Cassius was accustomed to hearing sirens. They sounded when he ate, when he worked, when he slept—or tried to. Sometimes he wondered if the Stormlord had some untold-of magic that allowed him to see into Cassius’s mind, to know when he was the most distracted or vulnerable, because that was always when his storms came calling. It would be more realistic for him to move his living quarters into the dome itself so that he had quicker access to the skies.
But Cassius was a selfish man. He had never denied that.
So like many times before, he was in his office, the princess’s former study, when this siren sounded. He had recently finished dispensing a thunderstorm, a mere annoyance more than anything, and had kicked off his boots and coat to relax for however long he could.
Never long, not anymore. He was so damned tired.
But when the siren sounded, it took even Cassius a few moments to realize that this siren had nothing to do with tempests.
He stood abruptly from his desk, knocking over a bottle of ink in the process. Black liquid spread across his papers like unholy blood, but there was no time to stop it, not even time to be frustrated with himself for his clumsiness.
They were under attack.
Not by storms, but by men.
He hastily pulled on his boots, inserting a spare knife into each one, then grabbed his sword. By the time he entered the main hallway, the edge had left his movements and his steps had grown into a sprawling stalk. This was where he thrived. Give a predator prey and he came alive, no matter how close to death he might feel. His vision sharpened, the exhaustion disappeared, and a hunger rose from deep in his gut.
A fight was exactly what he needed—and not with some faraway magic, but up close, hand to hand, face-to-face, blood drawn. He needed to feel victory. Needed to serve up a defeat that was permanent.
When men died, they stayed that way, unlike the enemies he normally fought.
The hallway swarmed with soldiers, all clearly taken by the chaos. He grabbed the highest-ranking officer he recognized and spat, “Tell me what you know.”
“A breach, sir. The main gate.”
Bleeding skies. How had they gotten through the main gate without anyone noticing?
“Where is the fighting located?”
“We don’t know, sir.”
Cassius froze, his eyes narrowing, and his jaw went tight. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“We have not found the intruders.”
His heart slowed, forgoing its beats as his mind raced—not in anxiety, but in deference, as if one knew the other was more needed. What would intruders want? Where would they go? What would their goals be?
One blink, and he knew.
“I want soldiers on every member of the royal family, now.” He was surprised there had not been an attempt at overthrowing them before now, frankly. “Once my family is protected, then every other remaining soldier is to scour this palace until the intruders are found, do you understand?”
An affirmative chorus rang out from the soldiers in blue, and then everyone was in motion, chattering about who would be seeking out his father, brother, and mother. The room emptied quickly of everyone except Cassius and a handful of soldiers who stood behind him.
“I did not mean me,” he growled.
The soldiers hesitated still.
“Go!” he barked. “Find them. Now.”
Then, blessedly, he was left alone, the siren still wailing on occasion, the only company for his scattered thoughts.
He should have gone after them, should have put himself in the thick of things, but instead he turned and headed back the way he came, down the royal wing where the Pavan family had stayed.
He was the only Locke to call this wing home. He was not certain why, but he bypassed his office and went for the door at the very end of the hall, the queen’s rooms. He listened for a moment, but heard nothing inside. He knocked. Again, he could not say why. The woman rarely ever woke, not since his father had started bribing the nurse to add something extra to her tea.
But sometimes when he looked at this door, he had this feeling in his stomach that he didn’t recognize, a feeling he didn’t know how to name. And it told him to knock before he went inside. When no answer came, he turned the knob and entered on his own. First, his eyes saw bare ankles, and followed them to the unconscious form of the nurse who cared for the queen. Her arms were askew in front of her, and her face lax, but a quick press of his fingers to her neck told him she was not dead. He lifted his eyes farther and found only rumpled sheets where the queen should have been.
Something in him rose high, pressing right under his skin, the part of him that liked to hunt and hurt.
He had been just down the hallway. Had someone managed to steal the old queen right from under his nose? Or did he somehow have even less knowledge and control than he thought? Could she have walked free herself somehow?
He had sent all those soldiers off searching and here was the breach right under his very eye. Where he slept and worked. Humiliation burned deep in his gut, and he charged toward the bed, pulling at the sheets as if he might find some clue there to how he had allowed such a blunder.
Could this be the Stormlord? Another prong in his plan? The meager resistance his brother had been cheerfully exterminating to impress their father? Or something else entirely? There were too many pieces on the board for him to win this game. The board was too damned big for him to even know what the game was sometimes.
Quickly, he searched the rest of the room, searching for any advantage, and he found it in the poorly closed balcony door. Outside, he discovered a peculiar crawling vine that had somehow made its way from the ground up to the queen’s balcony even though he had never seen it on any of his walks around the grounds. He touched the leaves, bright green and crisp—fresh. And something else about them—they were real, to be certain, but they hummed under his touch, as if they brimmed with something that was nearly familiar to him.
Cassius knew what he was seeing, knew it by heart from years of engrained warnings and fear. But his father had done such a thorough job of eradicating the practice and the people from Locke, it had often seemed more myth than malevolence.
But here before him was proof.
He rubbed a newly birthed leaf between the pads of his fingers, and plucked it free from the vine. He waited for it to wither or turn to dust, but it stayed—both a truth and a lie all at once.
There was a witch in Pavan.
And whoever they were, wherever they were, they had the Pavan queen.
There had been an itch somewhere beneath Kiran’s skin from the moment he’d left Aurora sprawled out and weeping before the palace gate, and he knew it would not go away until he saw her again. It distracted him throughout the entire mission, as they crept through the halls, each time they quietly dispatched an unsuspecting guard. He kept waiting for an attack to come out of nowhere, and for a sword to pierce him clean through, because he could do nothing but think of that look on her face. Try as he might to convince himself that he did not know this Aurora at all, he knew down to his bones that she had been terrified.
And he had left her there.
He hated himself for that almost as much as he hated her for lying, for making him believe something was possible when it wasn’t.
They had nearly reached the wing where the Locke family resided, and the group began to split apart, so that they could surround the wing and cut off escape.
He and Ransom had naturally been paired together, as they were the ones to initiate the next part of the plan. Zephyr and her lieutenant, Raquim, were the last pair to leave. She asked, “Ready?”
Kiran only nodded.
“This is important,” she added.
“This family killed my sister,” he snapped. “Trust me, I know the importance.”
She began to turn, looking satisfied, but then a loud, blaring siren cut through the air, shattering the stillness that had been their friend up until this point. A door swung open in the hallway beyond, then another, followed by a woman’s voice.
“Onto plan number two,” Ransom growled, ripping a glass jar from his utility belt and throwing it around the corner into the hallway where they hoped at least one royal family member would be. The shattering of glass was followed by a quiet whoosh of noise and the spread of moisture in the air. Kiran knew thick tendrils of fog were unfurling from the broken jar, spreading to consume the hallway.
Each of them reached for a small vial containing powdered fog Stormheart, and threw it back. The powder melted in seconds on Kiran’s tongue, tasting like some odd mix of mist and ash. Their supplies had been low, so they only had enough to give each member of the rebellion a small amount. It gave them a limited window of time during which they would be immune to the fog storm’s particularly potent effects of confusion and sedation.
Duke, the one member of their crew who had remained back at command for this mission, had been unable to say exactly how long they would have, so they needed to get in and out as quickly as possible. They had intended to use this method for escaping the palace. Now they would need to make it last through the capture too.
He and Ransom entered the now eerily clouded hallway with Zephyr, leaving Raquim out as a fail-safe in case something went wrong. Hopefully, the rest of their group would be making their way back too now that the plan had been upended. There were ten of them in all, and he thought they were likely to need every single hand to get out alive.
The first step into the fog was a leap of faith. Both Ransom and Zephyr held back a breath, but Kiran charged forward. He had lived his whole life running straight at danger, arms open wide. There had been a brief time there when he thought that would need to change, that he would need to find some other way to live. But now he knew better. This was who he was, who he would always be. The one who stepped forward first.
The fog parted around him, clinging to his shoulders, surrounding him. When he took a second step and then a third, he knew that the powder had done the trick. He waved his arms out in front of him, trying to push away as much of the dense cloud as he could, for it was hard to see anything at all. In fact, he didn’t even notice the broken jar until his boot crunched on top of it.
The noise brought Ransom to him, and Zephyr a few seconds after that.
“Come. We don’t have much time,” Zephyr murmured, pushing past him and taking the lead.
They came upon a few soldiers first, one still with his arms up, as if to protect his face from either the shattering glass or the incoming magic. He was not frozen, per se—more like he had forgotten the reason he had put his hands up in defense to begin with.
Of all the storms he had faced—twisters and firestorms and hurricanes—fog unnerved Kiran more than any other. He would rather die in a fiery blaze of chaos than waste away wandering under a storm’s enchantment, lost to himself. It was why it was one of the only affinities he had not sought for himself. When it came time to steal the heart of a storm, you were betting your heart was the stronger of the two. And he had always been willing to do that with the fiercest tempests from which others shied away. But to take the heart of a fog storm required strength of mind as well as heart. You had to not only empty yourself of the fear of death, but of the fear of living on, caught by the storm, a slow, torturous, forgotten death.
“Over here!” Zephyr yelled.
Kiran left his thoughts behind and followed her voice to find her kneeling by a middle-aged woman with honey-brown skin and expensive clothing, who was sprawled facedown on the floor. She appeared to have fallen in the chaos, and now she looked chillingly unaware, laid out that way, her eyes wide but unseeing.
“This is the queen. I would rather have one of the men, but she will do if we cannot find anyone else,” Zephyr said.
A lump rose in Kiran’s throat. He hated the Locke family, hated everything about them, and every single thing they stood for. But a woman? In all their planning for this mission, he had never imagined they would kidnap a woman, regardless of who she was. He glanced over at Ransom, and the hard set of his friend’s jaw told him that they shared the same thoughts.
“We’ll look for someone else,” Kiran said, immediately turning to search farther down the hallway. Ransom’s heavy footsteps followed behind.
“Wait!” Zephyr cried. “That siren had to be about us. It was not the usual storm signal. They will be searching for us. We have to go. Now.”
Neither hunter replied. They only kept trudging through the hallway until they reached the end. When they found no more enchanted victims waiting for them, the two looked at each other again, unsure what to do.
“Doors,” Ransom offered.
Kiran jumped on the suggestion, and they each took one side of the hallway, throwing open every door they passed.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
Kiran had just thrown open his fourth and final door when he heard a shout behind him, followed by a heavy crash. He spun fast to see Ransom heaving himself up off the floor, a broken piece of pottery smashed all around him. His attacker, a lean young man with curly black hair and skin just a shade darker than the queen’s, was frozen in place by the door, his face a mask of cruelty, teeth gritted in determination, as wisps of fog tangled around him in a slow, sly dance.
Zephyr appeared in the doorway, her expression grim. She lifted one arm and touched a claw on her gloved hand to the man’s cheek. “Casimir.” She tapped her claw twice, and dragged it down to his chin, leaving a pale line behind. “I watched from a nearby building when he had the Eye burned. I think he enjoyed it.” The man did little more than blink, his thoughts locked away somewhere inside by the fog storm’s magic, as Zephyr gripped his jaw hard and smiled. “You’ll do nicely, Casimir Locke.”
Aurora’s uneasiness grew with every empty hallway they traversed and each step that carried her farther away from her mother. Her heart beat a heavy repetition in her throat, making it difficult to swallow or breathe, let alone whisper the required directions to Jinx following alongside her.
“Wait,” she said, the words more like a gasp. They slowed to a stop as they neared the center of the palace. Through the next archway, they would be in the Great Dome, and it would be much harder to conceal their presence if any soldiers were about. The official entrance to the dungeons was where the dome met the south wing, where most of the military was housed and organized. But Aurora knew a second passage existed in the Hall of the Ancestors near the stairs that led up to the back of the ballroom. Neither seemed like a safe avenue, but they were the only options.
She checked her hood and mask, making certain she was as covered as possible, then she sidled closer to the archway. She could hear a commotion, shouting and the slamming of boots against the ground, and then … the clash of swords.
She hesitated. That had to be the rebellion. They’d been found, perhaps surrounded. Kiran could be in danger; Ransom too. Aurora took one step toward the fighting, but Jinx pulled hard on her elbow.
“No. They can handle themselves, and we need the diversion.”
Her friend was right, but the metallic clang of sword against sword reverberated inside Aurora’s skull, and she did not know how to walk away.
“What happens to the rebellion if you’re caught today?” Jinx asked. “Your mother will never be free, nor will your friend. You’ll be used as a pawn to quiet the malcontents, and—”
Aurora had heard enough. She never wanted to be anyone’s pawn, not ever again. So she ignored the pull she felt to the fighting at the front of the dome, and instead darted out from the archway and toward the servant’s halls used to serve the ballroom during large events.
Her shoulders bunched tight, and her head ached from her clenching teeth. She kept waiting for a disruptive noise, a loud voice, some signal that they’d been seen, that the fight had moved their way, but Jinx was right. The fighting gave them the perfect diversion. The more steps she took, the farther away the voices drifted, and soon she had rounded a corner and pushed through a door into the servant’s hallway. It too was empty, so she took the opportunity to run, covering the narrow, dimly lit space in a dozen long strides.
She must have held her breath nearly the entire way, because Aurora was dizzy by the time she stepped into the ornate hall that housed paintings and sculptures of her Stormling ancestors. There were two golden altars to the goddess on each side of the room, but they were small, and more like decorative antiques in comparison to the monstrously elaborate and expensive pieces that had been commissioned for her ancestors. Aurora fixed her eyes on the far altar, a tumble of confusing emotions sluicing through her belly at the sight.
She’d left this place so naive. And while she knew so much more now about the world than when she left, she was more confused than ever with regards to her thoughts on magic, and the goddess. She knew now that naivety of the world did not disappear with age, only the willingness to admit one’s own unknowing. If her magic revealed anything to her, it was that the world was far more complicated than anyone could possibly know, and it was only the truly naive who tried to pretend they understood it.
“This is … bleeding skies, Aurora. How rich are you?”
Aurora turned to find Jinx fixated on a painted and gold-filigreed statue of her mother. It was as tall as the room, high enough that her mother’s outstretched hand towered above their heads. It was her mother, yes, the same skyfire hair and tall build, but if her mother had been well enough to walk beside them, the statue would have dwarfed her too. None of these depictions were about truth; they were about power.
“You forget none of this belongs to me anymore,” Aurora answered simply, then she knelt by the altar of the goddess.
“Is now really the time?” Jinx asked. “To each his own, of course, but we’re not entirely out of danger here.”
The altar had a half-relief carving of the goddess. Her arms were the only thing fully sculpted, and they stretched out, holding a bowl meant to symbolize the day she poured out the tempests upon the earth. Aurora placed her hand flat in the bottom of the bowl, pushing down first. The arms did not budge, but when she placed a second hand in the bowl to push, the arms began to slowly lower until she heard a click, then Aurora pushed forward and the relief carving of the goddess slid back into the wall far enough that there was a gap to crawl past.
Jinx gave a low whistle. “You royals are too rich for your own good. But I must admit to being a fan of all the secret passages. Much better use of the coin than … that.” Jinx waved her hand vaguely in the direction of all the expensive statues and paintings.
Without replying, Aurora crawled past the goddess, and then waited in the dark tunnel for Jinx to do the same. When they were both inside, she pushed the goddess back into her rightful place, and heard a heavy clunk as the secret door closed behind them. In the dark, she rested her hand against the back of the altar and sent up something like a prayer, not to the goddess necessarily, but just outside herself.
Be safe. Please, please be safe.
A faint glow flicked over the stone walls when Jinx dug an eternal ember from a bag at her hip. “You must have had the most amazing childhood,” Jinx whispered, waiting for Aurora to take the lead.
After a few feet of crawling they were able to stand upright, and Aurora answered honestly. “I did not have much of a childhood at all.”
They continued on in silence for a few steps, but Jinx was never one to leave things alone.
“And who is Nova to you?”
Aurora sighed. “A friend. The only one I ever had really.”
“A princess with one friend? That’s not how I ever pictured it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You do know most little girls dream of a life like yours, don’t you? Myself included, once upon a time.”
Aurora swallowed something between a laugh and a cry. “I suppose we have that in common then, because I dreamed of a life like yours. Don’t misunderstand me, I know how blessed I was to grow up in a place like this, with food to eat and a safe bed to lay my head, and a mother who would protect me at all costs. But … there were costs. My brother, the original heir, died when I was a child. And when we realized that my magic was not coming, at least in the way we expected, I had to isolate myself in every way. Each word I spoke had to be turned over and over again in my mind before it could leave my lips, lest it give me away. I was a nervous, emotional child, especially after my brother died, and I—I could not be trusted to keep my own secret. So instead, it was me that had to be kept. Away from the world, from other people, including my one and only friend.”
“So that’s why you left.”
Aurora met Jinx’s eyes in the flickering ember light and nodded. “Part of it. There was also my looming marriage to Cassius Locke. It was the only way my mother could see for me to keep the throne and have a Stormling present to protect the city. But … he was cold and cruel. A life tied to him would have been like a life bound to the tempests we fight.”
“To hear Kiran talk of the Lockes, they’re like monsters.”
Aurora shrugged. “My mother kept me too sheltered to know much, but I learned enough to know they had a cruel edge I wanted no part in. With my secret, I felt very much like I was bleeding in a pool of sharks. Now I know they were even worse than I feared.”
“So that’s when you decided to kidnap yourself?”
“Nova helped me escape, even though she thought the idea was mad. She did not hesitate, despite the fact that I’d pulled away from her years before. Truly, I do not deserve her.”
Jinx said, “You don’t have to feel guilty for wanting to be free. It’s hard to live under the weight of that kind of secret. I left my home for a fresh start too.”
“Yes, but you did not leave an entire kingdom at the mercy of a carnivorous family and your best friend to take the fall for your disappearance.”
Jinx stopped asking questions after that. Either because she had the answers she wanted, or because the passageway began to turn in sharp circles as they wound down into the lowest levels of the palace. The air had grown cold and slightly sour by the time they reached the end of the passageway.
And it did in fact end. One minute, they were walking through the darkness with only the glow of the ember to help them, and the next they had come upon a brick wall that allowed them no way forward.
“Now what?” Jinx asked.
Aurora swallowed once, and then again, because she did not know. She knew the passageway existed, but she had never actually followed it all the way to its destination. Was it always like this? Or had the Lockes discovered it and cut it off to prevent infiltrations like the one she was attempting?
Aurora laid her palms flat against the brick and pushed, but nothing happened.
“Roar?” Jinx whispered.
Ignoring her friend, Aurora pushed again, harder this time, sliding her hands to different spots, searching for some weak or special area, but again, the wall did not budge. Her thoughts began to race inside her head, flipping and turning over on themselves, twisting until the inside of her mind felt loud and churning, like the rapids of a flooded river.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “I don’t know what to do next.” The words came out scraped and raw. She had to get Novaya out. She could not even fathom how long she had been locked away down here, could not bear to think of what she had endured, all for Aurora’s frivolous freedom.
Jinx, as always, was undeterred by the snag in their plan. She laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. “Let’s see what we have.” She too began to examine the wall, running her fingers across the bricks and along the grooves between them.
“It’s enchanted,” she murmured. “Like the front gate. It requires magic to open.”
Aurora’s eyes widened. That made sense. The purpose of this particular passageway was for use in the event of a hostile takeover. Should the ruling Stormling be locked away in the dungeon, they would have a built-in way of escape that would only work for them.
Quickly, she closed her eyes, calling up the skyfire storm in her chest, and slammed as much energy into the wall as she could. It shook, dust raining down around them, but it did not open.
Jinx pulled back, hissing, shaking out her hands. “Warn a witch next time before you go throwing around skyfire.”
Aurora might have mumbled an apology, but she was more focused on trying again. This time, the whole tunnel around them rattled and her hair rose up with the amount of electrical charge she funneled into the brick.
But still … nothing.
Aurora growled in frustration. “Goddess burn it. Why won’t it work?”
For a long moment, there was silence, then a voice came from the other side of the brick.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
Aurora knew immediately who it was. Relief surged through her so strong, she was nearly sick from it.
“Novaya? Is that you?”
There was no answer. Had there been a guard? Goddess, it was the dungeon—of course there was a guard. What if they’d just brought all the soldiers directly to them?
“Nova? Are you alone? Are you well? Please, please be well.”
This time the voice came back louder, and clearly shocked. “Aurora? It can’t be…”
“It is. Stand back. I’m getting you out.”
Aurora did not know how yet, but this wall would not stand between her and her friend. Nothing would.
“Maybe it’s not skyfire that unlocks it,” Jinx offered. “What other magic does your family have?”
Aurora frowned. “None that I can control.”
“Then it’s good that you’re not the only one on this crew with magic.”
Aurora gasped and spun around. The words hadn’t come from Jinx, and the two of them were no longer alone in the passageway. Leaning against the stone wall a few paces back was Sly, looking as though she’d been there all along.
“What are you doing here?” Aurora whispered.
“Following you,” Sly whispered back.
Jinx pierced the tense moment with a chuckle.
“How? You followed us the whole way, and only just now showed yourself? And we never noticed?”
Sly shrugged off the wall, her posture casual. “I might have lost track of you for a bit with that last secret passageway. But I figured it out eventually.” She clapped her hands together and continued, “Now, let’s see about getting past this wall.”