I COULDN’T KILL ALTAN.
No matter how much I despised him, I couldn’t kill him.
“It’s easy,” Tirta said. “Just stab him somewhere vital. His throat or an eye ought to do, if you put enough muscle into it. I don’t recommend the heart; too hard to get between the ribs.”
My mouth dropped open. “Who are you?” Hartans didn’t speak like that. Of course, I knew better than to assign stereotypes to people, what with the company I tended to keep, but tips on where to stab someone? That would be shocking from any of my friends, except maybe Gerel.
Tirta just smiled widely at me. “Are you going to do it? Or should I?”
“Are you an assassin?” I whispered. She’d always looked strong, but I’d never thought of her as particularly strong, and I’d definitely never thought she’d have been willing to kill someone, or teach someone else how to do it. Suddenly the sweet girl I’d known for two months was a stranger. A very scary one.
She’d been sentenced to the Pit for something, though.
She’d never told me what.
Now, it seemed likely she was here for murder.
“I don’t think the question is about what I am,” she said, glancing at my hands. “The real question you should be asking is what are you? I saw what happened with that noorestone.”
I pressed my palms together, smothering the remnants of fire. The noorestone still stuck in Altan’s side was dark—dead—but the others glowed along the walls with their steady blue light. When I touched the nearest crystal, my whole body tense with anticipation, nothing happened.
The energy stayed where it was, trapped in crystal, released only as radiant light.
On shaking legs, I limped around the room (four steps, five, six . . .) and removed the noorestones from the sconces on the wall until all the light was gathered in my sore arm.
“What are you doing?” Tirta was still in the doorway, checking the hall.
“I’m leaving him in the dark, just like he left me.” I placed the nineteen noorestones on the table, white-blue illumination shining at my fingertips. “Why did you come here?”
“To help you escape.” She glanced at Altan. “To save you from him.”
“I saved me from him.” I hiked up my dress, stabbed it with one of the sharper stones, and tore it into a long strip to bundle the crystals together. The stones went into the widest part of the strip of cotton. With some weight in there, it’d make a decent, if shallow, bag.
Tirta checked the hall again, then stepped inside quickly, shutting the door behind her. “Someone’s coming.” Her voice dropped low as she crept toward Altan’s motionless form.
I finished tying a knot at the ends of the cotton strip, easy enough to carry over my shoulder, and watched Tirta pull the baton from Altan’s limp fingers. “Don’t kill him.”
Her expression was hard, deeply shadowed with all the light contained in my bag, as she glared down at my nemesis.
Maybe he was her nemesis, too.
It was hard to think of her as anything but the only person who’d wanted to befriend me here, who’d gossiped and reminded me to keep my humanity. But I couldn’t erase the echoes of her words, or the implications that she’d stabbed men before.
Out in the hall, footfalls thumped on the stone floor, growing in volume and then fading. Whoever’d come by was gone now.
“Don’t kill him,” I said again.
Tirta released a long breath, and the tension that had gathered in her shoulders. She stepped back and tore her gaze from Altan, as though not killing him caused her actual pain. How little I knew about her.
“Are you really Hartan?” Harta hates harm.
“Are you really Daminan?” She wrinkled her nose. “What kind of question is that?”
Offensive, apparently.
“Sorry,” I said. “So you came here to help me?”
“Yes, but as you already pointed out, you helped yourself.” She headed toward the door again, Altan’s baton in hand.
As for my nemesis, he remained on the floor, fingers twitching in his sleep. How much heat had I—or the noorestone—shoved into him? Enough to knock him out. Plus the stab wound. A pool of dark blood shimmered at his side, reddening as I approached with my bag of light.
I knelt to reach for the noorestone stuck in his side, but Tirta’s voice stopped me.
“Leave it there if you really want him to live. It’s plugging the flow of blood right now. If you remove it, he’ll bleed out, and I get the feeling you don’t want to be a murderer.”
“That wasn’t what I was doing.” A lie. She probably knew it. Instead, I removed the ring of keys from his belt, careful to avoid touching him. I wasn’t proud—or even sure—of what I’d done, and I didn’t want to risk doing it again. Not when he was already down.
I slipped the key ring into the bag of noorestones and retreated from Altan’s unconscious form. How long would he stay out? Aaru hadn’t been unconscious for too long, but he’d had a longer, sustained burn. Altan—that had been all at once.
It was a wonder he was still alive.
I padded toward the door, listening for clatters and clanks in the bag. Nothing. The nineteen noorestones and the keys were packed tightly enough they wouldn’t move, as long as I kept the makeshift bag pinned against my ribs.
“How do you do it?” Tirta asked. “You hate him. Your life would be better if he were gone forever. But you won’t take action to make it happen.”
“I won’t compromise my humanity for my comfort. I won’t become him to be rid of him.” I touched the doorknob, cool metal under my fingertips. “I thought you understood that.”
Her eyes, once sweet and familiar, now held a secret darkness. “I understand survival. You should, too.”
I didn’t want to understand the world the way she did. Not anymore.
Tirta pushed past me and opened the door. “Come on.” She slipped into the hall, grip tight on the baton.
I stepped out of the interrogation room and shut the door after me, leaving Altan alone. In the dark. Bleeding.
Still, he had no idea how lucky he was that I was not Tirta.
I stepped back from the door. One. Two.
“Are you coming?” Tirta tapped the baton on her thigh. “There aren’t usually many guards in this area, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be spotted.”
I was still staring at the door, wondering how this act measured up to all of his.
I’d stabbed him. I could still feel the resistance and pop and give of his skin.
“Don’t look so upset.” Tirta touched my good arm, almost the girl I knew again. Her tone was gentle and her expression soft, but now that I knew to look for it, I could see that this was just a mask. This wasn’t the real Tirta. “He’d have done worse to you,” she went on. “Anyway, don’t you want to get out of here? Feeling bad for him isn’t going to get you free.”
She was right. As much of a stranger as she was now, she was right. Three, four, five. I moved away from the door. It got easier with every step, like a fraying tether.
Six. Seven. The tether snapped. “I have to save the others. They’re still in the first level.”
She shook her head, lengthening her stride. “I barely escaped as it was.”
Now that she brought it up, how did she escape her guards? As a denizen of the third level, she had more freedoms than the rest of us, but she’d come charging into the interrogation room . . . to save me? “How did you know I was in there?”
“I heard warriors talking about how hard Altan was working to get information out of you. They were coming from the first level.”
That seemed really lucky, but before I could question it, she turned her glare on me.
“You really won’t leave without your friends?”
“I had a chance to escape while I was on Bopha,” I said. “But I returned to the Pit for you.”
Her frown softened. “All right. We’ll get them.”
“Take me to the Hall of Drakon Warriors first. We have to get something.”
“What?” She slowed and checked down an intersecting hallway before we turned.
“Dragon reins.” The copper rods the guards had used earlier were meant to direct dragons, like reins for a horse. The sanctuary staff used them to guide hurt or sick dragons.
“Why do you need dragon reins?”
“Because there’s a Drakontos ignitus in the first level, and if the guards you heard were coming from the first level, they were probably the ones who brought Kelsine. Did they have reins with them?”
“I think so.”
“What about a dragon?”
“Definitely not.”
“Then the dragon is still in there and we need something to control her with. They might have calm-whistles, too, but it’s hard to say if warriors ever want their dragons to actually be calm.”
Her eyes widened. “There’s something wrong with you, Mira. Normal people don’t decide they can save their friends from a dragon.”
“Maybe there’s something right with me.” Surely she could understand that. “After all, you came to save me. Why?”
She motioned me around another corner, keeping our pace quick. “Because it’s my job to look after you.”
A sense of unease struck deep inside me. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not a prisoner, Mira. At least, not in the same sense as the rest of the inmates.” She walked faster and faster. “I did what I did to save my life, and I truly do care what happens to you. But I’m not like the others.”
“I don’t understand. If you’re not a prisoner—”
“Hush.” She grabbed my good arm and pulled me behind a column just as I caught the sounds of footsteps on stone.
In tense silence, we waited for three warriors to go by, and I cursed all the light coming from the noorestones I’d refused to leave behind. They were heavy, and they shone a brilliant glow up the column, where I pressed the sack and tried to smother the light with my body.
Tirta, too, leaned toward me, and as the warriors strode by, she held her breath.
But then they were gone, and we both sagged in relief.
“You should get rid of those.”
I shook my head.
She cast a deep frown. “That’s not a Daminan gift, you know. The way you used it earlier.”
Of course I knew. It wasn’t an anything gift. But if I thought about the implications too much, I’d never be able to move forward. Right now, I couldn’t let myself be distracted.
“If you’re not a prisoner,” I said again, “what are you doing here? How is it your job to look out for me?”
“Let’s keep moving.” She waved me onward. “And as for your questions, I haven’t been in the Pit as long as I told you. I actually got here when you did.” She held up a hand to silence interruptions. “Many of the guards—yes, even Altan—knew about me, but they weren’t permitted to unmask me. They had to go along with everything and act as though I were a prisoner, too. There’s a reason we met in the mess hall, and then were paired in the bathing room so often. There’s a reason I was chosen to help you prepare the day the Luminary Council came for you.”
Apparently our entire friendship was a giant lie. “And that reason is what?”
“To observe you. To learn you.” She shifted her posture, lifting her chin and setting her shoulders just so. Shades of familiarity struck me: for a second, she reminded me of my sister. “I admire you, Mira. What you did on the docks in the Shadowed City—that was brave. What you said at dinner—that was incredible.”
“How do you know about those things?” I whispered.
“If anything goes wrong,” she went on, as though I hadn’t spoken, “I’m supposed to get you out of the Pit.”
“What went wrong?” Besides a dragon in the cellblock. Besides Altan attacking me. Besides everything.
“I found out the Drakon Warriors aren’t disbanded like we’d believed.” She looked at me askance. “I found out what kind of questions Altan was asking you.”
“So you’re going to help me escape?” I didn’t understand. Who did she work for? Why did they care?
“It’s not as though Altan or the Drakon Warriors will just give you up at this point. If we want to move you, we have to do it the hard way. We probably should have killed Altan.”
“Who is we?”
Tirta stopped walking. “Here it is.”
We’d come to a huge door, easily twenty paces wide and three times as tall. Khulan’s crossed maces filled the mahogany planks. The silver inlay was polished to a shine, gleaming in the light of seven large noorestones that surrounded the door. But it was the second part of the image that arrested me.
Gold. Familiar. The very thing my dreams were made of.
A pair of serpentine dragons wound around the maces, their talons hooked on handles. Flame rushed from their mouths, crossing just above Khulan’s beloved weapons.
The Hall of the Drakon Warriors.
The doors were open just wide enough for a small dragon to pass through. Plenty of room for Tirta and me.
We slipped through and into an immense chamber filled with noorestones and banners and stained-glass panels that showed Drakon Warriors of old. They flew through blue skies. Fire burned enemies. The children of the gods were respected and revered.
“We need to find the armory.” I tore my gaze from the dragon; there was no time for admiring—not with my friends’ lives in danger. I didn’t want to imagine what Kelsine might be doing in the cellblock, but I knew it wasn’t good. We needed those reins.
“This way.” Tirta moved like she knew exactly which path to take.
The proper key was easy enough to determine: it was the biggest, and the brass matched the lock. Breathless, I gave the key a sharp turn, and Tirta and I stepped inside.
The room was much bigger than I’d expected, with seventeen noorestones illuminating the wood-paneled space. There were ceiling-high cabinets (twenty) and stands of weapons (one hundred). They held mostly maces, batons, and bows, but twenty racks held what might have been swords or long daggers; I couldn’t tell the difference. All of them looked terrifyingly sharp, with a glittering edge that might have been cut from diamonds.
The cabinets held knives, knuckles, and items I had no hope of identifying, like wires strung between two brass handles, and something that almost looked like shears but had serrated blades and hooks on both ends. I couldn’t tell exactly how one might use them to harm another person, but it was all terrifying and deadly to me.
Finally, I found the dragon reins, seized a pair for myself, and continued searching for calm-whistles, like the one Ilina always carried in the sanctuary. None. If there were calm-whistles in the Pit, the Drakon Warriors must have kept them on their persons. Still, I hesitated before leaving. There were fire-resistant jackets and burn kits. The last cabinet held leather backpacks.
“What are you doing?” Tirta checked the hall, bouncing nervously. “We have to go.”
“Let’s put the noorestones in here.” My sore shoulder groaned in relief as I lowered the reins and my makeshift bag to the floor, and then took one of the packs from the cabinet. A small pouch on the front already held a small field medical kit. That was useful. I took two more all-purpose medical kits, two burn kits, and three jackets. “They might be hurt. We need to be prepared to treat wounds.”
We worked quickly, wrapping crystals with the dress strip, two empty backpacks, and two of the jackets. There wasn’t enough space for the third jacket, so I slipped it on over my tattered dress.
“Anything else?” she asked. “The longer we take, the more likely it is that Altan will wake up or someone will find him.”
“Knives.” I added seven—one for each of us—to the bag and pulled the drawstrings tight. The light of the stones squeezed through the seams and the cinched top, but this would do for now.
“Ready?” Tirta asked, sliding the dragon reins into her belt.
“Yes.” I slung one bow and quiver over my good arm; Ilina had taken lessons when she was younger. Then I fitted two swords—one for Hristo and one for Gerel—into loops on the backpack. My hurt shoulder felt like it was on fire as I slipped on the backpack, and a low moan poured from my throat.
“Let me carry that.” Tirta reached for the bag, but I backed away. I couldn’t trust her. Not when she’d lied to me about who she was. She’d lied for months and knew things she shouldn’t and . . .
“Who do you work for?”
Her expression darkened. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to help you—”
“Then tell me who you work for.”
Her shoulders slumped in resignation. “The same people who sent you here. The Luminary Council.”