Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(32)

After three countdowns she quieted the part of her mind that echoed with guilt for things long past. She was too far gone to drown in guilt. She’d learned to swim in those waters long ago. She needed to focus.

Finn shut the slat, the key to the vault secure in her pocket. Whatever was going on, it had nothing to do with her. She was here to get the cloak.

Now that she’d retrieved the key, she needed to travel back down to get to the royal vault. It must’ve taken nearly an hour to go through the tangle of passages and ladders into the depths of the palace. She felt the air shifting, becoming danker. She wondered if the palace really had dungeons like she’d heard. Curious, she checked the map. Yes, it did.

She’d be avoiding those, thank you very much.

Finally, she made it to a passage that opened into the hall where the vault’s floor-to-ceiling silver doors stood. Of course, there was no direct passage into the vault. She wasn’t that lucky or the palace architect wasn’t that stupid. Through the slat she could see two guards sitting at a table before the vault. The table was scattered with playing cards. It looked like they’d been playing a round of cambió. She grimaced. She’d had more than enough of that game.

One of the guards was already nodding off. The other was staring at the ceiling as if he could will himself to float up to the party upstairs.

Out of her bag, Finn pulled a stoppered vial full of five gray quilbear quills as thin as a fingernail and as long as her middle finger. She pulled off the stopper and with a beckoning motion of her hand, the quills rose to her eye level.

Quilbears were massive beasts covered in sharp, venomous quills that they shot at enemies and prey. The quills themselves were strong, threaded with a great deal of metal. And what was metal but a type of stone?

With a flick of her fingers, Finn poised two quills at the slat’s opening. She needed to do this right the first time. If she missed, they might spot the quills and realize someone was trying to knock them out. But if she could hit them, she could get into that vault without a hitch.

Finn held her breath and eyed her targets. Neither was moving much. Now was the time. With a purposeful flick of her fingers, the quills zoomed out of the slat.

Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, Finn thought fervently.

The quills buried themselves in each of the guards’ necks, and their heads lolled forward as they fell fast asleep. Finn put her fist in her mouth to stop herself from shouting in victory. Her shadow swirled triumphantly around her.

She exited the passage and plucked the quills out of the guards’ necks, then pushed the key into the slot of the great door. The lock gave a resounding click. Finn looked back at the two guards whose heads were resting on the table, still fast asleep. Quilbear venom knocked people out for a good ten minutes. Fifteen, if she was lucky. She needed to find the cloak and get out before then. She pushed open the great doors and closed them behind her. Her jaw dropped.

The vault was bathed in the golden glow that came only from treasures too expensive to comprehend. Everything shined, calling out to her fingers for thieving. There were dummies draped in the most beautiful gowns and headpieces she’d ever laid eyes on. They must’ve been the wedding clothes of former queens. There were preserved documents that even Finn recognized as historic: Castallan declarations, sacred texts from before Englassen occupation, and marriage contracts between princes and princesses. She opened chests and found more gold pesos than she’d known existed and necklaces so heavy with jewels they might snap her neck. Beside a neatly arranged pile of tapestries was an undressed dummy in a glass case. Something beautiful must’ve once been kept in it. Finn wondered what, but then her eyes fell back on the gold. Before she could stop herself, she was shoving fistfuls of pesos into her pockets.

“Stop,” she told herself. She wasn’t going to get out of the palace unseen if she was lugging around a chest of gold. She emptied her pockets.

Well, she emptied most of them.

Then she set about finding the vanishing cloak. What the cloak actually looked like, Finn wasn’t sure. Every Castallan child had been told the story of the great rebellion that began with a single vanishing cloak. But in every tale it changed in color or description. Some said it was light as a shadow, others said it was weighty with history. Some said it was the rich red of the Castallan flag. Others claimed it shimmered with every color known to man and all the colors that weren’t. Finn didn’t know what to look for. She figured she’d know it when she saw it. But she tried on fancy cloak after cloak and none made her invisible or looked particularly special.

With a growl of frustration, Finn plopped herself on top of a dark wood chest, her arms crossed. How the hell was she going to find something when she didn’t even know what it looked like? She rolled her neck from side to side, feeling the tension cording through it. As she searched the vault in vain, she walked past a pedestal topped with a velvet pillow. On the pillow sat what looked like a severed piece of a statue—two thickly muscled arms and hands carved from dark, smooth stone. The work was so painstakingly detailed that it didn’t seem carved at all; it looked as if it’d sprung from some mountain face just as it was.

The stone hands were interlocked, the long fingers laced together. Probably a piece of some famous sculpture she knew nothing about. Finn was hardly one for art, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. It even had fine hairs sculpted onto the arms. She’d never seen a statue with that kind of detail. Whatever sculpture the arms came from, Finn knew it was a towering, imposing one.