One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns #2)(75)

Soon enough the ground changes, and his mare’s hooves ring off small half-submerged stones. Pietyr lifts his head and sees the Breccia, though he would swear it had not been visible a moment before.

The Breccia Domain. A deep, dark cut into the heart of the island. It is blacker than a crow’s wing, blacker than night. It is where they once threw the bodies of the vanquished queens, and where he threw his Kat when he thought the priestesses were going to behead her.

Pietyr tosses the mare’s reins across a low branch. The long, knotted rope in his saddlebag was purchased from a trusted merchant in Prynn. Coil after coil of thick, sturdy knots that weighed the mare down on one side as they rode. Coil after coil, and still he is not sure whether he purchased enough.

He studies the trees, but none seems strong enough to tie off on. Not even the ones as thick as his waist, when the Breccia Domain is leering over his shoulder. He would prefer a trunk as thick as his horse. He considers rigging an additional safety line to her saddle, but if she were to run she would drag him back up over the side. And besides, the extra line would cost too much rope.

“Get on with it,” he growls, loudly, to break the silence and bolster his courage. “I did not ride all this way for nothing.” He holds his mare’s cheeks between his hands. “If I am lucky,” he says to her, “I will see what Kat saw.”

The horse blinks. It does not take a naturalist to see she knows he is lying. If Pietyr is lucky, he will not see, or feel, anything at all.

He chooses a tree and ties his rope, then lets out slack all the way to the mouth of the fissure. Sweat dots his forehead. His hands shake. He is terrified of a hole in the ground. How Nicolas Martel would laugh at him if he were there.

Pietyr throws the loose end of the rope over the side of the rocks, and it unfurls for many long seconds. He does not hear it strike the bottom. It only comes to an end, tugging against his fists.

Perhaps the rumors are true, and there is no bottom.

With the rope in place, he walks back to his horse, and takes a small lamp out of his saddlebag. He ties it to his belt, and stuffs extra matches into every pocket. Then he breathes in deep, goes to the edge, and lowers himself over the side.

The knotted rope makes for easy enough going. His feet do not slip, and his hands are strong and sure. Even so, he keeps his eyes on the patch of blue-and-white sky overhead. When the patch is dishearteningly small and his legs have begun to tire, he finally looks around, resting against the side of the crevasse. The sides are sheer, steep rock. He does not know how Katharine was able to stop her fall.

He continues on, deeper and deeper into the dark. Until his feet search for the next knot, and it is not there.

Pietyr’s hands clench tight as he tries to catch his previous foothold. It is hard not to panic thinking of how far it is to climb back up and how far he may yet have to fall. And it is so dark now that he cannot see the rope in front of his face.

A sudden wind moves across his shoulders. He jerks, and his hip strikes painfully against the stone. But it is only wind, sneaking down from the surface. Never mind that the wind somehow smells like death and rot. Or that when he laughs at his foolishness, there is no echo.

There is nothing here, he thinks as the back of his neck prickles. There is no one down here, no one watching. This was a waste.

He reaches for the lantern at his belt. He will light it just to be sure, to get a look at the darkness and nothing below his feet. But when his fingers find a match, he does not want to strike it. What if he is near the bottom? Will he see everything that they have discarded? Long-dead queens lying in piles of bones and ragged black dresses, staring up at him with empty, accusing eye sockets and bare, yawning jaws.

Or will he see Katharine, his Katharine, rotting where he threw her, and the claw marks on the stones of whatever scratched its way out to take her place?

No, he thinks. That is foolishness. A flight of frightened fancy.

He strikes the match.

It struggles to light, and he touches it quickly to the lamp. Yellow-orange flame casts against his clothes, against his rope and the stone it hangs beside. Carefully, he unties the lantern and holds it out, looking down, past his feet.

There is nothing. No bones of dead queens. No cavern bottom of rocky growths. It is only a void, and that is a wonder in itself considering how far he has descended. The length of rope he would need to reach the bottom would have been too much for his horse to carry. All he can do now is drop the lamp, and try to see something in the moment that it lands.

Before he can let go, something scrapes against the rock. The sound was not subtle. It sounded close, but he cannot see a thing.

I imagined it, he thinks, and then, a lizard. Or a natural shifting of the ground.

Foul-smelling wind ruffles his hair. It curls into his collar like a bundle of clammy fingers.

“Who is there?”

A silly question, and no one replies. But in Pietyr’s mind, he sees teeth and a grin stretched wide in the dark.

He swings his lamp out to all sides. There are more noises now: scraping and the clacking of bones.

“It is not possible!” he shouts, foregoing all restraint. “There is nothing here!”

But everyone knows that the Breccia Domain is more than an empty hole in the earth. Who knows what happened to the queens who were thrown down into the dark? Into the heart of the island, where the Goddess’s eye is always open. Who knows how she kept those queens or what she turned them into.