For two days I forgot to be afraid, and that was the mistake. I can see it clearly now, looking back. At the time it felt like the opposite of a mistake. It felt like waking up.
The Undercity had decided I was theirs.
I don't know how else to describe what happened in those two days before the Council session. Word of the old woman — of the gray thread I'd cut, of the leash forty years old that had simply fallen off — went through the tunnels faster than fear ever had, and the trickle of rogues coming to look at me became a flood coming to follow me. They organized. They didn't need me to tell them how; they'd been organizing to survive their whole lives, and now they had something to organize toward. Marrow's drowned station filled and overflowed. People I'd never met began calling me by a title I'd never claimed.
And there was a boy named Finch.
He was nineteen, maybe twenty, quick and bright and rogue-born, with a laugh too big for the tunnels and a way of appearing exactly when I needed something carried, found, or fixed. He'd lost his whole family to a House purge as a child and grown up in the dark believing in nothing, and he looked at me like I was the first thing he'd ever been allowed to believe in, and — God help me — I loved him for it a little, the way you love someone who makes you feel like the person they think you are. Within a day he was my right hand. Within two I was telling him things I hadn't told Marrow.
"You're moving too fast, girl."
Marrow caught me on the second evening, her blind eye hard in the lamplight. "I warned you. A Blood Moon walks in and promises the tower, that's a light. You've spent two days making it a bonfire. Every rogue in the Undercity knows where you are now — which means it's only a matter of time before someone who isn't a rogue does too. Slow down. Move them in small groups. Trust no one you've known less than a decade."
"These are my people, Marrow." I heard the certainty in my own voice and mistook it for strength. "They've been sold out and stepped on their whole lives. They're not going to sell out the one person who finally looked at them and meant everyone."
Marrow looked at me for a long moment.
"You'd be surprised," she said quietly, "what a desperate person will do for someone they love, when a man in a good coat offers to make that person safe." And she went away into the dark, and I told myself she was just old and careful, and I did not listen, and that was the second mistake, stacked on the first.
Alaric heard the whole thing. That night, in the brick room, he said only one thing about it — and I understood, later, what it had cost him to say only one.
"You know I'm not going to tell you you're wrong," he said. "I promised. Partners." He was quiet a moment. "I'll only say that I once stood exactly where you're standing, certain that gathering my strength around me was the same as being safe, and someone I trusted opened a door. I'm not saying don't. I'm saying — I know that feeling. The one where you're finally strong enough that caution feels like cowardice." He met my eyes. "It's the most dangerous feeling I know. I've never once been right when I felt it."
I heard him.
I just didn't listen. I'd spent my whole life being small and afraid, and I was so tired of it, and being reckless felt so much like being free that I couldn't yet tell the two apart.
That was the last mistake. The one that mattered.
⁂
In a warm study far above the tunnels, Lucian Vale poured two glasses of wine, and handed one to no one, and drank alone, and was content.
The boy had played along beautifully. Kellan had sat there over the untouched tea and let Lucian explain it all away — a clerical error, a jealous rumor, nothing to trouble himself with — and had smiled, and thanked him, and gone home. Lucian did not for one moment believe he'd been fooled; the boy was lying now, playing his own small game, and that was fine. A pawn that thinks it has begun to move on its own is simply a pawn that has stopped needing to be pushed. It goes where you built the board to send it.
And the board was very nearly finished.
The Council would sit in two days. The King would come — he had to; a King who hid from a vote had already lost it — and he would bring the girl, because the girl could not be left behind and could not stay away, not with her own name on the docket. They would walk in together, the discarded omega and the guilty King, and they would be so proud of the little army they'd gathered in the dark.
Lucian smiled, and set down his glass, and thought of the frightened young rogue whose sister the Temple had taken into "protective care" a week ago, and how very much that young man wanted her back.
"There's a good boy," Lucian said, to no one, to everyone, to the whole turning board. "Tell me where she sleeps."
