Page 73 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
“Only fools would do that, Huntress, and I am no fool.” He pushed himself away from the frame. His hand reached for the door, the most his body had entered my room so far. “I’ll see if it can be arranged.”
Hope bloomed inside me, for the first time since I’d woken up in that bleeding coffin. “When?”
“We’ll find out.” That smirk of his returned with a vengeance right before he closed the door and cut me off from the rest of the frosty fortress. “Until then, Huntress…endure.”
Chapter
Fourteen
ALLIE
Three days.
Three days of losing my mind with worry over my cousins and Clan, mapping out back alleys in a strange frozen city, and trying to cobble together an escape plan that could go wrong in so many ways, I doubted each step.
Three long, confusing days since I’d awoken in this frozen crater that defied all logic and nature.
This menacing hole in the ground was stuck in a perpetual winter, even though the sun shined for more hours than normal. Midnight here was like a crisp six in the morning back in Aquila, when the sun was barely climbing through the clouds and the light was still in that blueish spectrum that made Marea Luminaria’s surface seem darker than the turquoise waves I’d grown up in and around.
The almost constant light–which never seemed to stray too far from nuances of grey–filtering in through the large balconydoors in my room didn’t help with the fatigue which still hadn’t left my body.
But that was the least of my problems.
I’d snatched a butter knife from one of the dinners Mrs. Thornbrew had brought up to my room–“you need to rest and recuperate, dear, no point in walking up and down stairs until then. Ry would have wanted you to join him for supper. Oh, no, he didn’t say anything, I could tell”–and sharpened it on the stone floor of the balcony until it could slice clean through one of the fancy towels in the washroom.
I kept it under my pillow, clutching it even in those rare, lone hours my body finally gave into a restless sleep plagued by images of bloody olive trees and a familiar voice I couldn’t identify cackling in the background, like it was glad I’d failed.
I’d hidden my tattered, bloody dress under my bed, and when I was absolutely sure nobody was listening, when even the night owls didn’t hoot, I clutched it to my chest and howled harder than the moon.
I swear I could still smell my father’s last embrace on the silk, underneath his blood.
Even then, I used a pillow to muffle my cries, acutely aware only a door separated me from the bloody Commander.
I’d never heard him come in or out and hadn’t been analyzed by his blue eyes since that first day, but knowing he was in the same building was enough to keep me on a weird edge.
Worse, my powers were still as dormant as that horrid day on Sanctua Sirena. I barely managed to slink out of bed each morning and crawl back in at night, my body protesting each movement. Even with a steady diet of delicious venison steaks and stews so rich, they had small golden dimes of fat floating in them, I was starting to lose weight I desperately needed to survive in a climate which could chill me to the bone. My veinsstuck out on my forearms, like that damn poison had slithered inside my veins and left its grim signature on me.
Maybe I’d inhaled too much of that mist back in the garden.
Perhaps I was cursed.
This whole damn place felt cursed.
The city streets were…strange.
A few times, I swore I could see a strange purplish light pulsing underneath the cobblestones at the oddest times, with a distorted hum beating against my bones. But when I looked more closely, there was nothing but perfectly polished stones and the frozen wind hissing underneath the wooden eaves.
Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone–or something–was constantly watching.
Waiting.
None of that stopped me.
The sooner I escaped this place, the faster I could distance myself from whatever simmered in this damn crater. It couldn’t have been anything good.
Each day, I put on my borrowed clothes, laced up my gifted boots, pulled up my hood, and slunk through the streets of the city, the sharpened knife hidden in the fuzzy inside of my sleeve.
Begrudgingly, I could admit these Blood Brotherhood clothes were impressive. The coats didn’t let a whiff of cold penetrate and the boots were sturdier than any I’d worn, mercilessly crunching the snow, yet somehow not sinking into it.
