Beneath the Veil Read online

  "Shh. I'm going to get you out of here."

  I untied her as swiftly as I could, then gathered her into my arms. She seemed so small. Shudders wracked her. Her skin was as cold as the blizzard outside. I took off my cloak and wrapped her in it. We sat on the floor of Rosten's workroom. When her body finally stopped its trembling, she looked up at me. Her lips met mine.

  I thought of women carrying their infants across snow-bound mountains with little more than rags to cover them. "And we'll get out of here."

  She nodded, then stood with a wince. She held onto me for support. "I'm lucky. I think he was planning to really start beating me tomorrow." She looked at me with wet eyes but managed a smile. "He doesn't realize the man of my house beat me regularly. What the Book Monster did was like love taps, compared."

  Who'd have imagined we could laugh there, in Rosten's workroom? But we did, until the giggles made us breathless and we had to gasp for breath. She clapped a hand over my mouth to silence me and looked to the door the soldiers stood behind.

  "How do we get out of here?"

  She looked down the corridor Rosten had left through. "There are cells down that corridor. There are women in there. And there's a door that leads outside. The death door. That's how they...that's where they take out the bodies."

  That sobered us. I moved to the doorway and peered down it. Cells lined it all the way to the place where it went out of sight to match the building's curve. I heard the soft sound of a baby's cry, quickly hushed by its mother.

  "He has children in there?"

  "Only the girls." Galya limped behind me and looked around. "He took the boys away already."

  My heart broke a little more for the mothers whose babes had been taken from them. "Will they be ready to go, if we help them?"

  She nodded. "I think so."

  We entered the cell corridor. "We'd better hurry. There's no telling how long before Rosten comes back."

  Galya had paused to pull a tattered kedalya from a pile on the floor. She tore off the headpiece and let it fall, then put on the rest of the garment. "Do you think they've escaped safely? The others, I mean."

  "Daelyn and his men were going after them. If there's a way, they will have found it."

  I didn't want to think about what would happen if they hadn't. If Daelyn were discovered...and Lir...

  "Come on, then." Galya took my hand. "We can only try. I'd rather die trying than with that bastard's kiss on my skin."

  The women had all been placed in the same cell. Seven of them, identical even now in the kedalyas they hadn't removed. Small children slept in their laps, or at their sides. There were sixteen people, all together.

  "How are we going to get them out?" Galya asked.

  I looked around for a key, but of course found none. I looked for a tool that might help break open the lock, and remembered seeing some that might work in Rosten's workroom. I brought back a heavy pair of pincers and a large-headed hammer.

  The lock was nothing fancy. I imagined Rosten had felt little need for heavy-duty hardware, since so few women would have even tried to escape from his prison.

  These women, by the very fact they'd agreed to follow Galya to Elitan, were different. They stirred as I banged open the lock. They gathered their children about them. They stood. They waited for me to open the door, and then they began to file through.

  "Wait!" I said. "We have to figure out –"

  "It's all right," Galya murmured. "Sisters, are you all ready?"

  They nodded. One stepped forward. "I am ready, Galya."

  "Aeris, this is Zia. She is my nearsib."

  Zia peeled back her headpiece to reveal a face so like Galya's I had to smile. "Do you have a plan for us?"

  "Where is the door outside?" I asked Galya.

  "At the end of the corridor. But it's guarded on the outside, I'm certain of it."

  "I'll be right back. All of you, back into the cell until I return, in case the soldiers decide to check."

  Galya followed me down the corridor to the door. I put my ear to it but could hear nothing. We were far below the ground, and it seemed probable there were steps or another hall before we could actually reach the night air.

  I took a step back. Myself, and even with Galya, I might have taken the risk. We both could fight, even with the crude weapons from Rosten's workshop. But with untrained women, and children, I dared not take a chance.

  I looked around the corridor for some idea of what to do next. It had gotten narrower the further down we went, and darker. And colder, despite the tapestries hung along its walls. No scenes of the hunt or revels on these woven masterpieces. Instead, pictures of degradation and torture decorated them.

  Yet something about their design plucked at my mind. I touched one, thinking. I lifted one to peer behind it. Nothing but a stone wall.

  "Aeris?"

  I lifted another, then a third. "Galya, I think I might have found a way out."

  The sixth tapestry I lifted, the one in the narrowest and darkest part of the corridor, revealed a set of stones slightly lighter than their neighbors. If I hadn't been looking for the difference, I'd never have spotted it. Another secret passage.

  "Now I know how Daelyn did it." I pushed on the stones and they slid back enough for me to get my fingers hooked behind. I nudged the false wall over enough to put my face to the hole it left behind. The sharp tang of the sea came to me. "We'll go this way."

  It took little time to gather the women and children again, but little time was all we had. I took a lantern from a hook and gave it to Zia, and we herded them all into the hidden passage.

  "Follow it to the sea," I told her. "I don't know what you'll find there –"

  "We'll manage," Zia interrupted, very much like her sister. She squeezed my arm. "We'll find a way. Thank you."

  It wasn't enough to send them on their way to uncertainty and danger, yet I had no choice. I'd acted from the heart. There was no time for anything else.

  "Aren't you coming?" Galya asked as she slipped behind the fake wall.

  "My place is here, for awhile longer anyway." I needed to face Daelyn and Lir. "I did what I came to do."

  "But –"

  She had no more time to speak, for we heard shouting.

  "Go!" I cried, and thrust her into the passage. I pulled the stone wall shut and rehung the tapestry.

  The shouts grew closer. They were coming from Rosten's workroom. I ran for the door to the outside and flung it open to find a set of steep stairs. I climbed with the noise of the soldiers close behind me. I burst into another dark corridor and ran, blind, praying to the Invisible Mother I would not find a wall or door with my head.

  The air around me expanded and I could no longer feel the sides of the hall close by my shoulders. Without warning, I slid in something cold and wet. Snow. I looked upward and felt it covering my face. I was outside.

  I took the guards by surprise. I'm sure they hadn't expected someone to come running pell-mell past them. I made it all the way to the street before they came after me.

  Bright and welcome light assaulted me from the streetlamps. I was three or four blocks away from the House of the Book. The snow hadn't kept away the men in the poetry houses. With curfew drawing close, they'd stumbled into the street to make their drunken ways back to their beds. I came out of the alley into a crowd of them and slid in the icy street.

  More shouting, this time from in front of me. Several soldiers burst out the door of the poetry house, along with a large number of patrons.

  "Find him!"

  "Find the bloke who put up this nasty business!"

  The one on the left waved a familiar poster around. The snow turned it into a sodden mess, but not before I caught a glimpse of the picture. Another mother and child. The running ink gave her tears.

  More men burst out of the door behind the soldiers. Drunk, most of them, though some spilled out from the poetry house in a cloud of herb smoke so thick it made me cough from where I stood. All of t