“Just trying to … help you avoid distractions,” he mumbles. “Don’t want this escape attempt going sideways.”
I return my gaze to Dash and find him laughing so quietly it’s little more than silent shaking. Hopefully he’s laughing at himself and the unlikely notion that being locked up in this prison might be ‘worth it’ because he got to meet me. I clear my throat and look down at the ruby on my wrist. “Oh, hey, it’s almost time.”
“Good,” Zed murmurs. “Guess I’d better … get myself ready.” He grips the bars of his cell and pulls himself upright.
“What are you going to say when your power is ready?” Dash asks.
“Um …” I look back at forth between his sphere and Zed’s. “Something like, ‘Dash’s sphere and Zed’s sphere, open.’ Sounds stupid, but it should work.”
Dash nods. “Okay. And what about everyone else?”
With a sigh, I close my eyes. Why did he have to bring that up? I was hoping not to have to think about it again. I don’t want to face the moral dilemma I have no answer to. “I don’t know if I should do that, Dash. I’m sure some of these people don’t deserve to be here, but most of them probably do. How do we distinguish the innocent from the guilty? And I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to open every sphere. If it requires too much power, I’ll end up passing out.”
Dash blinks. “Really? Has that happened?”
“Yes. I overexerted myself trying to do too much with one command. I think if I allowed my Griffin Ability to replenish multiple times without using it, I might be capable of doing more, but we don’t have time for that now.”
“But Em, you … you brought two people back from death. That must have taken … an enormous amount of power. Opening just two spheres shouldn’t use … too much. I’m sure you can try to open more.”
“And what if I’m freeing criminals?”
“If they’re the king’s enemies, they’re probably on our side.”
“True,” I admit, “but how do I know who should be freed and who shouldn’t?”
“We can’t save everyone,” Zed says. “It isn’t possible. They’ll—” He cuts himself off, a look of horror slowing spreading across his face. Then he lets out a bitter laugh, staring wistfully into the distance. “Finally, I understand. If only I’d … understood years ago. I could have … made them understand too. None of this would have happened.” He looks at me. “None of it.”
I stare back, completely confused. “Um …”
“We can’t leave innocent people behind,” Dash presses, pulling my attention away from Zed.
“Then you can tell your Guild about it when you’re safely back home. They’ll fix this. That’s their job, isn’t it? To right these kinds of wrongs.”
Zed laughs again. “All those years ago … they said the same thing. We’ll come back for you … they said. And they never did.”
“Hey, I thought you were on my side for this one,” I tell him. “We can’t save everyone, remember?”
He nods. “We can’t save everyone.”
“Not everyone,” Dash agrees, “but some.”
“And then what, Dash? Let’s say I let a whole bunch of people free. And then let’s say it turns out I actually can’t open the faerie paths. Like, I run out of power, or it isn’t possible to open them with a Griffin Ability, or something like that. Then what happens to all the people I’ve freed? They can’t use their magic, and the guards are going to come rushing down here to lock them away again. Some of them will fight back, and they might end up dead. Which means more people I’m indirectly responsible for killing. I don’t want that on my conscience, Dash. Maybe you think I’m a selfish coward for not wanting to free anyone else—and that’s probably partly true—but I also don’t want people to end up dead because we don’t have a proper plan for getting everyone out of here. So I’m only freeing the two of you. We’ll escape this court, and you can tell the Guild about everyone down here. They can come and investigate.”
Dash shakes his head. “It doesn’t work … that way. The Guild can’t simply barge in. There’s … a balance. They’d risk starting a war between the courts.”
“They don’t have to do any barging, okay? They can just ask for details of who’s imprisoned and why. Surely they have a right to do that?”
“Maybe, but the Unseelies aren’t going to like it.”
“Then your precious Guild is just going to have to upset the balance. If loads of people are unjustly imprisoned here, then maybe it’s worth starting a war over.”
“This …” Zed says, pointing weakly at me. “This is what we needed … all those years ago. Someone willing to start … a war for us. Someone who didn’t choose to leave us in prison.”
“I’m agreeing with you,” Dash protests, his breathing even heavier now. “But I’m saying we should … get everyone out now.”
“I think he’s still confused,” I tell Dash. “Too drugged to make sense.”
“I am making sense,” Zed says, his eyes never leaving mine. “You’ll see.”
I turn back to Dash. “Please just trust me on this. My Griffin Ability has limits. I need to break open both your spheres, tell the drug potion to leave your systems, and then open the faerie paths. I don’t think I can do all that and free everyone.” I don’t add that if any Griffin magic remains after those three commands, I should be able to hold onto it. If I do end up with some leftover power, then we can decide what to do with it.
Finally, Dash relents. “Okay. You know your power better than I do. When I’m back … at the Guild … I’ll see what I can do about … freeing these people.”
I stand as I sense that shiver of power getting ready to radiate up my spine. I don’t know how these spheres would normally open, but I picture the unbreakable glass bars cracking apart and falling away. As my power rushes to the surface, I halt it. It struggles to break free, but I manage to release it slowly as I speak. “These two spheres will open,” I say, stepping back and looking first at Dash’s round prison cell, and then at Zed’s. My voice sounds both far away and right inside my head. “The drug potion will leave your bodies, and you’ll have full access to your magic. And faerie paths,” I add, turning and speaking to the air itself, “open a doorway.”
I swing back around to face the spheres as I hear a crack. Then another crack. Dash’s bars snap and tumble to the ground with a several clangs, followed almost immediately by the bars imprisoning Zed. Dash raises his hand, and sparks jump to life immediately, whizzing around his fingers. With a grin, and his eyes alight with life and energy, he climbs quickly from his prison cell and sweeps me into a brief, tight embrace. A smile stretches my lips as I hug him back, then twist in his grip to look behind me.
The air ripples, distorting my view of the vine-covered wall beyond it. The ripples become waves, undulating repeatedly and violently, as if something is trying to rip through the air itself. My Griffin power begins to drain from my body. I grasp mentally at it, tugging it to a halt as my hands tighten into fists and my body tenses. Success. I can’t quantify it, but I sense there’s still power simmering beneath the surface of my control.
I relax my limbs and focus on the space in front of me, hopeful that a doorway is about to materialize.
But the seconds tick by, and nothing happens.
Twenty-Eight
“It didn’t work,” I say, my shoulders drooping as if a weight is slowly crushing them.
“So it isn’t possible after all,” Dash says quietly.
“I don’t understand. I obviously had no way of knowing if it would work, but I really thought my Griffin Ability would be powerful enough to access the paths. I mean, it doesn’t take much magic to open a doorway, right?” I turn back to face Dash.
“It doesn’t,” he says. “Perhaps it would have worked if the faerie paths were here to obey your command. But maybe they don’t exist here.”
“I thought they existed everywhere.”
He shakes his head. “I
don’t know, Em. Maybe the ancient enchantments keeping them from being accessed in this part of the world are so powerful that even your Griffin Ability can’t mess with them.”
“Emerson,” Zed says. I look at him. He moves closer, but stops a few paces away from me. His gaze is intense as he watches me closely. “Thank you.”
I wonder if it’s disbelief I’m seeing on his face. Perhaps he doubted I would actually free him. “Um … sure. You’re welcome.”
“So,” he says. “Dragons are the only way out, then?”
“You’re free,” a woman says from somewhere behind us. “How did you get free?”
I look back and see a woman in the sphere beyond the empty one next to Dash’s sphere. She watches us with wide eyes, then scrambles to the front of her cell and grips the bars. “Let me out next, girl.”
“I … I can’t. I’m so sorry. My magic is finished.” Which is a lie, of course, but I know we’ll need the rest of my Griffin power to escape this palace. “The, uh, the spell I used—the ingredients—I only had enough for two cells.”
“Liar!” she hisses. “I heard you. All you did was speak. You didn’t apply any additional enchantment. If you could open their cells, you can open mine.”
I back away, not wanting to face the guilt of leaving everyone else behind. “I can’t. I’m so sorry.” I glance around and see other faces watching us. Some visible in the gaps between the Dash and Zed’s spheres, other hanging higher up. “Let’s go,” I mutter to Dash and Zed.
“Wait, please,” the woman says, one hand reaching through the bars as her expression changes from suspicion to desperation. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I’ve just been here for so long. Please help me. Please.”
I shake my head. “I can’t, but I’ll be sending someone back for you.”
Her face twists suddenly into a mask of rage. “Let. Me. Out,” she hisses through her bared teeth. “LET ME OUT!”
I take another step back as fear weaves its way through my insides. “Why isn’t she slow and sluggish like the two of you were?”
“I don’t think they drugged her,” Dash says.
“They didn’t,” Zed says. “See the metal band on her wrist? It blocks her magic. She can’t access it, but she still has her ordinary strength. She isn’t experiencing the fatigue we experienced.”
“We need to leave before her screaming alerts the guards,” I say, turning my back on the woman. We hurry toward the stairs, but her shrieks only grow louder.
“Don’t you DARE walk away! I will KILL YOU, you little WHORE!”
“Whore? Jeez.” I throw a glance over my shoulder and see her tugging on the bars of her cell, rocking wildly back and forth.
“I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” she screeches.
“So how far away are the dragons?” Zed asks as we reach the stairs.
“On the other side of the palace.”
“Wonderful,” Dash mutters.
“But toward the left. So we don’t have to get too close to the palace itself. Hopefully we can make it there without being seen.”
“That’s the challenge,” Zed says. “Everything in this place is guarded.”
“I still have some Griffin power. I’ve been practicing holding onto it, and I managed to prevent it all from slipping away just now. Maybe I can use it to mimic that camouflage spell. If I have any power left after I’ve opened the trapdoor.”
“If you don’t, then we might just have to hide until it’s dark,” Dash says. “Which we should perhaps do anyway so that no one sees a dragon flying away when it isn’t supposed to.”
We’re about halfway up the steps when I hear a low rumble. I freeze and look up. Bright light shines down from the trapdoor. “Guards,” Dash mutters. He spins around, tugging me with him. The three of us hurtle down the stairs so fast I’m amazed we don’t trip and tumble over each other all the way to the bottom.
“There she is!” someone yells behind us.
We jump down the last few steps and take off between the rows of spheres. Bright golden light flares on my right, and then on my left. A hurried glance both ways tells me that both Dash and Zed have guardian blades in their hands. The glittery magical kind that appear from nowhere.
“I doubt there’s anywhere else to go down here,” Zed says as we duck left beneath a low-hanging sphere and race between another two rows. “They’ll soon corner us.”
“Then we’ll fight them off,” Dash answers.
“Did you look behind us as we reached the bottom of the steps?” Zed asks. “There must have been dozens of them rushing through that trapdoor.”
“We can handle it,” Dash says.
“Have you seen Bandit anywhere?” I ask, suddenly remembering he’s no longer in my pocket.
“Little preoccupied here, Em,” Dash says, beginning to sound breathless. “But I’m sure he’s fine. He’s smart. He’s probably out of the prison already.”
With a wall up ahead, we veer right and turn between another two rows of spheres—and I slam into the back of Dash as he skids to a standstill. At the other end of the row, at least ten guards race toward us. Dash’s knives disappear, replaced instantly by a bow. He raises it and—
“Run while we still can!” Zed says, tugging me back between the spheres before I can see where Dash’s arrow lands. “Fight when we have no other option.”
“I hate running,” Dash shouts, but I hear his footsteps pounding the ground just behind us.
“I love running,” I mutter.
“Back to the stairs?” Zed calls over his shoulder to Dash. “We’ll fight off whatever guards are waiting there for—Aaah!”
Pain crushes my side and the world flips around. My head whacks something solid. I come to an abrupt halt, feeling cold ground along the length of my body. I gasp, my winded lungs desperately seeking air and getting nothing. Scrabbling against the ground, I push myself up and looking wildly around, trying to make sense of things as my lungs cry out for oxygen. I see one of the spheres rolling away from me, knocking into another sphere. All around me, prisoners are screaming.
“Move!” Dash yells. An unseen force shoves me to the side, rolling me over and over into a disoriented heap. I look up in time to see a sphere racing past me at a terrifying speed. It crashes into two more spheres, sending them spinning, which in turn sends more spheres rolling.
“Dammit,” I gasp when I can finally get some oxygen. “It’s like a giant freaking pool table in here.”
Hands grasp beneath my arms and pull me up. I shove backward with my elbow, and my attacker lets out a grunt of pain. “It’s just me,” groans Zed.
“Crap, sorry.”
Dash ducks past a rolling sphere and runs up to me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“There are too many to fight,” Zed says, twisting around, looking everywhere. Nevertheless, he moves so that his back is against Dash’s and raises a glimmering, golden sword in each hand. A crossbow materializes in Dash’s grip. I press closer to both of them, my eyes darting around. Everywhere I look, I see men and women in Unseelie uniforms racing toward us between the rolling spheres, weapons raised and magic sparking from their fingers.
“Dammit, dammit,” I mutter, wishing I knew how to fight or use combat magic.
“Say something, Em,” Dash tells me. “That’s the only way we’re getting out of here.”
“I … I don’t know what to—”
“Anything!”
I allow power to leak into my voice and utter, “The guards can’t see us!” before grabbing onto the last wisps of my magic. Dash holds his crossbow in one hand and wraps the other around my arm. He pulls me swiftly sideways between two spheres that are about to knock into each other. Zed darts after us, and we make it through the gap just before the spheres collide and bounce apart. Guards still surround us on every side, but some of them are slowing down now, and others are looking around in confusion as they run. Not a single one is focused directly on
us.
“Are we invisible?” Dash whispers.
“I think to them we are.” A brief smile stretches my lips. “It worked.”
“Damn, your voice is freaky when you’re using your Griffin Ability,” Zed says.
“Freaky amazing,” Dash says. “Now, if we can just sneak past all the guards, we can make it up the stairs and through the trapdoor.”
“Quickly,” I whisper. “They’re not stupid. They’ll block our way out soon.”
We slip between spheres and past guards, making our way toward the stairs faster than I would have thought possible. Behind us, the guards shout to one another, quickly coming to the conclusion that none of them can see us.
Then someone yells, “Block the stairway!”
We’ve already made it to the base of the stairs, though. We race upward without pause. Oddly enough, a squirrel leaps from step to step just ahead of us. “Bandit?” I hiss, and the squirrel freezes. Its tail twitches. Then it jumps up as we run past, landing in my arms in cat form.
Once outside, Dash spins around, sweeps his hand through the air, and the trapdoor swings shut. “Do a locking spell,” Zed says immediately.
Dash crouches down, then looks up. “I have no stylus.”
“Oh. Here.” As if he knows I need my hands, Bandit shifts into a smaller form and scurries up the lapel of my coat. I retrieve Aurora’s stylus as quickly as I can. Dash swipes it from my hands and bends down—just as something bumps the trapdoor from below.
“Crap.” He smacks both hands down on the trapdoor.
Zed drops to his knees and holds both palms just above the trapdoor. I don’t see any magic, but his gritted teeth suggest he’s exerting some kind of invisible force on the trapdoor. “Quickly!” he says. Dash writes across the trapdoor, then pulls his hand back. Slowly, Zed does the same. Banging and the sound of shouts reach our ears, but the trapdoor remains shut.
“They’ll break through the enchantment quickly,” Dash says, rising and stepping backward as he returns the jewel-encrusted stylus to me.
We run through the garden, roughly toward the left side of the palace. We skirt around empty pavilions and leap across streams. Only when we reach a pair of silver trees with elaborate carvings in their wide trunks do we come to a stop to reassess our situation. I take a few moments to catch my breath, leaning against the tree trunk with one hand. When my breathing finally slows and adrenalin is no longer pumping through my system, I’m able to sense it: a glimmer of Griffin magic. I managed to hold onto some of it after telling the guards they couldn’t see us.