“We haveyourback,” he reiterated, perhaps noticing her apprehension. The others nodded in the dark. Theyourwas pointed, a soldier’s agreement to see one another through a thing, whatever its abstract. Queensguard didn’t know camaraderie. The gesture settled some of the vibrating happening just beneath her skin.
“Right.” She nodded her appreciation and then took a deep breath. “Well, don’t fall.”
They followed Cutter out onto the sheer rock face, a violent eastern wind whipping them as they found footing on worn ledges. Nova looked upward to get a sense of the distance, but they might as well have been climbing the starry night sky itself. Reflexively, then, she looked down.
“Shhiiii—” She shut her eyes and tightened her grip on the rocks, pressing herself so hard into the wall the sharp edges carved into her ribs.
“This is a terrible idea, Cutter. Why would you have me do this?” she hissed at him quietly.
Cutter raised a finger to his lips to shush her as the Gold Guard fanned out to their right, placing themselves at wide intervals so they’d emerge covering more ground. Once they were in position, all eyes went to Cutter, who looked at her patiently, the way he had when she’d had a hard day training as a child.
“Fuck.FUCK!” She pressed her head against the wall, breathing quickly to psych herself back up. “Come on!”
Cutter lowered a hand to offer her assistance, the old muscles of his other giant arm flexing to keep up the rest of him with what appeared to be very little effort.
“I hate you,” she spat, refusing his hand.
He smiled before moving away himself. “Good. Up you get.”
They all began climbing at once, keeping a similar pace with eyes toward the upper edge.
“I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this.” Nova cursed the dark and the slick and her own apparent lapsed sanity for agreeing to any of it. The wind wanted her up there even less than she did.
They paused just before the ledge. The glow of a hand lamp illuminated sea mist just over her head. She looked to Cutter, now some twenty feet away, who nodded that he’d seen the same. When the light drifted over his head, he reached forward, gripped a guard’s ankle, and flung him over the cliff. The scream was lost on the wind.
They clung to the side of the mountain in silence for a few moments, and Nova let her anxiety be traded for adrenaline before she raised herself enough to peer over the edge. No one else was coming. The palace was lit, and more hand lamps marking guard positions around the edges of the garden told them of their targets. But she was free to climb without being noticed.
She signaled Cutter, who signaled the others, and then pulled herself up.
The six of them moved low through the gardens, plucking off guards in silence, catching lanterns before they could clatter on the ground. The Gold Guard replaced those they dispatched, standing in their stations so any onlookers wouldn’t notice the absence of bodies. Cutterjoined Nova at what remained of the Bear Queen’s toppled statue: a cracked base, but no sign of the rest of her, stone or otherwise.
“Think they tossed her?” Nova whispered, gesturing back toward the cliff.
Cutter frowned but shook his head, pointing instead to the grass where what appeared to be heavy drag marks carved a crude path up between the darkened braziers and into the crypt. They exchanged wary glances, and Nova’s eyes flicked to the roof line, where shadows were moving among the turrets. Her skin prickled. They could be running out of time and the Gold Guard was hiding out in the open.
They made their way quickly up the path, steering clear of the flagstones in favor of the much quieter grass. The drag marks stopped where the ground became brick and they crouched at its end, listening for any movement within. Moonlight only penetrated so far beneath the crypt’s arched entrance, but beyond what Nova could see, all was still. The pair moved inside, sticking to the shadowed edges of the corridor. There was no sign of anything out of place in plain sight, so they moved along the inner wall, quietly breaching the doors of the masons’ storerooms.
“My queen,” Nova hissed into the dark but received no response. Dim, filtered moonlight dripped through high transoms connecting the rooms together along their shared walls, making only the outline of half-manipulated stone blocks and sharp tools hanging from rafters barely visible.
She met Cutter back in the hallway, where they briefly exchanged disappointed glances before moving to the next room.
Nova pushed on a fifth or sixth door with the same firm, quiet force that had opened all the others, only…
“What’s wrong?” Cutter said.
Nova gave it another shove and then gave him a meaningful look. “It’s stuck.”
They were silent a moment, Cutter’s eyes wide and chest visibly heaving in anticipation.
Here. She’s here.
Cutter practically shoved Nova aside to leverage his own weight against the door. “My Ligh—Circe?” he whispered as forcefully as he could through the door. It wouldn’t budge. He may as well have been trying to move the wall itself. “Cir—”
“Shh!” Nova hissed. They froze. Distant footfalls on stone, someone’s unintelligible yelling. Booted feet swept through the grass at the other end of the crypt. Guards were running.
Shit,Nova thought.Shiro and the others.
They crept back toward the entrance, prepared for a fight. The shouting continued above them around the turret track. Shiro and the Gold Guard had all left their positions and gathered near the eastern cliff’s edge, gazing out at the sea. Nova moved to join them but stopped short.
