A Thousand Heartbeats

The hammering knock came on my door when the sky was still gray. I could see the sun was thinking about rising, and I wished, so deeply, that it would reconsider.

I’d hardly slept. While awake, all I saw was Annika’s proud eyes, daring me to think I could best her, telling me I was wrong. When I closed my eyes, I saw her still, looking over at me, pronouncing Cassiopeia so elegantly, reminding me how the stories written in stars were once so beautiful and mysterious to me.

And now, in the seconds between knocks, I saw her headstone next to her mother’s.

“Lennox! Get up, boy!”

I hopped up instantly, looking around my room for Thistle, making sure she was gone. Kawan didn’t allow us to waste resources on animals, and he sounded like he was already in a bad mood. I didn’t bother tucking in my shirt or throwing on a waistcoat. It was rare he wanted something this early, so I was already on edge.

“Yes, sir?” I said, opening the door. “What can I do?”

Behind him, Blythe was standing, arms crossed.

“She’s gone,” Kawan said.

I couldn’t tell if my sigh was out of frustration or relief. “What?”

“I went to check on her,” Blythe said. “There’s a pile of clothes on the ground near the window. She broke out of her restraints, shifted the bar in the window, and ran for it.”

I stood there in shock.

“She . . . she got out of her shackles?”

Kawan slapped me hard across the face. “She got out of the castle! On your watch! How could you let this happen? What kind of offering was this meant to be in the first place? How exactly does this serve the army? You’ve all but given us away! For as foolish as your father was, you’re ten times worse.”

It took all I had not to lunge at him. I was strong enough; I stood a chance. But there were bigger concerns than my pride at the moment.

I moved my jaw, refusing to reach up and touch my throbbing face. “How was I to know that wisp of a girl was capable of getting out of her shackles?”

“How were you stupid enough to not stay down there?” He stared into my eyes, his own so very dark. “Did memories of her poor mother come back to haunt you?” he guessed in a sarcastic tone.

The urge to throw a punch at him was growing in my stomach. I just wanted one. One.

“My only failure was not knowing my enemy,” I told him. “The point of my Commission was to show you just how easy it was to get into the land you’ve said we were going to take for ages. This girl might have taught us something very important today. Perhaps everyone in her country knows how to escape chains. This will change the way we hold their prisoners from here on out, will it not?”

Kawan stood there, irritated that I’d found the bright side in all this. And I had to give myself some silent applause for pulling that idea out of the air.

“Fix this,” he commanded, pointing a cracked finger into my face. “Now.”

He stormed down the hall, his footsteps thunderous.

“Don’t move,” I told Blythe as I shut the door. I grabbed my waistcoat from the night before and flung it on, as well as my belt with its pouch. I shoved my feet into boots and grabbed my riding cape. I had a sense we would need to mobilize immediately.

“When did you go down there?” I asked as I opened the door and headed toward the mess hall. I wanted reinforcements.

Blythe immediately followed. “It’s been maybe thirty minutes.”

“The shackles are in there?” I clarified.

“Yes. One of the cuffs has grit on it. It looks like she used it to hammer at the stone by the base of the bar in the window.”

I shook my head. How clever. I wondered how many people here would have thought to do the same.

“She took off her outer layer of clothes to get through the window, and that’s all in a messy pile down there as well. If she’s in her underclothes, I don’t know how she’d survive the cold,” Blythe added.

I nodded, thinking of the harsh winds that sometimes kicked off the sea, how she’d had no food or water since yesterday morning, and how she was blindly trying to find her way back home in the dark. Add the Forest to the equation, and it seemed all but impossible for her to succeed.

“Good point.” I supposed that solved a problem for me. It was likely she’d have to die. Now if she died, it wouldn’t be by my hand.

“After I inspected the cell, I went straight to tell Kawan. He wasn’t pleased at being woken so early. Once I explained the situation, he went and got properly dressed, and we came to you.”

I thought the timeline over, trying to remember when I’d left the girl last night. At best, she’d had a six-hour head start.

“Do we know if she got a horse?”

“No.”

“Wait,” I said, stopping just before the mess hall. “Why were you in the dungeons?”

A flicker of something passed across her eyes so quickly I could not name it. “I was looking for you. I wanted to see how the interrogations were going.”

I sensed this was a lie, but I couldn’t call her on it.

“There are animals out there,” I thought aloud. “The terrain is treacherous. She had no supplies, hardly any clothes, and no clue where she was. In all likelihood, she’s dead.”

“Probably.”

“But we have to search for her, or Kawan will hold it over me.”

“Absolutely.”

I huffed and went into the mess hall. “Inigo! Griffin!”

I didn’t wait to see if they followed; I knew they would. I marched out to the side of the castle with the overhang that we used for stables. From here on out, I would be keeping count of horses.

I grabbed a waterskin for myself and tossed one to Blythe. By the time I had, Griffin and Inigo were running up behind us, wordlessly going for horses. We mounted up, and I started heading west. If she had even the slightest bit of sense, she would have headed for the tree line, so I chased.