Fenella waved emphatically in the vague direction of the guarded door. “We were almost there. All we needed was a few more minutes, and we would have been through that door. We would have found out what the queen is hiding.”
“Except Toryn said he doesn’t actually know how to get into the dungeons.” I turned to him and lifted a brow. “You had a few ideas, but you weren’t certain. Right?”
“Well…yes. But that door was being guarded. It stands to reason that…” He clenched his jaw, realization dawning in his eyes. “My mother knew we might try this and that we wouldn’t have much time to explore the castle before the winds would drive us back into our rooms. And she would never risk us actually reaching the tunnels if she were truly hiding something. That’s not the door, is it? She lured us there on purpose to make us waste time.”
“It was a decoy,” I said. “One that worked. Wherever the real entrance to the tunnels is, it’s not there.”
“Oh, I think I know where it is now,” he said grimly. “But it means we’ll never get through it, at least not right now.”
We all waited for the hammer to drop.
“The entrance to the tunnels is inside the queen’s chambers.”
Twenty-Four
Tessa
After confirming we were alone in the corridor, Toryn explained. “She didn’t let my siblings and me inside her rooms very often when we were children. I thought it was just how she was. Mother was always distant with all of us, and she left us to our own devices most of the time—that, or maidservants took care of us. Anyway, one of the few times I ever stepped foot in her rooms, she wasn’t in there. Owen thought it would be fun to sneak in when she wasn’t around and see what all the fuss was about.” His jaw tensed. “He was like that, always pushing the boundaries.”
Nellie placed a hand on his arm in solidarity, and some of the tension in Toryn’s tightly wound body seemed to melt away.
He continued. “When we were in the middle of play-fighting with these rolled-up maps—pretending they were swords—Mother walked in, furious. But she didn’t come from the door. She came from another room, her bedroom. We’d checked there before we started messing around in her living room, and both of us swore up and down for days afterward that she’d never been inside that room. For a long time, I thought she had some hidden power that no one knew about, some kind of ability to shift through space and time. But after I left the Kingdom of Storms and she never appeared in Dubnos, even after decades and decades went by, I realized Owen and I were wrong. I thought maybe she’d been in the room the whole time, but now…”
“There’s a hidden passage leading out of her room,” Nellie said, her voice soft.
“And I’m assuming she won’t just let us walk in and check it out for ourselves,” Fenella said dryly.
“No.” Toryn’s expression darkened. “Although I imagine she would show me what she’s hiding if I won the trial against Owen.”
“Toryn,” Kalen said sharply. “Don’t think like that. There will be another way.”
With a grimace, Toryn turned to gaze down the corridor, as if he were imagining the path to the Queen’s rooms, where the answers to our questions hid behind a secret bookcase or false wall. If he were to officially win the title of heir, if he were to take over and become the storm fae king, then she would no doubt share the secrets of the realm with him. But Kalen was right. Theremustbe another way. To wait for Owen’s return would mean allowing the comet to arrive before we joined our armies. By then, it might be too late.
More than that, I didn’t think any of us wanted to put Toryn through this trial.
“We’ll just have to get inside her quarters when she isn’t there,” I said, voicing the words I knew everyone else was thinking. “The trial isn’t an option, so let’s not even consider it.”
“I have run from my fate for so long, Tessa,” Toryn said. He sounded achingly weary. “Perhaps it’s time for me to stop running.”
“Speaking of running,” Fenella suddenly said, her voice as loud as thunder. “We need to get out of this hallway.Now.”
I turned her way just as a bitter blast of wind slammed into us. Like an invisible hammer of war, it swept me off my feet and sent me crashing hard onto the floor. My teeth cracked together; my backside smacked the stone so hard that I was momentarily stunned. A cascade of stars swirled through my vision.
As I blinked and tried to steady myself, the powerful wind rushed against me, keeping me pinned to the ground. My hair snapped free of my braid and swirled around my face, into my eyes, and against my throat. The strands even slid into my mouth.
Groaning, I rolled onto my stomach and faced the opposite direction, finding a small measure of relief. The wind beat against my back, but at least I could see now. Just ahead of me, Nellie was bracing herself in the frame of a door, her long talons sinking into the wood. She met my gaze, grimacing. I sucked in a sharp breath at the deep crimson that burned in her eyes. She looked down at her feet and then at me, nibbling on her lip as if she were contemplating dragging me over to her.
“Stay there!” I shouted at her, unsure if she could even hear me over the wind. “Can you go inside that room?”
She shook her head. “It’s locked!”
“Then claw the damn thing open!” Fenella shouted as she crawled up beside me, her elbows digging into the stone floor. She huffed and tried to push the tangle of silver hair out of her eyes, but the wind was relentless.
“Where are the others?” I asked, trying to cast a glance over my shoulder, but the wind was so harsh against my eyes that I couldn’t see a damn thing.
A thump of Kalen’s power was my answer. His mist washed over me, sinking into my skin, even though he’d thrown it in the opposite direction from where we huddled on the floor. I ground my teeth against the force of it, my fingers curved against the stone to keep me steady. A moment later, the wind died, and strong hands hauled me from the floor.
“Let’s go,” he said into my ear. “Run.”
