Page 11 of Of Masks and Fury

“Go,” she hissed. “I’ll distract them.”

I bolted down the hall to a narrow door in the end wall. As I yanked it open and threw myself inside, hauling it shut behind me, the woman wailed. Her shriek of madness and pain echoed off the stone walls and sent ice down my spine.

Darkness swallowed me and Pherin whole.

The space was barely large enough to be called a closet, my shoulders brushing both walls. The air reeked of mildew and something fouler that had soaked into the stone over decades.

Her wails grew louder. The guards shouted.

“What in the fates?—”

“Shut up! Shut your damned mouth.”

“She’s mad.”

I tipped my head back, squinting up in the darkness, finding a faint outline of a grate in the ceiling, barely visible against the lighter stone around it. It was too high to reach by jumping.

With my back against one wall and the flats of my feet against the other, I began to climb. The technique was one Addie and I used as children, wedging ourselves between narrow spaces and wiggling upward. My muscles trembled with the strain, but I forced myself higher, ignoring the burn in my thighs and the way my arms shook.

My fingers hit the grate, the metal crusted with rust, the edges rough enough to cut. I pushed against it.

Outside, the woman’s screaming had dissolved into sobs. The guards were trying to calm her, their voices a mix of threats and awkward grumbling.

I pushed harder, and the grate groaned but held fast.

Think. Use your magic. Control it.

Taking a breath, I forced my panic down and placed my palm flat against the metal. When I reached for my magic again, I did it with purpose instead of fear.

I focused on the rust itself, on the way time and moisture had already weakened the metal. Encouraging that decay, I fed it with my power, accelerating what was already happening.

The metal crumbled, flaking away in reddish-brown chunks. The grate shifted and gave way entirely.

Pherin flew through the opening.

Holding onto the edge, I hauled myself up, my arms screaming in protest. The space beyond was much narrower than the closet below, a tunnel that angled sharply upward into absolute darkness.

Footsteps echoed in the hall.

Shoving myself into the tunnel, I pulled my legs up and slid the grate back into place as the closet door banged open below.

I froze as light spilled into the closet.

A guard poked his head into the small room.

“Nothing,” he called out, peering around. “You must’ve heard rats.”

It wasn’t until he’d shut the door and walked back down the hall that I dared to breathe again.

The tunnel was barely wide enough for me to fit. The walls compressed in on both sides, rough stone scraping my arms as I crawled up the steep slope. The air hung thick and stale, heavy with dust that made my eyes water.

I couldn’t see. I could barely breathe. The absolute, suffocating darkness pressed down on me like a boulder.

The old Amarissa would’ve panicked.

Isi kept crawling.

My hands found purchase on the rough stone, my knees bracing against the walls as I hauled myself upward, bit by bit.