Blood Heir

35

Ana was dreaming. Ramson held her, his outline silvered by the moon against the darkness, his arms twined around her as though he never wanted to let go. Pressed against him, through the fabric of their clothes, her heart beat in time with his.

Yet… she could sense the cold that numbed her entire body, the water dripping from Ramson’s hair onto her neck, the goose bumps on his neck as she pressed her cheek against it. And, by her side, a roaring sound steadily grew louder.

Bit by bit, cold breath by cold breath, the world seeped back in. The untouched snow blanketing the ground. The river rushing before them. The castle walls behind them. They’d washed up to the inner riverbank at the rear of the Palace—a place impossible to get to unless you swam through the river.

Ana pushed Ramson away with a gasp. He fell back and coughed, but his eyes never left her. His voice was hollow when he said, “I thought you were dead.”

“I thought you were dead,” she choked, staring at him. “Sadov said—Kerlan—”

And then the truth of what he had done—what he was meant to have done—hit her all at once. The Order of the Lily. The assassination attempt on Luka.

“Before you say anything,” Ramson said quietly, “just know that I know everything, Kolst Pryntsessa.”

“As do I.” Ana snatched his left wrist, where she’d seen the tattoo of that curled stem, those three small flowers. Ramson flinched. Her gaze cut to his. “I know you were working with Kerlan. I know he sent you to kill my brother. So tell me why I shouldn’t throw you back into the river right now.” She was shaking, her limbs growing numb from the cold. She needed to move—but she also needed to know.

Despite the fact that he was shivering as well, Ramson managed a half smile. “Because I’d just swim back out again?” Ramson twisted his hand, trapping hers in his grip. His eyes flicked to hers, hesitant but hopeful, water clinging to his lashes. “I know I’ve made some terrible choices in my past, Ana. I fell in with the wrong people. I’ve been running in the wrong direction ever since.” He swallowed, his throat bobbing, and traced a thumb over the inside of her wrist. “But then I met a girl who told me that it is our choices that define us. And I… I want to make the right choice. If it’s not too late.”

She had no idea what to say to that. No idea whether she was falling for some new trap he’d planted for her. She thought she’d seen a glimpse of the boy Ramson had once been, standing there beneath the first snows of winter with her—but perhaps that had been a lie, too.

Ana snatched her hand back and pushed herself to her feet. The river had borne them quite a ways. In the distance, the torches of the Kateryanna Bridge shimmered like forgotten stars. She could barely make out people gathered on the bridge, smaller than the size of her fingernails. She was glad for the walls of the Palace, looming over them and obscuring them in shadow. “I need to go, Ramson.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Ana said, already moving forward one step at a time. The cold dragged at her. Her gown was weighed down with water that would soon become ice in these conditions.

“Ana. Kolst Pryntsessa,” Ramson corrected, and his hand caught hers. He stepped in front of her. All traces of mirth were gone from his face when he said, “I didn’t come back for a princess. I came for the girl I met in a high-security prison. Who jumped down a waterfall with me. Who fought by my side for the past few weeks.” He reached out, and she held as still as she could when he cupped a hand to her cheek. “The girl who’s not afraid to stand up to me. Who threatens to choke me with my own blood. The girl who’s so much stronger than most people I know, but hides both her smiles and tears for when no one else is around.”

“Then tell me this.” She lifted her gaze. “Would you have killed Luka if you’d had the chance?”

He hesitated. Water trickled from his hair, threading a path down his neck. “I don’t know.”

Ana pulled away. He’d saved her—she owed him her life. But did that make up for whatever crimes he’d committed before?

Your choices, Luka whispered, and she suddenly saw herself reflected in Ramson’s clouded hazel eyes. She had killed; she had tortured—and yet didn’t she still want another chance? Didn’t she still wish, resolutely, desperately, that above all the crimes she had committed and the people she had killed, her choices would define who she was?

Her mind was a whirl of emotions, of indecision. But the cold pressed at her, and time seeped through her fingers. The Coronation would start soon. She had to move. She had to make a choice.

“A friend told me that there is good and bad in everything,” Ana found herself saying. “It is the good that’s worth saving. I hope you have enough of that left in you, Ramson.”

She heard him exhale as she turned away. Ana tilted her head back, judging the distance from the Kateryanna Bridge to where they stood. Behind them, the Syvern Taiga rose, a dark outline blotting out the stars.

She knew where she was. “There’s a passageway to the dungeons up ahead,” Ana said quietly.

Ramson shook his head. “It’ll be locked. Trust me, I’ve studied the Salskoff Palace extensively.”

“Not this one.” Her breath frosted in the air as she waded through the snow. They were at the bottom of the riverbank, the Tiger’s Tail so close that one slip would send them back to the clutches of the terrifying waters. The bank sloped steeply upward to the edge of the Palace wall. Ana thanked the Deities that they were far enough to be hidden from view from the archers who would shoot anyone who approached the walls.

The cold weighed her down, robbed her of breath. Her hair, her gown, her skirts, and her shoes dripped water, and she was shivering so hard that talking felt impossible.

Ramson seemed to realize the danger they were in as well. Too long in the cold, drenched with icy river water, and their body temperatures could plummet below functional levels. His tone was devoid of its usual humor when he spoke next. “How far are we?”

“Almost,” she whispered. And—there. She spotted it, that thin crack along the Palace wall, large enough to be noticeable from this distance, but innocuous-looking. Someone had made it a long time ago.

Which meant… her passageway was…

Right here.

Ana crouched, running her fingers along the edge of the riverbank. And, surely enough, hovering just above the frothing waters was a hole, half-submerged in the Tiger’s Tail.

“Genius,” Ramson said. He was on his knees, peering at the tunnel entrance. “Whoever designed this escape route held the Imperial family’s swimming skills in high esteem.”

“It’s not an escape route. It used to be a dumping place for bodies, hundreds of years ago when executions still took place in our dungeons.”

“I didn’t realize princesses were intimately familiar with the waste disposal plans of their palaces.”

“I’m not.” Markov’s salt-and-pepper hair and lined face came to her. “When I was arrested for Papa’s murder, one of my guards helped me escape. This was the only way out of the dungeons.”

Something flashed in Ramson’s eyes—pity? sympathy?—but it was gone the next moment. He held out his arms. “I’ll help you this time.”

Ana gripped the slope of the riverbank, her fingers digging into frozen mud. “I’ll help myself,” she murmured, and, before she could think twice, swung herself down.

For a single moment she hung suspended over the edge of the riverbank and just above the river. Water roared in her ears, so terrifyingly close. Her skirts and her feet skimmed the surface, and she swung forward by momentum. Her feet touched wet rock; her hands scrabbled for purchase.

And then she was in the tunnel, clinging to the grooves in the wall, her heart beating so fast that she thought she would throw up.

Ramson swung in just seconds later. He swore as he slammed into the wall just below her.

The tunnel slanted up, and Ana thought of the bodies that had been shoved down and discarded into the river below. It was a tunnel built for getting out of the Palace, not for going in.

Ana put one hand above the other, feeling for the grooves in the wall, and began to climb.

The cold clenched her body like a living thing. Her muscles felt like stone. More than once, she lost her grip and slipped, resulting in a single, terrifying second when she thought she would plummet back into the river.

“Will you stop kicking mud in my face?” came the whisper from behind.

Ana gritted her teeth. “Death threat, remember?”

“Charming. I was going to be a gentleman and tell you that I’d catch you if you fell.”

“And I was going to be a lady and tell you that I’d kill you if you spoke.”

They continued their climb, bickering between them, and each pithy retort distracted Ana from the seemingly impossible task of each painful pull upward. The roaring of the river had faded to a hum, and there was only darkness and the quiet drip, drip, drip of water onto the stones all around them.

And suddenly, they came upon the door: a square piece of stone made to resemble part of the dungeon’s wall on the other side. With numb fingers, Ana latched on to the ridge at the edge of it and pulled. The door gave way with a loud grating noise.

Ana heaved herself up and climbed to her feet. She had always thought the dungeons to be freezing, but the dry air felt warm to her skin. Ramson slid the door shut behind them, locking them in.

“The Palace was built with hidden hallways for servants’ to use.” Ana tried to inject confidence into her voice, but she was whispering. “Yuri used to take me through them, so I know them well. We’ll dry off and get a fresh change of clothes at one of the servants’ stations, and then…” She grimaced. “We storm the Coronation.”

Ramson didn’t miss a beat. “After you.”

It was painful to force her half-frozen limbs into movement again. Memories pressed at her in the darkness: Sadov, his shadow looming, his long white fingers clasped in expectation. Little monster…

Ana flared her Affinity and held it before her like a blazing torch that chased away the darkness. She sensed the blood around her. It was in every single inch of the dungeons: smeared on the walls, dried and cracked on the rusting shackles.

Nothing. Besides traces of blood, there was nothing here but her own fear.

Ramson’s ragged breathing followed her. Gradually, the darkness became punctuated with orange flickers of a torch somewhere far off. They drew closer, and Ana’s Affinity sensed blood flowing warm through two bodies.

She and Ramson paused around the corner. The entrance to the main section of the Palace was right in front of them.

The two men guarding the door barely had a moment to react as she fixed her Affinity upon them, holding them in place. Ramson proceeded to calmly take the cuffs on each guard’s belt and chain the men to cell doors, gagging them with their own shirts.

“That was easy,” he whispered, joining her at the door.

“There used to be more prisoners and guards down here,” Ana said. Praying that there was nothing on the other side of the door, she opened it a crack.

A spiral of stairs led up to the ground floor of the Palace, letting out in a hallway next to the servants’ living area. There would be a doorway into their rooms right next to the dungeon entrance. She’d seen Yuri emerge from it dozens of times, peering at her as Sadov led her down. The sight had given her comfort back then.

Ana and Ramson shut the door behind them and stole up the twisting staircase.

They emerged into an empty hallway. The dungeons were at the back of the Palace, and on a night like this, most Palace occupants had no reason to be there. They hurried down the familiar marble floors and silver-lined walls of her childhood until they reached a pedestal with a Kemeiran vase. Next to it, the thinnest of crevices ran up along the wall. A secret door—one of the many around the Palace—that led to the hidden servants’ hallways.

Ana threw her weight against it and pushed. The door gave way, and she slipped inside, just as she’d seen Yuri do so many times.

They were in a narrow hallway lined with shelves that were stacked with white linens and clean tablecloths, ready to be transported to their destinations.

They found a rack of guest gowns and tunics and shivered as they shed their wet clothes. Ana sighed as she dried herself with a soft cotton towel. She slipped on a gown that fit her—crimson, in a neat, simple cut. She dried her hair as best as she could, running her fingers through the snarls to smooth them so she wouldn’t look too out of place. And, as she waited for Ramson to finish changing, Ana finally let herself touch a hand to the cream-colored walls. This was real. She was home again.

Ana drew a deep breath. When she reopened her eyes, it felt as though she had shed the skin of the lost girl who hated herself and feared the world. She stood straighter, squared her shoulders, and lifted her chin.

She was the Crown Princess of Cyrilia and the Blood Witch of Salskoff in one, and tonight, she would take back her empire.

“Kolst Pryntsessa.” Ramson stood by the door in a fresh navy-blue doublet, his hair still wet and tousled, curling at the nape of his neck. “Are you ready?”

The halls were blessedly empty when they stepped out, yet with each twist and turn of the path, Ana reached out farther with her Affinity, expecting at any moment to happen upon guards or servants or other guests.

As they turned to the corridor that led to the Grand Throneroom, Ana gave a soft gasp. She’d been so tense that she hadn’t paid attention to where they were going.

A grand hallway materialized before her as though from a dream, with sweeping marble balustrades and crystal chandeliers that cast the whole place in golden light. Pillars rose as high as the arched ceilings, statues of Deities and angels poised atop as though they had just alighted from the heavens. The Hall of Deities.

“Hello again, old friends.”

Ana and Ramson spun around. The voice had made Ana’s blood freeze even before she caught sight of the speaker.

Dressed in an immaculate suit of deep violet, a gold fountain pen glinting at his breast, a man stood beaming at them from ten paces away. It wasn’t until she heard Ramson’s sharp intake of breath and caught sight of the plant with the small bell-shaped flowers pinned to his lapel that she realized who it was.

Alaric Kerlan, the Head of the Order of the Lily, spread his hands in a magnanimous gesture.

“Ah, what spectacular company we have. The Princess and the con man.” Alaric Kerlan stood ten paces away from them, his smile stretching from ear to ear. “I’ve been waiting for you.”