Chapter 234

Chapter 234: Chapter 234

Julian

By the second night in the dungeon, the silver had burned through the skin of my wrists, and I’d stopped pulling against the manacles. I sat on the damp stone with my back to the wall and my bound hands in my lap, watching the torch outside my cell burn down to an orange stub.

Every time I shifted, the chain between my wrists scraped across the floor and echoed down the empty corridor, and every time it echoed, I hated Calix a little more.

My lip had split again. I pushed my tongue against the cut and tasted my own blood, thin and stale, which was the closest thing to a meal anyone had offered me since the guards dragged me down here. My coat was gone too. One of Commander Valen’s men had ripped it off my shoulders in the great hall, and I’d spent my first hour in this cell mourning that coat more than my rank, because I’d had it cut for me in the south and I’d only worn it twice.

I closed my eyes and walked through the gala again, the way I’d been walking through it since the cell door slammed shut behind me.

I started with the music and the candles, and with Drake standing at the head of the hall wearing the cold, bored face he saved for the elders. I’d stood beside him that night with my chin up and my glass full.

Then Calix had stepped out of the crowd in his gray suit, with his hands folded in front of him and his voice so quiet the elders had to lean in to hear it. He’d laid it all out for them, the potions and the bond and every lie I’d ever told, one piece at a time, as calm as a steward reading out the household accounts. He’d had proof of things I’d never written down, and he’d known names I’d never said out loud.

That was where it fell apart in my head every time. I couldn’t find the moment I lost. I went back over every conversation I’d ever had with him, every corridor where we’d passed each other, every dinner where he’d sat at the far end of the table and smiled into his glass, and I couldn’t find the night I’d slipped.

I’d barely spoken to the man, and I’d barely noticed him. I’d spent months watching Lysander, because Lysander was the one standing between me and Drake, and the whole time Calix had been watching me.

My stomach cramped hard and low, and the hunger rolled through me in a wave that left my fangs aching in my gums. I pressed my forehead against my knees and waited for it to pass. Nobody had brought blood, and I didn’t expect anybody to. I’d sworn on the first night that I’d starve before I begged a guard for a cup, which had sounded far braver in my head than it felt now.

A sharp metal click broke the quiet.

I lifted my head. For a second, I thought I’d imagined it, the way I’d imagined footsteps on the stairs a dozen times since dark. Then the cell door swung outward on its hinges with a long, lazy creak, and it stopped halfway open, as if someone had pushed it with one finger and lost interest.

No one stood on the other side.

I didn’t move. I sat with the chain in my lap and kept my eyes on the gap, waiting for the guard sent to drag me before the council, or for the executioner sent to spare them the trouble. I listened for boots and for breathing. I waited for a blade to slide through that gap and find my throat, because nobody opened a cell in this house by accident, and I’d lived among these people long enough to know a gift from a trap.

Nothing came. The torch spat, and somewhere down the corridor, water dripped onto stone in the same slow rhythm I’d been counting for two days.

"Hello?" My voice came out cracked and ugly. "If you’re here to kill me, I’d appreciate it if you got on with it. The waiting’s very rude."

Nobody answered.

I got my feet under me and stood. My knees screamed after two days on the cold floor, and the chain clanked against my shins as I shuffled forward and nudged the door wider with my shoulder. It swung without a fight. I leaned out into the corridor and looked both ways.

The corridor ran empty in both directions, lit by one guttering torch at each end. The other cells stood dark and shut. Near the foot of the stairs, the guard post sat in a shallow alcove cut into the rock, and I made myself walk toward it, because I had to know whether a guard was asleep in that chair.

There wasn’t a guard. The wooden chair stood pushed back from the little table at an angle, as if whoever had been sitting there had stood up in a hurry. A tin cup sat on the table, half full of tea gone cold, with a thin brown skin floating on the surface. I touched the side of it with one knuckle. It was cold all the way through, and a crust of dried sugar ringed the rim where someone had stirred it, taken a sip, and walked away without bothering to finish.

I stared at that cup for a long time. In all my years in Drake’s house, I’d never once seen a guard abandon a post. Commander Valen would’ve had the man whipped bloody for less, and every guard on this estate knew it.

Every instinct I had told me to walk back into my cell and pull the door shut behind me. I told myself to sit down and wait for whoever had arranged this to come and explain it.

Then the hunger cramped through me again, and the instinct lost.

The stairs wound up through the rock in a tight spiral. I climbed them slowly with one shoulder pressed to the wall, wincing every time the chain rattled against the steps. At the top, the heavy door to the lower hall stood unbarred. I eased it open an inch and pressed my eye to the gap, ready for torches and shouting, and I found only a dark, quiet passage that smelled of tomorrow’s bread rising in the kitchens.

I walked out of Drake’s house like a servant heading home after a long shift. I took the narrow passage behind the kitchens, where the stone floor dipped from generations of feet, and I passed a row of copper pots on their hooks and a basket of onions somebody had left by the door. Nobody stopped me, and nobody even glanced out a window. I pushed through the back door into the yard and sucked in a lungful of mountain air so cold it burned my nose.

The side gate stood unlatched, with its iron bar leaning against the wall. I slipped through it and kept walking, and I didn’t let myself run until the first bend of the road hid the estate behind me.