He sits straight up, looking around. “Waterfall?”
“Here,” Hector says. “She has a chunk of wood lodged in her thigh. We’ll have to cut it out.”
Storm drags himself to Waterfall’s side. She puts a hand to his cheek. “Thank you for saving me.”
I have to roll my eyes at that, because we all saved her. Every single one of us.
“Mara, can you get a fire going?” Hector says. “I need to heat up my dagger.”
Storm rises, grabs my arm, and pulls me aside. “Will you heal her? It could get infected. She could still—”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
I frown. “It only seems to work on people I care deeply about. But maybe you could heal her? You’re the one who loves her.”
“I don’t know how to heal.”
“What you mean is you’re afraid to try.”
His face turns thoughtful. “Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Forgive me for not speaking more precisely. I fear hurting her. She is . . .” He looks down. “She is dear to me.”
“Let Hector do what he can. If she needs healing afterward, I’ll show you what to do.”
“All right.” He puts his hands to his face, then runs them through hair that now reaches the nape of his neck. “All right.”
I’ve learned to face death and injury when I must, but it’s never easy. I step away from the others, into the darkness, telling myself our tunnel is too narrow and small for everyone to be an onlooker.
A tiny hand creeps into mine.
I look down at the girl and squeeze gently. “Thank you for what you did, Red Sparkle Stone.”
“You’re welcome,” she says gravely.
She has been with us for such a short time, yet she was willing to risk her life for our cause. “Weren’t you scared?” I ask.
“Yes. But it was a good scared.”
“There’s a good kind?”
“Oh, yes.” Her voice drops so low I have to strain to hear. “Orlín made me scared all the time. Scared I would starve. Scared I would get too cold. Scared he would hurt me again or get so mad that he’d throw me to one of the men. That was nasty bad scared.” She pauses, scuffing her boots against the floor. “But you never hit me, even though I’m your slave.”
“You’re not my—”
“You always feed me. You call me a true name. Now when I’m scared, it’s not because of meanness. And today I chose my own scared. It’s always a good scared, when you get to pick it your own self.”
I squeeze her hand again, whispering, “I think I know exactly what you mean.”
In the months since becoming queen, there has been a nebulous thought wavering in my mind, just beyond the clarity of consciousness—that if I wanted to, I could give it all up. I don’t have to fight for my kingdom. I could abdicate. Hand it over to Conde Eduardo, who wants it so badly. Let him fight it out with Invierne. I could go back to Orovalle, to Papá and Alodia. I would be a failed queen, a failed bearer, yes. But I would be safe. My life would be easy.
I know I’ll never do it, even though my current path means danger and maybe even death. It’s terrifying. But it’s a manageable terror. Because I’ve chosen it.
I wince at Waterfall’s muffled scream. “Got it!” Hector says.
Mara sacrifices some of her precious burn ointment for disinfecting purposes, then Hector stitches her up. I call a halt for the day—if indeed it is day—to give Waterfall a chance to rest and ascertain the true extent of her injury. We’ll see if she can walk tomorrow.
But I gaze down the tunnel into the dark, knowing it’s too late to turn back, racking my brain for an idea on how to get across the false floor.
After breakfast I tell everyone the plan I came up with while we rested. I’m greeted by silence. “Or,” I add, “we can turn around and go back. Take our chances in the snow.”
“This is our best option,” Hector says.
“I agree,” says Belén.
Mara closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, but she nods.
We set up quickly. Hector shows Red how to tie a rolling hitch knot and has her practice several times. We loop one end of the rope around a rocky outcropping, the other around Red’s waist.
Traveling this tunnel has been made even more difficult by the fact that it is rough-hewn and jagged, for the goal of the original miners was to tunnel as quickly as possible. But now I’m grateful. There are plenty of places to tie a rope down. It might be what saves us.
We hold tight to Red’s rope as she sets off. She holds her cloak out in front of her, and she uses it to brush years of dust away from the floor to expose the rotting wood. We hope that by being able to see the floor, we can avoid the more obviously rotted parts as we cross.
She takes a step on the floor. It creaks. She waits a moment, then takes another step. On the third step, her foot breaks through and she jerks left to retain her balance, clutching at the wall. I brace myself and grip the rope so tightly my palms ache, but she doesn’t fall through. She doesn’t look back, and she doesn’t hesitate. She pulls her foot from the hole and keeps going.
The moment her feet touch solid ground, she jumps into the air with a whoop. “I did it!” she says, whirling to show us her grinning face. “I did it!”
“Good work, Red,” I call out. “Now can you tie the rope to something?”
She removes the rope from her waist and looks around. She spots a promising outcropping of rock, then loops the rope around twice and ties it off the way Hector showed her.
“Your turn, Waterfall,” Hector says.
She limps forward and grips the now-taut rope that stretches across the hidden chasm.
“Hold on with both hands,” Hector instructs. “And try to keep to the path Red used.”
I hold my breath as she starts forward. Ideally, we’d tie another rope to her waist. But this one will have to be cut when we all reach the other side, and we dare not risk losing another. I make a mental note that if I survive this and have the misfortune of embarking on another long journey, I will take lots of rope. A mountain of rope.
Waterfall reaches the other side safely. Then me, then Mara, then Storm and Belén. Hector goes last. He insisted on it, saying he is the heaviest and thus most likely to weaken the floor for everyone else.
My heart is in my throat as he sets out. The floor groans beneath his weight. He has only gone two steps when something snaps. The entire floor falls away, and Hector with it.
“No!” I yell, rushing toward the edge. Hands grab at my elbows, trying to hold me back, but I push them away.
The dust clears. The rope sags into the pit, but it is not broken. Hector hangs from it with both hands. He swings one leg up and hooks the rope with his ankle, then does the same with the other. With slow, jerky movements, he executes an upside-down crawl along the length of the rope toward us.
“Hurry, Commander,” Storm says. “The rope is fraying.”
I whip my head up. Sure enough, the rope is unraveling where it rubs up against the opposite edge. We’ll be lucky if it holds much longer.
One of Hector’s ankles slips, and the rope sways wildly, scraping hard at the edge of the pit. He swings his leg back into place and keeps going, hand over hand, dragging himself along as the rope unravels, and I can’t stop muttering, “Please, God, please, please, please.”
He reaches the edge. The rope snaps.
Hector’s head drops out of sight as Belén and I lunge forward to grab him, and miss. My chest feels like it’s turning inside out, until I see Hector’s fingertips, gripping the edge so tight they’ve gone white.
We grab his wrists, then his arms. My fingers dig into his flesh, and my shoulder sockets burn as I pull with all my might. He gets an arm over the edge, then a leg. I grab the back of his pants and help him to solid ground.
He lays there panting, staring at the ceiling. “That was close,” he says.
I stick a finger in his chest. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
Before I can blink he grabs me, pulls me atop him, and right in front of everyone, kisses me soundly. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” he says, his lips still against mine. “To watch someone you love almost die?”
I rest my forehead against his. “Once this is all over, I say we stop doing that to each other.”
He grins. “Agreed.”
I get to my feet, pulling him with me. “Can you travel?”
“Like the wind.”
I turn to find everyone else staring at us without bothering to disguise their amusement. Except Red, who wrinkles her nose at me. “That was gross,” she says.
29
THREE or four days later, we reach a crossroads. Waterfall crouches to read the runes and says, “This way.” And we follow her into a different tunnel, even narrower than the last, with a ceiling so low that everyone save Red and me must stoop to pass.
When instinct says it’s time to halt for the day, I decide to keep going, for the tunnel is so narrow that we would have to lay out our bedrolls single file to camp. No one complains. We push on and on, until we reach a spot where the ceiling is so low we must get on our hands and knees and crawl through. The walls press tight around us. The rock above me feels heavier than ever. Surely it will give way any moment, tumbling around us, crushing us to death. In this tight space, it would be impossible to run from danger.
In front of me, Mara whimpers. I reach up and squeeze her leg.
At last the tunnel opens into a wide natural cavern, with a high ceiling thick with stalactites that sparkle like icicles, and we tumble into it as fast as we can. It’s such a relief to stand up straight, to stretch our arms high. Waterfall stands in the center and holds out her torch, revealing water-smoothed rock and a sandy floor. Dark blots of shadow mar the walls, indicating branching tunnels.
“This place floods regularly,” Hector observes, bending down. He grabs a handful of sand and rubs it around in his palm. “No moisture. It’s been dry for a while.”
“Maybe in the spring?” Belén says.
“Or when winter comes early, after the first thaw,” Waterfall says.
Oh, God. What if the sun is shining outside? What if it’s melting all that snow?
“Maybe we shouldn’t camp here,” I say. “Maybe we should keep going.” But my legs quiver. If I were to guess, I’d say we’ve been walking or crawling for a day and a half.
“Rest for a bit,” Waterfall says, with uncharacteristic softness in her voice. “Sleep if you can. I need time to figure out which of these tunnels to take anyway.”
It’s as good a plan as any. We unshoulder our packs and look for a place to lie down. Hector finds a flat bit of rock and stretches out on his side. I stretch out behind him, wrapping my arm around his chest and burying my nose in his back. His hand comes up to trap my arm.
I should savor this moment, with my body pressed against his, breathing in the familiar scents of leather oil and the soap he uses to shave. But suddenly all I can think about is Waterfall. I hope we were right to trust her. We’ve come so far, taken so many turns, that without her, we would be lost down here forever.
Scritch-scritch-scritch. Something echoes in the dark. I blink to clear fuzzy vision and shake off sleep, wishing for the thousandth time that we could manage more light in this awful place. I roll away from Hector as it sounds again. Scritch-scritch-scritch.
I shake him awake, and he lurches to a sitting position. I put a finger to my lips. “Listen,” I whisper.
The others breathe softly around us. Waterfall is nowhere to be seen. One of the branching tunnels glows. She must have taken a torch to investigate it.
Scritch-scritch-scritch.
“An animal,” Hector says. “Something small. With claws.”
“Small is good,” I say in a weak voice. My mind tumbles through its brief catalog of small animals with claws that might live deep in a cave. Rats, maybe. Or bats. Do bat wings sound like claws?
The tunnel brightens. The light is steady and sure, blue-white rather than orange.
“Hector? That—”
“Get the others up,” he says. “Now!”
We run around shouting, shaking everyone awake. Storm’s bleary eyes turn sharp almost at once. “Where is my sister?” he demands.
“We don’t know. Be ready. Something is coming down that tunnel toward us.”
The scratching is steadier now, louder. It doesn’t sound like a small creature with claws anymore. It sounds like thousands of them.
Storm pulls his amulet from beneath his shift. Mara strings her bow, her fingers flying. Belén and I draw our daggers, Hector his short sword. Red grabs a burning piece of wood from the fire and stands beside Mara.
The walls of the tunnels pulse with light. Something scuttles over the lip of the tunnel entrance toward us. Fist sized, glowing. A deathstalker.
Then others pour out after it, a whole flood of them. Red screams as our cavern fills with soft light.
“Get ready to stomp!” Hector yells. He grabs another chunk of wood from the fire. Sparks fly as he flings it at the deathstalkers. It lands near the entrance to the tunnel, and the scorpions part to make way for it, like water rushing around a boulder. “They’re afraid of fire!”
The nearest have reached us. Mara and Belén stomp furiously, knees kicking high. Several crawl up Mara’s legs, up her back, into her hair.
I anchor myself to the ground, call the zafira, and spring up a barrier between us and the tunnel. They pile up against it, scrambling over one another’s bodies in a frenzy.