“My mother told me of a cave,” Lovisa said numbly, sitting farther away than the others, her back to a tree, shivering.
Giddon spun to her. “What did she say about it?”
“Her father sent her there for punishments,” said Lovisa.
“Hava’s cave doesn’t sound like an accessible sort of cave,” said Giddon.
“I saw a trapdoor in the floor of the storehouse,” Lovisa said. “With a key sticking out of the lock.”
“Well then,” said Giddon, with rising impatience, “if that was the access point, it’s gone now.”
“She used to talk of being able to watch the sun set from the cave. She talked of being visited by birds,” said Lovisa, speaking with the numbness of an automaton, as if she had a rote announcement about the cave and had to make it all the way through from start to finish before stopping. Meanwhile, Hava was trapped. Giddon wanted to shake anyone who wasn’t helping.
“That means there’s another access point,” said Bitterblue, who was still lying with her ear to the ground.
“What?”
Bitterblue sat up. She turned big, black, unhappy eyes to Giddon. Then she pointed out across the yard, to the place where the trees gave way to nothing but sky.
“This property is on a cliff, Giddon,” she said. “If Ferla could see the setting sun from her cave, it means there’s an opening to the cave in the cliff wall.”
* * *
—
The dim voice of Hava confirmed this theory.
“Yes,” she called. “I see daylight, now that I’m looking for it, straight ahead. It seems small, and far away.”
“The storehouse is built back from the cliff,” said Giddon grimly.
“We need rope,” said Bitterblue.
“I found no rope in the barn.”
“The rope was kept in the storehouse,” said Lovisa, in that same expressionless voice. “We exploded it.”
And so, they collected every sheet in the house. The house staff—a cook, a maid, and a housekeeper who all seemed so thunderstruck by the situation that Giddon was inclined to believe in their innocence—helped them, leading them to a spare pantry that even Lovisa didn’t know about. The staff’s eyes went huge whenever they glanced at Lovisa, who stayed against her tree, filthy, scratched, tattered, and crying. One of them brought her a cup of tea. Lovisa held it in her hands, unseeing.
While the others tied sheets together, Giddon rubbed grime out of his eyes, then experimentally stretched his arms. Like everyone else in the group, he was still coughing from dust, which filmed his eyes, nose, tongue, the back of his throat. His hands were stiff and bruised from punching guards. But he understood that the person who went over the edge to look for a route to Hava needed to climb down the cliff wall, then free her from that ladder, then probably carry her. That meant him.
The others—Davvi, Nev, Lovisa, the cook, the maid, and housekeeper—would arrange themselves in a line above the cliff, grasping the sheet rope’s other end. They agreed on a system of shouts and tugs for communication, though Giddon wasn’t sure how anyone would be able to hear anything over the crash of the water, or how he was supposed to tug on a sheet rope while clinging to a rock face.
Bitterblue was forbidden from helping, with anything. She was still too high. Nor was she allowed to remain near the hole by herself, where at least she could’ve comforted herself—and Hava—by talking to Hava. She sat against a tree near the rope operation, rubbing her braids with shaking fingers and pretending to be fine.
A sheet rope tied tightly around his waist and groin, Giddon went to her.
“Bitterblue,” he said, crouching before her, meeting her enormous, frightened eyes. “I’m just going down once. I’ll find her and free her. Then we’ll both come back up again. It’ll be over in a few minutes. Okay?”
She whispered, “Okay.”
“The rope is safe,” he said. “We’ve checked and double-checked every knot, and I’ll climb wherever I can to minimize the strain on it. Do you understand that?”
“No, but it comforts me that you do. Will you give me a math problem?”
He would’ve smiled if she hadn’t looked so sick. “Square integers for me,” he said. “When I come back, I want you to tell me how far you got. Okay?”
“You promise you’ll come back?”
“I promise.”
“Okay,” she said.
He kissed her forehead. Then, returning to the others, he approached the cliff’s edge, got down on the ground, and peeked over. The ocean was very, very far below. The water pounded against rock. Giddon saw no cave opening.
He checked with the rope team, swung himself over, and began to climb down.
* * *
—
The cliff face was slippery. Cracks and knobby places abounded, but his cold fingers couldn’t grasp slick rock. He slipped once, his full weight yanking down on the sheet halter, and the team above held on. Below him was the tiniest ledge.
I’ll climb down to the ledge, he told himself. I can make it to the ledge.
After a few more minutes of wedging his fingers hard into cracks, he achieved it, his feet touching down. It wasn’t much of a ledge, narrow, running sideways around an outward-curving bend to a part of the cliff wall Giddon couldn’t see. But it held his weight while he breathed, refocused, and tried to examine his surroundings. He spotted no doorway to a cave.
Giddon took another, calmer breath, quieted his shaking, and looked harder. He saw one bird, then another, come from the sea and shoot straight toward the part of the cliff face he couldn’t see, at a speed that was either suicidal or indicated that there was no wall to stop them.
Then he understood. That was the opening, on the other side of that bend. He began to move sideways along the ledge, trying not to think about how the rope would swing him like a pendulum if he slipped again. The route became smelly, and slimy with bird droppings, then with blood that seemed to be seeping from one of his hands. The ledge grew narrower, and still he saw no cave opening.
Suddenly birds exploded out of rock right beside him, launching themselves across the sea. He nearly lost his grip, it startled him so much, but he steeled himself and kept pushing sideways, knowing it must be near. He stretched, reached, wedged his bleeding fingers into cracks. Yes! He could see it now, a small, dark gap in the cliff! As he neared it, the ledge petered out. For a few terrifying steps, he had to balance his toes on any knobs he could find, straining not to slip.
Finally, excruciatingly, his boots reached the safety of the opening, where he could stand.