Chapter 235

Chapter 235: Chapter 235

Julian

I didn’t ask why it had gone so smoothly. I didn’t want to know. A small cold voice in the back of my head kept asking who’d opened my door and emptied the guard post and left the gate unbarred, and I shoved that voice down every time it spoke. If I listened to it, I’d have to stop walking, and I couldn’t stop now that I was out and still breathing.

The road wound down the mountain between black walls of pine, and the moon hung low and fat over the ridge, bright enough to throw my shadow across the frozen ruts. I ran until my lungs gave out, then walked, then ran again. The chain slapped against my thighs with every stride. The silver kept burning, and each time the manacles slid across the raw skin of my wrists, I had to bite down on my split lip to stop myself from crying out.

Halfway down, I found a boulder at the side of the road and smashed the chain against it with everything I had left. It held. I smashed it again, and pain shot from my wrists up to my elbows, and I fell to my knees in the frost with my bound hands pressed against my chest, gasping until the black spots cleared from my eyes. Silver didn’t break for my kind. I knew that. I’d known it my whole life, and I’d still needed to try.

I stayed there on my knees in the dirt, and that was when the fear finally caught up with me.

For as long as I’d lived in Drake’s house, I’d thought of Calix as Drake’s pretty shadow. He fussed over the seating at dinner, and he sulked for a whole evening if Drake forgot to ask his opinion on the wine. He spent hours making sure his cuffs lay flat. I’d laughed about him behind his back more times than I could count, and I’d never once bothered to watch him, because nobody watches the furniture.

That pretty shadow had taken me apart in front of every elder in the territory. He’d done it in less time than it took the musicians to finish a single song, and he’d never raised his voice or lifted a hand or broken a sweat. He’d walked me into a cell with almost no effort, the same way he straightened a picture frame or brushed lint from his sleeve.

I’d been playing a game for months, and I’d never even known Calix was on the board.

The cold soaked through the knees of my trousers. I made myself think it through, because thinking was the only thing that had ever kept me alive. Calix hadn’t exposed me because he cared about the truth. Nobody in that house cared about the truth unless it got them something. He’d exposed me because I stood beside Drake, and he wanted that space empty. Now I was gone, and only one person still stood beside Drake. That person was Lysander, with his big wounded eyes and Drake’s child in his belly.

If I was right, Lysander didn’t have long. A small, mean part of me enjoyed that idea for about three seconds, until I remembered that once Lysander was gone, the only one left beside Drake would be Calix.

I couldn’t beat him alone. I knew that the way I knew silver burned. I had no rank, no money I could reach, no friends left inside that house, and silver locked around my wrists that I couldn’t get off. If I marched back up that road and told Drake the truth about Calix, he’d hand me straight back to the council and thank Calix for the trouble.

I needed allies, and they had to be people who wanted something Calix stood in the way of.

I sat back on my heels and stared down the road toward the scatter of lights in the valley, and two names came to me so fast I almost laughed.

Darius and Gideon had wanted Lysander for as long as I’d known them. Darius was human, old, and sharp as a tack, and he’d never forgiven Drake for taking what he believed should’ve been his. Gideon was his son and his blade, and he did whatever his father pointed him at.

They’d both watched Lysander across every room he’d ever walked into, like starving men outside a bakery window. If Calix put Lysander in the ground, those two would lose the one thing they’d been chasing for years.

That meant they had a reason to want Calix gone, even if they didn’t know it yet.

I hauled myself up off the frozen ground and started walking again. It occurred to me, somewhere around the next bend, that I was about to fight to keep Lysander alive. It was the first time in my life I’d ever considered doing that, and I hated every second of it.

The road leveled out at the bottom of the mountain and turned into cobblestones. The city slept around me with its shutters closed and its lamps burned down. A dog barked at me from behind a fence, then lost interest. I kept my bound hands tucked against my stomach under the torn sleeves of my shirt and stuck to the shadows, and the only person I passed was a drunk asleep in a doorway with his hat over his face.

Darius now lived in the old quarter, in a tall narrow house with iron railings and a door painted dark green. I climbed the front steps barefoot, filthy, bloody, and chained, and I didn’t let myself think about how I looked.

The house was dark except for one thin line of lamplight under the front door. I stood on the top step for a long moment, listening to my heart pound and the chain tick against the railing as my hands trembled. Then I lifted both fists together and knocked, three heavy blows that rang out over the empty street.

Nothing happened. I knocked again, harder.

Footsteps came down the hall inside, quick and quiet. The bolt slid back with a heavy scrape.

The door swung open, and Gideon stood in the gap with a blade already in his hand, its point level with my throat.