I aim my chakram at the captain with his boots mucked up in sewer gunk. His eyes swim over me. “The Winterians are sending girls to do their dirty work now?” he sneers. “Why don’t you put that thing down before someone gets hurt?”
I push out my bottom lip and widen my eyes. “This?” I lower the chakram. It’s now aimed at the captain’s left thigh. “They gave it to me and said throw! I don’t even know how it works—”
The soldiers jeer, a deep-throated chuckling that says this is a fight they’re sure they’ll win. I let the chakram fly as the captain moves forward, my body bending into an arch. The chakram soars through the sewer, slices clean through the captain’s leg, and continues its spin back to me in one elegant circle of purpose. He screams and drops into the sewage, grabbing his thigh like, well, like I just sliced through it.
“Oh.” I run one hand down the flat side of the blade. “That’s how it works.”
The other soldier eyes me from the opposite walkway, his hands out like he might start dancing. Or running. Probably the more likely option. But then he smiles, and his shift from scared to amused is so abrupt that a flicker of disquiet tightens in my stomach.
Magic.
The word flies through my mind like it was there all along, a quiet pulse of knowledge that told me everything felt off. Wrong. And it was wrong, all of it, because the soldier drops his arms and pulls his shoulders up straight, his body morphing before me. Bones cracking and re-forming, muscles stretching with a sickening rip. The soldier isn’t a soldier, at least not a nameless, nothing soldier, and the captain I shot laughs from his still-fetal position, his anticipation laced with pain.
That wasn’t Herod earlier. Of course it wasn’t. Herod wouldn’t waste his time mingling with the city master; he would be here, with the locket half, waiting to intercept thieves.
Herod finishes transforming until the only thing light about him is his golden hair, green eyes, and pale skin—the rest of him is shadow, a testament to his master’s evil. He’s huge too, his head nearly brushing the ceiling, and thick in the shoulders, the body of someone who was born holding a sword. Which does not sound like fun for his mother.
I lean forward to launch my chakram but Herod lunges off the platform, takes one step through the sewer gunk, and throws his body at my knees. I trip off the walkway and go down in the middle of the sewage, my breath knocked out by both Herod’s body and the sudden immersion in feces. He grabs the chakram and slides it onto the walkway, out of reach, before pinning my arms above my head in a painful twist, sneering at me as feet thunder down the staircase. The not-Herod and his men have broken through the door.
This could have gone better.
I wiggle in his hands, something in my pocket digging into my hip—a weapon? No, Mather’s lapis lazuli ball. The only thing it’s good for now is as a painful reminder of Mather, of Winter, of how he’ll never forgive himself if anything happens to me.
Herod’s fingers tighten around my arms and I flinch. His grip is just above my one remaining weapon—the knife in my sleeve.
“Sir!” A soldier rushes into the sewer. It’s the not-Herod, slowly morphing back into his own form. I’ve heard stories of the magic Angra uses his conduit for, beyond controlling his people. Tales whispered when people returned from missions in bloody tangles of broken limbs, memories shared in the heat of fever and agony. Angra uses his magic to induce visions so real they drive his people mad, to snap traitors’ bones and tear out organs while his people still live, and for transformations like this one.
As Herod drags me up, the only solace I find is that both of us are covered in sewage.
“Bind her. We’re taking her to Angra,” he orders, and steps way too close to me as a soldier loops rope around my wrists. “Scared, soldier-girl?”
I force myself to look him in the eye. I don’t have the luxury of fear. When we’re at camp in the safety of our tents and Sir explains all kinds of horrific possible deaths to me, I can’t show fear. Fear is a seed that, once planted, never stops growing.
But I was there when Gregg, one of our soldiers, stumbled back into camp six years ago. He and his wife, Crystalla, had been captured while on a mission in Abril and thrown into the nearest work camp. Gregg told us about it, babbling in the grip of madness about the grueling work, the decrepit living conditions—and the brutal, inhuman way Angra made Herod kill Crystalla. Gregg barely escaped with his life, and even that he lost a day later, when the injuries Herod gave him proved too much for his body to handle.
A tremor runs through me, and I know Herod saw it. That seed of fear.
I cannot die like Crystalla.
A soldier lifts me onto a horse and ties my wrists to the saddle. Hope flutters in my chest—they didn’t check me for weapons. Whether because of the chaos of my intrusion or the need to get the locket half out of Lynia as fast as possible, I don’t know—but I still have my knife. I still have a chance.
Herod eases the locket box from the hole and holds it for a moment, looking up at me. That face, that mocking twitch around his lips—this is the monster in Gregg’s story, the one Angra uses to destroy his enemies in the most brutal ways possible. Angra doesn’t like getting his hands dirty, not when he can watch as his puppets dance around in such glorious shows as he uses his Royal Conduit to control them. Why be the dog when you can be the master?
Herod tucks the box into the saddlebag nearest me. Before he mounts, he grabs my chakram off the walkway, tossing it between his hands and eyeing me with that taunting sneer. He leaps onto his stallion and slides the chakram into the saddlebag on the other side of his horse. There’s no way I can get it now.
“You try to escape and you’ll be dead long before we reach Abril,” he warns.
I suck in a breath, twisting my wrists as imperceptibly as I can until my knife drops into my palm. “And I’ll kill you before all of this is over.”
Herod smiles, the bloodlust on his face glowing more strongly. Nausea twists my stomach in unrelenting knots—he likes when I fight back. Something to keep in mind.
With a shout, Herod tells the men to leave. He grabs my horse’s reins and pulls me forward, my leg bumping against his saddlebag. I can feel it, the small square box pressing into my shin. The only thing separating it from me is a layer of leather.
I need to keep him distracted, focusing on body parts other than my hands.
“How are they?” The question is quick and sharp. They, the Winterians in the camps.
I swallow. Two of the ropes are cut. One more . . .
Herod turns to me. He smirks, pulls my horse close so that I’m hip to hip with him. “The backbone of the Spring Kingdom. Though you Winterians die too quickly for my taste.”
A few more fibers cut, and the rope falls off my wrists. I fight the urge to stretch my poor, abused arms and concentrate on Herod, on letting him think I’m resigned to my fate.
I turn to him, meet his eyes, and lean a little like I’m sliding toward him in my saddle. “Well, there’s one Winterian I know who isn’t dying. At all. And he’s going to destroy Angra.”
Herod does exactly what I hoped he’d do: he lets go of my horse’s reins long enough to slap me. The blow yanks my hand up, the hand that I had managed to slide into his saddlebag and wrap around the small blue box.
I kick my horse, hard, and launch down the sewer’s walkway, all so fast that Herod still has his hand in the air before he realizes I’m free—and I’ve got the locket half.
“No!” he screams, gravelly voice reverberating off the stone walls.
I urge my horse on, galloping beside the muck of the sewer until we escape into darkness, out of the lantern light. Arrows fly past but smack off the stone, lost without something to aim at. Hooves pound behind me, shouts and curses follow, and I make a mental note to always, always put a knife in my sleeve when I go on missions.
The horse seems to know where he’s going, so I just urge him faster. Surely he’s as repulsed as I am by the stench and remembers how he got down here—too bad his new rider is covered in sewage. I gag, finally calm enough to feel the stink of feces all over me.
I shift on the reins, keeping my other hand pressed so tightly to my stomach that tomorrow I’ll have a box-shaped bruise there. A mark of my heroics—Meira, the first soldier to retrieve half of Winter’s locket. A well of pride springs in me, and I hold on to the feeling as tightly as I clutch the box.
The horse curves around one more turn and we fly up to the surface. The cool, fresh night air makes me smile and I kick the horse faster, faster. Not quite free yet.
We’re only seconds from the north gate when the guards stationed there realize what’s happening. They scramble for the lever that will close the iron bars over me, but it’s too late—I push the horse on, throwing a glance at the guard who first stopped me on my way in. His eyes widen with recognition, so I rip off the black cap that covered my hair as I whizz past, galloping across the bridge over the Feni River. White strands stream around me, some matted with sewer muck, but most tossing in the wind. A living snowstorm, a vibrant white reminder that they haven’t enslaved every Winterian. Some of us are still alive. Some of us are still free.
And some of us are half a locket closer to taking back our kingdom.