Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(28)
It’s hard, and confusing, this growing awareness . . . that she can love her sister more than anything, yet that she must be apart from her in order to know, and perhaps one day, love herself.
The map of the territories, tucked inside her dress, rustles against her chest, and she tries her best to gauge their direction, stopping to make a mark on the map whenever the tunnels fork, so she can chart which way they’ve gone. She can only hope she’s leading them the right way, and not to their deaths . . . though she knows that she could very easily be doing both at the same time.
The trapped air smells of bodies, of sweat and earth and roots and heat. And too, the vinegary scent of fear. Murmured commands and hissed warnings travel through the pack as the women move in a tight, tangled mass of limbs and skirts, hair and torch and weapon. Aurora can hardly tell where she ends and the rest of her makeshift army begins. They are one.
Finally, after the better part of a day, the tunnel narrows like a constricted throat, and then they are hit with a burst of cool, musty air as it opens wide into a vast underground dungeon.
Blackthorn.
They did it. A sudden euphoria washes through her. They are in the nadir of the castle.
Quickly her excitement mellows into caution. This is Malfleur’s dungeon. From the stale stench of human waste and standing water, and the faint groan of rusty voices, Aurora can guess at the state of the prisoners even before she sees them. She pulls her arm across her mouth to keep from gagging as she scans the cavernous room, squinting through the thick air.
There are several aisles of cells, all in a row like horse stalls; hay covers the ground, black with mold and rot. People who hardly resemble humans are locked behind iron bars, and in the dim sphere of her torch’s light, the white-gray bones of skeletons cast sharp shadows along the floor. A collection of the dead and nearly dead. The embodiment of disease, abuse, cruelty.
The living are mostly too weak, too faded, even to beg for help. Some hardly seem to notice the sudden entrance of all these women. One prisoner cries out quietly, urgently, “The beast! The beast is back to feed!”
Another moans, “Take me next!”—his voice hardly more than a breath.
Aurora shudders, ashamed at her own revulsion. Is Heath among them? Panic races through her chest. She hopes they’re not too late. It’s only after she has hurried from cage to cage that she runs into Wren again, and they grasp each other’s arms, and she knows that they have both come to the same discovery: Heath is not here. He is not one of the prisoners. She heaves a sigh of relief; can see it too in Wren, who does not pull away. No news of him is better than bad news.
“They aren’t from Sommeil, but we must save them,” Wren says, looking around her at the wretched prisoners.
The other women have crowded into the cavern, pushing through the filth, searching for the entrance into the castle proper—obviously impatient, nervous, desperate. They are so close now, they can’t afford a wrong move.
“We will,” Aurora vows with a bravery, and a certainty, that are not quite her own. “We will find the keys and set them all free.”
“Look,” Wren says. She gestures to where a large group of women have gathered at the mouth of a small, dark stairwell, and are pushing one another to get through.
“Wait,” Aurora warns, her heart pounding hard in her chest. Nearly all of them, at least, can hear her voice. This is something she can’t take for granted. At least not now. Not yet.
But if her idea works . . .
She goes over the plan and the formations. The fastest and lithest women—the ones carrying pouches of poisoned darts and finely whittled flutes—must lead the pack, disabling as many soldiers as they can. Next come the largest and strongest women, those with heavy, blunt weapons, who will push back the remaining opposition and create space for combat. The fiercest among them will follow at the tail end—those who are not afraid to shed blood, to kill by any means.
Aurora and Wren will lead the first wave. The satchel of poisoned darts trembles in Aurora’s fist. She slides one out and slips it inside her wooden flute, smooth and solid against her palm. She has practiced the way to purse her lips, covering the playing holes and blowing air through the flute in a hard tuft to shoot the dart at her opponent. She’s tempted to trace her finger along the dart’s tip, knowing that even a faint nick could be enough to undo her. As she pushes her way up the winding stone stairs, she is almost amused to think of what happened last time she pricked a finger.
Their skirmish, if you could even call it that, does not go as planned.
A surge of soldiers greets them at the other side of the bolted door, and Aurora is hardly able to take in her surroundings—a wide storage cellar, lit with dripping wrought-iron chandeliers, and hordes of men in terrifying, curve-beaked masks—before she is shoved violently to the side, dropping her flute and cracking her head against a wall. A spray of blood—someone else’s—strikes the stone beside her, painting her fingers in it, making them slippery.
Even as she clambers back up to fight, the chaos has multiplied itself. It seems the women were anticipated. Armored men are bludgeoning the invaders, pulling them back by the hair, stepping on their skirts, holding them down with their knees. The sounds of women screaming echo in the chamber, and Aurora barely manages to shove a soldier, grinning savagely beneath his mask, away from Wren, driving one of her darts into his neck by hand.