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 the Keep shrink with each breath I take, each strangled sputter of my heart 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 light lifting up from below, a flutter of yellow.
“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 the space between us, 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 dive into the staircase and slam the door behind me, but my kick broke the lock so the door refuses to close. Though it means I’ll lose a knife, I jam one of my blades 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 slippery 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.” From the sounds of their conversation, there appear to be only two of them.
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 opens 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, the other man stands ankle deep in Lynia’s filth. Very few men, but any more would draw too much attention.
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 with his boots mucked up in 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 chuckling 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 re-forming, 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 fun 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 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?”