A needed outing brought Lance to the canteen for lunch for the first time in several days. With his shifts in the furnaces all transpiring at night, he had little incentive to awake before afternoon was well underway, and then it was to sit for dinner, spare those few hours he had for his friends or for Ben.

  He had not seen him in some time, either. Too much lingered in his mind’s eye to pce much focus on the little things, good or otherwise.

  He had agreed to lunch with Ben because he felt he was neglecting him. With everything so new, he did not want to come across as dodgy, did not want Ben to think he had lost interest, that he was contempting breaking things off before they had gone much farther than digging out a basement to support the house he intended to build.

  If everything could have just stayed simple…. he thought dejectedly, as he passed under the great clock, its pendulum swinging to and fro just over his head. His tray was poputed with simple offerings. The kitchens had been stretched thin with the demands of the nobility of two cities to contend with, and their offerings had become much less inspired as a result.

  He should be happy they hadn’t elected to serve wheat gruel three times a day. As it was, he approached a table where Ben sat by himself with boiled sausages and a baked yam to contempte.

  He took the saved seat across from him, set his tray down, and picked up his fork.

  “How’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Decent, I guess.” Ben said. “Lady Therien’s been on one with the Mirrhvalians here…and that business with Lady Tamalsen. I think she’s taking it personally what happened.”

  “What did happen?” Lance asked, meeting his gaze.

  “She was flogged. Beaten to a bloody pulp. Rashanna was on duties for Lady Jain to clue her in on…something…and she saw….” Ben trailed off, a concerned expression stealing over his face. “Are you okay?”

  “Just tired. I’m not used to being up this early.” Lance said. He tried on a grin. “So Rashanna?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I promise I’m fine.” Lance said.

  Ben nodded, but the expression on his face only ratcheted up Lance’s concern. Why didn’t I take you with me? It’d be so much simpler if I could just tell you what’s going on.

  But he wouldn’t. To tell Ben anything would only invite more complications into his life.

  “Right.” Ben said. “So Rashanna walked in on what was happening. She was the one who reported it. She’s still pretty shaken up over it.”

  “Sky Lord’s mercy.” Lance breathed. “I’m sorry she went through that.”

  “She’ll be okay. She wasn’t hurt or anythin’. She’s just in shock over it all. It was…well, I guess she said she wasn’t sure what she saw. But she swears she recognized the person who did it.”

  “Did she say who?”

  “Y-yes. I don’t know if I should tell you if I’m being honest.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “Sami, actually.”

  Lance flinched.

  “You said you hadn’t seen her in a while. Well, it’s lookin’ like she probably did Lord Bran in, too. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s a lot of things, but I don’t think—“

  “It’s okay, just…can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure.”

  There it was. Another complication to add to the small mountain of problems facing him. Those memories recently pulled loose by a spirit whose name he didn’t know—whose nature was made known to him even as she chose to withhold her identity, to deny him her aid—skittered across his mind. Harrowing perils tap danced across the spongy tissue of his brain, leaving him more confused than he could remember being, and with too much to process besides.

  There was the problem of Peter and his block. That he couldn’t hear the spirits voices seemed something Lance was personally responsible for, and whatever solution came along to mend that wrong needed to come from him, or he would never be relieved of his guilt.

  They shared the same problem, if its manifestation was different for each of them. They were bonded now in their silence, a need for secrecy. His friends had, almost overnight, become little boxes for him to stash away secrets, with no two of them knowing everything he knew, and he hated it. Peter did not know how he had come to arrive in the furnaces, why it was deemed necessary for him to be there. But Ben did.

  Ben did not know what Master Gregor and Lord Aren were up to, or what they cimed Lance was. This alien entity who might, if he could learn to harness his power, save them from something they had been less than forthcoming in defining. But Peter did.

  Sami knew something of the perils he was embroiled in, too, or why had she gone rogue. What had made that sweet if rebellious woman turn murderer? Why had she chosen to single out Lady Tamalsen, of all people, for a lesson in humiliation? She must have stumbled onto something, and he could not stop thinking about a staircase behind a metal grate, a pce he had happened upon first when in the company of the very man sitting across from him. Which inspired such palpable anxiety in him that he would rather be anywhere else.

  He could not stop thinking she had gone down there. That whatever had driven her to cold blooded murder was housed at the other end of it.

  They made idle chitchat as they tucked into their food, avoided all talk of her, of his condition and what it might mean. Ben kept things on light notes, did the heavy lifting of keeping conversation flowing. And if he thought Lance was acting strangely, he might attribute it to having just learned his very best friend was a killer.

  He thought of Ariana, too. If she knew Sami had attacked Lady Tamalsen, she couldn’t be in good spirits, either. Knowing nothing other than a friend who had disappeared had resurfaced a violent criminal, one at rge and with an agenda that seemed inspired by vengeance, she could not be doing well either.

  He walked with Ben to the spiral stair leading to the upper floors of the Servant’s Tower, took him to his floor, and kissed him goodbye. Then, he traced his steps back the way he came.

  If Sami had been driven to such violence by that pce, he would go there. If that pce had nothing to do with her sudden shift toward cruelty, he would still go there. In that secret reach y answers to at least some of his questions. If nothing else, there would be a confirmation there for some truth he held close, that not all in this pace was as it seemed.

  He listened at the entrance at the height of the stair until he was certain it was safe, and then proceeded down the steps.

  He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. The best way to overcome your fear is to confront it. Maybe the other servants were okay with not knowing what was down there, what the truth behind this secret was, but he needed to. This pce elicited the same palpable fear in Ben as it did him. He suspected most servants had a simir reaction to it. Animal panic, bereft of reason. A memory in the body of dark times, which the mind refused to identify.

  Some disease brought small truths to the surface in the servants in those vulnerable moments when they were frightened or defenseless. Something needed to be forgotten for them to accept their pce in the pace. He might regret knowing, but it would be like repcing one regret with another. He was convinced the source of his madness, of all of their madness, y here, at the other end of this staircase.

  He steeled himself, pushed his fear aside, and kept going. He pressed his hand to the wall as a guide through the darkness, navigated the steps by feel. An ache formed in his temples as he descended, and the air grew progressively colder. He halted halfway down, and closed his eyes.

  He was a child—maybe three years old. He sat in front of someone atop a beast with a neck extruded from a fleshy hump covered in coarse fur. As far as he could see in any direction, there was only sand. He was thirsty, but the bdders he knew contained water hung out of his reach on the animal’s saddle, and the person behind him wouldn’t help him with it.

  Memories like this one had become a frequent intrusion on his daily life since that ancient woman who called herself the moon looked into his eyes. She had unlocked a door within him, and the terrors in his past had come spilling out, but they had not all come at once.

  He opened his eyes, started moving again. In the distance, lights flickered, warm and yellow-orange, the afterglow of a fire.

  He closed his eyes again, paused where he stood.

  He was a child in someone’s home. My home.

  Low fmes flickered in a hearth near his seat on a broad strip of velvet carpet. People sat around a pile of neatly wrapped parcels. They wore sweatshirts tooled with fanciful designs and scks to mark the formality of the occasion. A boy with his dark hair slicked back surveyed the parcels through hungry, storm-gray eyes. The older people ughed and sipped at drinks, their cheeks red, eyes glossy. There was the man that matched the boy, a woman with eyes that matched Lance’s. There was another man with them—with silver eyes and salt and pepper hair, dressed in a fuchsia, four-piece suit. Then another walking in from somewhere else with a tray in hand. He was coal dark, coconut headed with round ears and wiry hair. Two older children sat on a couch with a green-eyed girl that looked somewhat like the younger boy. The daughter, darker than the son, was of an age with the green-eyed girl. The son was a few years older, maybe fifteen.

  They looked so happy—all of them gathered together. And he knew he had been happy with them once.

  When he opened his eyes, the chill on the air was in his bones, cold water filling him, stiffening his legs, pressuring them to resist as his brain signaled the march forward.

  He kept on.

  The light intensified. The silence deepened. He stopped on the st step. This time, he didn’t close his eyes.

  The room that crawled out from under that step was a simple expanse, with floor and walls of poured stone. A blocky prominence with a door marked a holding room of some kind. In the recess next to it, a trough full of dirty water sat beside a pile of ptes and trays arranged willy-nilly atop a ragged looking stool. A table framed by bench seats filled the space in front of it. A kitchen knife y on its surface, and it was covered in grease.

  Across from the recess and the holding room and all down a hall that fell out of sight were panes of mirrored gss with columns of poured stone between, each a hand’s width thick.

  He stepped into the room. The weight of rumor and story was with him as he ran his hand over the rough surface of the table, the wall of the holding chamber where a torch burned in its bracket. He touched its handle to make sure it was real.

  Finally, having summoned every ounce of his courage, his skin crawling with static, he set himself in front of those mirrors.

  He reached out with shaky fingers, pressed his hand to the gss. The gss cleared, fog on the window chased away by a sudden wave of heat. The crity spread to its corners, revealing what y beyond. Where his reflection had been looking back at him, a cell appeared. His stomach roiled. A lump in his throat threatened to choke him.

  There, waiting for him to find, was a boy. He was no more than four years old. His hair was a matted, dirty mess. His skin was coated in grease, and salt, and soil. His fingertips, where they clung to his shins, were crusted with dried blood, the nails chipped and grimed. He huddled in the far corner under a wall scratched over with so many overpping marks there was no telling where one prisoner’s desperate attempt to keep time ended and the next one’s began. A pile of feces took up the corner furthest from the boy, whose only garment was a pair of briefs gone yellow and crusty, if not from urine then from sweat and dirt.

  Lance felt the itch in his private parts, the burning sensation from defecating and having nothing to clean up with. He felt the oil on his skin, could smell, suddenly, as clearly as if he was the one in that cell, the sour, onion-and-pepper odor of his own, unwashed body. His scalp itched and his eyes watered. He couldn’t remember when he started crying, but soon his breath hitched in his throat; and anger, and pain, and fear battled with each other inside of him. He felt sick, like nothing in the world would ever be right again.

  He closed his eyes.

  Fire burned everywhere. He was surrounded by it. A broken timber blocked the door out of his wood-paneled room. He sat on his tiny bed, watching the fire burn, inhaled smoke and listened to his sister scream and bash the door.

  She couldn’t save him. Young as he was, he knew that he would die before she got to him.

  Cold hands wrapped around his shoulders. He fell backward through some unseen barrier, into darkness.

  One memory gave way to another.

  Light poured into a darkness he knew concealed a fate like that of the child in the cell, and a woman stood in that light. She was tall in his memory, with full lips and bck hair done into a neat bun at the back of her head. She wore a lic and obsidian dress, with skirts that hugged her figure. A pendant with a green stone set into its woven, silver frame hung between her breasts from a fine chain.

  She cimed to have saved him, and he loved her for it. The Shadow Queen, Meredith, whom he knew now had imprisoned him after she ordered him stolen from his family.

  He stumbled, caught himself on the edge of the table. The door to the holding chamber burst open. A Wraith—dressed in an oil-skin loincloth, a band of script running around his midriff, another broader coil over his heart, stood inside the doorway, holding the door against his forearm.

  “You’re not supposed to be here!” he shouted.

  All of the rumors came unbidden to Lance’s mind. No one comes back from here. They never come out again. They’ll execute you if you go down there…or worse. He searched for a way out, but the Wraith had seen his face. A ball of fme coalesced against the Wraith’s palm. He cranked his arm back, readying to throw it.

  Lance panicked.

  He snatched the knife off the table. The grease made it slippery in his grip.

  He screamed, charged, the knife held in front of him in both hands.

  The Wraith hesitated. The knife smmed into his throat, above the colrbone.

  Lance recoiled as the elf stumbled and fell over. Blood ran from the wound in his neck. Lance stood there dumbly as the blood pooled under the elf and spread.

  Then, he ran—up the stairs, across the hall, through a door into the servant’s tunnels and down. He ran until his legs wouldn’t carry him and then slowed, stopped.

  He ducked into a storeroom. He was near the kitchens now, his legs and lungs on fire.

  “What did I just do?” he breathed.

  His hands shook violently. He couldn’t believe they were capable of such violence, couldn’t comprehend how he had just…killed someone.

  “What did I do?”

  He pulled himself together. It took some time and even when he had his composure it felt as if one wrong word would pull him apart again.

  He stripped off his clothes, tossed them in a mop bucket full of dirty water that he used to scrub his hands and forearms clean. He wiped his face with the untainted back of his tunic, and left the storeroom in his underwear, hoping—as he navigated the tunnel, ducking into storerooms or taking a new path whenever he heard another servant approaching—he could get back to his barracks unseen. He was certain that if he was caught, he would be immoted. Thought for anything else was ephemeral.