his cunning and bravado, Ramson Quicktongue did not have a plan.
Fear sharpened her wits, and the world shifted into focus as the smarting in her eyes faded. Corridors fanned out in all directions from them: three to her left, three to her right, three before her, three behind her, all identical, all white.
Her head pounded with the effects of the Deys’voshk; she couldn’t even remember which way she’d come in. This place was a maze, designed to trap prisoners and visitors like quarry on a spider’s web.
Ana seized Quicktongue’s shirt. “Which way?”
He peered out from a slit between his fingers and groaned. “The back exit,” he mumbled.
She drew a breath. Of course, none of her readings of Ghost Falls—which had been sparse enough to come by already—had mentioned a back exit. The front, Ana knew, had three sets of locked and guarded doors, not to mention a courtyard watched by archers who would stick them like shooting-range targets if they even stepped a toe outside. She’d taken it all in quietly as she’d followed the guard inside—back then as a visitor.
Never, in her wildest imagination, had she thought she would be running from the prison with a convicted criminal in tow and a dozen guards on her trail.
Fury spiked in her; she grasped Quicktongue by his filth-stained tunic and shook him. “You got us into this mess,” she snarled. “Now you get us out. Which way to the back exit?”
“Second door…second door to our right.”
Ana hauled him into a run after her. Boots pounded along one of the corridors—she couldn’t tell which. At any moment, the reinforcements would be there.
They were halfway down the hallway when a shout rang out behind them. “Stop! Stop in the name of the Kolst Imperator Mikhailov!”
The Glorious Emperor Mikhailov. They flung Luka’s name around so casually, so authoritatively. As though they knew anything about her brother. As though they had the right to command by his name.
Ana turned to face the prison guards. There were five of them, silver Cyrilian tiger emblazoned against white uniforms, their blackstone swords drawn and flashing in the sunlight. They had come fully equipped, with helmets, too; their attire glittered with the telltale gray-hued alloy.
They snarled at her, spreading out like hunters surrounding an untamed beast. There was once a time when they might have knelt in her presence, when they would have raised two fingers to their chests and drawn a circle in a sign of respect. Kolst Pryntsessa, they would have whispered.
That was long past now.
Ana’s fingers curled over her hood, pulling it closer. She raised her other hand, wounded and gloveless, at the guards. Blood trickled down her arm in a lover’s spiral, vivid crimson against the dusky olive of her skin.
Nausea stirred in the pit of her stomach, and her throat ached with revulsion. Unlike apprenticed or employed Affinites who had honed their abilities for years, Ana had only a basic and crude control over hers. Fighting this many people at once could easily mean losing control of her Affinity entirely. It had happened before—nearly ten years earlier—and it made her sick to think of it.
An archer knelt into position, the tips of his arrows glistening with Deys’voshk. Ana swallowed. “Cover me,” she said to Quicktongue, and her Affinity roared to life.
Show them what you are, my little monster.
Show them.
She let her Affinity free and it coursed through her, singing and screaming and writhing in her veins. Through the haze of her frenzy, she latched on to the outlines of the five guards, their blood racing through their bodies with a combination of adrenaline and fear.
She held those bonds and gave a sharp, violent pull—
Flesh tore. Blood filled the air. Her Affinity snapped.
The physical world rushed back in a torrent of white marble floors and cold sunlight. Somehow she was on all fours, her limbs trembling as she struggled to breathe. The beige-gold veins of the marble floor spun before her eyes, the Deys’voshk running its course through her head. In less than ten minutes, the onset would be complete; her Affinity would be gone.
She leaned forward, her back arching to a fit of coughs. Crimson spattered the white marble floors.
A hand closed on her shoulder. Ana flinched. Quicktongue crouched by her side, his mouth hanging open as he surveyed the scene.
The corridor was eerily empty. Beyond the stairwell, scattered throughout the hallway, were five crumpled shapes. They lay still in pools of their own blood, the dark stains inching over the floor and creeping