I ignore the nagging urge to turn back, and I slide through the hole legs first. For less than a second, I fall freely before Blaise’s arms come under me, one beneath my knees and the other at my back. He sets me down immediately.
It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, but as they do, his face comes into focus. Unlike in the banquet hall, I can truly look at him now without any consequences. His face is long, the way his father’s was, but with dark green eyes he inherited from his mother. There is nothing on his bones but hard muscle and ashen olive skin. A long, pale scar cuts from his left temple to the corner of his mouth, and I shudder to imagine what could have caused it. He always dwarfed me by a few inches, but now I have to look up to catch his eyes—there’s nearly a foot of difference between us, never mind the broadness of his shoulders.
“Ampelio is dead,” I tell him when I finally form words.
The muscle in his jaw jumps and his eyes dart away from me. “I know,” he says. “I heard you killed him.”
The bite in his voice makes my breath hitch.
“He asked me to,” I say quietly. “He knew if I didn’t, the Kaiser would have had someone else do it and then my own life would have been forfeit as well. Now the Kaiser believes I am loyal to him above my own people.”
“Are you?” he asks. His eyes are locked on mine, searching them for the truth.
“Of course not,” I say, but my voice wavers. It’s the truth, I know it is, but just saying it is enough for me to remember the Theyn’s whip biting into my skin, the Kaiser’s cruel eyes on me, reveling in my pain every time he so much as suspected my loyalty to him wasn’t bound in iron.
Blaise stares at me for a long moment, sizing me up. Even before he speaks, I know I’ve been found wanting.
“Who are you?” he asks me.
The question is a wasp sting.
“You’re the one who wanted to meet me here, who risked both of our lives in the process. Who are you?” I reply.
He doesn’t flinch, instead keeping his gaze trained on me in a way that feels like he’s reading me down to my bones.
“I’m the one who’s going to get you out of here.”
He says it so gravely, but it sends a wave of relief through me. I’ve been waiting for a decade to hear those words, for a glimpse of freedom. I never thought it would come like this. But shiny as this new hope is, I can’t bring myself to trust it.
“Why now?” I ask him.
His eyes finally drop from mine. “I promised Ampelio that if anything happened to him, I would do whatever it took to save you.”
My chest feels hollow. “You were working with him,” I say. I had already figured as much, but hearing him say his name still hurts.
Blaise nods. “Ever since he rescued me from the Earth Mine three years ago,” he says.
That hurts worse. I know that Blaise’s life in the mine was much more painful than my life here is. Still, while I was waiting for Ampelio to save me, he saved Blaise instead, and I can’t deny the way that digs under my skin.
“What happened to the serving girl at the banquet?” I ask, ignoring the feeling and focusing on something else. “Is she…”
I can’t say the words, but I don’t need to. He shakes his head, though his eyes are still far away. “Marina is…a favorite of the guards. They won’t kill her. It’s why she volunteered. She’ll meet us on the ship.”
“The ship?” I ask.
“Dragonsbane’s ship,” he says, naming the best known of the Astrean pirates. His actions are responsible for more than a few of the scars on my back. Blaise must see my confusion, because he sighs. “It’s hidden about a mile up the coast from here, in a cove just past the forest of cypress trees.”
I have a vague idea of the area he’s talking about, though I haven’t left the capital since the siege. I can see the tops of the tall cypresses from Cress’s window. Still, I don’t want to let myself believe what he’s saying until he says the words.
“We’re getting you out. Tonight,” he says, and everything in me uncoils.
Out. Tonight. I didn’t allow myself to think about that possibility when I came down here; didn’t allow myself even a glimmer of hope that tonight would end with me being free from the Kaiser’s hold. But now I do. Freedom is close enough to touch, but the thought terrifies me as much as it excites me. I’ve been close to freedom before, after all, and it hurts so much when it’s yanked away again.
“Then what?” I ask him, unable to keep giddiness from leaking into my voice. I can’t help it. The idea of freedom is working its way through me, and even though I feel like it can be yanked away as quickly as it was offered, it’s hope, and it’s more real than anything I’ve felt in a decade.
“There are countries that have taken in Astrean refugees,” he tells me, counting them off on his fingers. “Etralia, Sta’crivero, Timmoree. We’ll go to one of those, make a new life there. The Kaiser will never find you.”
The hope flooding my veins sputters. It doesn’t die, but it twists into something new and unexpected. In all my fantasies of being rescued, I never saw it going like this. I thought of Ampelio coming to me with anger and armies and a plan to retake Astrea. I hate living under the Kaiser’s thumb, but this palace is my home. I was born here, and I always imagined fighting to retake my mother’s throne and sending the Kalovaxians back to the desolate wasteland of their home country.
I took my first steps here. The thought of leaving my home behind is what I’ve wanted for ten years, but the idea of never coming back? That feels like a punch to the gut.
“You want to run?” I ask quietly.
Blaise flinches at the last word. He was raised in this palace, too, after all. Leaving it behind can’t be easy for him either, but he doesn’t back down. “This has never been a fight we could win, Theo. With Ampelio, there was a chance, but now…All the Guardians are dead. The forces Ampelio managed to gather scattered after he was captured, and they weren’t many to begin with. Maybe a thousand.”
“A thousand?” I repeat, my stomach sinking. I am shocked. “There are a hundred thousand Astreans.”
His eyes fall away from mine, looking instead at the stone floors. “There were a hundred thousand,” he corrects, grimacing. “The last numbers I heard put us closer to twenty.”
Twenty thousand. How is that possible? The siege took many lives, but could it have been so many? We are a mere fraction of what we were.
“Of those twenty thousand,” Blaise continues, ignoring my shock, “half are in the mines and unable to escape.”
That I know. The mines were heavily guarded before the Air Mine riot last week; I’m sure the Kaiser doubled the number of guards there since.
“But if you escaped, there must be a way,” I point out.
“I had Ampelio. We don’t,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate. “Of the other ten thousand, Dragonsbane smuggled about four thousand to other countries, which leaves six thousand in Astrea—maybe three thousand here in the capital. None of them have ever fought a day in their lives. Many are children who have never lived in a world not run by the Kaiser. They’ve never raised a weapon. One thousand were willing to try.”
I barely hear him. While I played the Kaiser’s games, eighty thousand of my people died. Every time the whip bit into my skin and I cursed my country and the people trying to save it, my people were slaughtered. While I’ve danced and gossiped with Cress, they went mad in the mines. While I’ve feasted at the table of my enemy, they starved.
The blood of eighty thousand people is on my hands. The thought turns me numb. Soon I will mourn them, and once I start I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop, but I can’t do it now. I force myself to think instead about the twenty thousand people who are still alive, people who have been waiting for ten years for someone to save them, just like me.
The time has come for little birds to fly, Ampelio said before he told me to kill him, to end his life to save my own. He can’t save us anymore, but someone has to.