Chapter 8: The Escape and the Betrayal

The tower door had barely clicked shut before Elena moved.

She had learned, in the months since the curse had wrapped its cold fingers around the Northern court, that survival belonged to those who acted before fear could root them to the floor. So she did not let herself look back at the shadow of her husband standing alone in the dark below. She did not let herself wonder what he had whispered into the silence, or whether his hands had stopped trembling. She had two small, warm weights pressed against her chest and a corridor to cross before the guards changed their rotation.

“Quickly,” she breathed, adjusting the sleeping twins in the sling against her body. Mira, the younger by seven minutes, stirred and made a soft sound. Elena pressed her lips to the downy crown of her daughter’s head. “Hush, my love. Hush.”

The servant was waiting at the base of the stairwell, exactly where he had promised. He was old, weathered, a man she had never bothered to notice in the endless parade of staff who kept the castle breathing. He had appeared in her chambers three nights ago with a map drawn in ink that smelled of iron, and a promise: a passage beneath the north wall, a horse waiting, a boat across the strait to the neutral coast.

“My queen,” he whispered now, bowing his head. “This way. And we must not speak again until we are through.”

She nodded, following him into the warren of servants’ corridors that honeycombed the castle’s underbelly. They smelled of tallow and damp stone. Her slippers made no sound on the cold flagstones. Above them, muffled through layers of floor and tapestry, she could hear the distant rhythm of the castle settling into its night: a door closing, a laugh, the clink of goblets.

She thought of Kael. She thought of the way his jaw had tightened when the physicians had spoken of the curse and its price. She thought of the way he had stopped touching her, as though her skin had become something that might burn him. She thought of the vow she had made on their wedding day—to stand beside him, in light and in shadow, in peace and in ruin. She was breaking it now. And she would do it again, a hundred times over, for the two heartbeats pressed against her ribs.

The servant stopped at a wooden door set into the base of the wall. He produced a key from a chain around his neck and turned it with a soft click. Cold air rushed in, smelling of pine and snow and the distant sea.

“The tunnels,” he said. “Half a mile. Then the horses.”

Elena stepped through. The darkness swallowed them whole.

It was a nightmare of a journey. The tunnels were narrow and slick with frost, and she had to turn sideways to keep the twins from scraping against the walls. The servant moved ahead with the confidence of a man who had walked this path many times before. His lantern threw long, dancing shadows that seemed to reach for her with skeletal fingers.

Mira woke and began to fuss. Elena stopped, pressed her against her shoulder, and hummed a lullaby—the same one her own mother had sung to her, in a kingdom that no longer existed. The servant did not slow. He did not offer to help. Something cold began to coil in the pit of her stomach.

“How much further?” she whispered.

He did not answer.

“I asked you how much further.”

He stopped. The lantern swayed. In its light, she saw his face clearly for the first time—and the expression on it was not the expression of a loyal servant.

It was the expression of a man who had already been paid.

“I am sorry, my queen,” he said quietly. “Truly, I am.”

The tunnel opened without warning into a wider chamber, and the chamber was not empty. Men stood in a loose ring around the entrance, their cloaks the deep crimson of the Southern court, their swords already drawn. At their center stood a woman Elena had seen only once before, at a peace summit three years ago, when the world had still been a place of treaties and polite lies.

Princess Isolde of the Southern Reach. She had been beautiful then. She was beautiful now, in the way that winter is beautiful: sharp and merciless.

“Elena of the North,” Isolde said, and her smile did not reach her eyes. “Or should I say, Elena of nowhere at all. You look surprised. Don’t be. Your husband’s enemies have been waiting a very long time for a door to open.”

Elena’s arms tightened around her children. “My husband will burn your kingdom to the ground for this.”

“Your husband,” Isolde said, stepping closer, “is currently standing in an empty tower, whispering to a curse that has already begun to devour him. He will not even notice you are gone until morning. And by then—” She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from Elena’s face. The touch was almost gentle. Almost tender. “—by then, you will be halfway across the sea, and your children will be the leverage that finally brings the North to its knees.”

The servant. Elena turned to look at him, and the betrayal hit her like a blade between the ribs. He would not meet her eyes. He stared at the ground, and his hands, she saw, were shaking.

“Why?” she whispered. Not to the princess. To him.

“They have my son,” the old man said. His voice cracked. “They took him three weeks ago. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

Isolde gestured, and two soldiers stepped forward. Elena did not fight. She could not fight. Not with Mira on her chest and Ari sleeping at her back. She could only stand there, frozen, as they pulled the sling from her body and took her children from her arms.

Mira woke and wailed. Ari opened his eyes and reached for her, and the sound he made—a small, confused cry of *Mama*—would echo in her skull for the rest of her life.

“Please,” Elena said. The word tore out of her, ragged and raw. “Please, not my children. Take me. Take anything. Just not them.”

Isolde looked at her for a long moment. And for just a heartbeat, something flickered in her eyes—something that might have been pity, or might have been memory.

Then she turned away.

“Bind her,” she said. “And send word to the Northern court. Tell them the queen and the heirs are guests of the Southern Reach. Tell them we await the king’s surrender.”

They dragged Elena from the tunnel into the bitter light of dawn. Snow was falling. The sea was a gray line in the distance, and somewhere beyond it, in a tower of cold stone, a man who had once held her in his arms was whispering to the dark.

She did not know that he had already begun to burn. She did not know that the curse, patient and ancient and starving, had tasted his fear and found it sweet.

All she knew was that her arms were empty, and her children were crying, and the last thing she saw before they threw her into the carriage was the old servant falling to his knees in the snow, his face buried in his hands.

She did not know, as the carriage lurched forward and the Southern banners snapped in the wind, that the betrayal in the tunnel was only the first of many. That the princess who held her children was not the true enemy. That the true enemy had been waiting, all along, inside the walls of her own home.

But she would learn. Before the end, she would learn.

And so would Kael.