Ash Princess (Ash Princess Trilogy #1)(79)

“Most of them won’t know the difference,” she says. The words are cruel, but the fight has gone out of her voice. She sounds as tired as I feel. “You might be the queen, but you’re just one girl. The revolution won’t stop because you do. It didn’t stop when Ampelio died, and he’d done far more than you have. If you died, or I died, or Heron, or Blaise…We’re all just pieces. We do what we can, but at the end of the day, we’re all expendable. Even you.”

“Then why do it at all?” I ask her. The words come out bitter, but I don’t mean them that way. I really do want to know.

She doesn’t say anything for a long moment. It’s only when I’ve given up hope of getting an answer that she speaks, her voice low and steady and so unlike the brash, loud Artemisia I’ve gotten to know.

“Because that’s how water works. The river flows, pushing against a stone, even as it knows it won’t move it. It doesn’t have to. Enough currents go by, over enough time, and even the strongest stone gives in. It might take a lifetime or more, but water doesn’t give up.”

“Nothing will stop him. I can’t win against him,” I say.

“No,” she says. “You likely can’t.”

“Art,” Heron warns again. The hand he’s holding has turned to pins and needles, like it’s fallen asleep. It doesn’t feel the way it does when Ion heals me after the Kaiser’s punishments. His touch always leaves my skin feeling tacky and slick and grimy, but Heron’s touch is comforting, warming, as his power travels over my skin.

“I won’t lie to her,” Artemisia scoffs.

Her words are harsh, but there’s something refreshing about her honesty. I think I prefer it to Heron’s kind fibs.

“We won’t let anything happen to you,” Heron says. “As soon as the Prinz is back, we’ll get you out.”

“After I kill him, you mean. And the Theyn, and Cress.”

If Blaise were here, he would probably tell me that my safety was the priority. He would begin making plans for all of us to leave immediately, and I don’t know that I would have the courage to turn him down. But he isn’t here.

Heron and Artemisia exchange a look that I can’t read.

“Yes,” Artemisia says.

Heron releases my hand and the skin of my palm is smooth and clear, as if I never fell apart. He takes the other and begins again.

“In the mines,” Artemisia says, drawing my attention back to her. She isn’t looking at me, instead staring at the patterned tile floor, tracing the lines with her little finger. “I learned quickly how to use the only leverage I had with one of the guards. It…was its own kind of torture, but he gave me extra rations in return, and the easiest shifts. He looked the other way when my little brother didn’t pull his weight. I told myself…I told myself he cared for me, that I cared for him even. It’s easier to lie to yourself, isn’t it?”

No, I want to say. It’s not the same thing. But I can’t help thinking that maybe it is. Maybe lying to yourself is the only way to survive.

When she speaks again, the softness is gone. “But when my brother went mine-mad and that same guard smashed his head against a boulder five feet from me, I saw the truth of it.” Her breath shakes. “For months after, I would fall asleep next to my brother’s murderer and pray that death take me as well.” She laughs, but it’s an ugly sound. “I never prayed before, never saw any use for it. I didn’t believe any of it, even as I thought the words; I just needed to talk to someone, even if it was only in my mind. I still don’t believe in your gods, but I do know that I grew stronger and stronger, until I had the strength to slit the guard’s throat while he slept.”

Her dark eyes flash up to meet mine and there is a kind of understanding there I never expected from her. I realize suddenly that I don’t know her at all, or Heron, or even Blaise anymore. They all must have stories like this, stories I haven’t heard, about horrors I can never really understand.

“We are not defined by the things we do in order to survive. We do not apologize for them,” she says quietly, eyes never leaving mine. “Maybe they have broken you, but you are a sharper weapon because of it. And it is time to strike.”



* * *



—

When Artemisia and Heron leave, I can’t sit still. It isn’t the same panicked energy from earlier—there is a calm to my thoughts, a distance. I see the situation as if it were happening to someone else. My mind is busy, and so my hands yearn for something to do as well.

I go to my hiding place in the mattress and dig around until I find the nightgown I ruined when I first met with Blaise what feels like a lifetime ago. The once-white material is gray with dirt and grime.

It tears easily into strips, though they’re sloppy and frayed at the edges, not like they would be if I were allowed a pair of scissors. But it will do.

Artemisia and Heron say nothing as they watch me roll each strip into a shoddy rosette, bound with pieces of straw from inside the mattress. After a few moments, Blaise settles back into his room without a word, but I barely hear him. I’m barely aware of any of them. All that exists are my fingers, the rosettes, and my mind turning over every possible outcome.

Though I know what I have to do, I can’t help but wonder if my mother would make the same choice in my position. The truth is, though, I don’t know what my mother would do. She is half memory, half imagination to me.