Ash Princess (Ash Princess Trilogy #1)(14)

The smile stays fixed on my face as I continue down the hall. The cellar is in the west wing of the palace, beneath the main kitchens, so I need to turn left. Or is it to the right? In the dim light from torches lining the walls, I can’t be sure of anything. All it will take is one wrong turn, one wrong corridor, one person where they aren’t supposed to be. The thought almost sends me running back for my bed, but I know it’s only a slower death that awaits me there.

I have to make a choice. I have to trust myself. I go left.

The sounds of late-night revelers travel up the grand staircase and down the halls to me—music and drunken laughter, shouts of glee at Astrea’s expense. A toast is raised to the Ash Princess, and they make lewd jokes I’ve heard so often they roll off my back like water. The easiest path to the kitchens leads right past them, down the stairs and just around a corner—a terrifying prospect, considering their current state—but there is a reason Blaise designated the kitchen cellar, and it isn’t only because it’s dark and deserted at this time of night. It’s because of the tunnels.

When we were children, before the siege, Blaise was determined to explore all the passages hidden within the castle, drawing up dozens of scrawled maps that only he could read. And since his mother and mine were close friends and always together, he was often forced to let me tag along. I discovered them as well. We didn’t come close to finding all of them, but in the year or so we spent looking, we found dozens. Including one that leads from the east wing of the palace to the kitchen cellar.

It’s the kind of memory I thought long lost, like most of my memories before the siege, but seeing Ampelio today and then Blaise has them all coming back to me.

Still, it would be only too easy to miss the entrance after so many years. The darkness doesn’t help and I didn’t dare bring a candle. The voices of the revelers are moving now, getting closer, but they head down another passageway, away from me, and I let out a sigh of relief.

When I come to what I am almost positive is the right hallway, I reach out and trail my fingers along the wall. Ten years ago, the stone was at eye level, so now it should be about waist height. How can it be possible that I’ve grown so much, when it feels like yesterday that I watched my mother die?

But then, it was also another lifetime.

I’ve nearly given up finding it when I run my hand over a stone that juts out slightly from the rest.

Like Guardian Alexis’s nose, Blaise had said with a snicker when we’d first found it. Guardian Alexis was an Air Guardian who had a nose that arched like a bow ready to snap and who liked to tell jokes I didn’t understand. He must be dead now.

I twist the stone once clockwise, twice counterclockwise, before giving the wall a firm shove with my shoulder. It takes a few more shoves before a hidden door hinges open, but that’s a good thing. It means no one has used this tunnel in quite some time. With one last look back to make sure I’m not being followed, I step inside and push the door closed behind me.

The tunnel is narrow and dark but I press forward, feeling along the dust-draped walls to find my way. I should have brought a candle. And shoes. No one has been in this tunnel for a decade, and the stones that make up the walls and ground are coated in dirt and dust that cling to my hands and the soles of my feet.

I walk and walk and the path twists on longer than I remember, curling in ways that make me certain I’m going in circles. Every so often, muffled voices leak through the stones, and though I know their owners can’t know I’m here, I hold my breath as I pass. One way or another, I’m sure now that this will end in my death, but it doesn’t matter. Even if all this is for nothing and I am killed for it, even if it is a trap, I’m doing the only thing I can.

Finally my foot touches wood and I stop. I drop to a crouch and sweep away the dust and dirt on the door I know is beneath me as best I can, feeling around for the cold metal handle. It appears under my hand and I turn it only to find it rusted shut. I have to throw all my body weight against it to turn it a quarter of the way. I turn it again and again, until my arms burn, and the door inches open wide enough for me to slip through.

“Hello?” I whisper into the darkness below.

If I remember correctly, it’s a ten-foot drop to the stone floor of the cellar, and with my bare feet I can’t possibly make it without help.

The sound of shuffling footsteps moving closer.

“Are you alone?” he whispers up to me in Astrean. It takes a few seconds for the words to register.

I have to translate my response in my mind before I say it, hating myself as I do. Even my thoughts are Kalovaxian now.

“Are you?” I ask.

“No, I thought I’d bring a few guards and the Kaiser along.”

I freeze, though I’m fairly sure he’s joking. He must hear my hesitance, because he sighs impatiently.

“I’m alone. Jump and I’ll catch you.”

“I’m not six years old anymore, Blaise. I’m a good deal heavier,” I warn.

“And I’m a good deal stronger,” he answers. “Five years in the Earth Mine will do that.”

I can’t manage a reply. Five years enslaved in a mine, five years that close to the raw power of the earth goddess, Glaidi. No wonder he looked so haunted. My decade in the palace has been a nightmare, but it doesn’t compare to even half that time in a place like that. Once, those mines were holy places, but I can’t help but feel the gods abandoned us during the siege.