Her necklace was gone.
Panic triggered her body to roll over. Splinters bit into her palm as she found the broken half of the torch that had slipped from her hand when she fell. She sucked out the splinter, blood dancing on her tongue. Bitter, it tasted. And alive.
She lit the last match in her pocket and held it to the cloth. The small flame radiated an orange glow over the walls. A shadow stretched above her head, inviting her to turn around and meet a skull staring straight into her eyes. The black grains that strippedthe skull’s translucent skin looked like rotten sand had washed over his corpse. Nausea swirled in her stomach. Flashes of bad memories, blue lips, maggot trails. A familiar body in her arms. An echo of a scream.
Corin bit back her bile, breathed slowly, and focused on one point of clarity. The skeleton’s brittle finger glinted in the shadows, dangling her necklace that had been caught on bone. She snatched the chain and wrapped it around her neck. Her palm pressed against her chest as she counted the rapid beats of her heart and wiped the flashbacks from her mind. It was easier if she could focus on the cold metal against her sweat, the smooth touch of her mother’s hands when she’d given Corin this pendant, the story she’d told about Corin’s grandmother crossing these tunnels to Gyldan.
The necklace was the only reminder Corin had that a future was possible. And she couldn’t picture any future without Elly.
She pressed her palms flat on the cavern walls as she crossed deeper inside the tunnels. The torch’s dying flame turned fuzzy in her blurring vision. Perhaps it was better she couldn’t see clearly, so she could avoid staring at bodies draped over the jagged rocks. She wouldn’t think about Harlow or how she’d let her other friends die. She would leave them behind with the rest of the corpses in the tunnels, shutting them out, like her mind did with everything else.
By the time the corpses whittled down in numbers, the sour smell wafting under her nostrils died down. A new scent permeated the air, musky with mildew and notes of copper. Then came an invisible spark, something alive and tingling. The shift in the air remained even as she reached a dead end, the path stopping at a dirt wall that appeared to be a landslide.
It seemed too sudden, too abrupt of an ending. Dizzy fromdehydration, Corin rocked back and forth and deliberated what to do next. When she looked down, she was shocked to find a torn piece of cloth stuck to her boot. Her fingers snatched the maroon cloth so she could stare closer at the bright blue stitching that clumsily ran along the inseam. She recalled how the needle had pricked her fingers, her annoyance at Elly for tearing a hole in her pants, forcing Corin to practice her shoddy sewing skills before Rowan called her hopeless and fixed it himself. The stitching was an exact match to the clothes Elly had been wearing when she ran away.
Elly was here. More importantly, she was alive.
Corin dropped to the ground in a panicked frenzy and started digging, searching for traces of her sister to follow her path. A stone floor exposed itself beneath the soil. The concrete had to be paved somewhere. She stared at the dead end of the tunnel, then grabbed the wall, clawing her way through the dirt. Her hands dug for several grueling minutes until the fabric of her gloves thinned to strings and her skin turned raw. She searched and searched until, finally, she found a wooden door on the other side.
Corin stepped back in disbelief. People came and died searching for a buried castle, waiting to be stirred awake. She couldn’t explain what stood before her, how the stories could have possibly been true.
Just as Elly had said.
• • •
THE CASTLE FROM the fairy tale shouldn’t have existed. At least, not in this condition. Most of the structure remained intact, but large, gaping holes peppered the sepia-washed wallpaper, as if gnawed by a monster. Velvet drapes had turned maroon from oldage, covering cracked windows. Corin tried parting the curtains and coughed from the dust. Outside, the glass revealed dark soil surrounding the castle.
Surely, she was hallucinating. Hunger could do that to a person. Yet the air tingled with something peculiar, like a cold wind that had trapped itself inside and now howled in mourning. Goose bumps prickled her skin, and she clutched the torn cloth tight in her fist. No, it didn’t matter how this relic came to be. What mattered was that she needed to find Elly.
She pictured her sister walking through the castle, imagining what might catch her attention first. In answer, watercolors jumped from the hallway. She crossed the faded carpet that unfurled rows of paintings along the wall, where kings and queens of Gyldan’s past sat decorated in gold. Their bloodline was supposed to prove they were special, untouchable. Yet here they were, strings of parchment hanging off the edges of their destroyed features, every portrait slashed like an open wound.
She stopped in the middle of the hallway, where only one person remained unscathed. A tall woman sat next to one of the elderly kings and a blond child. White pearls clasped the queen’s neck. The bloodred fabric of her gown brought the same color from her pursed mouth. Her auburn hair was tied in knotted locks, and her sharp nose pointed to the air. She looked like someone posing to be royalty, resulting in a stiff upper lip and a set of unsmiling eyes.
Corin pressed her palm to the bumps of paint, drawing a line between the stiff queen and the blond girl whose face was destroyed. She kept hearing her sister’s stories about the royal family, doomed by curses and wicked stepmothers, and how this fate had brought them to ruin.
“El,” Corin murmured, “what if you were right?”
Light shone through the door from where she’d come, followed by a crash. She jumped at the sudden noise then stomped out her torch and tossed it aside. Shouts echoed through crumbled walls, forcing her to scramble toward the opposite end of the hallway.
She burst open doors to an empty ballroom and scanned for a hiding place. Dusty chairs had broken down and lay crooked, bleeding beige filling and feathers over the cracked marble floor, but there was a long sofa that still stood on four legs. As footsteps came closer, she rolled to the ground and ducked behind the sofa’s tapestry.
A group barraged the ballroom, stumbling over the marble.
“Ezran! You need to sit down. You can’t move too quickly after a ritual.”
She peered behind the sofa’s tapestry. A limping man barreled forward, followed by three women dressed in satin robes and laced veils. Light sparked from one of the woman’s fingertips as an armchair mended itself together and stood upright, catching the man when his knees buckled over.
Corin held her breath, forcing her body to freeze like a statue so her shock wouldn’t give her away. There’d been rumors that faeries once existed in the forests surrounding Gyldan, some even holding positions of council among the royal family. But with the monarchy collapsed, no faeries had ever been witnessed by human eyes. To Corin, this meant they were never real. Now she couldn’t explain the sight before her. Chairs did not move on their own, and ordinary people could not create light from their hands.
If faeries were real, and they had chosen to leave behind a dying kingdom after it no longer served them, there appeared to be at least one human who had convinced these faeries into providing him aid. The man named Ezran struggled to keep balance over thechair, as if the room were spinning and he had just landed in it. He looked pale and sick, the color of his skin matching his steel-white armor and cape. A breath hissed from his lips.
“We need to visit the tower now. The moonflower’s going to bloom.”
“We still have time before midnight,” one of the women said. “You need to preserve your energy before you cross over. We don’t know what will be in her subconscious until we arrive.”
The others nodded. “You’ve waited a hundred years for this. What’s a few minutes more?”
Ezran looked at them, jaw clenched.
