she had escaped and was far, far away, beyond the Southern Continent.
Elide limped into the raucous dining hall, a quiet cripple with yet another platter of food. She made her way down the long table, trying to keep the weight off her leg as she leaned in again and again to deposit rolls onto plates. The laundress didn’t even bother to thank her.
The next day, the Keep was abuzz with the news that a third of the laundresses were sick. It must have been the chicken at dinner, they said. Or the mutton. Or the soup, since only some of them had had it. The cook apologized—and Elide had tried not to apologize to him when she saw the terror in his eyes.
The head laundress actually looked relieved when Elide limped in and volunteered to help. She told her to pick any station and get to work.
Perfect.
But guilt pushed down on her shoulders as she went right to that woman’s station.
She worked all day, and waited for the bloodied clothes to arrive.
When they finally did, there was not as much blood as before, but more of a substance that looked like vomit.
Elide almost vomited herself as she washed them all. And wrung them out. And dried them. And pressed them. It took hours.
Night was falling when she folded the last of them, trying to keep her fingers from shaking. But she went up to the head laundress and said softly, no more than a nervous girl, “Should—should I bring them back?”
The woman smirked. Elide wondered if the other laundress had been sent down there as a punishment.
“There’s a stairwell over that way that will take you to the subterranean levels. Tell the guards you’re Misty’s replacement. Bring the clothes to the second door on the left and drop them outside.” The woman looked at Elide’s chains. “Try to run out, if you can.”
Elide’s bowels had turned to water by the time she reached the guards.
But they didn’t so much as question her as she recited what the head laundress had said.
Down, down, down she walked, into the gloom of the spiral stairwell. The temperature plummeted the farther she descended.
And then she heard the moaning.
Moans of pain, of terror, of despair.
She held the basket of clothes to her chest. A torch flickered ahead.
Gods, it was so cold here.
The stairs widened toward the bottom, flaring out into a straight descent and revealing a broad hallway, lit with torches and lined with countless iron doors.
The moans were coming from behind them.
Second door on the left. It was gouged with what looked like claw marks, pushing out from within.
There were guards down here—guards and strange men, patrolling up and down, opening and closing the doors. Elide’s knees wobbled. No one stopped her.
She set the basket of laundry in front of the second door and rapped quietly. The iron was so cold that it burned. “Clean clothes,” she said against the metal. It was absurd. In this place, with these people, they still insisted on clean clothes.
Three of the guards had paused to watch. She pretended not to notice—pretended to back away slowly, a scared little rabbit.
Pretended to catch her mangled foot on something and slip.
But it was real pain that roared through her leg as she went down, her chains snapping and tugging at her. The floor was as cold as the iron door.
None of the guards made to help her up.
She hissed, clutching her ankle, buying as much time as she could, her heart thundering-thundering-thundering.
And then the door cracked open.
Manon watched Elide vomit again. And again.
A Blackbeak sentinel had found her curled in a ball in a corner of a random hallway, shaking, a puddle of piss beneath her. Having heard that the servant was now Manon’s property, the sentinel had dragged her up here.
Asterin and Sorrel stood stone-faced behind Manon as the girl puked into the bucket again—only bile and spittle this time—and at last raised her head.
“Report,” Manon said.
“I saw the chamber,” Elide rasped.
They all went still.
“Something opened the door to take the laundry, and I saw the chamber beyond.”
With those keen eyes of hers, she’d likely seen too much.
“Out with it,” Manon said, leaning against the bedpost. Asterin and Sorrel lingered by the door, monitoring for eavesdroppers.
Elide stayed on the floor, her leg twisted out to the side. But the eyes that met Manon’s sparked with a fiery temper that the girl rarely revealed.
“The thing that opened the door was a beautiful man—a man with golden hair and a collar