“And now you’re here, with your big death-power,” Jilly continued, “and you won’t even use it to get us out. Fat lot of good you are, Your Majesty.”
Lore’s fingers twitched involuntarily against the linen wraps. Searching for Mortem threads, trying to call them. She could feel the filaments of death running through everything here, the rock and the dirt, closer to the surface in the people than they should be.
But they wouldn’t come. Mortem wouldn’t obey her.
Lore couldn’t tell Jilly that, either. “How exactly do you think that would work? I turn all the guards to stone and we take the ships, only to be executed when we get to the mainland? I know dust inhalation is bad for your brain, but surely you still have one.”
The older woman’s lip lifted, a sneer that showed her nightshade-stained teeth. “It’d be something,” she said quietly, with a lace of desperation. “Something other than this. Hope is enough, even when it doesn’t make sense.”
“Get moving!”
The guards on the Burnt Isles were somehow even worse than the bloodcoats in the Citadel. Just as self-important, with an extra helping of stupidity and brute strength. This one, Fulbert, was as tall as Gabe and probably twice his weight, with what seemed to be the common sense of a dazed cow.
“You’re up farther than you should be, Jilly; get back down to your tier and leave the Queen alone.” Fulbert leered at Lore, waving Jilly on with a hand built for fistfights. “Are you trying to hold court, Your Majesty? Miss having a whole Citadel pay attention to you?”
“You people desperately need a different bit,” Lore muttered, rewrapping her hands and retrieving her pickax.
Fulbert wagged his finger and grabbed it from her. “No more mines for you today, Queenie. You’re on dock duty. Martin’s orders.”
Ah. Time to make a bad day even worse.
The sun was covered in a gray miasma, but Lore still squinted as she stepped out of the rickety lift between the central mine and the beach—the sunlight reflected off the particles in the air, making it bright but not reallysunny, which didn’t seem fair. She paused, trying to get her bearings, but Fulbert was impatient and pushed her out, sending her stumbling onto the rocky sand.
“The beach is no marble floor, huh?” He grinned, poking heragain. The end of his bayonet was blunt, but it still hurt. “Not like the Citadel. Can’t walk without iron bars under your feet?”
Lore kept her mouth shut. It was the one skill she’d honed on the Burnt Isles. If she had any hope of escaping, of finding a way to the Golden Mount so she could finish the job Nyxara had left undone, she had to let them tire of her. Become one more unwatched face in the crowd.
With no response to his needling, Fulbert grew bored quickly, as men of his intelligence were wont to do. “Martin’s at the lighthouse,” he grumbled, turning back to the lift. “Go straight there and get a mop.”
She was sure a mop was not the only thing Martin would try to give her. Fists already clenched, Lore stumbled her way across the beach in her flimsy prisoner-issue boots, blisters screaming across her arches.
At first, she’d been shocked by how little the guards here… well, guarded. But after a week or so, it made sense. For the few miles directly around the Isles, the sea was nigh unnavigable, the ash so thick in the air that you could barely see a yard in front of your face. The only way the prison barges were able to make it was by following the steel lines in the water, anchored to the Auverrani shore and the island’s beach, laid by the first generation of prisoners. Every once in a while an inmate would disappear, but it was chalked up to either suicide or murder. If you were on the Second Isle, those were the only two ways to get off it.
Lore walked slowly across the beach, since there was no guard to prod her on. She wanted to spend as little time at the lighthouse as she could and already felt the first pangs of hunger. It’d be bad tonight. When you worked dock duty, Martin decided if you got your rations or not.
The Burnt Isles’ harbor hardly deserved the name. Five sun-bleached docks jutting out into the surf and a barnacle-encrusted lighthouse a few yards out, barely visible before the curtains of fogand ash closed over it, both thickening over open water. Depending on the tide, you had to either climb over sharp rocks to reach the lighthouse or wade through the ocean and hope you didn’t trip over them.
Today was a wading day. Lore hitched up the baggy trousers she’d been given upon her arrival—too long in the leg, too tight in the waist—and made her way to the lighthouse. The current pulled at her from the moment she stepped into the sea, forceful as hands on her ankles.
Martin was waiting. The lighthouse keeper lounged in the doorway and watched her approach, his tall, thin frame giving the impression of a spider lingering in a web. A sly smile revealed blindingly white teeth in a sunburnt white face, his cut-short hair turned the same grayish not-color as the sky. His neck was tanned, but his arms were nearly as pale as his teeth, as if he covered them up when he went outdoors. “If it isn’t the Queen.”
Lore stopped on the rock closest to the lighthouse, blessedly flat and mostly out of the water, locking her legs against the wind. “You called?”
He pushed off from the door, hands in his pockets, eyes flickering lazily up and down her form. She’d been wrong before. He wasn’t like a spider; he was like a snake, eyes slitted against the ashy light, body primed for striking.
“I have work for you.” Where most of the other guards on the Isles spoke roughly, Martin always had a superciliously polite air about him, carefully articulate. “Both inside and outside. Which will it be, Your Majesty?”
A seemingly benign question. But Lore had an advantage, the one kindness her fellow prisoners had shown her.
Space in the communal bunkhouse was reserved for prisoners who found at least five valuable pieces a day, and Lore never had. Her first night, she found a shallow cave with a relatively soft sandy floor, one that already held a few others who’d had thesame idea. One of them was a girl who’d been on the Isles for weeks, and she gave them all a rundown of the guards.
“Gellert is an ass, but he’ll let you get an extra drink from the trough if you’re quick about it and no captains are watching. Don’t try to go down a tier in the mine, or the seniors will jump you, and the guards won’t do shit about it. And if Martin calls you to the lighthouse, never tell him you want inside work.” She’d narrowed reddened eyes, pointed with a broken-nailed finger at no one in particular. “Or do—I’m certainly not above sticky work for a favor—but be smart about it. He’s the kind who doesn’t just want that.”
The bruises on her cheekbone had told the rest of the story.
The girl had been gone in the next couple days. No one looked for her. Martin started calling up new girls for the lighthouse afterward.
And it hadn’t taken long for him to ask for Lore by name. This was the third time he’d called her here, given her the choice of inside or outside work. They both knew what he was really asking.
