Snow Like Ashes(73)

I slurp mine down along with a mug of water and scurry away before someone can punish me for getting nourishment now too. When was my last meal? Breakfast in Bithai before the battle? Whenever it was, it was too long ago, and my stomach isn’t pleased with the surge of nutrients.

“You’re still here!” Nessa cries when a soldier pushes me inside our cage. She leans forward from her seat between Conall and Garrigan, her brothers too busy over their own bowls to care that I survived the day. “Did you get food? Do you need more?” She lifts her bowl of half-eaten stew up to me.

A spurt of laughter catches in my throat. She’s sacrificing her food for me, when I probably ate more in Bithai than she’s eaten in her entire life.

I slide to the ground, back scraping along the wall. “Keep it. I’m fine.”

Conall’s face flashes with the briefest show of surprise. He expected me to take food from her, someone much worse off than I’ve ever been? I stare back at him. Did I come off as selfish, or did he just assume that’s how I’d be?

I shift in the dirt, my stomach clenching even more uncomfortably around the stew. I probably did come off as selfish. That’s what I’ve been all along, isn’t it? Not wanting to be a marriage pawn, even if Winter needed the ally. Wanting to go on missions, even if someone stronger and faster and more skilled than me could have done the job better.

Before I can answer whatever question Nessa just asked, my eyelids sink down, pulled by the weight of all those rocks I lugged up the ramps today. Somewhere distant, Nessa whispers to her brothers and other Winterians murmur cautious conversations masked by night.

She’s here, another refugee. And she survived the first day.

I survived today. Others did not.

Days pass. Days of up and down the ramps, of hastily eaten stew, of falling asleep as Nessa and her brothers watch me warily from the other side of the cage. Some nights Nessa talks to me, asks questions about my life. I tell her what I can until Conall’s glare becomes physically painful; then I stop, curl into a ball in the corner, and try to sleep. Try, because their voices always keep me awake.

“You shouldn’t get attached,” Conall chastises so often his words are branded on my mind.

“I don’t care. You should see if you’re still capable of getting attached to anyone,” Nessa shoots back.

I’m not sure who I agree with. Conall, that no one should get too attached to me, because who knows how long I’ll live, or Nessa, that it doesn’t matter. The repetition of work and misery makes it impossible to do more than poke at these ideas feebly.

Until my ninth night here.

A knot of terror locks itself in my throat, tasting like blood. I burst awake, a nightmare black as death chasing every bit of sleep from my body. There’s something here, with us, in this room. Something dark and horrible and—

Nessa starts from where she crouches in front of me, dust puffing around her boots. “You’re dreaming!”

I fly back, body slamming into the cage’s wall. Nessa swings around on her knees while her brothers stand back, eyeing me as if I chanted in my sleep.

“We are Winter,” Conall states.

I frown. “What?”

He smiles. It’s faint, beaten down by a lifetime of torture.

Nessa stands, offering me her hand. I take it, afraid to put too much weight on her frail bones.

Conall and Garrigan move to the back corner of our cage, the part blanketed in the darkest shadows of late night. The camp is quiet in the exhaustion of a day’s work, the closest soldier the one who walks along the barbed fence.

I move to the cage’s door, my fingers wrapping around the iron bars. The lock that holds us in is as big as my palm, thick and old, and I touch the back of my braid absently. I don’t have any lock picks there. Would I pick it, though, if I could? I haven’t done anything to escape in the days I’ve been here. I can’t decide if it’s worth the risk—to myself and to everyone around me.

It’s so quiet now, so still I can almost forget everything else. No whips or shouts of pain or hollow faces scrunched with impending death. Just black sky and stars and—

Something creaks behind me and I spin around.

A door.

Garrigan pulls it up out of the ground, dust and rocks tumbling off the old planks of wood. Below it, dropping into the earth, a hollow tunnel falls into darkness.

“What is that?” I breathe.

Nessa looks at me over her shoulder. “They want to meet you.”

Conall steps up to the hole first and plummets into the blackness. A thump tells me he didn’t fall far, and sure enough, two hands shoot back up for Nessa. She drops forward and vanishes into the dark, and only Garrigan remains with me.

“Where does it lead?”

He motions to the hole and offers a weak shrug. “You’ll be fine,” he promises. In his eyes is a perfect blend of Nessa’s hope and Conall’s sternness. Garrigan is the glue that keeps them from tearing each other apart.

I slide across the ground. My boots nudge dirt into the tunnel, a blackness so complete I can only feel Conall staring up at me, can’t find his eyes or his outline.

Two hands reach for me. “Come.”

I exhale and fall forward, letting his thick hands catch me and set me on a dirt floor. The door thuds shut above us and I hear Garrigan smooth dirt back over it, the quiet swishing of pebbles on wood the only noise.