The Hour of the Crow

Chapter 11: The Royal Palace

Arran's legs were on the brink of giving out from fatigue, so he hoped the palace beds were every bit as comfortable and luxurious as he had always imagined them to be. The steady swing of princess Serafina's dark blue braid hypnotized his mind, to the point where he no longer registered their route and just followed that braid wherever it went. The princess tugged at his hand, just as energetic and purposeful as she had been at the black market hours ago.

Or so it seemed. Her golden eyes had lost some of their brilliance and her caramel skin looked pale in the moonlight. Fine wrinkles disfigured her forehead. She was an impressive figure, he'd give her that, with much more class and sophistication than the girls in his district, but her temper overshadowed that beauty to some extent. Arran made a face as he remembered how she had shouted at him the first time they had met, and again when he had re-emerged from the tunnels in Zohra's house.

Gods, at one point, he'd fantasized about throttling her for the way she mocked his ignorance. The triumphant glimmer in her eyes had told him she was well aware that she had driven him close to madness. Still, her behavior toward him had turned a hundred-and-eighty degrees afterwards, and now she was offering him refuge in the royal palace itself.

"Princess," he croaked.

She stopped in the middle of a dark alley, the palace's contours still a dark shadow in the distance. Raising an eyebrow, she stared into his eyes in that way of hers that made him feel exposed, as if she could read all of his secrets on his face. "My name is not 'princess'," she said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. "You may as well call me by the same name everyone else does."

"All right, Serafina."

She tsked. "Inna."

He blinked. "Inna, it is. I feel like we've been walking for almost an hour already. Why aren't we any closer to the palace yet?" He jerked his chin in the direction of the cluster of moonlit towers.

Her hand cramped around his own and a muscle twitched near her left eye, as though she fought the urge to roll her eyes at him. "The disused service entrance through which we'll sneak inside is connected to the tunnels under the city. The same tunnels you used tonight to get to Onshra's temple. There are no access points in the Gold District and since we'd better avoid the Silver District given recent events, we'll have to go to the Stone District instead." She gave him a look that said, Does that satisfy your curiosity?

He nodded and she started walking again—or striding, since Inna never just walked—dragging him along. Neither of them spoke again until Inna stopped at one of the bathhouses the Stone District was so famous for. She rattled a rusty iron gate attached to the side of the building, which opened with a loud screech that startled an owl in a nearby tree. The bird hooted an indignant protest before flying off into the night.

Inna had already moved on, however, leading Arran down a steep staircase. At the bottom, a stone archway interrupted the wave-like patterns in the bricks. Inna passed through with the confidence of someone who had done so a hundred times before, and he wondered just how often the princess broke the rules to explore the city without her father's knowledge.

Based on the little experience he had with Primsharah's opulent bathhouses, Arran had expected mosaics and the sweet aroma of bath oil. Yet, the room they entered looked much older than the rest of the building: the floor showed large cracks and the walls were dank and covered with moss. He saw no exits except for the one they had just come through and another, collapsed archway on the opposite wall, where debris blocked their way.

"What is this place?" he asked.

A small smile played on Inna's lips. "During the First Magical War, both the Uniformists and the Exclusivists dug a large, complicated network of underground tunnels along the entire Nahiri river, so that their spies and assassins could move around without being noticed by the enemy."