The three tugged the purple-and-gold numbers over their own clothes and headed down the hill. They were winding through ridiculously ornate gardens, arguing about where they should enter the castle, when they heard it.
A blood-curdling scream. One that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth itself.
Ula halted. “Luca. That’s Luca.”
“That’s Luca where?” Dunixi sniped. “I see no dungeons here.”
Ula held up a hand. “Listen.”
The scream renewed. Heavy. Sharp. Pained.
She raised her second hand and gestured in the direction of where she thought the sound might be, beyond coming from below them. Around a hedge was what looked like a gatehouse. Ula ran up to it, and the door fell open—unlocked. She stuck her head in and then immediately ushered the boys inside. “Stairs,” she whispered.
Dunixi plucked a candlestick from his pocket and lit it on a sconce, and then led the way as if he’d been the one who’d found the entrance in the first place.
Ula came next, curved sword unsheathed and hanging at her side.
Urtzi lingered at the top of the stairs, muttering, “Oh, now I’ll never eat.”
“Stop complaining and come on,” Ula growled.
They ran down the steps, each stone curling into the next. After several turns, Dunixi slowed, holding up a bejeweled hand beside his sun-ravaged neck. Ula stopped on a dime. Urtzi was slower on the uptake, but it didn’t matter with his lightning-quick reflexes, which allowed him to dodge Ula’s back in favor of a catlike leap to Dunixi’s step below.
When the pirates were still, they heard a voice, distinct and clear over the whimpering of a dying cry.
“Oh, very interesting. I’d say that was much less agonized than the last entry of the elixir. Are you getting used to it? Or are you simply losing your voice? Answer carefully. I have nearly two-hundred doses remaining in this vial and a hundred vials on top of that.”
There was a pause, and Dunixi started moving again, slowly, quietly. This was one thing he was good at—moving like a ghost.
When Luca’s voice came again, it was worn from screaming, and small. “Why?”
“Did the pain devour your memory? We’ve been over this.”
“No,” he said, before a pause as he seemed to gather strength. “Why do you have so many?”
From her spot, Ula watched as Taillefer smiled and turned his back, taking a moment to admire an entire curved wall of small glass vials. They ranged in color from cobalt to amethyst to crystal-clear and sparkling through with green liquid—this was the kind held in a gloved hand now. Dunixi made the smallest of movements with his hand and the pirates advanced forward, sneaking from the stair landing to an overflowing pile of dried wood beside a large hearth. A table was set there, too—a place for Taillefer to work as he reduced ingredients over the fire—adding to the weak coverage. The room was mostly round and held no real corners, no closets, no heavy furniture, or any other convenient places to hide. The prince’s back was to the entrance, and his general orientation faced completely away. The pirates would have to rely on Taillefer’s sense that nothing was amiss to avoid being detected. And yet they didn’t retreat.
The prince turned back to Luca. “Ah, now that is a good question, boy, as half this vial would surely kill you on its own. And I don’t have hundreds of you, now do I?”
Rather than prodding, Luca waited, tears streaming down his cheeks. He sniffed, his breath stiff and uneasy enough that they saw his chest stutter.
“Simple, my boy. When Pyrenee rules all of the Sand and Sky, it will need something to keep everyone in line. Swords and arrows can do much, fire pits and fear, too, but sometimes it’s the smallest, least flashy things that can be the most terrifying.” Taillefer raised the vial in his hand and smiled down on the boy, whose face had gone tight with all that the prince’s words meant. War. Conquest of the continent, bought on pain delivered by whatever was in that vial that made Luca cry out so. “Consider yourself an early servant of the most powerful regime in the world. Thanks to you, I will perfect my dosages until I can use them on any man, woman, or child who dares to defy Pyrenee as sole ruler of the Sand and Sky. Now let’s try for a fourth dose—will the fireworks be the same, or a little ho-hum?”
The prince held the cork stopper an inch from Luca’s chest. The screaming started again, twenty times louder than what they’d heard before.
Raw. Aching. Piercing.
Tears immediately threatened to roll down Ula’s cheeks. She tightened her grip on her sword. As if sensing exactly what she was thinking, Dunixi cuffed her wrist and gave the slightest shake to his head, white-blue eyes fierce. Don’t.
Luca’s scream seemed to last for eternity, though it must have only been a few minutes because, as it died into a whimper, the prince looked up from his journal, eyes lifted to the ceiling and the castle grounds above.
In the distance, a bell chimed. “Ah. Two hours until the wedding. I must be going. I want to look my best to watch history in the making.”
The prince winked at Luca and then turned for the stairs. The pirates shrank back on instinct, drawing into themselves. Urtzi did so forcefully enough that a twig rolled off the top of the pile and down to the floor. On impact it dashed itself airborne … and landed on the prince’s boot.
Taillefer bent to pick it up and the pirates held their collective breath. The prince snapped the twig in half and tossed it onto the hearth.
Then, humming to himself the dulcet tones of the wedding march so popular in the Sand and Sky, he made for the stairs.
But, as he exited, he paused on the landing, scrabbling in the half dark for something. The pirates exchanged glances, but not one of them knew what he was doing.
Then with a scrape and a loud clang, the prince swung a metal door shut and sealed his workshop. Next came the tinkle and turn of keys.
They were locked in.
* * *
“WHAT are we going to do now?” Urtzi asked with the quietest version of his voice Ula had ever heard in all the years she’d known him. Shock on this ogre of a boy was completely unsettling—and a complete indication of Taillefer’s madness.
Dunixi opened his mouth, ready with his de facto leader’s answer, but Ula cut him off, not bothering to wipe the wetness streaming down her cheeks.
“We’re going to help him, that’s what,” Ula snapped, springing up and slipping past the two boys, out of their meager hiding spot.
She ran to the prisoner then, touching his arm. “Luca, it’s Ula. I’m here. And I’m going to help—oh.” Her breath caught as she saw the raised, festering wound up close. The women of the orphanage in Eritri had often told her stories of dragons, and this looked exactly like what might happen if a beast like that matched a claw with human skin. It ran straight down the middle of Luca’s sternum, over his heart, and beneath it his chest struggled to rise, and his eyes blinked open.
But then something else caught her attention. A black mark, sitting just to the right of his newest scar. Her eyes pinned on it, all moisture leaving her mouth. Even her tears seemed to evaporate, time slowing, everything drying up into a pinprick of reality that only held that mark.
“Did … did Taillefer apply this ink to your skin?”