki cried out in relief and cast aside her worries about what she’d do once she escaped. Instead, she began digging anew toward the sound, albeit slightly upward. She didn’t want to tunnel straight into the sea.
Now the pounding of the waves motivated her like the Society of Taigas’ drums, big barreled things made of wine casks and pummeled with sticks as wide as a man’s fists. With each beat, Aki heard Luna urging her on, as if she were one of the goddess’s taiga warriors, unflinchingly brave and strong.
I’m a fighter, Aki told herself. She’d clashed with her brother before during the Blood Rift and prevailed. She could do it again, no matter how weak she was or how much Gin tortured her.
The ocean beat louder. Aki dug harder, scooping out chunks instead of just scraping.
When I get out of here, I’m not going to simply run away.
I will stand against Gin. I will save my people and my kingdom.
She couldn’t do it alone, though. But who could she turn to? The League of Rogues hadn’t come to rescue her. Perhaps they were already captured and part of the ryuu army. Or dead.
Aki let out a whimper. She stopped digging and leaned against the damp tunnel wall for support.
She remembered what Fairy had said about disguising herself as the empress to walk into a trap, that it would be an honor to do it, even if it meant Fairy’s own death. But the taigas’ pride and loyalty were inadequate consolation for Aki.
However, she also recalled something else Fairy had said to her in that same conversation: “You must stay alive if Kichona is to survive.”
Aki squeezed the rock in her hand. Fairy was right: no matter what happened, Aki had to survive and fight. She was the empress; only she had the legitimacy to retake the throne from Gin and restore Kichona to peace. The League of Rogues would have wanted her to carry on even if they were gone. She had to find other allies.
“The mainland kingdoms,” she said out loud. The idea echoed through the tunnel and seemed to grow with each reverberation.
She would dig her way out of here and somehow find her way overseas. The kings and queens there knew her, and she had especially good relationships with the monarchs of Caldan, Brin, Fale Po Tair, and Thoma. If Aki could get messages there, they would help her. Together, they could save Kichona.
She pushed herself away from the tunnel wall. Her people needed her. When this was over and her kingdom was safe again, she would properly mourn all those lost. Until then, she would press on, as an empress should.
Aki dug for two more hours. The closer she got to the sound of the ocean, the softer the clay grew as more water permeated through. She burrowed with more vigor, hope rising like the sun in her chest.
And then she hit solid rock.
“No!” She was so close she could hear the sea just on the other side. Aki tried to dig slightly higher, and lower, and to the left and right, but to no avail. There was only solid rock between her and her escape.
She kicked it. She beat her fists against it. She backed up and hurled her digging stone at it, only to have it break into pieces.
Aki withered onto the ground.
From the other side of the tunnel—in the direction of the grotto—glass shattered.
She jumped—that was the contraption she’d rigged to alert her when Gin or Virtuoso returned. It was part of a larger setup in the grotto, designed to buy her time.
Aki crawled as quickly as she could through the tunnel, using the slick of the clay to slide faster.
Within seconds, she was directly under her cell. She hoisted herself up through the hole in the ground, crawled out from under her mattress pallet, and hurried to the narrow passageway in the rock that led to grotto. It was such a tight fit that even she needed to scoot through it sideways.
She stepped out into the grotto just as her visitors untangled themselves from the net she’d made from knotting together strips of torn bedsheets. The trip wire—a thin rope she’d created from unraveling her cloak, then camouflaged by rubbing it in the clay—lay loose on the ground. Two glass jars—formerly full of dried apricots and biscuits—had shattered.
“Idiotic girl,” the man closest to her spat. “As if your pathetic net would be any match for ryuu.”
Aki tried to look as stupid as he thought she was, and scared. Of course she hadn’t actually thought she could capture the ryuu. But if she’d put together something that was obviously an alarm, they would have suspected her. So Aki had purposely rigged a pathetic-looking trap because she knew they would think her dumb enough to try, and that would prevent them from realizing that she was smart enough to have something better, like a tunnel in which to hide. And the glass jars did double duty, serving not only as counterweights to hold the net up until her trip wire was triggered but also to alert her when she had company.
The man glowered at Aki. “I was planning to drop in and introduce you to your new guards before we went back outside,” he said. “But now you’ve made me angry. So I think maybe we’ll stay. Meet Bone One and Bone Two. There are hundreds more just like them outside the acid falls.”
Aki’s mouth hung open as two more men climbed out from the bedsheet net. She hadn’t paid attention to them before, only saw their figures out of the corner of her eye. But now she saw that they weren’t men at all.
They were skeletons.
Bone One pointed a sword at her. Bone Two circled to the other side of Aki, his movement as graceful as if he were still alive.
“How . . . ?”
“They don’t call me Skeleton for no reason. I can control bones.”
“A-and you dug up dead bodies as your minions?” She gaped at the moving corpses.
The ryuu smirked. “The Society of Taigas’ cemetery, to be exact.”
Bile rose in Aki’s throat at the desecration of the taigas’ hallowed burial ground. But she didn’t say anything, because a third body emerged from beneath the net. This one, however, was fully fleshed out and still wore a taiga uniform. When she turned her head to reveal her face, Aki gasped.
It was Bayonet, one of her former Imperial Guards, but slightly rotted. Maggots had taken residence in Bayonet’s eye sockets, and the eyeballs themselves had sunken and shriveled like cherries left out for too long in the summer sun.
“She can’t hear you,” Skeleton said, his satisfaction dripping like grease off his voice. “She’s just a sack of bones that moves at my command. A vicious sack, though.”
The corpse stalked up to Aki until she was mere inches away.
“Bayonet,” Aki said, “if there’s any humanity left inside you—”
The former Imperial Guard opened her mouth to reveal a pit of worms.
Aki lurched backward. Then she fell to her hands and knees and threw up all over the grotto floor.
“Pitiful,” Skeleton said. “I expected more from a former empress than a childish net and a weak stomach. You’re not anything close to a threat.”
“You’re wrong,” Aki said, even though she was currently heaped on the floor in a mess of mud and vomit. She might have been an acid-scarred prisoner in a grotto, guarded by an army of skeletons, but she was also a descendant of some of the greatest rulers in Kichona’s history. There was gold in her hair, fire in her veins, and, most important, a fierce love for her people in her heart. No matter the obstacles she faced, she would fight to her last breath to save them from her brother’s clutches.
“One day I’ll be free of here, and then you’ll see,” Aki said. “You’ll be sorry you ever crossed me.”
Chapter Forty-Five
The tiger’s paw of Kichona was composed of four small islands. The one with Dera Falls was a sharp sliver, just the tip of a claw. That was where Sora thought Prince Gin might be hiding Empress Aki.
Sora lay on her stomach on another of the islands that formed the claw, crawling up to the edge of the white cliffs that dropped straight down five hundred feet into the sea.
The last few hours had been terribly awkward. Daemon had come back to the mining shack as dusk settled in, already in the form of a wolf.
“It’s time,” he’d said, but his growl lacked any bite, and even the sparks coming off his fur seemed dimmer than usual. They were a muted, dull blue, rather than the bright electric light that had previously illuminated him.
Sora walked up to Daemon and touched his shoulder softly. “Where did you go? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine. Fairy told me what happened. Do you want to talk about it?”
Daemon’s ears pricked, and the fur on his back stood alert. “What did she say?”
Sora tried to soothe the fur down. “Not much, just that she broke up with you.”
“Did she say why?”
“Only that she wasn’t the right girl for you. I tried to get more out of her, but she wouldn’t—”
His ears relaxed, and he exhaled. “It’s probably better that we don’t know.”
He seemed strangely relieved. Sora frowned. “But I don’t get it. You guys seemed happy. Don’t you want to know what went wrong? Maybe you can fix it.”
Daemon shook her hand off his back and bared his teeth. “I can’t. She doesn’t want to be with me, all right? Now, do you want to go to Dera Falls tonight or not?”
Sora stopped talking after that. She’d only wanted to help, but she’d clearly pushed too hard.
And she had to be careful, too, because there was that whisper just beneath the surface of her skin that wanted him for herself. Which was not what anyone needed right now.
Probably the best thing was to bother Daemon as little as possible and let him heal.
Of course, he had to carry her, Fairy, and Broomstick while he flew to the islands of the tiger’s paw, a trip filled with as much tension as one would expect. Broomstick tried to keep the mood light by rambling about inconsequential topics, like what kind of polish was best for keeping swords shiny, but his chatter backfired because every time Fairy said something, Daemon stiffened below them, and everyone could feel it against their legs. The conversation eventually died off, and they finished the flight in silence.
As soon as they landed on the white cliffs of one of the tiger’s-paw islands, Fairy and Broomstick practically leaped off Daemon’s back.
“We’ll go scout down on the shore,” Fairy said, heading away before Sora even had a chance to acknowledge her plan. Broomstick hurried off with his gemina.
Daemon didn’t look as they left. “I’ll do a few flyovers of Dera Falls.” He snuffed out the sparks in his fur and jumped off the cliff into the air.
“I guess I’ll stay here,” Sora mumbled to herself. Which is how she ended up crawling on her stomach to the edge of the cliffs, where she could get a better look at the island that she suspected was Empress Aki’s prison.
But what would they find when they got there? An empress, beaten down and tortured? Or one whose mind was stripped, who might look and act like the empress but was really the Dragon Prince’s puppet?
Sora seethed. Not that long ago, Prince Gin had stolen her mind, too, filling her with a bloodcurdling greed for the Evermore and the will to do whatever was required to get there. She’d walked and talked like herself, but otherwise, she hadn’t been Sora. She’d abandoned her friends because of Prince Gin, and almost killed Empress Aki. If it weren’t for Daemon, Sora would already be well on her way to becoming the murderous general in her Lake of Nightmares vision.
I won’t let anything like that happen to the empress, Sora thought, fingers tightening over the hilt of one of her swords.
But first, she had to find Empress Aki. Sora took a deep breath, then let go of the sword and instead pulled out a spyglass.
For a minute, she couldn’t see much, because the moon was blocked by a thick blanket of clouds. There weren’t any fires or signs of a soldier encampment over on the island, and her stomach knotted up. Maybe Sora had been wrong about the empress being here. Come to think of it, there were no ships either. Had she read the map wrong? Was Empress Aki elsewhere?
But the soul pearl stirred in Sora’s collar. The Dragon Prince’s magic was near.
She could use ryuu particles to fine-tune the focus on the spyglass. But Sora hesitated to touch that magic, the very thing that had damned her. Casting a ryuu spell would be like soaking her skin with pure evil.
But the magic itself isn’t bad, she argued with herself. After all, it was the same magic used by taigas—the only difference was Sight, the ability to see the particles and use the magic in even more powerful ways. And Sight had come from the afterlife, where it was supposed to be a gift to taigas for a life well lived. It was only the act of stealing that had cast a wicked pall on the magic.
Besides, she would be using the ryuu particles to protect Kichona, the very thing taigas were supposed to do.
Sora made her decision and called to the emerald dust.
It infused the spyglass, sharpening its focus and allowing her to better scan the short coastline. The island was not much more than two miles long and a mile wide, like a chunk of the cliff Sora was lying on had fallen off sometime in the past, tumbled into the ocean, and decided not to sink but instead floated a short distance away. It was made of jagged outcroppings and scored with narrow fissures that were probably created by water wearing down the rock over the centuries.
> Which means there might be caves inside, Sora thought. A perfect place to imprison a deposed empress.
Sora couldn’t see Dera Falls itself, since it was on the eastern side of the island, but Daemon was taking care of that with his flyovers.
They needed to figure out a way to sneak in and out. Ideally, they’d get in, Daemon’s magic would neutralize the Dragon Prince’s spell—assuming he’d hypnotized the empress—and then they would smuggle her out without anyone knowing. Of course, that was unlikely, but so far, Sora hadn’t seen much in the way of guards.
As she continued studying the island, the cloud cover shifted, and a little more light from the moon made it through the fog. The soul pearl strained against Sora’s collar, and she moved her spyglass to follow its direction.
There! Movement at the top of one of the crags.
Crow’s eye. A dozen guards on patrol, marching back and forth. But was she seeing correctly? Sora could make out their general outlines, yet the moonlight seemed to be shining through them. There must be some kind of reflection—maybe off the water’s surface—playing tricks on her.
She squinted and adjusted the focus on her spyglass.
Sora let out a gasp. Her eyes hadn’t been duped. Moonlight was shining through the soldiers, because they were made of bones.
“Skullcrusher and Skeleton,” she murmured, remembering the brothers. The bone warriors were their doing.
How do you fight soldiers who can’t die, because they’re already dead?
The skeletons moved with confidence, their strides long and sure, their grips firm on the swords, spears, and other weapons they clutched. Most of the warriors were completely bone, but a couple still had flesh on them, including the one marching into Sora’s view.
A sword protruded from his belly. But this soldier marched as if it didn’t notice the blade. When it turned, the moon revealed that the sword actually went through the corpse’s belly and out its back.
And then Sora saw its face.
Beetle.
A cry escaped her as she recognized the young ryuu who’d befriended her on Prince Gin’s ship. His hair was matted, and his skin was veined and gray from necrosis, but it was still him. The full cheeks that held on stubbornly to his baby fat. The pockets of his uniform stretched from all the snacks he used to stash in them. His lighthearted gait, as if the world were full of wonders just waiting for him to discover them.
