Page 151 of Zenith Court

We wrapped him in a spare gray coat. No insignia. No ceremony. I left it that way.

I watched until they set him down beyond the direct line of the door. Aldric lowered himself to the stone beside him, injured leg stretched stiff. “I’ll stay until the wounded are moved,” he said.

My father and Aldric had spent years on opposite sides of rooms like this one. Now Aldric rested the stave across his knees and kept watch.

The ring pressed against my wrist when I bent over the house sword. I left the blade beside my father. The ring I kept.

Astra’s line drew tight beneath my ribs: south, down, several turnings. Not alarm exactly. Need. I could feel distance in it and the force of the water gathering around her.

I rested my hand on my father’s covered shoulder. I opened my mouth, but nothing came.

Then I took the lamp from the stair wall and went after Astra. Behind me, the witness floor remained quiet. Ahead, water shook the steps beneath my boots.

42

Astra

We left Caspian kneeling beside Magnus while Aldric and two defected stewards held the bolted door. Kieran had the lamp, Jonah was already studying the stair, and the water below us was getting louder. I followed them down.

The first flight was Court stonework: dressed block, mason’s marks, a handrail worn smooth by centuries of gloves. Three turnings down, the mortar ended and the passage lost its right angles. Cut steps became uneven shelves hacked into the rock, some scarcely deep enough for a boot.

Delphine took my elbow when one riser dropped farther than the lamplight showed. She let go as soon as I found the next foothold. Behind us, the sounds from the witness floor had faded until all I could hear was our breathing and the water.

The channels along the floor were nothing like the Court’s narrow drains. These ran wide and deep, their edges rounded by long use. Water crossed beneath our feet and vanished through cuts in the wall that no mason had squared. When I touched the stone, vibration climbed through my fingertips and settled in my wrist.

We passed a spiral scored into the wall at knee height, nearly worn away, then a row of short notches beneath it. Later mortar crossed their edges. Delphine stopped long enough to trace the marks with two fingers. “Older than the Court,” she said, then looked back toward the nearest turn before moving on.

The pull strengthened with every turn. My three lines drew lower against my skin, not painful yet, but tense. The water in the channels ran in the same direction we did, gathering speed as smaller cuts joined it.

Our pace shortened. Jonah tested each landing before letting the rest of us put weight on it. Kieran kept the lamp high when the walls narrowed. Delphine trailed her fingers over the stone and counted the turns under her breath.

By the time water covered our boot soles, the roar had become strong enough to blur speech. We crossed the first flooded stretch in single file, Jonah leading and Delphine bringing up the rear. The floor dropped twice beneath me. Both times the water reached my thighs before someone caught my arm and hauled me onto firmer stone.

The cold found every tear in my clothes. Loose gravel rolled beneath the current and struck my ankles hard enough to change my step. Jonah moved sideways through the worst of it, one hand on the wall and the other extended behind him, so each of us crossed with a grip already waiting.

The corridor narrowed again where the water reached our shins. Jonah’s hand went up. We stopped mid-channel beneath a ceiling low enough for Kieran’s lamp to blacken it with smoke.

Metal moved against stone ahead of us. Quietly, but not quietly enough for Jonah.

Five guards came out of recesses cut into both walls. Water-slick leather covered old Court gray. They carried short blades instead of the hooked poles stacked farther up the passage, weapons chosen for a corridor where a full swing would strike stone. No one challenged us. They closed from both sides.

They had chosen the ground well. The deeper channel ran behind our heels, making retreat slower than advance, and the ceiling forced Kieran and Jonah to shorten their reach. Two guards stayed low while the others crowded the light, using their own bodies to throw shadows across the floor cuts.

Kieran reached the nearest before the man finished raising his blade. He stepped inside the guard’s arm, drove one shoulder beneath his jaw, and used the low ceiling for leverage. The man struck the wall and slid into the channel. Kieran kicked the fallen blade behind us and turned.

The lamp struck the water during the collision and went out. Darkness covered the corridor, broken only by the pale light running under the skin of my wrist.

I heard boots strike stone, a blade glance off the ceiling, someone’s breath leave in a grunt. The current swallowed the smaller movements; every footfall echoed off stone and water. I kept my injured hand against the wall so I would know which direction was forward.

Two guards came from the left. Jonah caught the first wrist, drove the blade into the wall until the man’s grip broke, and forced him face-down into the current with one knee between his shoulders. The second tried to step around them and found the footing Jonah had left open on purpose. His boot dropped into a deeper cut. Jonah struck behind the knee, caught his wrist as he fell, and twisted the knife free. “The channels,” he called. “Make them step where you want.”

A fourth guard came straight for me. I turned the first cut with my forearm and lost the second in the dark. Delphine found it for me. She stepped into the gap, took the blade high across her own forearm, and hit the guard in the face with the heel of her other hand.

The woman fell back into the water. Delphine stripped the knife from her, set its point beneath her jaw, and spoke close to her ear. “Stay down.” The woman looked at the blood running from Delphine’s sleeve and obeyed.

The last guard reached Kieran while he was still turning from the first. There was no room for Kieran to bring his arm up. The guard’s blade angled toward the space beneath his ribs.

I reached for the guard’s oath the way I had practiced: find the taut place in the Mark, pull just enough to break concentration, release. One clean interruption. Half a second for Kieran to move.