Another shape heaved itself into the brilliant light. This one was burlier, shorter, moving less freely but with a certain latent power. “You can make it out of there,” this figure called up to her. “I’ll hold back the flames.”
“Nelson!” That crazy delight swirled through her again. They were both alive; they were both here to save her. Suddenly the whole night seemed brighter, and it wasn’t because of the raging fire. “But are you sure?”
“You’ll be safe enough,” Nelson shouted. “Just come on down the stairs.”
Even as he spoke, she could feel the air around her radically cool. The molten light rising from the trapdoor turned faint and ghostly; even the leaping flames within the stained-glass blossom dropped so low she could hear the buzz of the gas feeding through its tube, though the fire was not completely extinguished.
She took a deep breath. I can do this, she thought. I can walk through fire. I can live through this night.
Nonetheless, it took all her will to crawl to the trapdoor and drop her legs blindly through the opening, feeling for the first stair with her toes. The minute her thin slippers touched the step, she yelped and curled her legs back up. The metal of the plank was so hot it seared her soles.
“What’s wrong?” Foley shouted. The men must have stepped inside the tower the minute she disappeared from view at the railing; the timbre of his voice echoed differently off the smoke-filled interior walls.
“I burned my feet. The stairs are hot.”
“I can’t do anything about that,” Nelson bellowed. “You’ll just have to be brave.”
“Courage,” Foley called. “Remember. That’s always been your blessing. Show courage.”
She took a deep breath and lowered her legs again, biting her lip against the stinging pain. Maybe if she moved really quickly, running from stair to stair, her skin wouldn’t have time to blister. She put all her weight on her feet and dropped through the trapdoor to land in a crouch on the top stair.
The dying fire had filled the tower with smoke and reduced the ambient illumination to almost nothing; she could barely see three yards in front of her, and the stairway circled down into an ominously impenetrable fog. She swallowed a whimper of terror and braced her hand against the wall.
Courage, she thought, and rose shakily to her feet.
It wasn’t possible to run down the stairwell, after all. The swirling smoke not only made it difficult to see the descending steps, it drifted around her face and resulted in a sort of poisoned vertigo. She focused on her feet and took first one stair, then another, each time trying to find the original wood instead of the supporting metal. That worked until she placed her weight on a plank of wood, and it gave way beneath her. She shrieked and pitched forward, her hands outstretched to break her fall, while her leg smashed through the shattered lumber almost to her knee.
“Corene! Corene! What happened?” came Foley’s instant cry.
Painfully, she pushed herself back to a sitting position and extricated her leg. It was scratched and bleeding and prickly with splinters, but it could have been worse, she supposed. It could have snapped in half.
“My foot went through a stair and I fell!” she called back. “I think I’ll be all right.”
“I can’t come up after you,” he replied. “You have to come down.”
She tried to stand, but the battered leg buckled under her and she hurriedly dropped back down. Very well, she’d descend on her buttocks, the way very young children did. At the back of her mind, a question circled: Why can’t Foley come up the stairs? She didn’t ask, because both possible answers were terrifying. Either he was too hurt to navigate the steps, or the stairwell was too compromised to hold his weight. In which case . . .
She didn’t feel as dizzy in the seated position, so her pace actually picked up as she continued downward. But the air grew denser with smoke, harder to breathe, and the stairs were increasingly dangerous—full of charred holes where the wood had burned away, many planks still smoldering with sullen fire. In multiple places she had to rise briefly to her feet and step carefully down on the remaining metallic skeleton, because all the wood was gone.
“Where are you? How far down?” Foley called.
“I can’t tell. I can’t see to the bottom. Can you see me?” She tried waving her hand through the gritty haze.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Just keep coming down.”
“If Kayle was here, he could blow all this smoke away,” Nelson grumbled.
This time Corene had to swallow hysterical laughter. If she was going to start wishing for impossible things, she’d wish for something a lot more useful than the elay prime. For instance, a handrail or a rope or an intact set of stairs. She bumped her way down two more steps.
“Where are you now?” Foley asked.
This time she did laugh. “I still don’t know.”
“Just keep talking to me,” he said. “It helps me gauge the distance.”
“What happened at the palace?” she asked breathlessly. It took a lot of effort to shout and scoot down the stairs at the same time, especially when the air was so thick. “Garameno didn’t kill Greggorio.”
“I know,” Foley said. “How did you figure it out?”
“Because I found Lorian—”
“Lorian!” Foley exclaimed. “But he—”
“I know! When I told him about the body, he got—got—so crazy—”
Nelson’s incredulous voice came next. “The murderous steward? That’s who you told?”
“Well, I didn’t know he was murderous until he sent soldiers after me—”
“And that’s why you ran?” Foley asked.
She giggled, and then she cursed when her backside landed on a particularly hot sheet of metal. She hurriedly descended to another step, but it wasn’t much better. The fire had apparently started at the base of the stairs and roared its way up; it would get dicier and dicier the closer she got to the ground. “I didn’t run, I drove,” she corrected him. “I stole Filomara’s smoker car!”
“We found it outside the tower,” Foley said. “That’s when we knew for certain you were here.”
“Very smart,” Nelson added. “Kayle would approve.”
Corene paused to catch her breath and try to assess where she was. She could hear the others more clearly now but she still couldn’t see them; she might be the equivalent of three or four stories up. On the roof of the Great Market, she thought, her spirits rising. You can climb down that far. “But how did you find out about Lorian?”
“He came running through the maze with soldiers at his back, screaming, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’” Foley said dryly. “I drew the logical conclusion.”
“Oh no! How many soldiers? How did you fight them off?”
“Four soldiers, as well as Lorian. Garameno and I could retreat to the gazebo and make a stand, but it was hardly much cover.”
“Can he fight? Really?”
“I’m guessing there are a lot of things young Garameno can do,” Nelson put in. “As soon as I met him, I could tell he was concealing a big secret, but I don’t read foreigners very well, so I couldn’t guess what it was.”
“He can fight,” Foley confirmed. “But he didn’t have to. Because moments after Lorian arrived, another set of soldiers came running through the maze—”
“Garameno’s troops,” Corene said. “I knew he must have some.”
“He’d sent his man after them the minute he found Greggorio. They made quick work of the soldiers.”
“And Lorian?”
Foley was silent a moment. “On his knees by Greggorio’s body. Holding him. Weeping. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Corene came to her feet to navigate another mostly nonexistent stair and felt the whole structure shudder beneath her. She held her breath until the shaking stopped, clinging to the red stone w
ith her fingernails—as if that could possibly help—then eased down one more step. Her heart was pounding so hard it was difficult to keep her voice steady.
“So what did you do with him?”
“I didn’t need to do anything because more royal guards started pouring through the maze. Hacking their way through, really—just leveling the shrubs. Filomara was with them. I saw her confront Garameno and I decided it was time to come look for you.”
“But he found me,” Nelson interposed, “because I was looking for you. Some fool had gone running through the grounds yelling about a woman stealing the elaymotive, and since it sounded exactly like something you would do—”
Corene managed a breath of laughter as she sank back to her buttocks and curled her fingers around the stair. This just felt like the safer method of locomotion. “I was afraid Lorian’s men would kill me,” she explained, feeling ahead of her for the next step. “So I thought I should—”
The entire stairwell before her ripped from the wall and collapsed in a mighty crash of sparks and splinters and rending metal. Corene shrieked and scrabbled for a hold, wrapping her arms around the final stair still attached to the wall, feeling it pull slowly away from its anchoring. The hot metal burned the skin of her forearms; her feet danced precariously over nothingness. “Foley!” she cried. “Foley! It’s coming down!” She heard the remaining bolts groan as they scraped through the stone.
“You’ll have to jump!” he called. “I’ll catch you!”
She felt panic gallop through her chest; she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. “I can’t! It’s too far!”
“No, it’s not. I can hear you—you’re so close.”
“I can’t see you! You can’t see me! I’ll just fall straight to the stone and die!”
“You won’t,” he said, his voice calm and reassuring. “I can hear you. I’m right under you. I’ll catch you.”
“I’m too high!” she choked out. “I’ll fall on you and crush you and you’ll die!”
“Then take my life,” he answered. “Take it. I don’t want to live anyway, if you’re dead.”
She whimpered. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t kill you to save myself.”
A section of the stair above her shifted and swung free from the wall, scraping along the rough stone. She shrieked again, almost mindless with terror. Her whole body was dangling from the bottom stair as she clung to the searing metal, but her sweaty hands were beginning to slip. “Foley!” she wept.
“Corene, I see you!” he roared. “Let go before the stairs fall! Let go!”
His voice rose to her from directly below. He was still invisible in the swirling smoke, but she had to believe that he was there. The faithful torz heart; the one she could trust with her life. Oh, but she did not want to fall into his arms and smash him against the ground. He would die to protect her, but she would die from the loss.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
He could not have heard her, not through the creaking of the stairs and the snapping of the embers and Nelson shouting something she couldn’t make out. But he answered her anyway.
“Corene, I love you,” he said, his voice so clear he might have been leaning over to speak directly in her ear. “I won’t let you fall.”
Courage, she thought, and opened her hands.
Seconds of smoke and cinders and air and nothing and then the collision—arms and chest and a hard impact on the stony ground and rolling, rolling, her body entwined with his, no sense of up or down, just pain and motion and terror. Then a pause—a suspension of thought and movement and sound and everything—and Foley’s insistent voice against her cheek, his breath against her skin.
“Corene. Corene.”
She tried to inhale, choked on the hot air, and didn’t speak his name so much as cough it. “Foley! Are you all right?”
“Yes—yes—unhurt, but you—I need to look at you. Sit up, can you sit up?”
“I don’t know, I’m so dizzy—”
How could they be alive, both of them? Maybe she hadn’t been so high up after all, or maybe she had perished in the fall and this smoky dreamland was where the dead existed. I didn’t think there would be so much pain once I died, she thought, her senses swimming as Foley pulled her to a sitting position. She felt his hands—his strong, capable hands—run swiftly over her arms, her ribs, her legs, pausing at the shredded skin along her right calf before checking her ankles and feet.
“I don’t think you’ve broken anything,” he said, his voice rich with relief. “And your head? Did you hit it when you fell?”
“I don’t think so. Everything else hurts, but not my head. And you? You’re really all right? You’re not lying?”
“I never lie to you,” he said.
All around them, currents of smoke swirled like particularly insistent ghosts, but they were in a small cocoon of open air, practically sitting on top of each other, their faces inches apart. She had no idea where Nelson had gone, but he wasn’t within the perimeter of this tiny magical space, so he might as well not exist. She lifted her hands—bruised and bleeding and streaked with red where she had clung to the hot metal—and put her palms on Foley’s cheeks.
“You said you loved me,” she whispered. “Did you say it just so I’d jump? Or was it the truth?”
He watched her steadily. His face was grimed with ash, his eyes rimmed with red from the stinging embers. Or maybe he had been crying. He repeated, “I never lie to you.”
“I love you, too. You know that. Or maybe you don’t. But I love you.”
“I know you think you do.”
“Oh, Foley,” she said, almost laughing. “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
She leaned in to kiss him. It was a remarkably sweela kiss. He tasted like smoke and ashes and fevered life, like miracles and passion and the embodiment of dreaming. Her skin was hot, or his was, or the very stone beneath their bodies still harbored fire, because she was flushed with heat and her lips burned against his mouth.
“I’m so glad I didn’t die,” she whispered.
There was a disturbance behind them and an eddy in the hazy air, and suddenly Nelson was standing there, his hands on his hips, his face streaked with soot. “Truly? Right now? This is the time you pick?” he demanded. “These stairs could collapse at any minute!”
Foley didn’t even bother to look embarrassed as he stood up and helped Corene to her feet. She clutched at his arm, but he didn’t show any inclination to let her go. “He’s right,” Foley said. “We need to get out of here.”
She nodded, letting him guide her toward the big square of blackness that must be the wide door. She’d only taken three steps before she had to step over a body on the floor, hidden till now by the low smoke. She caught her breath and tightened her grip on Foley’s arm. “Are they all dead?” she asked quietly.
He nodded. “Yes. Four of them.”
He had promised he would kill to keep her safe—and expressed the hope that he would never have to do so. Mostly because I don’t want you ever to be so much at risk. Well, she had been at risk and he had responded as promised, though it was horrible to think about.
“Four,” she repeated. “I’m impressed.”
“One of them was already dead from the fire I believe you set,” he said.
She nodded, her throat so tight she couldn’t speak. So she had killed a man after all. Sometime soon, she would need a long, quiet moment to think about that.
“And the sweela prime accounted for another one,” Foley added.
She swiveled her head to get a look at Nelson. “He did? I didn’t know he could even hold a weapon.”
Nelson’s grin was tired. “That’s not how a prime slays a man.”
“Oh,” she said, facing forward again to watch where she was going because Foley was steering her around
another dead soldier. Well, she knew what Zoe was capable of. The coru prime could call a man’s blood right out of his veins, make it seep through his skin in rivulets of red—though as far as Corene knew, Zoe had never actually killed anybody. Corene didn’t know how Nelson would stop an assailant, but she wasn’t surprised to learn he could do it. More surprised that he would.
There were too many bodies piling up in Malinqua. She was unutterably grateful that none of them were hers, or Foley’s, but she was tired of this place. Tired and sad and in pain and ready to sail away.
They stepped through the great door into the clear, cool night, and Corene took one deep breath of sweet air—then felt her feet freeze to the ground.
The tower was ringed with soldiers.
• • •
She felt Foley drop her arm and pull a blade; she felt Nelson press closer, bristling with heat and menace. But the soldiers didn’t surge forward, brandishing weapons, and neither of her protectors issued a challenge. They spent a brief, tense moment staring at each other in the imperfect light of flame and star, trying to make out faces and insignia. It didn’t take long for Corene to realize these men weren’t wearing Malinquese livery. In fact—could it be?—was that the small Welchin rosette embroidered on the fronts of their uniforms?
She drew herself up to what she hoped was a regal pose and demanded, “Who are you? Speak now.”
The lead soldier stepped forward and offered formal bows to Corene and Nelson. “Majesty,” he said. “Prime. I’m Captain Sorren of the Chialto Royal Guard, and these are my men. We await your orders.”
She felt Foley relax and Nelson start laughing, but she was too stunned to do more than stare. “Chialto Royal Guard,” she repeated. “How did you get here?”
A smaller shape slipped past Captain Sorren and resolved itself into Leah. “You’re safe!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms around Corene for a quick hug. “I brought the soldiers. When I realized what was happening—”