The Secret World of Briar Rose(11)

I hate you.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then a new thought emerged from her drowsy haze, like a dim light peeking through the dark clouds of near-death. Her hand roamed over her chest, fingers twitching for the ghost of an object. After her palm came up empty, her fingers jammed into the soiled pockets of her trousers and sifted through dirt.

Her necklace was gone.

Panic triggered her body to roll over. Splinters bit into her palm as she found the broken half of the torch that had slipped from her hand when she fell. She sucked out the splinter, blood dancing on her tongue. Bitter, it tasted. And alive.

She lit the last match in her pocket and held it to the cloth. The small flame radiated an orange glow over the walls. A shadow stretched above her head, inviting her to turn around and meet a skull staring straight into her eyes. The black grains that stripped the skull’s translucent skin looked like rotten sand had washed over his corpse. Nausea swirled in her stomach. Flashes of bad memories, blue lips, maggot trails. A familiar body in her arms. An echo of a scream.

Corin bit back her bile, breathed slowly, and focused on one point of clarity. The skeleton’s brittle finger glinted in the shadows, dangling her necklace that had been caught on bone. She snatched the chain and wrapped it around her neck. Her palm pressed against her chest as she counted the rapid beats of her heart and wiped the flashbacks from her mind. It was easier if she could focus on the cold metal against her sweat, the smooth touch of her mother’s hands when she’d given Corin this pendant, the story she’d told about Corin’s grandmother crossing these tunnels to Gyldan.

The necklace was the only reminder Corin had that a future was possible. And she couldn’t picture any future without Elly.

She pressed her palms flat on the cavern walls as she crossed deeper inside the tunnels. The torch’s dying flame turned fuzzy in her blurring vision. Perhaps it was better she couldn’t see clearly, so she could avoid staring at bodies draped over the jagged rocks. She wouldn’t think about Harlow or how she’d let her other friends die. She would leave them behind with the rest of the corpses in the tunnels, shutting them out, like her mind did with everything else.

By the time the corpses whittled down in numbers, the sour smell wafting under her nostrils died down. A new scent permeated the air, musky with mildew and notes of copper. Then came an invisible spark, something alive and tingling. The shift in the air remained even as she reached a dead end, the path stopping at a dirt wall that appeared to be a landslide.

It seemed too sudden, too abrupt of an ending. Dizzy from dehydration, Corin rocked back and forth and deliberated what to do next. When she looked down, she was shocked to find a torn piece of cloth stuck to her boot. Her fingers snatched the maroon cloth so she could stare closer at the bright blue stitching that clumsily ran along the inseam. She recalled how the needle had pricked her fingers, her annoyance at Elly for tearing a hole in her pants, forcing Corin to practice her shoddy sewing skills before Rowan called her hopeless and fixed it himself. The stitching was an exact match to the clothes Elly had been wearing when she ran away.

Elly was here. More importantly, she was alive.

Corin dropped to the ground in a panicked frenzy and started digging, searching for traces of her sister to follow her path. A stone floor exposed itself beneath the soil. The concrete had to be paved somewhere. She stared at the dead end of the tunnel, then grabbed the wall, clawing her way through the dirt. Her hands dug for several grueling minutes until the fabric of her gloves thinned to strings and her skin turned raw. She searched and searched until, finally, she found a wooden door on the other side.

Corin stepped back in disbelief. People came and died searching for a buried castle, waiting to be stirred awake. She couldn’t explain what stood before her, how the stories could have possibly been true.

Just as Elly had said.

? ? ?


THE CASTLE FROM the fairy tale shouldn’t have existed. At least, not in this condition. Most of the structure remained intact, but large, gaping holes peppered the sepia-washed wallpaper, as if gnawed by a monster. Velvet drapes had turned maroon from old age, covering cracked windows. Corin tried parting the curtains and coughed from the dust. Outside, the glass revealed dark soil surrounding the castle.

Surely, she was hallucinating. Hunger could do that to a person. Yet the air tingled with something peculiar, like a cold wind that had trapped itself inside and now howled in mourning. Goose bumps prickled her skin, and she clutched the torn cloth tight in her fist. No, it didn’t matter how this relic came to be. What mattered was that she needed to find Elly.

She pictured her sister walking through the castle, imagining what might catch her attention first. In answer, watercolors jumped from the hallway. She crossed the faded carpet that unfurled rows of paintings along the wall, where kings and queens of Gyldan’s past sat decorated in gold. Their bloodline was supposed to prove they were special, untouchable. Yet here they were, strings of parchment hanging off the edges of their destroyed features, every portrait slashed like an open wound.

She stopped in the middle of the hallway, where only one person remained unscathed. A tall woman sat next to one of the elderly kings and a blond child. White pearls clasped the queen’s neck. The bloodred fabric of her gown brought the same color from her pursed mouth. Her auburn hair was tied in knotted locks, and her sharp nose pointed to the air. She looked like someone posing to be royalty, resulting in a stiff upper lip and a set of unsmiling eyes.