The tunnel faced east, so we were blinded as the sun rose. It was impossible to sleep in the glare — or even pretend to — but we couldn't start work because we had to wait to be unchained. So the hour after dawn was a time for talking.
"You tried to kill him?" he asked for the second time. We weren't bothering to whisper anymore. None of our fellow slaves had shown the slightest bit of interest.
"Well, yes, I suppose."
"But now you're friends?" Tommas made a face, but I nodded. "And what's his name, again?"
"Temris," I said, sighing. It felt strange to be having this discussion with Tom, of all people. My life in the village and my life with the northerners had always felt so separate, and now the lines were blurring.
"Right. Anyone else I should know about?"
Most of the warriors would be self-explanatory, I reckoned. As for the rest ... I sorted through the list, and — oh. "There's Melia. She's Lord Ulric's daughter. We get along quite well."
"Our liege-lord's daughter," Tommas mouthed slowly. "Abyss, Lyra."
I shrugged. It all sounded normal now. It was my new, distorted reality. Someone had shaken the world and turned it on its head. Soon it would right itself, and kings would fall and peasant girls might find themselves elevated beyond their wildest dreams.
It took longer than I expected, introducing Tommas to that new reality. After an hour, when I had explained everything I could bear to, he was still having trouble believing any of it. He didn't say so, of course, but I could feel the pulsing scepticism lurking just below the surface. One slip and the whole story would collapse.
And then the man arrived to unlock everyone's chains, and I had to slip into a side tunnel and lie there in the darkness, silent as the grave. By the time it was safe to return, the morning's work had begun. The music of pickaxes on rock echoed through the tunnel, rendering every other noise insignificant.
Since there was nothing else to do, no spare dram to pull, I gathered scraps of rock and helped the other girls fill their drams. It took a good deal of buttering up before any of them were willing to talk to me, the strange infiltrator. Ghost, they called me when they thought I wasn't listening. Having appeared from the darkness, pale, bruised and bloodied, I could see their point.
"I could take over, if you like," I offered. "You could rest for a few hours."
My reply was a dozen vigorous head shakes. The drams were their responsibility, and they feared punishment for surrendering them. But the only way to come into contact with the children outside was to bring them a dram, and the only way to get a dram was trust, and building trust took time, so I had to wait. Even though Emri could have been a dozen paces away.
"I can try talking to them," Tommas said silently. He must have seen my unrequited efforts to make friends.
"Please," I implored.
He motioned for me to wait, handed me his pickaxe and then slipped past me. He had to talk aloud to the girls, and I watched them straining to understand every distortion and slip of the tongue.
"Lyra is a friend," he began hesitantly. "From years and years ago..."
He went on to explain about Emri, about how I had only come here to look for her, and he asserted frequently that I was flesh and blood, not a ghost. The first time around, none of them looked convinced, but by the third or fourth repetition, they were coming around.
"Is this all true?" one of them asked me, ever so cautiously.
"Yes." I snapped the word, and I had to remind myself to play nicely. "What would you do for your sister?"
She cocked her head to one side. "Whatever it took."
And so I had a dram. It was rusty, and the wheels screeched like a dying cat, but it could get me outside. The surface tunnels were different — there was no pulley, just an extended track which led to a bricked surface where the drams were upended and children picked through their contents, searching for the red-brown rocks which held the iron.
The girl had described it all for me, but nothing prepared me for the moment when I first crawled into the light. The dram was a constant, back-breaking weight, reminding me of where I was. It was almost a blessing when I caught my first glimpse of the children and my mind left my body far behind.
They had their backs to me. I couldn't see a damn thing except that there were five of them, but only two were small enough to be my sister. Closer, then. I dragged the dram across the open rails and let it grind to a halt on the bricks.
From there, I could see a little more. One of the little ones had fiery red hair, albeit much obscured by dirt and soot. Not her. But the second ... her hair was identical to my own, the same depthless shade of ebony.
The dram was heavy. I had to rock it on the rail and throw my weight against the side before it would topple, sending an avalanche of rocks crashing across the bricks. A couple of the children looked up at the noise, their faces twisting into grimaces at their added workload. But the dark-haired girl, the only one who mattered, carried on sifting through the rocks.
I righted the dram, slipped the chain from around my waist, and took a few wobbly steps towards her. With my heart thundering in my chest and my breaths coming in hoarse gasps, I crouched near her.
"Em?" I asked her quietly.
The girl dropped the rock she was holding and turned in alarm, staring up at me with sea-green eyes. She looked so very, very afraid. "Yes..."
I could see why Tommas had crossed the camp to follow the description. She had the right looks, in a vague sort of way. Short, dark curls and the pale complexion which was so common in the wetlands. But it wasn't her. It wasn't my Emri.
Because my Emri was dead.
And that little ball of hope I had been nurturing shattered inside me. The fragments sliced bloody holes through my heart and soul and left a trail of destruction in their wake. There was something broken — irreparably, permanently broken — because I had managed to undo all of my grieving in the last day, somehow.
In a daze, I began to wander back to the tunnel entrance. I almost made it, too. Three steps away and I stopped because Tom was watching me from the gloom. He raised his eyebrows, full of desperate hope. I managed to shake my head, and then I had to just stop and remember to breathe.
So when the soldiers began marching towards me, I didn't care. When a giant of a man seized my arms in an iron grip and wrenched them behind my back, crushing my flesh into my bones, I didn't care. They dragged me away to gods only knew where. Someone had told. One of the slaves had told. For a scrap of food or chance to see a loved one, they had whispered about the girl who had slipped into the tunnel in the dead of night.
I didn't care. It wasn't Emri, and it had never been Emri, and Emri's corpse was most likely rotting on our kitchen hearth.
"Lyra!" Tommas was mouthing at me, frantically trying to form the words before we were pulled too far apart. "What can I do?"
And I was tempted to keep my mouth shut, to do nothing, to let myself die just out of spite. But Temris was in this godsforsaken place, too, and he had come to protect me, whatever his motives. I didn't want him dying in the dark, deep underground, and I didn't want that for Tom or Ronan or Kiare.
But those precious few seconds of indecision had cost me distance, and I knew he couldn't see my lips anymore, so I had to shout, "Smoke, Tom."
He couldn't hear me. Of course he couldn't hear me. And damnation, I couldn't even signal without my hands. Shit, shit, shit.
I writhed in the soldier's grip. He might have been a giant, but he had the same weakness between his legs as every other man. My heel found the right place, his grip on my arms loosened for a split second, and I managed to pull them free. The other soldiers closed in without mechanical efficiency, but I had bought myself the second I needed.
There wasn't a signal for smoke, exactly. So I crossed my fingers into a lattice and pulled my hands past each other. It was the next best thing — fire. I wondered if he had been able to see it. I wondered if he even remembered.
Then someone clouted me around the head hard, and my ear went numb, and I sunk a little into darkness. Something was bleeding. A single drop of hot blood crept down my neck and carved a bloody trail down my back. By the time it hit the floor, I was unconscious.
***
"Welcome back, girl."
I blinked to clear the haze from my eyes. So tired, so sleepy, and yet I knew the real world demanded my attention, because I was about as far from safe as a person could get. And yet I couldn't feel the pinch of metal on my wrists. I seemed to be free to move, and someone had removed the manacles from my ankles. I was sat against the wall of a light, airy building, the bricks rough against my bare arms.
In front of me, there was a man sat in an ornate wooden chair. He was lounging in the seat as if he had all the time in the world, and I doubted I would have felt so threatened had I woken up to a knife in my face. It was the sheer laziness of it that conveyed the menace.
"How did you get loose?" he asked me in a deep, cultured voice, giving off the impression of mild curiosity.
There was blood in my mouth. I couldn't spit as far as he was sitting, so I swallowed it. Best not to give him the satisfaction.
When I didn't show any inclination to reply, he added, "You will tell me sooner or later, you know."
I simply stared at him. This seemed to be a strange interrogation tactic — no carrot and no stick so far. He didn't even seem particularly interested in what I had to say. Best to play dumb and buy some time for Tommas to get Anlai's attention.
"Perhaps I should introduce myself," he said to himself. "Yes, that would be polite. I am Lord Freedrik of the Sion House, and His Majesty the King appointed me as governor of this lovely establishment."
Oh. If I had held any expectations for Canton's governor, this man had shattered them all. He wasn't outwardly brutish or rough in any way — fine, expensive clothing, a slim build and an edge of grace to his every move. No, I suspected his cruelty ran deeper. There was a hidden ruthlessness somewhere within him. There had to be, because how else could a person command slavery on such a massive scale?
"I have done my research," Lord Freedrik went on. "You arrived in this camp two days ago in the company of a young northerner, and you were appointed to the third hill. Sometime last night, since you were accounted for at dusk, you escaped your lodgings, crossed nearly a league of terrain patrolled by my men, and settled yourself on the first hill."
Too much. He knew too much already, and I was living on borrowed time. Come on, Tom. Anyone. I had no doubt this man could keep me alive as long as he wished, against my own will, even, and eventually I would crack.
"Now, I am not a dull man, child, so I do appreciate the significance of all this." He tapped his fingers against the arm of the chair absent-mindedly, drumming out some marching rhythm. "We have had hundreds of escape attempts. Every few days, some poor soul breaks free and starts running. Some of them just want to throw themselves from a ledge, some of them go to ground, but most head for the wall and get themselves shot."
I shrugged my shoulders. If he wanted to tell me a story, he could. More of his time wasted, more time bought for the others.
"Never in the short history of Canton has a slave done what you did last night. Do you know why?"
"No," I muttered, fixing my eyes on the ceiling.
"Because the motives for such an action are convoluted, to say the least. To have the means to escape and use it only to imprison yourself elsewhere. I would like to know why you did that."
I kept my lips sealed and my eyes empty. Clearly, he knew I had something to hide, but if he got any inkling of exactly how much there was to hide, I would be put to the question in a matter of minutes.
"I can continue investigating," he offered. "There are several lines of inquiry to pursue. Your northern friend, the boy you were so desperate to find on hill one, the circumstances of your arrival at Canton... Why, I could have the whole story sketched out within the hour."
Yes, he could, but I couldn't let him go anywhere near those tunnels. The northerners wouldn't give Tem up without a fight, but if they got pinned into their tunnel, they wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance. And then there was Tommas, who may or not have been setting alight to everything he could get his hands on.
"This is a lot of fuss," I observed, "for one girl out of place."
A sly smile split his face. "You're right. Under most circumstances, I might let the strangeness of your actions slip. Desperate people do strange things, after all. But incidentally, one of my men died last night. He fell from a ledge very close to your accommodation."
I shut my mouth again. My eyes wandered past him, fixing on the glass panes which looked out over the red-brown hills. Clearly, Lord Freedrik liked the sound of his own voice, and who was I to interrupt such passion? He paused for a handful of heartbeats, waiting for my reply. When it didn't come, he was all too happy to take the conversation to his endgame.
"If you did kill him, and I am quite sure that you did, I can't let you live. So my offer is this. Tell me everything, right here and now, and I will let you die. Quickly and quietly. I will show you mercy."
And I fell into a fit of laughter because through the window behind him, I could see a plume of smoke rising from hill one.