The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

He’s right; that would be a shockingly freeing thought.

“Stop waiting,” Madoc says. “Sink those pretty teeth into something.”

I give him a sharp look, trying to decide if he is making fun of me. I lean down and write in the dirt and the crust of my own dried blood: Monsters have teeth like mine.

He grins as though I am finally getting his point. “That they do.”

Oak turns away from the lock in frustration. “Father, what exactly do you think you’re doing?”

“We were just talking, she and I,” Madoc says.

“Don’t listen to him.” He shakes his head with an exasperated look at his father. “He’s full of bad old-guy advice.”

“Just because I’m bad,” Madoc says with a grunt, “doesn’t mean the advice is.”

Oak rolls his eyes. I note he has a new bruise at the corner of his mouth and a wound on his brow that has caused blood to crust in his hair. I think of him fighting in the throne room, think of the pain when my tongue was cut out. Think of him watching.

I go to the bowl of soup, although I cannot stand to put anything into my mouth. Still, if I can get the dish into the cell, even if I tip out half the food, I can pass what’s left to Oak and Madoc.

As I begin to tilt it, though, I see something metal in the soup. Setting the bowl down again, I stick my fingers into the oily liquid and feel around. I touch the solid weight of a key and remember Hyacinthe’s words about getting me out of the Citadel.

Forcing myself not to look at Oak or Madoc, I palm the object. Then I tuck it away into my dress and retreat to the bench in the back of my cell. Oak has no luck with the lock. Neither of them seems inclined to eat the food.

I listen to them talk a bit more about Hurclaw, and how he argued with Lady Nore over some sacrifices that Madoc didn’t quite understand, and what would become of the bodies. Oak looks toward me several times, as though he would like to speak with me but doesn’t.

Eventually, Madoc suggests we rest, since tomorrow will be “a test of our ability to adapt to evolving plans,” which puzzles me. I know that Tiernan will arrive at the proscribed meeting place, with whatever it is in that reliquary.

The old general lies down on the bench while Oak stretches himself out on the cold floor.

I wait until they’re sleeping. I recall how he caught me in the woods and wait a very long time. But the prince is exhausted, and when I fit the key into my lock, he doesn’t wake.

I shove the heavy door, and it opens easily, the iron stinging my hand. I slip out, then tuck the key in a corner of their cell so that they will find it if I don’t return.

In the hall, I slip off my big boots. And then I walk, my bare feet quiet on the cold stone. The guard at the prison gate is sleeping, slumped over a chair. He must be used to having Madoc as his only charge.

Up the steps, rays of early-morning sunlight turn the castle into a prism, and every time the shadows change, I worry over being given away.

But no one comes. No one stops me. And I realize that this was my fate from the start. It wasn’t going to be Oak who stopped Lady Nore. It was always supposed to be me.

I do not meet Hyacinthe. I head for the throne room. As I tiptoe into a corridor that looks on the great hall’s double doors, I see they are closed and barred, with two stick soldiers standing at attention. I can think of no way to get past them. They do not sleep, nor do they seem alive enough to be tricked.

But no one knows the Citadel like I do.

There is another way into the great hall, a small pass-through tunnel from the kitchens where refuse is tucked away by servants—empty cups, platters, messes of every sort. The cooks and kitchen staff fish them out later to clean them. It is large enough for a child to hide in, and I hid in it often.

I move toward the kitchens. When I see guards passing, I duck into shadows and make myself unobtrusive. Although it has been a long time, I am well-practiced at being unnoticed, especially here of all places.

As I move, I have a strange dissonance of memory. I am walking through these halls as a child. I am walking through my unparents’ house at night, moving like a ghost. That’s what I’ve been for years. An unsister. An undaughter. An unperson. A girl with a hole for a life.

How appropriate to have my tongue cut out, when silence has been my refuge and my cage.

I creep down to the kitchens, on the first level of the Citadel. Their heat is what makes the prisons warm enough to survive. I would have thought the fires there, perpetually burning, would have melted the whole castle, but they do not. The base of the castle is stone, and what they do melt refreezes into a harder layer of ice.

I see a nisse boy, sleeping in the ashes before the fire, tucked into a blanket of sewn-together skins. I slip past him, past casks of wine. Past baskets of crowberries and piles of dried fish. Past jars of salted and pickled things and bowls of dough that are covered with wet towels, their yeast still rising.

I squeeze myself into the pass-through tunnel and begin to crawl. And although I am larger than I was the last time I was in it, I still fit. I slip by tipped-over wine goblets, dregs dried inside, and a few bones that must have fallen from a plate. I emerge at the other end, inside the empty throne room.

But as I push myself to my feet, I realize that I have failed again because the reliquary is gone.

I walk over to the place where it was, my heart beating hard, panic stealing my breath. I was foolish to come to Lady Nore’s throne room alone; I was foolish to come to the Citadel at all.