Amren was standing at the foot of my bed.
I jolted back, slamming into the headboard, blinded by the morning light blazing in, fumbling for a weapon, anything to use—
“No wonder you’re so thin if you vomit up your guts every night.” She sniffed, her lip curling. “You reek of it.”
The bedroom door was shut. Rhys had said no one entered without his permission, but—
She chucked something onto the bed. A little gold amulet of pearl and cloudy blue stone. “This got me out of the Prison. Wear it in, and they can never keep you.”
I didn’t touch the amulet.
“Allow me to make one thing clear,” Amren said, bracing both hands on the carved wooden footboard. “I do not give that amulet lightly. But you may borrow it, while you do what needs to be done, and return it to me when you are finished. If you keep it, I will find you, and the results won’t be pleasant. But it is yours to use in the Prison.”
By the time my fingers brushed the cool metal and stone, she’d walked out the door.
Rhys hadn’t been wrong about the firedrake comparison.
Rhys kept frowning at the amulet as we hiked the slope of the Prison, so steep that at times we had to crawl on our hands and knees. Higher and higher we climbed, and I drank from the countless little streams that gurgled through the bumps and hollows in the moss-and-grass slopes. All around the mist drifted by, whipped by the wind, whose hollow moaning drowned out our crunching footsteps.
When I caught Rhys looking at the necklace for the tenth time, I said, “What?”
“She gave you that.”
Not a question.
“It must be serious, then,” I said. “The risk with—”
“Don’t say anything you don’t want others hearing.” He pointed to the stone beneath us. “The inmates have nothing better to do than to listen through the earth and rock for gossip. They’ll sell any bit of information for food, sex, maybe a breath of air.”
I could do this; I could master this fear.
Amren had gotten out. And stayed out. And the amulet—it’d keep me free, too.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About yesterday.” I’d stayed in bed for hours, unable to move or think.
Rhys held out a hand to help me climb a particularly steep rock, easily hauling me up to where he perched at its top. It had been so long—too long—since I’d been outdoors, using my body, relying on it. My breathing was ragged, even with my new immortality. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “You’re here now.” But enough of a coward that I never would have gone without that amulet. He added with a wink, “I won’t dock your pay.”
I was too winded to even scowl. We climbed until the upper face of the mountain became a wall before us, nothing but grassy slopes sweeping behind, far below, to where they flowed to the restless gray sea. Rhys drew the sword from his back in a swift movement.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said.
“I’ve—never seen you with a weapon.” Aside from the dagger he’d grabbed to slit Amarantha’s throat at the end—to spare me from agony.
“Cassian would laugh himself hoarse hearing that. And then make me go into the sparring ring with him.”
“Can he beat you?”
“Hand-to-hand combat? Yes. He’d have to earn it for a change, but he’d win.” No arrogance, no pride. “Cassian is the best warrior I’ve encountered in any court, any land. He leads my armies because of it.”
I didn’t doubt his claim. And the other Illyrian … “Azriel—his hands. The scars, I mean,” I said. “Where did they come from?”
Rhys was quiet a moment. Then he said too softly, “His father had two legitimate sons, both older than Azriel. Both cruel and spoiled. They learned it from their mother, the lord’s wife. For the eleven years that Azriel lived in his father’s keep, she saw to it he was kept in a cell with no window, no light. They let him out for an hour every day—let him see his mother for an hour once a week. He wasn’t permitted to train, or fly, or any of the things his Illyrian instincts roared at him to do. When he was eight, his brothers decided it’d be fun to see what happened when you mixed an Illyrian’s quick healing gifts with oil—and fire. The warriors heard Azriel’s screaming. But not quick enough to save his hands.”
Nausea swamped me. But that still left him with three more years living with them. What other horrors had he endured before he was sent to that mountain-camp? “Were—were his brothers punished?”
Rhys’s face was as unfeeling as the rock and wind and sea around us as he said with lethal quiet, “Eventually.”
There was enough rawness in the words that I instead asked, “And Mor—what does she do for you?”
“Mor is who I’ll call in when the armies fail and Cassian and Azriel are both dead.”
My blood chilled. “So she’s supposed to wait until then?”
“No. As my Third, Mor is my … court overseer. She looks after the dynamics between the Court of Nightmares and the Court of Dreams, and runs both Velaris and the Hewn City. I suppose in the mortal realm, she might be considered a queen.”
“And Amren?”
“Her duties as my Second make her my political adviser, walking library, and doer of my dirty work. I appointed her upon gaining my throne. But she was my ally, maybe my friend, long before that.”
“I mean—in that war where your armies fail and Cassian and Azriel are dead, and even Mor is gone.” Each word was like ice on my tongue.
Rhys paused his reach for the bald rock face before us. “If that day comes, I’ll find a way to break the spell on Amren and unleash her on the world. And ask her to end me first.”
By the Mother. “What is she?” After our chat this morning, perhaps it was stupid to ask.
“Something else. Something worse than us. And if she ever finds a way to shed her prison of flesh and bone … Cauldron save us all.”
I shivered again and stared up at the sheer stone wall. “I can’t climb bare rock like that.”
“You don’t need to,” Rhys said, laying a hand flat on the stone. Like a mirage, it vanished in a ripple of light.
Pale, carved gates stood in its place, so high their tops were lost to the mist.
Gates of bone.
The bone-gates swung open silently, revealing a cavern of black so inky I had never seen its like, even Under the Mountain.
I gripped the amulet at my throat, the metal warm under my palm. Amren got out. I would walk out, too.
Rhys put a warm hand on my back and guided me inside, three balls of moonlight bobbing before us.
No—no, no, no, no—
“Breathe,” he said in my ear. “One breath.”
“Where are the guards?” I managed to get out past the tightness in my lungs.
“They dwell within the rock of the mountain,” he murmured, his hand finding mine and wrapping around it as he tugged me into the immortal gloom. “They only emerge at feeding time, or to deal with restless prisoners. They are nothing but shadows of thought and an ancient spell.”
With the small lights floating ahead, I tried not to look too long at the gray walls. Especially when they were so rough-hewn that the jagged bits could have been a nose, or a craggy brow, or a set of sneering lips.
The dry ground was clear of anything but pebbles. And there was silence. Utter silence as we rounded a bend, and the last of the light from the misty world faded into inky black.
I focused on my breathing. I couldn’t be trapped here; I couldn’t be locked in this hor
rible, dead place.
The path plunged deep into the belly of the mountain, and I clutched Rhys’s fingers to keep from losing my footing. He still had his sword gripped in his other hand.
“Do all the High Lords have access?” My words were so soft they were devoured by the dark. Even that thrumming power in my veins had vanished, burrowing somewhere in my bones.
“No. The Prison is law unto itself; the island may be even an eighth court. But it falls under my jurisdiction, and my blood is keyed to the gates.”
“Could you free the inmates?”
“No. Once the sentence is given and a prisoner passes those gates … They belong to the Prison. It will never let them out. I take sentencing people here very, very seriously.”
“Have you ever—”
“Yes. And now is not the time to speak of it.” He squeezed my hand in emphasis.
We wound down through the gloom.
There were no doors. No lights.
No sounds. Not even a trickle of water.
But I could feel them.