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Shelves that moved in the back of a kitchen pantry. A statue in a tiny alcove in the great hall that revealed a staircase when turned. Sliding bookcases in half a dozen bedrooms—in their parents’ room, abandoned since the de Rolo restoration, where Percy had first stumbled onto the Briarwoods’ hidden handiwork.
He was down there now, but she needed to be up here. Someone had to coordinate on the surface, someone had to stay behind. Percy, the twins, and Keyleth were all more suited to exploring dungeons than her, they had more experience at it, and…
Cassandra couldn’t go down there. She knew that in her bones, felt it in the hairline scars she imagined existed where her ribs had healed. There was nothing for her down there. And anyway—she had faced enough of their horrors in her own home. If there were more to be found, then it was about time Percy shouldered that burden.
Captain Jarett met her on the great hall staircase. “We found another one in the barracks,” he said. “They’d rigged a wall to rotate when you pressed the flagstones in the right order.”
“They really did have entirely too much fun with these mechanisms,” Cassandra sighed. She was fairly certain she smelled Anna Ripley’s handiwork, there. She pointed down the length of the hall. “There’s an alcove down there with a bust of the third Lord de Rolo that opens to a staircase when you turn the nose upside down.”
“We are so lucky your brother discovered this when he did,” Jarett said, shaking his head. “If the Children of Truth had staged a full attack using these tunnels…”
A chill ran up Cassandra’s spine. “Best not to dwell on paths we’ve avoided, I think.”
Jarett nodded with a grimace and began to list off other areas that needed sweeping. Cassandra tried to listen, but…
The chill wasn’t leaving. There was something bothering her, electricity shooting along her nerves. And Cassandra knew from experience beyond her years that if her body was trying to tell her something at a time like this, she needed to listen to it. A moment’s wandering thought, and—that was it. She knew them too well. They would have one there, for sure.
“Jarett,” she said in a lull in his report. “With me. There’s somewhere I need to check.”
Her bedroom was on the opposite side of the castle from the wing Vox Machina used when in residence. Percy had rather eagerly taken up in the room Vex’ahlia had chosen, rather than move back into the one across from Cassandra’s that he’d slept in when they were children. She couldn’t blame him for that, even as she insisted on sleeping in the same bed she always had.
(As the reigning Lady of Whitestone, Cassandra had every right to move out of her relatively small room and requisition her parents’ abandoned chambers for herself. She never would.)
As they entered, Cassandra thought to give Jarett ideas for where to start searching. But the words didn’t come. Instead, she found herself going right over to a sconce on the wall next to her closet. She stared at it intently, then plucked the candle out and, with her other hand, rotated the sconce to the left.
Nothing happened.
Tracing a path in a dream. She turned it back up and then to the right. Down. Left. Down.
With a series of clicks, the wall panel next to the sconce slid back, away, and revealed a tight spiral staircase, going down into the dark.
Jarett audibly startled behind her. “My lady, how did you know that was the combination?”
Jarett had lived in Emon until its fall, had chosen to stay in Whitestone permanently after the Chroma Conclave’s defeat. He hadn’t lived under the Briarwoods—and that fact, in addition to all his other qualifications, was why Cassandra had promoted him to head the Pale Guard. It meant that, on certain rare occasions, he would stumble into a question others did not have the nerve to ask her. Yet as useful as that was for their security, it was a double-edged sword. Particularly now.
“I don’t know,” she said. She let the candle fall and stubbed it out with the toe of her boot.
Liar.
She didn’t know, though. Whatever was down that staircase, Cassandra had never been down there, she had never seen this door opened, she did not know what the Briarwoods had hidden in the castle—she had certainly burned enough horrors they’d left in plain sight that first week free of them for her to believe that was all there was…
Cassandra couldn’t go down there. She hadn’t been down there, because she wasn’t meant to go down there, she knew that.
But she could see it now, in her mind’s eye. Flashes of that door opening. Shadows in the night. Eyes that burned in the dark; sometimes red, sometimes violet. Something that glowed a sickly green. The canopy of a bed above her—her parents’ bed, the one she would never touch again. Or was it? She tried to focus and the image shifted in her memory to one with a different pattern, back and forth, a trick painting that changed depending on the angle one viewed it from, and—
Someone was shouting, at the door. Jarett was touching her shoulder, lightly, and saying something to her. It was important, whatever it was. She was dimly aware of these facts. They weren’t half as troubling as that staircase, going down into the dark, the one she had never—that lead somewhere she couldn’t go—
Beckoning her.
Cassandra was sitting on her bed, now. Jarett was gone, Dawnfather knew where. Something was happening, but—her ears were ringing, her heart thundering a frenetic, irregular beat beneath.
Her neck, her wrists, her fingertips, all raw and tingling. Screams echoing off the walls, tearing her throat, tearing someone else’s. The revolting sensation of thin, dead cartilage cutting free in her fingers. Something on her tongue.
Her hand had a death-grip on her sword hilt—not the rapier Sylas had gifted her years ago, but the one she had taken from a corpse in Whitestone during the uprising, the one she had used to silence Delilah forever and carried ever since. It was the only part of her that wasn’t floating free, rising into the sky, and she slid the sword free of its scabbard and laid it across her lap, stared down at its gleaming, polished length. Without interrogating why—it was never a good idea to interrogate why—Cassandra tugged the glove from her other hand with her teeth, spat it out, and ran the ball of her thumb against the blade’s edge.
A sharp, familiar sting. When she lifted her thumb to her lips and closed her eyes, that was familiar too. Thick, warm, tangy—Cassandra was alive, she was human, they’d needed her to be seen to age, but though they’d never cursed her to live off it there were still so many moments she could bring herself through, rooted by that taste. Strapped to a chair, biting her tongue as Anna Ripley asked questions she didn’t understand. In a dungeon cell, tears staining her face, desperate to relieve pain on a wound they’d deemed too petty to bandage, her head pressing against Percy’s shoulder. Out of a goblet, a mocking toast cut with just enough wine to keep up appearances to every doomed guest but for the girl who Cassandra could tell was too afraid to admit she had seen through it. Off of—off of—
Don’t you want a taste of the spoils, Cassandra dear?
(Cassandra wasn’t sure if the look on that face had been accusing or understanding, at the end. She wasn’t sure which she wanted it to be.)
Bubbling up from her throat. Smeared across her face, a perplexed anointment in the dying throes of shock. Every time: the taste of copper in her mouth, so many times, and the taste of something else, salty and sweet and sour all at once—
She had been down there. Oh, yes. She still couldn’t remember, but she’d been down there. Things had happened to her, down there, and other people, and she’d seen it.
What was the point? She wanted to scream. What was the point of repressing memory when she already remembered so much? It was no mystery to Cassandra what had been done to her, it was no great secret. Every fucking way they had violated her, every betrayal they’d induced her to carry out, she couldn’t forget any of it as long as she lived. So what could possibly have been so bad about what was down that staircase that her mind had chosen to protect her from it, and nothing else?
But of course, she knew better. It wasn’t her mind, was it? She nearly laughed. And it wasn’t about protecting her, either.
It was possible to stand outside of herself and try to spot the edits, ever since Keyleth had burned Sylas to ash and freed her from vampiric suggestion for good. There was a book in her office, provided by Allura without a single follow-up question, about all the ways in which memory charms could be used and abused. But Cassandra could only ever try to map out her debased mind, because so often their touch had been so very subtle—just the slightest altered perception. What did it matter to her, which canopy she’d been looking up at? It didn’t change what happened beneath it—and that was always clear as day, as much as the incidents all blurred together.
Cassandra knew Sylas and Delilah in the way you had to know the people who had violated your mind as casually as they had your body. This filter in her memories, the ground that liquefied beneath her feet as soon as she’d noticed it, none of it was to protect her. It was, as ever, for their sake. Take their secrets, leave the pain—leave her to make sense of her fear and spin it into humiliating excuses for them.
The duties of a daughter.
Cassandra wasn’t sure how long she sat there, adrift, but she eventually heard the door creep open and snapped back to herself, snatching the thumb from her mouth and tucking it into her fist. She looked up, pushing the lady’s mask back into place, the requested status update on her lips—
It wasn’t Jarett leaning in the doorway, though.
She frowned. “Percy?”
Her brother slid inside and closed the door quickly behind him. His face was grave. “Cass.” He hesitated a moment, seemingly unsure what to say next, then grit his teeth and crouched down in front of her so their faces were on the same level.
He was coated in dust, she could see now. The familiar weight of dread settled across her shoulders. “What did you—”
“Delilah Briarwood was here tonight,” Percy said.
He waited for her response. She didn’t give one. She just stared, waiting for him to make sense. Understanding that, he endeavored to.
“She’s alive again,” he said. “Or undead. Revived by her Whispered One to lead his Children of Truth. She was the one who attacked Keyleth’s coronation.”
Cassandra should be shocked. Why was she not shocked? She wanted to be shocked. But it seemed such an expected balance—it was hardly keeping with the Matron’s inexplicable disdain for Cassandra, for her to get Percy back without there being a cost someday.
“She was experimenting with clones of Sylas down there—she came here tonight for a sample of his blood so that…” He winced. “So that the Whispered One could bring him back too.”
Of course. Whether in life or death, she would never leave her husband on the other side. Cassandra knew Delilah Briarwood better than she knew herself.
She tilted her head to the side. “Why are you so dirty?”
Percy gave her an odd look. “Delilah collapsed her secret tunnels with some kind of fail-safe when she left.” He glanced aside and startled, noticing the entrance Cass had uncovered for the first time. She followed his gaze and saw that the spiral staircase had vanished, filled with rubble that had spilled into her room.
“Oh,” Cassandra said. “I didn’t hear.”
Percy looked back at her, frowning, and she could see the flash of inquiry, the ghost of a question on his lips. Why was there a secret way into her room? Why had she been in a state where she hadn’t heard rubble falling mere feet away from her? What was wrong with her?
As ever, that ghost passed to join all of the others in Whitestone in their silence. As ever, Cassandra wasn’t sure if she loved or hated him for it. “I wanted you to hear it from me,” he said instead. “So you could…compose yourself. Word will travel the castle fast.”
“Yes,” Cassandra said tonelessly, seeing the cold, comforting necessity of it. Seizing on it. “We’ll need to prevent a panic.” People would look to her, and she could be strong for them. She knew how to do that.
“Cass,” Percy said, in that pleading tone he sometimes used with her. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this, do you hear me? She will never set foot in this castle again. We will put her down, and keep her from ever coming back again.”
“Whatever it takes to end it.” Cassandra agreed, entranced by her own words. “Shatter her soul, or trap it forever…whatever it takes.”
Percy’s arm twitched forward, an aborted impulse to reach for her hand. She was grateful for the hesitancy; if she was touched right now she knew she was going to scream and forget how to stop. “I’m so sorry.”
He always was. She loved and hated him for it, she was sure. Just as sure as she now was that even after nearly two years of every law passed in Whitestone bearing her seal and signature, there was still only one true law in Whitestone: that she was not allowed to win.
“I need a moment alone, please,” she said. Funny, asking him to leave her. Delilah would think it was funny.
“Alright,” Percy said. “Let me know if…”
She nodded.
He stood and, with a last lingering, agonized glance over his shoulder, said: “I have faith in you.”
The moment he was gone she was on her hands and knees, retching up onto the floor. Better the taste of bile on her tongue, she knew, than any other bodily fluid.