At first, she thought she was looking at a healing wing of some sort. Pillars were spaced evenly along the walls. Austere metal tables stretched in the center of the long chamber, neatly stacked with papers and pens and several bottles. The slick black walls curved and wove into shadowed alcoves, the walls between each one lined with shelves that bore medical supplies. Rows of scalpels that glittered like teeth, large and small bottles of liquids, gauze and needles in glass jars.
In one of the alcoves, something moved.
Linn bit down a cry.
There was a girl bound to the walls, long golden hair unkempt. She looked no more than skin and bones, her fingers curling like claws against her manacles. A black collar encircled her neck, dull beneath the shine of light.
More blackstone.There was so much of it here, she was beginning to realize: woven into the material of the walls, the pillars interspersed through the chamber, even the ceiling. Her Affinity had been reduced to the faint flicker of a candle.
Voices drifted to her, echoing in the empty chamber. The first was a male voice. The Bregonian words were rough and unfamiliar to Linn, but his tone was quiet, smooth, if not tense.
A second voice spoke, and Linn instantly recognized its unsteady tones that slipped easily into threatening snarls. Linn pushed the door open a bit wider, her heart hammering.
Sorsha came to a stop before the alcove with the girl. She gestured, and a man in white robes swept forward. He produced a key and unlocked the prisoner’s chains, including the blackstone band around her neck.
The girl crumpled to the ground.
Without so much as a flicker in his expression, the scholar grabbed one of her wrists and hauled her forward, disappearing from Linn’s field of sight.
She was debating whether she should follow them farther inside when the screaming started.
Fear bloomed. Her every nerve, every sense, whispered at her to run.
Monsters,came King Darias’s whisper.I just want to tell you about the monsters beneath my floors.
His monsters were right around the corner; she could feel it like the press of destiny at her back. The need to act pushed her forward, the knowledge that she was on the brink of discovering something greater than herself, than her fear. She had to see what lay down there.
Yet that didn’t stop her heart from beating like a trapped bird in her chest, her knuckles turning white around her grip of the dagger.
I am afraid, Ama-ka.She’d spoken those words aloud once, at six years old, before her first flight. Linn thought them now, her hands cold around her blades.
Ama-ka’s response came to her, the faintest glimmering threads in the shadows all around.
That, my daughter, is when you can choose…
The darkness was suffocating. No one would come searching for her down here if she was caught. No one was here to witness her choice. She was but a pawn in this war, where glory was reserved only for the few.
Sometimes, Linn thought, bravery was not loud, or grand, or brilliant as the blaze of a thousand fires.
Sometimes it was quiet. Unremarkable. Unknown. The resilient wend of water through rocks, year after year after year.
…to be brave.
Linn drew a breath, lifted her dagger, and slipped through the gap in the door.
Bogdan’s once-handsome face had hollowed out to the point of becoming skeletal, his cheekbones jutting sharply. His hair, which had before looked to be spun of gold, hung in grime-slicked strands to his chin. But what haunted Ramson most was the look in his eyes—that of a wild animal, of frenzied desperation.
Scholar Ardonn held out a hand. “Perform,” he ordered.
Bogdan moaned, and Ramson felt chills down to his bones. It was the sound he had heard earlier—the long, drawn-out keening noise, half-human, half-animal. He raised his arm—now stick-thin—and Ramson caught sight of a band around it. The material undulated in waves, reminding him of the ocean.
Searock,he thought. That looked like searock.
And then it started to glow. Fissures of light spread from the band onto Bogdan’s skin, crawling like veins up his arm, his neck, his cheeks, and to his eyes.
The gold rose into the air from Ardonn’s palm, gleaming in the light. It spun. The veins on Bogdan’s face began to bulge. And Ramson thought of Ana’s hands, the way her veins engorged with blood and turned dark when she used her Affinity.
No, this wasn’t possible.
