Rooke had assured her that Hawthorne and Sable were well trained and accustomed to dealing with shadow skins. That the king’s army would eradicate the threat. That everything was going to be fine.
But his assurances did nothing to calm her.
Just after midnight, Emeline’s pacing was interrupted by a knock on her door.
When she opened it, Sable stood in the frame, shoulders hunched, russet hair bedraggled, a bloody cut across her cheek.
“We chased a pair of them into the woods.” Sable sounded scared and small and not at all herself. “It was an ambush. Four shadow skins held me down while they dragged him away.”
Him.
She was talking about Hawthorne.
“I kept thinking … why don’t they just kill us? Why leave me alive?” Sable pressed her face into her hands. “It was as if they wanted me to watch him be taken.”
Hawthorne. In the hands of shadow skins.
Had they twisted his mind beyond recognition yet?
Had theykilledhim yet?
“Rooke’s assembling a search party.”
It will be too late,she thought.
“We’ll find him.”
It’s already too late.
The truth washed over her like a cold, powerful sea. Jolting her out of her shock. When Sable left, Emeline pulled on her Blundstones, shrugged on her coat, and slipped out into the hall.
She might not be able to wield a sword. She might not betrained to fight monsters. But she wasn’t helpless. She refused to sit behind the palace walls waiting for worse news.
Emeline limped quickly through the empty streets until she arrived at the city gate. It was locked and heavily guarded by more hedgemen than usual, the air around them tense.
Turning back, she headed for the door that led to Bog’s boardwalk only to find it gone. She ran her hands over the white stone wall, retracing her steps, but the door was hidden from her. She realized then that she’d only ever left the city with Hawthorne or Grace. It was possible the king’s prisoner was only permitted to leave if she was accompanied. Or perhaps the entrances and exits to and from the King’s City were sealed in light of the breach.
She pounded her fist against the wall, frustrated, when something scratchy brushed her cheek. She jumped, glancing up into the branch of a nearby sycamore.
Come,the tree whispered.
The sycamore’s bark was peeling, revealing a mottled green trunk beneath, and as her gaze followed it skywards she saw that its uppermost branches towered over the wall. The moon was almost full beyond its branches.
Climb,it said.
After glancing around to ensure she was alone, Emeline strode towards the tree, grabbed hold of its lowermost branch, and hauled herself up.
If she’d been in better shape, she might have scaled it easily. Instead, it took more time than she would have liked to get to the top. Her breath came fast and sweat dampened her skin. Straddling the sturdiest high branch, she used it to shimmy towards the top of the wall. As she neared the flat white stone, the branch bent, and Emeline’s heart plummeted, sure the branch was about to snap. She gripped it tight, ready to retreat, but whenshe glanced over her shoulder she found not the branch bending, but thetree.
Go,it said as it delivered her onto the top of the wall. A wall, she noticed, that was starting to speckle with black mold. Emeline wrinkled her nose at the musty, rotting smell, reminded of the moldy walls of the Song Mage’s house, deep in the Stain.
Had the curse spread to the King’s City? Was that how the shadow skins got inside?
If so, she couldn’t worry about it now; she needed to find Hawthorne.
When her feet touched stone, she let go of the branch, teetering a little without its support. The top of the wall was less than two feet across, and when Emeline looked down she found a twenty-foot fall. Her stomach lurched at the sight.
She quickly got down on all fours, avoiding the mold as best she could, then carefully lowered herself until she was dangling on the other side of the wall. “Thank you,” she whispered to the sycamore.
