She had no one to blame but herself.
As the wagon trundled north, Kestrel stared at the changing landscape through the barred window. She watched mountains give way to flat lands with patches of dull, reddish grass. Long-legged white birds picked their way through shallow pools. Once, she saw a fox with a white chick dangling from its teeth and Kestrel’s empty stomach clenched with longing. She would have gladly eaten that baby bird. She would have eaten the fox. Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She’d swallow everything—her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there’d be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made.
Awkwardly, she lifted her bound hands and knuckled her dry eyes. She thought that maybe she was too dehydrated to cry. Her throat hurt. She couldn’t remember when the guards driving the wagon had last given her water.
They were deep into the tundra now. It was late spring—or no, Firstsummer must have already come. The tundra, frozen for most of the year, had come alive. There were clouds of mosquitoes. They bit every bare inch of Kestrel’s skin.
It was easier to think about mosquitoes. Easier to look at the low, sloping volcanoes on the horizon. Their tops had blown off long ago. The wagon angled toward them.
Easier, too, to see lakes of astonishingly bright green-blue water.
Harder to know that their color was due to sulfide in the water, which meant they were nearing the sulfur mines.
Harder to know that her father had sent her here. Hard, horrible, the way he had looked at her, disowned her, accused her of treason. She’d been guilty. She had done everything that he believed of her, and now she had no father.
Grief swelled in her throat. She tried to swallow it down. She had a list of things to do—what were they? Study the sky. Pretend you’re one of those birds. Lean your forehead against the wagon’s wall and breathe. Don’t remember.
But she never could forget for long. Inevitably, she remembered her last night in the imperial palace. She remembered her letter confessing everything to Arin. I am the Moth. I am your country’s spy, she’d written. I have wanted to tell you this for so long. She’d scrawled the emperor’s secret plans. It didn’t matter that this was treason. It didn’t matter that she was supposed to marry the emperor’s son on Firstsummer’s day, or that her father was the emperor’s most trusted friend. Kestrel ignored that she’d been born Valorian. She’d written what she felt. I love you. I miss you. I would do anything for you.
But Arin had never read those words. Her father had. And her world came apart at the seams.
* * *
Once there was a girl who was too sure of herself. Not everyone would call her beautiful, but they admitted that she had a certain grace that intimidated more often than it charmed. She was not, society agreed, someone you wanted to cross. She keeps her heart in a porcelain box, people whispered, and they were right.
She didn’t like to open the box. The sight of her heart was unsettling. It always looked both smaller and bigger than she expected. It thumped against the white porcelain. A fleshy red knot.
Sometimes, though, she’d put her palm on the box’s lid, and then the steady pulse was a welcome music.
One night, someone else heard its melody. A boy, hungry and far from home. He was—if you must know—a thief. He crept up the walls of the girl’s palace. He wriggled strong fingers into a window’s slim opening. He pulled it open wide enough to fit himself and pushed inside.
While the lady slept—yes, he saw her in bed, and looked quickly away—he stole the box without realizing what the box held. He knew only that he wanted it. His nature was full of want, he was always longing after something, and the longings he understood were so painful that he did not care to examine the ones that he didn’t understand.
Any member of the lady’s society could have told him that his theft was a bad idea. They’d seen what happened to her enemies. One way or another, she always gave them their due.
But he wouldn’t have listened to their advice. He took his prize and left.
It was almost like magic, her skill. Her father (a god, people whispered, but his daughter, who loved him, knew him to be wholly mortal) had taught her well. When a gust of wind from the gaping window woke her, she caught the thief’s scent. He’d left it on the casement, on her dressing table, even on one of her bed curtains, drawn ever so slightly aside.
She hunted him.
She saw his path up the palace wall, the broken twigs of fox-ivy he’d used to clamber up, then down. In some places the ivy branches were as thick as her wrist. She saw where it had held his weight, and where it hadn’t and he’d almost fallen. She went outside and tracked his footprints back to his lair.
You could say that the thief knew the moment she crossed his threshold what he held in his tightening fist. You could say that he should have known well before then. The heart shuddered in its cool white box. It hammered inside his hand. It occurred to him that the porcelain—milky, silken, so fine that it made him angry—might very well shatter. He’d end up with a handful of bloody shards. Yet he didn’t relinquish what he held. You could imagine how he felt when she stood in his broken doorway, set her feet on his earthen floor, lit up the room like a terrible flame. You could. But this isn’t his story.
The lady saw the thief.
She saw how little he had.
She saw his iron-colored eyes. Sooty lashes, black brows, darker than his dark hair. A grim mouth.
Now, if the lady had been honest, she would have admitted that earlier that evening as she’d lain in bed, she’d woken for the length of three heartbeats (she had counted them as they rang loud in her quiet room). She’d seen his hand on her white-covered heart. She had closed her eyes again. The sleep that had reclaimed her had been sweet.
But honesty requires courage. As she cornered the thief in his lair, she found that she wasn’t so sure of herself. She was sure of only one thing. It made her fall back a little. She lifted her chin.
Her heart had an unsteady rhythm they both could hear when she told the thief that he might keep what he had stolen.
* * *
Kestrel woke. She’d fallen asleep. The floor of the moving wagon creaked beneath her cheek. She hid her face in her hands. She was glad that her dream had ended where it did. She wouldn’t have wanted to see the rest, the part where the girl’s father discovered that she’d given her heart to a lowly thief, and wished her dead, and cast her out.
* * *
The wagon stopped. Its door rattled. Someone set a key into its lock. It grated. Door hinges squealed and hands reached inside. The two guards hauled her out, their grips firm and wary, as if she might fight them.
They had reason to worry. Once, Kestrel had knocked one of the men unconscious by striking his temple with the manacles on her wrists. The second guard caught her before she could run. The last time they’d opened her door, she’d flung the contents of the waste bucket in their faces and pushed past them. She’d sprinted, blind in the sudden daylight. She was weak. Her bad knee gave out and she hit the dirt. After that, the guards stopped opening the door at all, which meant no food or water.
If they had decided to take her outside now, it was because they had arrived at their destination. For once, Kestrel didn’t struggle. Her dream had numbed her. She needed to see the place where her father had condemned her to live.
* * *
The work camp was enclosed by a black iron fence the height of three men. Dead volcanoes loomed behind the two blocky stone buildings. The tundra stretched to the east and west: tattered blankets of yellow moss and red grass. It was chilly. The air was thin. Everything smelled rotten.
This far north, twilight had a greenish cast. A line of prisoners filed into the camp through an open narrow gate. Their backs were to Kestrel, but she caught a glimpse of one woman’s face in the pale green light. The expression frightened Kestrel. It was utterly blank. Although Kestrel had been following her guards quietly, those empty, glassy eyes made her dig in her heels. The guards’ hands tightened. “Keep moving,” one of them said, but the prisoner’s eyes—all of the prisoners’ eyes—were shiny mirrors, and Kestrel, although she’d known her destination in the north and had known that she, too, was a prisoner, only now fully realized that she was going to transform into one of these empty-faced people.
“Don’t be difficult,” said a guard.
She went boneless. She sagged in their grip. Then, as they bent and swore and tried to drag her upright, she abruptly straightened and rammed her head back into one man’s face, threw the other off balance.
It was the least successful of her escape attempts. Stupid, to try anything just outside a camp that held scores of Valorian prison guards. But even as several of them swarmed out to help subdue her, she couldn’t think how she could have done anything else.
* * *
Nobody hurt her. This was very Valorian. Kestrel was here to work for the empire. Damaged bodies don’t work well.
After she’d been dragged inside the camp, she was shoved across the muddy yard and right up to a woman who looked Kestrel over with amused, almost friendly scorn. “Pretty princess,” she said, “what did you do to end up here?”
Though now dirty and disheveled, Kestrel’s hair had been braided with aristocratic flair the day she’d been caught. She remembered slipping into the soft blue dress and seeing the spill of it across her lap when she’d sat at the piano on her last night in the imperial palace—when was this? Nearly a week must have passed, she thought. Had it been that long a time since she’d written that reckless, wretched letter? That short a time? How had she fallen so far so fast?
Kestrel plunged again into that icy well of fear. She was drowning in it. She couldn’t even react when the woman drew the dagger from her hip.
“Hold still,” the woman said. With a few rapid slashes, she cut Kestrel’s skirts straight down between the legs. From her belt, the woman unhooked a loop of thin rope that hung next to a coiled whip. She cut the rope into several short lengths that she used to tie the slashed fabric to Kestrel’s legs, fashioning something like trousers. “Can’t have you tripping over yourself in the mines, can we?”
Kestrel touched a knot at her thigh. Her breath evened. She felt a little better.
“Hungry, princess?”
“Yes.”
Kestrel snatched what was offered. The food vanished down her throat before she even registered what it was. She gulped the water.
“Easy,” said the woman. “You’ll get sick.”
Kestrel didn’t listen. Her manacles jangled as she tipped the canteen to drain the last drop.
“I don’t think you need these.” The woman unlocked the manacles. The weight dropped from Kestrel’s wrists. Each wrist, now bare, bore a raised welt. Her hands felt disturbingly light, like they might float away. They didn’t look like they belonged to her. Grimy. Nails jagged. A nasty, infected graze over two knuckles. Had she really once played music with those hands?
Her skin prickled. Her stomach cramped—she had eaten and drunk too quickly. Kestrel tucked her hands under crossed arms and hugged them to her.
“You’ll be fine,” the woman said soothingly. “I hear that you’ve been somewhat of a troublemaker, but I’m sure you’ll settle down in no time. We’re fair here. Do as you’re told and you’ll be treated well enough.”
“Why…” Kestrel’s tongue felt thick. “Why did you call me princess? Do you know who I am?”
The woman clucked. “Child, I don’t care who you are. Soon enough, neither will you.”
Kestrel’s scalp was crawling. She had the odd and yet vivid idea that tiny beetles were marching in her veins. She looked down at her hand, half expecting to see moving bumps beneath the skin. She swallowed. She wasn’t frightened anymore. She was … what was she? Her thoughts streamed by in a blur: a magician’s trick with colored rags, a long line of them pulled out of the mouth, hand over hand …
“What did you put in the food?” she managed to say. “The water?”
“Something to help.”
“You drugged me.” Kestrel’s pulse was so fast she couldn’t feel each heartbeat. They blurred into a solid vibration. The prison yard seemed to shrink. She stared at the woman and tried to focus on her features—the broad mouth, the silvered braids, a slight tilt to the eyes, the two vertical wrinkles between her brows. But the woman’s smile was far away. Her features grew vague, unfinished. They pulled and drifted apart until Kestrel became convinced that if she reached out, her fingers would go right through the woman, whose smile broadened.
“There,” the woman said. “Much better.”
* * *
Kestrel didn’t know how she’d gotten inside the cell. She was consumed by an urge to move. Before she realized it, she was pacing the short space, hands opening and closing. She couldn’t stop. Her pulse thrummed in her ears: loud and high and soaring.
* * *
The drug wore off. She was spent. She sort of remembered that she’d paced for what might have been hours, but now that she was aware of the size of her cell—her wardrobes in the imperial palace had been larger—the memory didn’t seem possible. But her feet ached, and she saw that she’d worn down the thin soles of her elegant shoes.
Her heart felt like lead. She was cold. She sat in a heap on the dirt floor, looking at bright mold on the stone walls: a host of tiny green starfish. She touched the knots on the ropes that tied the cut-up dress to her legs. The gesture made her feel more like herself.
Most of the escape attempts on the road north to the tundra had probably been doomed to fail. Still, Kestrel couldn’t help hoping that her first effort might ultimately be the best. As desperate, perhaps, as the others, but maybe more likely to work. On her first morning in the wagon, the guards had stopped to water the horses. Kestrel had heard the voice of a Herrani. She’d whispered to him, pushing a dead masker moth through the bars of her window. She could still feel the moth between her fingertips, its furred wings. Part of her hadn’t wanted to let it go. Part of her thought that if she kept the moth, she might somehow reverse her mistakes. She would have said different things to Arin as he stood in her music room. It had been only the day before. She’d sat at the piano, smoothing hands over her blue skirts, feeding him lies.
Kestrel held the papery moth. Then she dropped it into the Herrani’s waiting hand. Give this to your governor, she said. Tell Arin that I—
She hadn’t managed more. The guards had seen her reaching out to the Herrani through the bars. They’d let the Herrani go after a rough search seemed to prove that Kestrel had not, in fact, given him anything. Had the moth dropped to the ground? Had it simply been too camouflaged for the guards to notice it? Kestrel hadn’t quite been able to see through the window.
But if that Herrani man went to Arin and reported what had happened, wouldn’t Arin be able to understand what she’d done and where she’d been exiled? She listed the pieces of the story in her mind. A moth: the symbol of Arin’s anonymous spy. A prison wagon headed north. Even if that Herrani man along the road didn’t know who Kestrel was, he’d still be able to describe her to Arin, wouldn’t he? At the very least he could report that a Valorian woman had given him a moth. Arin would figure things out. He was quick, cunning.
And blind.
I would do anything for you, she’d written in the letter her father had found. But that part, despite feeling true when she’d scrawled it on the page, had been a lie. Kestrel had refused Arin. She hadn’t been honest with him, not even when he’d begged. She’d pretended she was empty and careless and cruel.
He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.
She squashed her sneaking hope that Arin might discover what had happened and come to her rescue. That was a terrible plan. It wasn’t a plan at all. She could do better than that.
* * *
All the food was drugged. The water, too. On her first morning in the camp, Kestrel ate in the yard with the other prisoners, who were slack-faced and didn’t speak, even though she’d tried to talk with them. As she filed out of the camp with them in an orderly line, Kestrel felt the drug hit her heart. Her blood roared.
They entered the mining area at the base of the volcanoes. Kestrel couldn’t remember having walked the path to arrive here. She also didn’t care that she didn’t remember. This distant awareness of not caring brought a bump of pleasure.
It was a relief to work. The urge to move, to do, rode high. Someone—a guard?—gave her a double basket. She eagerly began to fill it, prying crumbly yellow blocks of sulfur from the ground. She saw tunnels that led below a volcano. The prisoners who went there carried pickaxes. Kestrel was made to work out in the open. She gathered—the realization was plucked like a stone from the rushing river of the drug—that she was too new to be trusted with an ax.
All the guards carried looped whips attached to their belts, but Kestrel didn’t see them being used. The guards—they could not be Valoria’s best and brightest, if commissioned to serve in the worst corner of the empire—were content to keep a lazy eye on the prisoners, who obeyed directions easily. The guards talked among themselves, complaining about the smell.
The boiled egg odor was very strong here. She noticed this without being bothered by it or by the sweat that stained her dress even as she shivered hard (was it very cold, or was this just the nature of the drug?). She loaded each of the two baskets attached by a flexible pole that she heaved up onto her shoulders. The weight felt good; it was so good to dig and lift and carry and dump and do it all over again.
At some point she staggered under the baskets. She was given water. Her marvelous strength returned.
* * *
By twilight, she was hollowed out. Her good sense returned. She refused the food served when the prisoners had filed through the black iron gate and into the yard.
“This food is different,” said the silver-braided guard from yesterday, whom Kestrel understood to be in charge of the female prisoners. “Last night I gave you a taste of how nice it’d be to work, but from now on you’ll get a dose of something different at night.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Princess, no one cares what you want.”
“I can work without it.”
“No,” the woman said gently, “you can’t.”
Kestrel backed away from the long table with its bowls of soup.
“Eat, or I’ll force it down you.”
* * *
The guard had told the truth. The food contained a different drug, one with a metallic scent like silver. It made everything slow and dark as Kestrel was led into her prison block and to her cell.
“Why doesn’t the empire drug all its slaves?” Kestrel mumbled before she was locked up.
The woman laughed, the sound murky, underwater. “You’d be surprised how many tasks require a mind.”
Kestrel felt foggy.
“New prisoners are my favorites. We haven’t had one like you in a long time. New ones are always entertaining, at least while they last.”
Kestrel thought she heard the key turn. She dropped into sleep.
* * *
She tried to eat and drink as little as she could get away with. She remembered the guard’s words … until, in fact, she no longer remembered them and avoided full meals simply out of the awareness that the drugged food changed her and she didn’t like it. She’d tip her bowl of soup out onto the muddy prison yard when no one was looking. She crumbled bread and let it fall from her hands.
Still, she was hungry. She was thirsty. Sometimes, she ignored her nagging worry and filled her belly.
* * *
I would do anything for you. The words echoed in her mind. Often, she couldn’t quite sort out who’d said them. She thought she might have said them to her father.
Then she’d feel suddenly ill, nauseated with an emotion she would have recognized as shame if she’d had a clearer head. No, she hadn’t said that to her father. She had betrayed him. Or had he betrayed her?
It was confusing. She was certain only of the sense of betrayal, thick and hot in her chest.
Kestrel had moments of clarity before the morning drug shot her up, or before the twilight drug dragged her down. In those moments, when she could smell the sulfur on her and feel its dust in her eyelashes, saw the yellow stuff beneath her fingernails and powdering her skin like pollen, she’d envision those words, written in ink on paper. I would do anything for you. She knew exactly who had written them and why. She became aware that she had been pretending to herself when she’d believed her words had been untrue, or that any of the limits she’d set between her and Arin mattered, because in the end she was here and he was free. She had done everything she could. And he didn’t even know.
* * *
The guards still didn’t trust Kestrel with a pickax. She was starting to worry that they never would. A small ax was a real weapon. With it, she might be able to escape. In her clearer hours, on the days when she ate and drank less, Kestrel was desperate to lay her hands on one of those axes. Her nerves screamed for it. At the same time, she was afraid that by the time a guard gave her one and sent her down into the tunnels, it would be too late. She’d be like all the other prisoners: wordless, eyes wide, minds gone. If Kestrel was sent into the mines underground, she couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t lose her sense of self along the way.
* * *
One night, she managed to avoid consuming anything before being locked in her cell. She regretted it. She shook with hunger and fatigue, yet nothing could make her sleep. She felt the dirt floor beneath the holes in her shoes. The air was chilly and damp. She missed the velvet warmth of her nighttime drug. It always swaddled her thickly. It smothered her to sleep. She’d grown to like that.
Kestrel knew that she was forgetting things. It was horribly unsettling, like walking down a staircase in the dark, hand on the rail, and then the rail vanished and she held nothing but air. Try as she might, Kestrel couldn’t remember the name of her horse in Herran. She knew that she had loved Enai, her Herrani nurse, and that Enai had died, but Kestrel couldn’t remember how she’d died. When Kestrel had first come to the camp, she’d had the idea of searching the prisoners for the face of someone she knew (a disgraced senator, wrongfully convicted of selling black powder to the east, had been sent here last autumn), but she found that she didn’t recognize anyone and wasn’t sure if that was because she knew no one here, or if she did and had simply forgotten his features.
Kestrel coughed. The sound rattled in her lungs.
That night, Kestrel pushed away thoughts of Arin and her father. She tried to remember Verex instead. When she’d first met the prince she’d agreed to marry, she’d thought him weak. Petty, childish. She’d been wrong.
He hadn’t loved her. She hadn’t loved him. Yet they’d cared for each other, and Kestrel remembered how he’d set a soft black puppy into her hands. No one had given her such a gift. He’d made her laugh. That, too, was a gift.
Verex was probably in the southern isles now, pretending to be on a romantic excursion with her.
Maybe you think that I can’t make you vanish, that the court will ask too many questions the emperor had said as the captain of his guard had held Kestrel and the sour scent of terror rose off her skin. Her father had watched from the other side of the room. This is the tale I’ll tell. The prince and his bride were so consumed by love that they married in secret and slipped away to the southern isles.
Verex would obey the emperor. He knew what happened to people who didn’t.
The emperor had whispered, After some time—a month? two?—news will come that you’ve sickened. A rare disease that even my physician can’t cure. As far as the empire is concerned, you’ll be dead. You’ll be mourned.
Her father’s face hadn’t changed. Something fractured inside Kestrel to remember this.
She looked out the bars of her cell but saw only the dark hallway. She wished she could see the sky. She hugged her arms to her.
If she’d been smart, she would have married Verex. Or she would have married no one and joined the military like her father had always wanted. Kestrel tipped her head back against the stone wall with its cushion of mold. Her body shuddered. She knew that this wasn’t just from cold or hunger. It was withdrawal. She craved her nighttime drug.
But it wasn’t simply withdrawal, either, that racked her limbs. It was grief. It was the horror of someone who’d been dealt a winning hand, had bet her life on the game, and then proceeded (deliberately?) to lose.
* * *
The next night, Kestrel ate and drank everything she was given.
“Good girl,” said the silver-haired guard. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. I’ve seen you spill your soup and pretend to drink from a cup. This way”—the woman pointed at Kestrel’s empty bowl—“is better, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kestrel said, and was tempted to believe it.
* * *
She woke to see, in the weak dawn light that filtered from the corridor through the bars to her cell, that she had been drawing in the dirt floor. She jerked upright.
One vertical line, four wings. A moth.
She had no memory of doing this. This was bad. Worse: maybe soon she might not even understand what such a drawing meant. She traced the moth. She must’ve sketched it last night with her fingers. Now they were trembling. Crumbs of dirt shifted beneath her touch.
This is me, she reminded herself. I am the Moth.
She’d betrayed her country because she’d believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?
He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choices. It was unfair to blame him.
But she wanted to.
* * *
It occurred to Kestrel that her moods weren’t her own.
She wondered if she’d feel so desolate and alone if she weren’t constantly drugged. In the morning at the mines, when she was a tireless giant and prying sulfur blocks from the ground was an obsession pushed into her by the drug, she forgot how she felt. The worries about whether what she felt was real were far away.
Yet at night before sleep, she knew that her darker emotions, the ones that curled inside her heart and ate away at it, were the only ones she could trust were true.
* * *
One day, something was different. The air—hazy and chilled, as usual—seemed to buzz with tension.
It came from the guards. Kestrel listened to them as she filled her baskets.
Someone was coming. There was to be an inspection.
Kestrel’s fast heart picked up even more speed. She discovered that she had not, in fact, lost hope that Arin had received her moth. She hadn’t stopped believing that he would come. Hope exploded inside her. It ran through her veins like liquid sunlight.
* * *
It wasn’t him.
If Kestrel had been herself, she would have known from the moment she’d heard about an inspection that it couldn’t be Arin, pretending to have come in some official imperial capacity to inspect the work camp.
What an idiotic, painful idea.
Arin was visibly Herrani—dark-haired, gray-eyed—and scarred in a way that announced his identity to anyone who cared to know it. If he’d received her message, and if he’d understood it, and if he came (she was beginning to despise herself for even contemplating such implausible ifs), every Valorian guard in the camp would arrest him, or worse.
The inspection was just an inspection. From the prison yard that evening, Kestrel saw the elderly man who wore a jacket with a senator’s knot tied at the shoulder. He chatted with the guards. Kestrel winnowed through the prisoners, who milled aimlessly in the yard after a full day’s work, the morning drug still jangling inside their veins as it did in hers. Kestrel tried to get close to the senator. Maybe she could get word to her father. If he knew how she suffered, how she was losing pieces of herself, he would change his mind. He would intervene.
The senator’s eyes snapped to Kestrel. She stood only a few feet away. “Guard,” he said to the woman who’d cut Kestrel’s skirts on the first day. “Keep your prisoners in line.”
The woman laid a heavy hand on Kestrel’s shoulder. The weight settled, gripping hard.
“Time for dinner,” the guard said.
Kestrel thought of the drug in the soup and longed for it. She let herself be led away.
Her father knew full well what the prison camp was like. He was General Trajan, the highest-ranking Valorian save the emperor and his son. He knew about his country’s assets and weaknesses—and the camp was a huge asset. Its sulfur was used to make black powder.
Even if the general didn’t know the details of how the camp was run, what did it matter? He’d given her letter to the emperor. She’d heard his heart thump calmly as she’d wept against his chest. It had beaten like a perfectly wound clock.
* * *
Someone was stabbing her. Kestrel opened her eyes. She saw nothing but the low black ceiling of her cell.
Another prod against her ribs, harder.
A stick?
Kestrel climbed out of gooey sleep. Slowly—it hurt to move, she was a tangle of bones and bruises and blue rags—she pulled herself up into a sitting position.
“Good,” came a voice from the hallway, clearly relieved. “We don’t have much time.”
Kestrel shifted toward the bars. There was no torchlight in the hallway, but it never got fully dark this far north, even in the dead of night. She could make out the senator, who pulled his cane back through the bars.
“My father sent you.” Joy rushed through her, popping and sparkling all over her skin. She could taste her tears. They ran freely down her face.
The senator gave her a nervous smile. “No, Prince Verex did.” He held out something small.
Kestrel kept crying, differently now.
“Shh. I can’t be caught helping you. You know what would happen to me if I were caught.” In his hand was a key. She took it. “This is for the gate.”
“Let me out, take me with you, please.”
“I can’t.” His whisper was anxious. “I don’t have the key to your cell. And you must wait until at least several days after I’ve left. Your escape can’t be tied to me. Do you understand? You’d ruin me.”
Kestrel nodded. She’d agree to anything he said, if only he wouldn’t leave her.
He was already backing away from her cell. “Promise.”
She wanted to scream at him to stop, she wanted to grab him through the bars and make him stay, make him get her out now. But she heard herself say, “I promise,” and then he was gone.
She sat for a long time looking at the key on her palm. She thought about Verex. Her fingers curled around the key. She dug a hole in the dirt and buried it.
Curling up with her hands beneath her cheek, she rested her head right above the buried key. She tucked her knees in close and toyed with the knots that bound her cut dress to her legs. Kestrel’s mind, though still sticky and slow, began to work. She didn’t sleep. She began to plan—a real plan, this time—and as she arranged the different possibilities there was a part of her that reached for Verex in her mind. She embraced her friend. She thanked him. She dropped her head to his shoulder, breathing deeply. She was strong now, she told him. She could do this. She could do it because she knew that she hadn’t been forgotten.
* * *
The senator left. There were several lean, thirsty days. Once Kestrel caught the guard in charge of the women prisoners watching as she spilled her drugged water to the dirt, but the guard just gave her the sort of look a mother gives a misbehaving child. Nothing was said.
It worried Kestrel to grow weaker than she already was. She wasn’t sure how she’d survive the tundra in her condition. But she needed to keep her wits about her. She was lucky it was summer. The tundra was brimming with fresh water. It was full of life. She could raid birds’ nests. Eat moss. She could avoid the wolves. She could do anything, as long as she got out of here.
Her body didn’t like being weaned off the drugs. She shook. Worse, she craved the nighttime drug. In the morning, it wasn’t so hard to pretend to eat and drink, but at twilight she wanted to gulp everything down. Even the thought of it made her throat dry with desire.
* * *
She waited as long as she could for the senator’s sake. One warm night in her cell, she untied two lengths of rope from around her legs. She adjusted her makeshift trousers, which were held together with the remaining knots the guard had tied on Kestrel’s first day in the camp. The trousers looked more or less the same as they had before.
Kestrel knotted her two pieces of rope together. She tied them with the strongest knot her father had taught her to make. She tugged at the new length—about as long as four of her hands, from fingertips to wrist. It held. She curled it up and shoved it down her dress.
Tomorrow would be the day.
* * *
Kestrel made her move after the prisoners returned from the mines.
In the fuzzy, greenish twilight, Kestrel pretended to take her meal. Her heartbeat still held a trace of the morning drug; it tripped over itself. Then it seemed to steady, pulse strong. Kestrel should have been nervous, but she wasn’t. She was sure. This would work. She knew that it would.
The silver-braided guard led Kestrel and the other female prisoners into their block of cells. They turned down Kestrel’s hallway. Unseen, Kestrel slipped the knotted rope from her dress. She made a fist around it and let that fist rest against her thigh in the shadows. The guard imprisoned women one by one. Then, her back turned, she stood before Kestrel’s cell and unlocked it.
Kestrel came up behind her, rope stretched taut between her hands. The rope went down over the woman’s head and tightened around her throat.
The woman thrashed. Kestrel had the wild thought of having caught an enormous fish. She clung hard, ignoring the wheezing. Even though she was rammed back against a wall, she didn’t let go. She tightened the rope until the woman slumped and collapsed.
Kestrel ran into her cell and feverishly dug up the key to the gate. When she came back into the hallway and saw the woman on the floor, the cell door key having fallen from her hand, she registered the other prisoners, standing where they had been, their faces blank but their bodies uncertain, fingers twitching at their sides. They were aware enough to know that this was not how evenings went. None of the women, though, seemed to know what to do about it.
“Come with me,” Kestrel said to them, though this offer was foolish enough to border on suicidal. How would she get them to the gate without being noticed? She couldn’t save the entire camp. How would they survive on the tundra, and not be caught? But … “Come with me,” she said again. She moved back down the hallway, toward the exit. She beckoned them after her. They stood still. When Kestrel took a woman’s hand, it was snatched back.
Finally, Kestrel picked up the cell door key that had fallen to the ground and pressed it into a prisoner’s hand. The fingers stayed loose. The key dropped.
Frustration surged through Kestrel—and relief, and shame at her relief. She wanted to apologize. Yet she wanted most of all to live, and she knew—the knowledge was sudden, lancing, sharp—that if she didn’t leave now, she would die here.
Kestrel clutched the gate key. “I’ll leave the gate open,” she promised.
No one replied.
She turned and ran.
* * *
It wasn’t dark enough. She cursed the greenish sky. Someone was going to spy her shadow, creeping along the outside wall of her prison block.
But no one did. The windows of the guards’ barracks burned brightly. She heard laughter. She saw one lone guard by the gate. The young man was leaning lazily against the bars.
Still crouched in the shadow of the prison barracks, Kestrel shifted the heavy key in her palm, its jagged teeth pointing out.
The guard at the gate shifted. She thought she saw him close his eyes as he sighed and settled into a more comfortable position.
Swiftly, her tattered shoes silent over the ground, Kestrel sped toward him. She swung her fist with the key at his head.
* * *
He lay in a heap at her feet, his temple bleeding. Kestrel fumbled with the key, her breath loud, gasping. It wasn’t until she moved to set the key into the gate that she thought of the possibility that it was the wrong key, that she had been tricked, or Verex had, or the senator.
Horror spiked through her. But the key went in smoothly and it turned, making no more sound than a knife in butter.
A giddy rush. Her heart soaring in her chest. Her ribs spread wide with relief. A laughing breath.
She pushed the gate open. She slipped out onto the tundra, stealthy at first, then running as fast as a deer.
She was free.
* * *
Her foot plunged into a puddle. The ground was soggy, the vegetation short and shrubby. Little cover. Nowhere to hide. She was too exposed. Her breath rasped. Her heart faltered. Her legs were hot and thick and slow.
Then: horses.
A sob of fear burst past her lips. She heard them behind her. Fanned out wide. Galloping. A hunt.
A shout. She’d been seen.
Little rabbit, little fox.
Run.
She fled. She couldn’t really see where she was going, couldn’t look back. Gasps tore at her throat. She stumbled, nearly fell, forced herself forward. She heard the horses stop and that was worse, because the guards must be dismounting now, they were close, and she didn’t want to know this. It could not be over.
But someone caught her from behind. Pitched her down. She screamed against the wet earth.
* * *
She was dragged back inside the prison gate. She refused to walk. They pulled her through the mud and then finally carried her.
As on her first day in the camp, she was brought before the silver-braided woman. A thin purple welt cut across the woman’s throat. Kestrel should have killed her. She should have locked all the women prisoners in their cells. Her escape had been too quickly discovered. She hadn’t had enough of a head start. Yet another mistake.
“I told you that if you behaved, no one would hurt you,” the woman said. She unhooked the whip from her belt.
“No.” Kestrel shrank. “Please. I won’t do it again.”
“I know you won’t.” The woman shook the looped whip. It snapped out loose at her thigh.
“That makes no sense.” Kestrel’s voice got threaded and high. “I won’t be able to work if you do that.”
“Not at first. But afterward I think you’ll work much better.”
“No. Please. Why punish me if I won’t remember it? I won’t, I’ll be just like the other prisoners, I’ll forget it, I’ll forget everything.”
“You’ll remember long enough.”
Kestrel twisted wildly, but hands were already opening the back of her dress, she was being turned around, pushed up against the gate, tied to the bars. The wind whispered across her bare back.
I have been whipped before, she heard the memory of Arin’s voice. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?
Kestrel strained against her bonds, terrified.
“Princess,” said the guard behind her.
Kestrel’s muscles went tight. Her shoulders hunched. She couldn’t breathe.
“Every new prisoner shines with a little light,” the guard said. “Your light happens to shine brighter. It’s best for everyone if it goes out.”
Kestrel pressed her forehead against the bars. She stared at the tundra. Her breath was coming again now. Hard and fast.
There was a sharp, whistling sound like a bird taking off.
The whip came down. It carved into her. Something wet ran down her ribs.
She wasn’t brave. She could hear herself as it continued. She wasn’t anything she recognized.
* * *
It used to be that Kestrel would treasure the memory of Arin singing to her. She’d worry that she’d somehow forget it. The sliding low notes. The sweet intervals, or the way he’d sustain a long line, and how she loved the sound of him taking a breath as much as she did the way he could hold a musical phrase aloft until it ended exactly where it should.
But after the guards untied her from the gate, when her back was on fire and she couldn’t walk and her bones were a trembling liquid, she looked at the cup in the woman’s hand. Kestrel reached for it. She begged to drink.
The cup was set to her lips. She caught the silvery scent of the nighttime drug. The thought of becoming just like the other prisoners no longer seemed so bad.
It would be a blessing to forget.
After all, what was there to remember?
Someone she never could have had. Friends dead or gone. A father who did not love her.
The cup tipped. Water ran over her tongue, cool and delicious. She forgot the pain, forgot where she was, forgot who she’d been, forgot that she had ever been afraid of forgetting.