Chapter 19
By the time I stumble back to my room, I’m done with evian politics and my sister and rings and prophecies and everything else even remotely related to any of it. I collapse on my thick, champagne colored carpet and sob into Cookie’s fluffy coat. She doesn’t mind one bit. Which is exactly why I love my dog so much.
Maybe I am weak, and maybe I cry too often, but he never complains.
A light knock at the door connecting my room to Mom’s leaves me scrambling to sit up. Mom never waits long after her courtesy tap, so she catches me, puffy red eyes and all. Not that it matters. She could probably hear me sobbing though the walls connecting our rooms. Most evian walls are soundproofed heavily because of our sensitive hearing, but Mom wanted to be able to hear my heartbeat at night. She says she can’t sleep without it.
Mom sits next to me on the floor and pulls me against her chest. “Ready to kill Lark?”
My breathing hitches, and her hand strokes my hair. “Relax. You’ll be pretending to kill Lark, and Frederick will testify he saw it. I’ll lead her out through one of the secret passages to freedom instead.”
“Wait, we have secret passages?” I wipe my cheeks and sit up straight. “How did I not know that?”
“Duh,” Mom says. “Because they wouldn’t be secret if everyone knew about them.”
I lift one eyebrow. “I know about the secret bunker.” I wonder how many other secrets my mom is hiding.
Mom shrugs. “Need to know.”
“Does that mean Judica—”
“Has no idea. True.”
I beam.
“Balth told me today didn’t go so well.”
I shake my head.
“Well, maybe you’ll feel better once Lark is safely on her way.”
Yes, maybe my spirits will be lifted when I watch my best friend escape through a tunnel to a world I’ll never join.
Mom’s eyebrows draw together. “I know it’s not what you had in mind when you woke up this morning.”
This morning I thought the world was safe. This morning I knew my place. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time to this morning. A single tear streaks down my face, but I wipe it away. Because crying won’t help Lark, but helping free her might. I stand up and nod at the air duct. “Is that the passageway?” The air whooshing through always seemed abnormally loud to me.
Mom laughs. “Not even close.” I signal for Cookie to stay in my room. Then I follow Mom through the door into her room and watch as she slides a portrait of me as a baby aside and presses her finger into a tiny scuffed spot in the wall. A bookcase that I’ve never seen shift even a hair slides silently to the right, opening to show a dim hallway that slopes steeply down.
“What in the—”
She signals Duchess to stay, and says, “Let’s go.”
I rush after her, nearly bumping into her backside before she begins to jog downward. I shudder when the bookcase slides shut behind us, closing off the last of the light from Mom’s bedroom. Now the corridor is completely black. I follow my mother’s heartbeat, its steady, slow buh-bump reassuring in the complete darkness. It’s so quiet down here that I can make out the heartbeat of some tiny animal, like a bird, or ugh. I shudder. Maybe a mouse or a rat. It’s beating much quicker than Mom’s heartbeat, and very near.
I speed up, and stumble over a rock. It’s bad timing, because Mom stops short. I bump into the back of her, and she takes my hand and places it on a rod next to me. She’s been walking along with the guidance of a handrail, and I move much easier with that in my grip, even if I still feel like I can hear the mouse.
“There are normally low lights, but that EMP you set off killed them all. Move quietly, or the guards will hear. We need to wait until Frederick takes over for them. He’s going to be the witness for the execution.”
“You’re the Empress,” I whisper. “Why is all the secrecy necessary? Why not just free Lark? She had nothing to do with her mother keeping her here, and you certainly already punished Lyssa.”
“You’ll learn someday that what you can do and what you should do aren’t always the same. I know in my heart I should force you to execute your friend, but I also know what that would do to you and to us. I’m not willing to face it. But if my people see me as lenient, well, I can’t have that, either. Sometimes it’s more judicious to fly under the radar. Empresses always have so many options open that it’s often hard to choose. But after a few centuries, it’s easier to know.”
Mom stops in front of me, and there’s just enough light that I can see her tilt her head slightly. She’s listening, her face pressed to a wall.
Feet on the other side of the wall scuffle around, and then guards shuffle out, presumably to make their reports. This is our window. Mom places her hand on a rectangular box I can barely see, but nothing happens.
Mom swears under her breath and my jaw drops in the dark. My mother never swears. Ever.
“Of course your EMP wiped out the sensor for the door. That means we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”
Mom turns a corner and begins shifting stones in the dark.
“What’s the plan?”
“We could have marched in and announced we were executing Lark. But it would have drawn attention, and it would have been harder to move her, and practically impossible to transport the goat we’re using as cover. Sneaking down to free her lets you say goodbye, and makes this all simpler. But that door should have slid out of the way, and it can’t because the board is fried. Luckily, there’s an alternate method.”
“That’s good news.”
“The bad news is that we have to shift all these stones to access it.”
I crouch down and follow her lead, shifting heavy stone blocks out of the way one at a time. Once we’ve cleared a two-by-two area, Mom stoops and crawls through on her stomach. I try not to think about the mouse when I follow Mom into a utility closet that services the holding cells in the basement. Once we step into the center of the cell matrix, it’s clear that someone has lit the old wall sconces. It’s nice to be able to see.
Since we’ve only got one prisoner at present, it’s easy to know where to go. Lark’s heart thumps along steadily in the third cell on the right, just a little faster than it should. I can’t believe I never realized she was half-human. Mom beelines for her cell, with me following close behind.
At the sound of our approach, Lark stands.
Two fingernails on her right hand are broken and one is ragged, like she was prying at stones too, even though there aren’t any in her cell. Her always pristine hair is rucked up on the right side, as though she’s run her hand through it twenty times in the last few minutes. Which she probably has, because her mother’s dead. Even though I’ve been thinking of it all day, the realization still strikes me like a slap to the cheek.