The inferno within cooled to a warm glow. The fire in the bathtub snuffed out. My limbs were weak as I opened my eyes. Brietta’s back was to the wall, her palms flat against the pink paper.
“You…” she stammered, “are you some kind of—?”
“Sorceress.” The damning admission left my lips. Fatigue weighed me down, but I shifted onto the balls of my feet, as if ready to run from an executioner the moment I said the word.
I had just put my entire life—and Riyan’s—on the line. Before, I would have slithered my way out with a string of lies, but the flame inside me was too bright for the darkness of my deceit.
Ihadto trust Brietta with my secret.
Her lip quivered. Her eyes darted from my face to the crystal and back. “Sera, you cannot—”
“And unless you want me dead, you cannot tell.”
The silence that followed nearly strangled me. After a couple of thudding heartbeats, Brietta tilted her chin up.
“Fine, sorceress.” The imperious gild to her voice suited her, although it sounded strange coming from her lips. “I will keepyour secrets if you can keep mine. Freya and I did not just bring you here for a bath.”
I let out a shaking breath. I was safe. She would not turn me in. I was fine. Just fine.
Brietta turned around, placed her hand against a green bird on the wallpaper, and pushed.
With a heavy clink and a soft sigh, a panel opened up in the wall to her left.
I had slipped into a secret passageway in the palace before with Mother, but this opening had more sophisticated mechanics than a small door hidden behind a tapestry.
Brietta took a candlestick off a nearby table and stepped into the dark stone hallway behind the pink wallpaper.
The flicker of the candlelight in the dark made her round face look almost dangerous. “Lycaster is nothing like we thought. Follow me.”
I picked up my choker off the floor. The moment the crystal met my palm, I let out a slow breath. My knees were still weak, but I was somehow calmer.
Slowly, I entered the shadows with Brietta. She pulled a rusted lever and the bathing chamber wall moved back in place with a groan.
I followed Brietta through the hallway that was so narrow, I was surprised her shoulders did not scrape the stone walls. Her fingers traced the wall until they disappeared into what looked like nothingness. She turned sharply and suddenly she descended.
I followed the light of her candlestick down a tight spiraling staircase.
“Do you remember learning about ‘Alastar the Good’ in school?” Brietta said as her feet softly tapped on the stone stairs.
“The second Duke of Lycaster?” I ran my hand along the soft stone to keep balance. “The Baron council named him ‘TheGood’ after his death because he freed all the barbarians his father had enslaved, right?”
“That is what our matrons taught us, anyway.”
“I suppose you also learned that our matrons lied?”
We spiraled another full turn before she responded. “Talking with Freya has been…enlightening.”
Just as I was getting dizzy, Brietta stopped. We entered another dark hallway and she marched forward. Her circle of candlelight was our only bubble of safety against the unknown.
“Alastar the Good abolished one form of enslavement, sure.” Brietta groped along the wall until she found an iron handle of a door. “But he wrote into law another one, a sneakier one, one that we still use today.”
Did she know about Fraleigh’s captivity? Maybe I should not tell her everything I knew just yet. “What slaves are in Lycaster?”
Brietta ducked under the doorway. The candlelight lit up her brown eyes like amber gems. “You think you would know—considering you are one.”
My hand floated up to my neck, stroking the bare skin there. What was she talking about?
“Every noble girl is shipped off to Ashmore Academy the year we turn fifteen,” Brietta said. “No one has a choice—that is the law. They keep us in that prison, stuff us full of lies, and as soon as we are ripe, they auction us off to men to do whatever they please for the rest of our lives.”
