UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

4

BOOTS POUND ACROSS the room. The curtain flashes open as Finn and I leap, dropping face-first off the balcony and into the cool night.

“Winterians!” Herod screams. “Lock it down now!”

In the seconds of free falling before I hit the ground, I find myself faced with two options. Continue my fall, drop into a roll on the street, and make all haste out of Lynia on the hope that we can get back in later, or cling to the building and find a way inside. Key or not, we’re still so close to the locket half that something as small as a jagged piece of metal shouldn’t stop us. But the plan was that if either of us ran into trouble, Finn and I were to regroup outside of the city. If we leave now though, getting back in will be impossible. They’ll move the locket half without hesitation, and we’ll be back where we started.

My body makes the decision before I do. The rock wall shreds my fingers as I scramble against it, and two windowsills fly past before I find purchase on one, body jerking to a halt, wrists screaming at having to support my weight so abruptly. I flail, arrows barely grazing my kicking legs and straining arms as I scramble against the rock, searching for footholds, and use a few chipped pieces of mortar to pull myself up and over the windowsill.

The window pops inward and I tumble inside, blinking in the darkness until my vision adjusts. Please don’t let this room be anything with soldiers inside. Maybe a kitchen, or a nice cozy bedchamber, or—I look around wildly—a storage room. It’s a storage room, empty but for stacks of shadowed crates in the narrow, lightless space. Perfect.

Outside, Herod’s voice carries, screaming about Lynia’s failures. I peek over the windowsill and spot Finn’s plump shadow skirting into an alley. He pauses, face caught in a ray of moonlight as he scans the area. He doesn’t see me, and I don’t want to draw any Spring attention by waving. He’ll go back to camp now, I know—another of our protocols. If one of us goes missing, the other is to leave immediately.

Before I realize the full extent of what I’ve done, how alone I am now, Finn’s gone. He’ll get back to camp and tell Sir I vanished in the chaos, and Sir will growl something about how he never should have let me go in the first place.

I have to prove him wrong.

My arms are too rubbery from my windowsill catch to throw my chakram, so I settle for the curved knives hidden in my boots. One in each hand, I creep across the narrow storage room. The door pops open easily enough and I fly out, knives ready, heart racing.

But the hall is empty, lit only by a few widely spaced sconces on the walls. The floor slopes up to the right and down to the left. I run to the left, the sounds of chaotic anger closing in on me from above. No doubt Herod’s rushing down the Keep, shouting to the men below that I’m coming. Too bad I’ll beat him there.

A few stories later, I stumble out of the wrapping hall into the center receiving room, a grand affair draped in gray stone and heavy green curtains. The late night works in my favor—there are no men here. They’re all with the city master.

Herod’s shouts echo from up the hall, closer and closer. I scan the room, my pounding pulse choking any air from getting into my lungs, leaving me gasping as I survey each corner. A door nearly three stories tall shoots into the air on my left—the exit, most likely. I do a quick count—four other doors branch off of the room, two closed, two open. The two open ones show a long dining room and a small, dark kitchen. That leaves the two closed doors.

I slide one of my knives into my sleeve and attack the first door. It pops open without a fight and I stumble into … somewhere really, really bad.

To my left and right stretch two long rows of cots, most filled with the lumpy bulks of sleeping soldiers. A barracks for the Keep’s guards. Terror makes sweat slick down my back, candlelight pouring in behind me from the chandelier that hangs over the center receiving room, and I chirp in surprise, then immediately smack my hand over my mouth. No one moves for a moment, and just when I think I might get by, Herod’s shout barrels into me, only a story or two above.

“To arms!” he cries, and that’s enough to send every sleeping soldier into instant readiness, whipping to their feet and scrambling for weapons.

I grab the door, yank it closed, and sprint for the other closed door. This is close, too close, and by the time the soldiers in the barracks open their door, I’m shaking the last closed door—locked—and spitting every curse I’ve ever heard.

“Snow and ice and frost above.” Luckily Sir likes to test Mather and me with inane challenges like Pick the lock on this chest, your supper’s inside. His tests and the finger-length hook-pick I keep in my hair finally prove useful, though I certainly don’t plan on telling him that. I tuck one of my knives under my arm and busy myself with the lock.

The soldiers stumble out of their room. Herod draws closer. The lock doesn’t budge, whether because I’m too twitchy or my hands are slick with sweat or I just need to practice more lock-picking. My chances of making it out of this room shrink with each breath I take, each strangled dance of my heart as it sputters against the anxiety filling my body.

“Who needs a key?” I growl as a I rear back and hurl all of my weight into kicking through the lock. It breaks open, sending the door thudding against the wall. A set of stairs curls downward with sconces lighting the way.

“Stop!”

I whirl. Herod stomps into the hall and his lumbering bulk freezes across the room. Such a perfect chakram shot; damn my shaky arms. But soldiers fill up the center, most half dressed, clutching weapons and blinking away the blur of sleep. Too many to take all at once.

Herod glares at me and his face reddens. “Winterian!”

I slam the door behind me, but my kick broke the lock so the door refuses to close. Though it means I’ll lose one of my knives, I jam it as hard as I can through the lock and into the wooden frame. It’ll hold enough to give me a better lead.

The stairs get slick the deeper I go, the walls coated in what smells like donkey waste. This isn’t just a cellar, and on a deep inhale, I realize exactly where I’m going, where they hid the locket half: the sewers. Oh, fun.

A few stifled breaths later, the sound of gruff voices echoes up at me. I test my arms—not quite as shaky—and draw out my chakram, tightening my hand around the familiar, worn handle.

“Hurry! There’s a ruckus above. Best we move quickly.”

I stop at the last turn in the staircase, the glow of lantern light strong. They’re close. Chakram-range close. My favorite kind.

“I’m not touching that thing. You know what it is! You pick it up.”

The other man growls. “I’m your superior! I order you to pick up the damn locket piece.”

I smile. There’s my cue. “Now, boys, no need to argue. I’ll pick it up.”

I emerge from the staircase with my chakram wound back, ready to soar through the air. We are indeed in a sewer—a tunnel stretches around me, holding a river of murky waste lined with foot-high walkways on each side. One man and a few horses wait on the farthest walkway, another man stands ankle deep in Lynia’s filth. Very few men, but any more would draw too much attention, and we’ve moved in on this location so quickly, Angra hasn’t had time to do more than send Herod here.

Behind the men, one of the wall’s bricks has been removed and in the hole, illuminated by a few lanterns, shines a blue box. Relief fills me up. After years of searching, half of the locket is finally within reach.

I aim my chakram at the captain, the one with his boots mucked up with sewer gunk. His eyes swim over me. “The Winterians are sending girls to do their dirty work now?” he sneers. “Why don’t you put that thing down before someone gets hurt?”

I push out my bottom lip and widen my eyes. “This?” I lower the chakram. It’s now aimed at the captain’s left thigh. “They gave it to me and said throw! I don’t even know how it works—”

The soldiers jeer, a deep-throated chuckle that says this is a fight they’re sure they’ll win. I let the chakram fly as the captain moves forward, my body bending into an arch. The chakram soars through the sewer, slices clean through the captain’s leg, and continues its spin back to me in one elegant circle of purpose. He screams and drops into the sewage, grabbing his thigh like, well, like I just sliced through it.

“Oh.” I run one hand down the flat side of the blade. “That’s how it works.”

The other soldier eyes me from the opposite walkway, his hands out like he might start dancing. Or running. Probably the more likely option. But then he smiles, and his shift from scared to amused is so abrupt that a flicker of disquiet tightens in my stomach.

Magic.

The word flies through my mind like it was there all along, a quiet pulse of knowledge that told me everything felt off. Wrong. And it was wrong, all of it, because the soldier drops his arms and pulls his shoulders up straight, his body morphing before me. Bones cracking and reforming, muscles stretching with a sickening rip. The soldier isn’t a soldier, at least not a nameless, nothing soldier, and the captain I shot laughs from his still-fetal position, his anticipation laced with pain.

That wasn’t Herod earlier. Of course it wasn’t. Herod wouldn’t waste his time mingling with the city master; he would be here, with the locket half, waiting to intercept thieves.

Herod finishes transforming until the only thing light about him is his golden hair, green eyes, and pale skin—the rest of him is shadow, a testament to his master’s evil. He’s huge too, his head nearly brushing the ceiling, and thick in the shoulders, the body of someone who was born holding a sword. Which does not sound like a fun birth for his mother.

I lean forward to launch my chakram but Herod lunges off the platform, takes one step through the sewer gunk, and throws his body at my knees. I trip off the walkway and go down in the middle of the sewage, my breath knocked out by both Herod’s body and the sudden immersion in feces. He grabs the chakram and slides it onto the walkway, out of reach, before pinning my arms above my head in a painful twist, sneering at me as feet thunder down the staircase. The not-Herod and his men have broken through the door.

This could have gone better.

I wiggle in his hands, something in my pocket digging into my hip—a weapon? No—Mather’s lapis lazuli ball. The only thing it’s good for now is as a painful reminder of Mather, of Winter, of how he’ll never forgive himself if anything happens to me.

Herod’s fingers tighten around my arms and I flinch. His grip is just above my one remaining weapon—the knife in my sleeve.

“Sir!” A soldier rushes into the sewer. It’s the not-Herod, slowly morphing back into his own form. I’ve heard stories of the magic Angra uses his conduit for, beyond controlling his people. Tales whispered when people returned from missions in bloody tangles of broken limbs, memories shared in the heat of fever and agony. Angra uses his magic to induce visions so real they drive his people mad, to snap Spring traitors’ bones and tear out organs while his people still live, and for transformations like this one.

As Herod drags me up, the only solace I find is that both of us are covered in sewage.

“Bind her. We’re taking her to Angra,” he orders, and steps way too close to me as a soldier loops rope around my wrists. “Scared, soldier-girl?”

I force myself to look him in the eye. I don’t have the luxury of fear. When we’re at camp in the safety of our tents and Sir explains all kinds of horrific possible deaths to me, I can’t be afraid. Fear is a seed that, once planted, never stops growing.

But I was there when Gregg, one of our soldiers, stumbled back into camp six years ago. He and his wife, Crystalla, had been captured while on a mission in Abril and thrown into the nearest work camp. Gregg told us about it, babbling in the grip of madness about the toiling work, the decrepit living conditions—and the brutal, inhuman way Angra made Herod kill Crystalla. Gregg barely escaped with his life, and even that he lost a day later, when the injuries Herod gave him proved too much for his body to handle.

A tremor runs through me, and I know Herod saw it. That seed of fear.

I cannot die like Crystalla.

A soldier lifts me onto a horse and ties my wrists to the saddle. Hope flutters in my chest—they didn’t check me for weapons. Whether because of the chaos of my intrusion or the need to get the locket half out of Lynia as fast as possible, I don’t know—but I still have my knife. I still have a chance.

Herod eases the locket box from the hole and holds it for a moment, looking up at me. That face, that mocking twitch around his lips—this is the monster in Gregg’s story, the one Angra uses to destroy his enemies in the most brutal ways possible. Angra doesn’t like getting his hands dirty, not when he can watch as his puppets dance around in such glorious shows by using his Royal Conduit to control them. Why be the dog when you can be the master?

Herod tucks the box into the saddlebag nearest me. Before he mounts, he grabs my chakram off the walkway, tossing it between his hands and eyeing me with that taunting sneer. He leaps onto his stallion and slides the chakram into the saddlebag on the other side of his horse. There’s no way I can get it now.

“You try to escape and you’ll be dead long before we reach Abril,” he warns.

I suck in a breath, twisting my wrists as imperceptibly as I can until my knife drops into my palm. “And I’ll kill you before all of this is over.”

Herod smiles, the bloodlust on his face glowing more strongly. Nausea twists my stomach in unrelenting knots—he likes when I fight back. Something to keep in mind.

With a shout, Herod tells the men to leave. He grabs my horse’s reins and pulls me forward, my leg bumping against his saddlebag. I can feel it, the small square box pressing into my shin. The only thing separating it from me is a layer of leather.

I need to keep him distracted, focusing on body parts other than my hands.

“How are they?” The question is quick and sharp. They, the Winterians in the camps.

I swallow. Two of the ropes are cut. One more …

Herod turns to me. He smirks, pulls my horse close so that I’m hip to hip with him. “The backbone of the Spring Kingdom. Though you Winterians die too quickly for my taste.”

A few more fibers cut, and the rope falls off my wrists. I fight the urge to stretch my poor, abused arms and concentrate on Herod, on letting him think I’m resigned to my fate.

I turn to him, meet his eyes, and lean a little like I’m sliding toward him in my saddle. “Well, there’s one Winterian I know who isn’t dying. At all. And he’s going to destroy Angra.”

Herod does exactly what I hoped he’d do: he lets go of my horse’s reins long enough to slap me. The slap yanks my hand up, the hand that I had managed to slide into his saddlebag and wrap around the small blue box.

I kick my horse, hard, and launch down the sewer’s walkway, all so fast that Herod still has his hand in the air before he realizes I’m free—and I’ve got the locket half.

“No!” he screams, gravelly voice reverberating off the stone walls.

I urge my horse on, galloping beside the muck of the sewer until we escape into darkness, out of the lantern light. Arrows fly past but smack off the stone, lost without something to aim at. Hooves pound behind me, shouts and curses follow, and I make a mental note to always, always put a knife in my sleeve when I go on missions.

The horse seems to know where he’s going, so I just urge him faster. Surely he’s as repulsed as I am by the stench and remembers how he got down here—too bad his new rider is covered in sewage. I gag, finally calm enough to feel the stick of feces all over me.

I shift on the reins, keeping my other hand pressed so tightly to my stomach that tomorrow I’ll have a box-shaped bruise there. A mark of my heroics—Meira, the first soldier to retrieve half of Winter’s locket. A well of pride springs in me, and I hold on to the feeling as tightly as I clutch the box.

The horse curves around one more turn and we fly up to the surface. The cool, fresh night air makes me smile and I kick the horse faster, faster. Not quite free yet.

We’re only seconds from the north gate when the guards stationed there realize what’s happening. They scramble for the lever that will close the iron bars over me, but it’s too late—I push the horse on, throwing a glance at the guard who first stopped me on my way in. His eyes widen with recognition, so I rip off the black cap that covered my hair as I whizz past, galloping across the bridge over the Feni River. White strands stream around me, some matted with sewer muck, but most tossing in the wind. A living snowstorm, a vibrant white reminder that they haven’t enslaved every Winterian. Some of us are still alive. Some of us are still free.

And some of us are half a locket closer to taking back our kingdom.