Vaasa winced. “Wearing a sentinel’s jacket was smart, I’ll give you that.”
“Not as clever as you would have done it, I imagine.”
“I would have made him suffer for far longer,” Vaasa admitted.
Sachia gave a slow nod. “As long as you aren’t like your brother, you and I are going to get along fine,” Sachia said. “Now let’s go. I have a feeling that sentinel of yours is going to check my work.”
CHAPTER
27
The moment darkness bathed the blue rugs and stone hallways, Vaasa slipped from her room and found Roman waiting, just as he’d promised. In the winter, night fell early on Mekës, and Vaasa had every intention of taking advantage of that.
The two walked through the night, and they didn’t speak about the evening prior. Didn’t speak about the full day she’d just spent with Sachia and Melisina. In secret, she had basked in the feeling of her magic. Had spent all afternoon releasing it, hoping that would be enough to quell it for tonight.
Vaasa was dressed in royal blue breeches, the same ones the sentinels wore, her hair pulled up and folded tightly at the nape of her neck. She donned their coat and even a fur hat. Thoughthe disguise was a bit bulky, it would do. Colder and colder the air became, the hallways narrowing until they found the large staircase Ozik had stopped them on last time.
He wasn’t waiting for them. She’d considered that outcome, had weighed it as a possibility. Relief came quick, her magic seeming to duck back into herself as if it no longer felt the need to be alert.
Roman reached a heavy door at the end of the servants’ halls. He used an iron key—one of many—on the small metal loop he kept latched at his hip. Vaasa made a silent note of the key’s shape, tucking the information away.
He turned to her. “Are you ready?”
“I’m not actually jumping from the bridge,” she told him.A rite of passage, Roman had called it the day he and his friends had leapt over the side of that bridge into the frigid waves, as every sentinel in Mekës someday did. It was a dangerous initiation into their ranks, but one Roman had passed with flying colors. “We just need these men to believe I am.”
He gave her a brilliant smile, one that would have had her heart melting ten years ago. He gently pulled a brown sack over her head, completing their disguise, and dragged her into what Vaasa could only assume was a smuggler’s den.
“We’ve got a jumper!” Roman exclaimed, and the guards waiting all cried out in unison. Roman didn’t have to explain himself to the men stationed at the private entrance and exit—they were his friends, Vaasa quickly realized. Men who felt a kinship to him for their roles in this place. Though she couldn’t see through the gauzy sack he had pulled over her head, she heard everything. She could feel them all—their ease, their humor, even their hunger. Magic stirred in her body.
The sentinels didn’t question him as he dragged her into one of the skiffs used to carry goods back and forth from the prison. Vaasa tripped over the lip, and Roman let her stumble, notdaring to break their characters as she slammed into the boat. Her knee collided with the bench and she bit her tongue, but she stifled her grunt of pain. Her magic lurched, but she clamped down on it.
The men around them hollered with laughter.
“You think an unbalanced lad like that’s going to survive the jump?” one of the guards asked.
The others kept laughing, tossing out their own jokes. Vaasa used her hands to guide herself up and onto one of the benches, keeping silent and hanging her head as if she were embarrassed.
“Says he wants to try,” Roman said as men presumably pushed the skiff into the water. “Who are we to deny him the embarrassment?”
The men threw out their agreements, some mocking, some more sincere. Their voices faded as the boat rocked in the water, the smell of brine and fish stuffing up Vaasa’s nose. Eventually, Roman tucked his fingers under the brown sack and pulled it from Vaasa’s head. He smoothed out the strands of her hair that flew around her face. “You did well,” he said.
She scanned their surroundings. They paddled into the Iron Bay, wind rocking their boat. “You sounded just like them,” Vaasa remarked.
“It’s just a language among men,” Roman clarified.
Vaasa quietly looked out at the water, at the lights of the city at the shore, and thought that she knew plenty of languages, andmenwho didn’t speak like that. Waves lapped at the side of their boat, the ocean churning with the cold, salt water spraying up and onto Vaasa’s face. She pulled her borrowed sentinel’s coat tighter around herself as Roman rowed. Minutes felt like hours. She remembered this trip feeling shorter when they’d forced her to return to the fortress.
The island grew closer, larger, more ominous. Roman maneuvered their boat to the backside of the prison, aiming forthe Last Crossing. As she eyed the towering bridge, she thought of the night Roman had made the jump. Of the way he had snuck into her room afterward, cold and emboldened, and it was the first time she had ever taken him into her bed.
She looked at him then. He tilted his lips into a remembering grin as he spotted those very same lights, this unexpected memory coursing between them as he felt more familiar to her in that moment than anyone in Mekës ever had.
But the man who sat before her now… he was no longer that person.
“It’s a foolish tradition,” she chastised him.
“It earned me you,” he said in return.
With an amused shake of her head, she let the comment pass. He pulled into a dark crevice beneath the bridge. It must be the place all the sentinels went when they wanted to jump. A weak spot in their rotations, or one they purposefully ignored to make the leap itself possible.
