These Divided Shores, page 12
“Vex?” she panted. She shook her head, and it broke her heart that she didn’t trust herself or the soft, imploring way he called to her.
“He’s here,” Ben assured her. “He’s really here.”
Her shoulders caved. And she was running. Running as she had up the prison’s halls, to escape one thing and reach another—imprisonment for freedom, terror for joy.
Vex was the reason for the warning bell. He was here.
Lu dropped to her knees before him. Vex lunged forward, scooping her up so their torsos collided and knocked the air from her lungs. The reassurance of that force made her sob, and the scent of him, sweat and ashy fire smoke and spice, sent her anxiety skittering.
She pressed closer, not close enough, wanting to claw into him and feel his heartbeat thunder alongside hers. His own passion ruptured in the way he clamped one of his hands around the back of her neck, the other digging into her hip, resolute and present, here and real.
“We have to go!” one of the people behind Vex shouted. “We don’t have time!”
Gunnar and Ben brushed past them, and adrenaline flooded Lu again. She grabbed Vex and hauled him up, but he buckled.
Edda was in front of them, tears glossy on her cheeks. “His Shaking Sickness—”
“Damn it, Edda, I’m fine,” he snapped.
His Shaking Sickness had progressed in the time they’d been apart. Guilt rendered Lu silent. She looped Vex’s arm around her neck and helped him up the hall with the mass of people clawing for the surface.
Edda fell in step beside them and pulled a vial from her vest. “What about you?”
She offered Lu the vial. Lu frowned, heart thudding at the idea of more magic.
“Narcotium Creeper,” Edda explained. “To combat the Bright Mint in the stones.”
“Bright Mint?” Lu almost lost her footing.
“You didn’t know?” Vex eyed her. Lu swayed to see his face, to hear his voice, his voice. “The Emerdians cook it into the stones. It enhances the Bright Mint’s effects. It didn’t get to you?”
“Elazar gave us an antidote.” Lu nodded at Ben. That was all she could muster.
The Emerdians had cooked Bright Mint into the stones of the prison, enhancing the effects, driving Gunnar mad.
The Mechts prepared Eye of the Sun with their sacred bear’s blood.
Lu stowed this information as Vex twisted against her.
“There’s one last hall!” he shouted at the crowd, and Lu didn’t question how he knew. “Keep going—straight ahead—that door!”
Their group shoved through and a hall of cells stretched on. Arms wove through the bars; people begged for release. Raiders shot to pick the locks while others kicked through the iron.
People shoved out in cries of joy. “The Pious God has freed us!” an older woman wept. “He has saved us!”
The woman’s declaration was so repulsive that Lu didn’t notice the other prisoners until a small form hooked her waist.
“Thank you” came a high voice.
Children. Families. Innocents who Elazar had deemed raiders.
Vex brought his hand up to cup her chin. “Lu. Hey—Lu, look at me—”
Lu rocked back as the little boy rushed past. He was the right height, the proper build, with dark hair and vibrant eyes, and Lu heard the distant sound of her own voice saying, “Teo?”
“Teo isn’t here,” Vex told her. “He’s in Port Mesi-Teab. He’s safe, I promise.”
These children weren’t, though. Because of Argrid. Because of the cause Lu had unknowingly aided.
This was why she didn’t deserve peace. This was why Grace Loray was suffering again, still—but she would fix it. Even if she never got that peace. She would make this island right.
The torchlight thrashed. Lu wobbled, Vex’s weight too much for her. She dropped down the wall and he twisted, swinging around to kneel in front of her as children scrambled to escape and the world broke.
“Adeluna,” Vex said. His voice was gentle, so unlike Milo that Lu grabbed his shoulders to make sure he was there, in front of her.
The tolling prison bell increased its cadence. They needed to leave.
Someone was saying that. We need to leave. One of the raiders, ushering people out. Vex waved them off. Give her time—we’ll be right behind you—
Gunnar glanced to the side, then spun. “Where’s Ben?”
Vex pushed to his feet. “What? Ben!”
Up the hall, torches showed someone slamming another person into a wall—
“Stop!” Gunnar took off, Vex and Lu clawing to keep up.
The rush of the fight, the surge of prisoners into the hall, the heave of raiders acting as one body to help these people—Ben hadn’t realized how much he needed this. Hope, action, progress. The last time he could remember feeling this consumed had been with his uncle at the University, with Inquisitors buzzing around him as they studied magic and advanced their understanding.
The delirium, the weeks of torture, had cooked his heart and soul down as he’d cooked plants with Lu—distilling, evaporating the extraneous, until all that remained was a shell of a boy who had spent most of his life alone.
The energy hummed in Ben’s veins as he flew from cell to cell. He reached the last one in this hall, but hands within were already fast at work picking the lock.
A wisp of a man stomped out, flicking a braid of dirtied, white-blond hair over his shoulder. Three other people followed him, large, burly men with gnarled pale hair.
“It’s about damn time,” the man said in a shockingly deep voice for someone so slender. He arched his back, stretching. “Nathaniel sure took his sweet time coming—”
One of the burly figures nudged the man. “Pierce.”
Pierce stopped. He looked at Ben and his narrow face pinched.
“Argridian,” he spat. A blink, and his hand was around Ben’s throat. “This a trick? You here to make us beg the Pious God for salvation? You here to make us belt out hymns? You disgust me, warping the doctrine like that, like heathens—”
Ben choked, waving his hands to keep balance. Instinct from his training with defensors flared countermoves into his limbs, but Pierce’s words stayed him.
“I’m not—” Ben tried. “I wouldn’t—”
“Stop!”
Ben and Pierce turned to see Lu, Gunnar, and Paxben only paces from them. The clatter and shouting of the escape rushed all around.
Pierce surveyed Ben’s group. “Devereux Bell? What the hell—”
Devereux Bell? Oh. Ben’s vision spun, his mind tripping over Pierce’s grip. Paxben.
“We’re with your husband!” Vex tried. “We came with the Tuncian syndicate too, for Cansu Darzi, but we’re getting you out—this is Argrid’s doing—”
“That I agree with.” Pierce retightened his grip on Ben’s throat.
As Ben struggled to think through which move would cause the least damage to Pierce, Lu swooped in and ripped Pierce off him. Air rushed into Ben’s lungs and he doubled forward, scrambling until his hand connected with someone.
He expected his cousin. But Gunnar slid one arm around Ben’s waist, his eternal heat enveloping Ben in a cocoon of warmth.
Ben was pretty sure he could stand on his own just fine. But he didn’t tell Gunnar that.
Lu shoved Pierce back. One of his men slammed his forearm into Lu’s chest.
Vex ripped something out of his ear. “Stand down, Pierce! God, talk to your husband, all right? It’s Budwig. He’s got the other one. He’s in the guardhouse.”
Pierce grabbed the Budwig. “We’ll see how much longer he’s my husband after letting Tuncians and Devereux Bell rescue me. I cannot believe this.” He thrust the Budwig into his ear. “Nathaniel Gilroy Blaise, you incompetent, scheming—” A pause. “Devereux Bell? And you listened to him? Pious God help me, I leave you alone with our syndicate and you make an alliance with the Tuncians and— Oh, don’t you take that tone with me. It is our syndicate.”
Pierce elbowed around the remaining raiders who crowded the hall. When he got to the end, he looked over his shoulder.
“Are you coming? Nathaniel claims to have an elaborate escape in the works.”
Pierce took another step and slipped on mildew. He stomped the rest of the way into the darkness, grumbling about how he wasn’t made for this kind of environment.
Lu and Vex started off behind Pierce, Gunnar helping Ben to walk. One of Pierce’s raiders touched Ben’s arm as they passed.
“Thank you,” the man said. “We’ve been in a cell with him for two weeks. Thank you.”
Another of the raiders punched the first one. “He’s the Head’s husband!”
“Doesn’t stop him from being a spoiled pain in the ass.”
Gunnar dragged Ben out of the hall, the slightest grin tugging at his lips.
“Which part of this do you find funny?” Ben asked as they squeezed into the narrow passage. They were chest to chest, and Gunnar seemed to realize the awkwardness of holding Ben. He let go and dipped ahead.
“Pierce sounds like you,” Gunnar said over his shoulder. “How you talked to your defensors on the ship, telling them to do this and get you that. I like that word. Spoiled.”
Ben squeaked offense. “I talked to them like that to make them think I was—that was a ruse—you knew it was a ruse! You were part of it!”
Gunnar looked back at Ben again with a taunting smile. Ben’s chest ruptured, filling him with a heat as intense as when he had been in Gunnar’s arms.
By the time they got free of the prison, chaos seemed far too simple a word to describe the courtyard. People sprinted in every direction, most following the direction of a raider on an overturned crate who bellowed the way to the escape boats. Other people ran for freedom beyond the gate and into the city, electing to risk their luck with the Argridian defensors again.
The prison’s alarm still tolled, and out in the city, defensors shouted, booted feet thundering up the road—and an explosion came that Ben recognized.
He shouted, “Cannons!” a mere breath before part of the courtyard’s wall erupted.
Stones on the outward-facing side of it shot into the air, a shower of dust and shards of rock. Everyone in the courtyard ducked at once, the silence after the blast punctured by screams. Where there had been chaos was now utter bedlam—bodies shoved and fought for escape, children wailed, raiders brandished pistols over their heads in search of an enemy.
In the madness, a slender Tuncian girl bolted forward and threw her arms around Lu. Ben had seen her on the deck of the Astuto—she was one of Vex’s crew, like the tall Mecht woman who had caught up with them as they left the prison. Nayeli and Edda, Lu had told him.
Nayeli pulled back from Lu and looked at Vex.
“Did you find her?” Vex and Nayeli asked each other in tandem.
Nayeli’s eyes widened. “No one found her?” She swung around. “Cansu! CANSU!”
Vex put a hand on her arm. “Maybe we didn’t hit all the prison’s levels.”
Next to them, Pierce whipped around from searching the crowd, likely for his husband. “Are you questioning Nathaniel’s methods?” He tapped the Budwig in his ear. “He says we searched every level. If we didn’t find someone, they aren’t here.”
Nayeli dove at Pierce, her fingers in claws. Edda caught her around the waist.
“Cansu could be in this madness,” Vex offered. “We’ll get to the escape boats and go to Port Mesi-Teab—it’s the first place the Tuncian Head would go.”
People ran, cannons blasted, and Nayeli screeched horror and frustration and grief. Edda heaved her around and the two shot off into the courtyard along with the thinning stream of people, followed by Pierce and his raiders. Lu and Vex, his arm over her shoulders, limped across the trampled grass.
More cannons fired, more defensors were coming.
Ben took off, Gunnar hot behind him, ushering the last few stragglers out of the courtyard and to the twisting stone staircase that led to the prison’s wharf.
Docks stretched into the water, most holding quiet prison transports. To the left, other docks held steamboats for escape: two huge paddlewheels and five smaller boats with single smokestacks. Three had launched off into the water, their decks alive with escapees.
“Blaise!” a raider cried from the deck of a paddlewheel. “Where to? Head Blaise!”
A voice came from the crowd, disembodied—but furious.
“Port Mesi-Teab! God help me, Port Mesi-Teab!”
A cheer went up from here, there, a boat farther down. A decision had been made, one Ben couldn’t recognize, and he left it in the pile of things he would deal with later.
Ben and Gunnar leaped onto a paddlewheel with a wide deck of dented pale wood and a two-story section of rooms rising above the pilothouse. Ben looked over the railing and spotted Lu and Vex crouched on the deck of a different boat before a voice bellowed, “Off!”
The command echoed across the boats. A rev of engines, and the steamboats launched away from the docks, charging out into the river as the final prisoners leaped to the decks.
None too soon. Defensors arrived close enough to fire at the escapees, bullets clanging off hulls, people shouting in fear. Orders volleyed, and defensors boarded the prison boats—
“The pipe’s broken!”
“This one, too!”
The raiders had disabled the prison transports. By the time the defensors found functioning craft, the escapees would be long gone.
Port Camden’s night-shadowed silhouettes faded, and a hush fell over Ben’s steamboat. He noted the gaunt, watchful faces across the deck—some prisoners, others raiders who had helped with the rescue, stricken by the sight of Port Camden shrinking into the night.
These people were likely Emerdian, then. Or had called Port Camden their home.
Someone started a lilting hymn about healing from sorrow. Others joined, and Ben winced. Were they singing for their own devotion, or had Elazar’s imprisonment manipulated them? Had monxes sung over them as they had over Ben and Lu? Without the antidote for the prison’s magic, hymns and prayers could have compounded, warping minds, stunting reason.
Ben started to remind these people that they were free and didn’t have to bow to Elazar’s influence. But tears streamed down the face of an elderly man, and Ben’s eyes lifted to Gunnar, behind him, shadowed in the heavy night.
“You will confirm that you are the traitor he has made you,” Gunnar had said in the first village Elazar had dragged them to.
What could the Crown Prince of Argrid do here, now?
Ben leaned against the railing, memorizing the shape of Port Camden’s buildings against the swell of the jungle, the rush and rise of the escapees singing.
He couldn’t help these people yet. He just wanted to remember this moment.
Narcotium creeper
Availability: extremely common
Location: grows up the sides of trees in Backswamp
Appearance: vine
Method: leaves are chewed and the juices are swallowed
Use: hallucinogen
12
THE STEAMBOAT’S WINDOWLESS washroom had a metal basin, a water pump, a waste bucket, and a stack of towels, some already used by the other prison escapees. The kick of relief when the door closed at Lu’s back came with a tug of sorrow, that this dingy room, with its odor of tartness and mildew, felt more luxurious than any place she had ever been.
Lu plugged the basin and sloshed in two pumps of water. It was river water, gritty with sediment, but it was cool and smelled of Grace Loray—sunshine and freshness and plants. She splashed a handful on her face, letting it trickle over her chin and between her fingers.
This was the safest she had been in weeks. Yet the knot of horror in her chest remained, drawing tighter when she braced her hands on the basin’s edge.
Silence had gripped the steamboat until they were away from Port Camden. Now that they were almost to Lake Regolith and the Argridians had’t pursued them, the dozen prison escapees had started moving, whispering, lining up for the washroom.
And Vex, one of the three raiders on this boat who had saved them, had done his part to help, passing out rations, water, blankets. He had tried to see Lu when he could, but—
She flinched, running her fingers through her greasy hair to work it into a new braid. She knew she couldn’t avoid him much longer. But she had no words for him. Why was it that she had spent so long trying—and failing, as it turned out—to make permanent magic, but hadn’t made more of the plants that would cure him? She hadn’t told Ben that Vex was sick until recently. On top of everything, she was a murderer, a traitor—and he had even known that before he’d come to save her.
But he hadn’t come to save her, had he? He’d come for Ben. Or Elazar’s other prisoners.
Lu squeezed her eyes more tightly shut, using a half-soiled rag to scrub off the gunk of the prison. It was the best she could do here, but being moderately clean soothed her soul.
She slid out into the blue-gold softness of early morning. A man, next in the line that wrapped up the stern, shoved his way around her and slammed the washroom’s door. Everyone on this boat, save for their rescuers, was caught between horror and the relief of freedom.
Lu curled her arms around herself and angled between the line of waiting escapees and the railing, making for the bow. As she passed, an elderly woman turned to a man beside her.
“Is it true that raiders planned our escape?”
“No,” the man said. “It was that councilmember. Saw her overseeing it.”
“Kari Andreu?”
Lu faltered. The raiders had mentioned her mother in the chaos of the escape, but she hadn’t seen her. After all Kari had done for Grace Loray, fighting for freedom and unity, Lu couldn’t believe she had been involved in Tom’s betrayal. Did Kari know of the things Tom had made Lu do? What would she think when she found out the unforgivable acts Lu had committed for Argrid?
Lu took another wobbling step, steadying herself on the starboard railing.
