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Chapter 32
The door opened onto cold, and Cael did not follow us through it.
“This is yours,” he said again from the threshold. His voice had gone strange and low, echoing at the doorway of a place where no living man went. He stood aside, a hard, unyielding shape carved against the lamplight of the corridor behind us, the last remnant of the world I knew.
Auden and I passed him into the chill. Behind us, Cael remained anchored where new stone met old, letting the dark close over us until we were swallowed by something far older than the empire.
I felt the age of the subterranean vault before my eyes could make sense of it, as a swimmer feels the crushing depth of freezing water the instant before submerging. The air was dead. It was not merely stale or shut-away, it was the absolute, motionless cold of a tomb untouched by the turning of seasons for three hundred years. It lay against my bare skin like a held breath that was not my own. My breath bloomed in faint, fragile clouds before my face. Somewhere far above, beyond the reach of the lamp Auden carried, the ceiling dissolved into a vast shadow that our small flame could not hope to climb. I had stood in ancient temples, in the witch’s reach, and in the depths of my own darkest nights, but I had never walked through a space that felt so much like the inside of a sleeping beast.
And the curse within me loved it.
That was the horror I had not braced for. The relentless pull that had dragged at my bones all the long way down ceased its fighting. It eased into the space, settling in with a terrible, seductive relief. The fox beneath my ribs lifted its head as if coming home, as if this silent, frozen vault, with heavy chains bolted into the rock, was the single spot in all the world it had been destined to inhabit. That sudden ease was far more dangerous than the tearing agony of the transformation. For one languid, terrifying moment, I longed to yield to it. Letting go here felt as natural and inevitable as drawing breath.
I locked my knees, dug my heels into the flagstones, and forced myself to take in the room.
The chamber was round and low-ceilinged, encircled by endless rows of curved shelves. The wooden ledges were crowded with the grim work of centuries: blackened jars, stoppered glass bottles, bound bundles of dried roots withered with age, and racks of slender vials. At the centre sat a long work bench, its surface heavily scarred and stained by ten thousand dark workings.
Over all of it, cut massive into the far curved wall and scorched dark into the stone, was the bound sun. A rayed circle crossed with heavy chains. It was the exact mark from the scrying water, the emblem Rainthorn had bidden me draw on the back of an old herb list. It loomed vast and watchful over the bench, presiding over the gloom. I understood without a word spoken that every cruelty in this room had been committed beneath its gaze. This was the heart beneath the heart of the empire, the sunken place at the bottom of the world where the cutting was done.
I was so consumed by the dread of it that I did not notice the crow until it moved.
It sat perched at the far end of the bench, shrouded in the deep shadow just beyond the lamp’s reach. It had remained so motionless that my eyes had mistaken it for another dark vessel. Then it shifted its weight with a dry, metallic scrape of claw on wood. As it turned its head, a flat black eye caught the lamplight and held it. Three legs anchored it to the perch, the third limb jutting unnaturally from its breast.
My stomach turned. I had seen this bird at Selene’s window, watching the house the day my life began to unravel. It had arrived ahead of us, waiting patiently in the dark for us to walk into its trap.
My blood turned to ice. We had not slipped past her wards unseen. The moment we crossed her threshold, she had known, sending her familiar to sit in the dark and watch our slow approach.
The black beak parted, and a voice issued forth that belonged to no bird.
It was a woman’s voice, ancient, dry, and terrifyingly calm. It emerged from the beak as if traveling from a great distance while whispering directly behind my ear, filling the circular chamber to its hidden ceiling.
“You should not have come here, little vixen,” it said. “There is nothing in this room for you. Whatever the old herb-woman told you to fetch, she was wrong, or she lied. Turn around. Take your borrowed knight and go, and I will even allow it, for the novelty of it. No one has amused me in a long while.”
* * *
Three bends of the corridor away, Morrigwen was steps from the throne room when she felt the intrusion. Through the crow’s black gaze, she saw them standing within her sanctuary: the cursed girl and the warrior at her side.
Morrigwen went utterly still.
She paused in the lacquered passage outside the grand hall where the emperor sat alone with his grief and his guttering lamps, brooding away the night as he had done every night since he ruined the spell meant to end her. She felt the ancient wards of her private sanctum shiver and snap under feet that had no right to tread that stone. For a moment, she did not move. In three hundred years, no living soul had breached those wards against her will, not even the most ambitious of the emperors she had served and buried. Anyone who entered her domain did so by her leave, or when she chose to look away. These intruders had not waited for permission.
Then she recognized the intruder: the silver-haired girl, drawn back to the source of her curse. That much fell within her calculations. But as her sense expanded to the man standing at the girl’s shoulder, her ancient composure cracked.
A Veilborn. One of the five stood within her inner chamber.
She turned from the throne room doors without making a sound. As she walked, she permitted herself one rare, unguarded breath to feel the dark fury she usually kept buried, before folding it away beneath a mask of ice. She descended through the gloom of her fortress toward the bottom of the world, cursing softly with three hundred years of venom directed at the weak, weeping boy on the throne behind her. He had been given a single task: confine one Veilborn captain. He had failed, and his softness had allowed a spectre from the past to walk straight into the one room that could bring about her undoing.
* * *
“She is lying,” I whispered to Auden, my voice sounding fragile beneath the distant ceiling. “It is here. It has to be.”
“Of course I am lying.” The voice from the crow was pleasant, almost indulgent, sliding into my mind to seek out my deepest vulnerabilities with the practice of three hundred years. “But consider, before you waste your remaining hours, what you came for and where you have chosen to look.”
The surrounding shelves seemed to lean inward, crowding us with endless rows of glass and clay.
“A thousand herbs rest here, child. More. Half of them appear identical to an untrained eye. Most would look identical to a master with a year to study them. It took me a hundred lifetimes to learn this room by heart, and you have until morning before you wear your other face forever.”
The terror struck home. I felt it spreading like ice over a winter pond, fracturing my resolve. She was right. I looked at the dark jars and could not distinguish one from another. A heavy certainty settled into my chest: I was going to die in this dark room, stripped of my humanity, and it would not even be a merciful end. My mind would simply fragment, leaving a wild beast to inhabit my body for years while no one remembered the girl who had loved her mother, learned her letters, and carried a name. They would find an animal among the shelves and never know it had once spoken, loved, and grieved. Despair opened beneath me like a chasm.
