I double back the way I came, but when I reach the sloping tunnel punctuated with sewer grates, I pause, mind shuffling through Thaelan’s maps. Where would he go? Where do I go? His directions got lost somewhere in the dark between here and Alistair Pembrough, and wandering into these tunnels without some guidance would be suicide.
Downhill, I think; find an exit. Thaelan has Cadence and he’ll know what to do. He’ll know where to find me, unless—
Unless it was easier for them to keep going. What if they’re already on their way to Avinea?
What if they escape and I don’t?
I stop, seized with an envy so sharp it cuts the breath out of me. Turning, I put a hand to the wall, debating the risk of calling for Thaelan and alerting the guards.
But then I hear them coming. The shadow rats.
I run, gaining speed as I slope downhill, stopping beneath the first grate I find, but I’m shorter than Thaelan, and my fingertips barely graze the metal. Not good enough.
I keep moving, dodging debris and floating garbage until there, ahead, a slurry of rubble where the tunnel wall has partially collapsed, forming an unsteady stair-step. From there, I’m able to shoulder a grate open and hoist myself up, not even bothering to look for witnesses before I’m scrambling to my knees on the rough cobblestones above. An instant later, shadow rats flood the tunnel below me, their smoldering bodies hissing steam as they charge through the water, herded by a guard with a torch in one hand, a sword in the other.
Shaking, I find my feet and collect my bearings. Alive. Unharmed.
Alone.
Thaelan has Cadence, I tell myself. He’ll keep her safe. They’ll make it to Avinea and one day, I’ll find them again. No matter how long it takes.
It doesn’t take long.
Within days, Thaelan hangs from the castle walls, cut open and left as carrion for the birds and a warning for the rest of us. Over the next few weeks, guards bolt down every drainage gate in the kingdom and fit iron bars over every open culvert.
We live in a kingdom carved out of stone, protected from the plague through the mercy of our king. But we are also hostages here.
And nobody leaves Brindaigel.
Two
THE WORKHOUSE SITS BACK FROM the dusty road, brooding and unnaturally silent. The iron side gate hangs crooked, shrieking on its rusted hinges as I squeeze it open and slip inside. Grass doesn’t grow here, in constant shadow of the mountains, and the ground is rocky, cracked, littered with trash and broken clothespins.
I slink around to the back, avoiding the windows along the first floor. Only one light burns in the growing twilight, near the back: Mistress Ebbidens’s office, where she perches stiffly in a velvet armchair, clutching a glass of brandy as she nods in conversation with a man whose back is to me. He fills his own seat with skin to spare hanging over either side, a contrast to Mistress Ebbidens’s bony, birdlike figure.
A labyrinth of clotheslines fills the backyard, sagging beneath the weight of damp linens and yellowing shirts. Pale, weary faces dart in between the sheets; the only sound is the clicking of wooden pins being shoved into place and the snapping of linens as they’re folded over the lines to dry.
Nobody notices me and yet I step lightly all the same, careful as I wind through the maze, searching faces until I find the one I want. My sister stands in the cave of the three-sided laundry shed, dwarfed by a vat of soapy water that rises to her waist, her features dulled by a veil of steam curling through the chilly twilight. Like the others, she’s dressed in a starched gray dress with matching apron, both freckled with bleach. Her blond curls are matted to her head and my fingers flex against my legs, desperate to comb through her hair, to pull it out of her face and braid it down her back. I even have a ribbon for it hidden away—bright green, the color of spring grass.
Her favorite.
Wetting my lips, casting a glance toward the house, I kneel beside my sister. “Cadence,” I say.
She plunges both arms into the hot water, fishing for her next garment. Burns shine on the back of her hands; her knuckles have split and healed and split so many times they’ve formed permanent scabs. Where her skin isn’t red, it’s leached unnaturally white from exposure to the chemicals they dump in the water, the perfumes they use to hide the smell of lye.
“Number eight-six-three-nine-one,” I whisper.
She looks up, blue eyes glassy, darkened by the spell cast across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks, fading toward her temple. It hides her freckles the way the mud used to after she fought with the Brim boys who challenged her to races and then got angry when they lost.
“Yes?” she parrots.
But there’s no fight in her now. There’s nothing at all.
My smile wavers as I touch her hair, my fingers catching in her tangles. They’ll cut it off before they’ll ever bother to comb it, and sell it to a wig maker. I should have brought the ribbon.
Reaching into my bag, I pull out a pear. “Last harvest of the season,” I say. “I almost got caught this time.”
I force my voice light, breezy: I make it a joke. The truth is, I almost lost my position without wages. The truth is, I almost lost my hands. Luckily, the guard who saw me stealing fruit from the wagons at the end of the day also saw the half-kronet in my palm and vice outweighed his virtue.
Not all the guards are so imbalanced.
You promised me, Thaelan whispers, but I shove his admonishment aside with a jolt of guilt. What good are promises to the dead?
There’s no reaction from Cadence. Not a flicker of recognition or pleasure or life in her face. The king’s spell turns all of the children into mindless golems of skin and bone, stuffed with soap and chemicals. They know nothing but work and aching bones and a room upstairs crammed with twenty-eight other children serving the punishment of their parents.
Or their sisters.
It’s my fault she’s here. I’m the one who left her behind to be found by an executioner and an army of rats. Every day following Thaelan’s death, I haunted the dungeon gates like a ghost, watching. Waiting. Fingers curled around the cold iron bars, knowing that my sister was somewhere beyond those walls, beyond my reach, terrified that her final thoughts would be spent on the same question my mother left me: Why? Why didn’t I come for her when she called in the sewers?
Fourteen nights spent in prayer to the gods, to the saints, to any virgin willing to barter with me for her safety; fourteen mornings with my heart in my throat as I approached the castle, never knowing if her body would be the next to hang in warning, or if her age—if her king—would grant her leniency.
But if I expected mercy for a child from Alistair Pembrough, he soon corrected me.